All the President’s (Corrupt) Men

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QB is made with egg yolks only, giving it this incredibly rich umami flavor that elevates everything. Burgers, fries, sandwiches, chicken, noodles. Chefs use it. Restaurants use it. People who really love food and flavor use it. Whatever you're eating, QB it. So if you haven't tried QB yet, find the bottle with the red cap and see what everyone's talking about. You'll understand. QB, the original Japanese mayonnaise. Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Then another Tuesday, another day spent waiting for Trump to make up his mind about what he wants to do in a run. Yeah, we had that ceasefire YouTube. Uh, subscribe to our YouTube channel, uh, on Friday and it feels like it wasn't a ceasefire after all. It was just a bunch of truth social posts. Yeah, it was a lot of, a lot of diplomacy by truth social, by tweets. Um, we're going to walk you through all the latest. There's the on again, off again, diplomatic talks in Pakistan. There's the on again, off again, closures of the Strait of Hormuz. We're also going to dig into deeper things like what life is like for people in Iran. Uh, we'll talk about the latest from Lebanon, including why conservative Christians are not at all thrilled with the United States. We're going to talk about the United States and what's going on in the Middle East. Then we're going to talk about the latest on the Israeli military. I think this is, um, probably underappreciated story. The degree to which that this image of an IDF soldier smashing, uh, a statue of Christ circulated on the internet over the past weekend. Um, then we're going to talk about corruption and conflicts of interest in the Trump administration and how it's impacting foreign policy. Yeah, really? Wait till you hear about this Jared Kushner guy. Then we're going to talk about, uh, the recent elections in Hungary and Bulgaria, the latest on the administration's like slow rolling regime change. Ish efforts in Cuba. Try to figure out what the hell's happening there. Um, then we are going to update you guys about friend of the show and FBI director cash Mattel. He's having a, he's having a good time in the barrel, throwing back a few beers, $250 million lawsuit against the Atlantic. We'll see, we'll see if that goes to court. The discovery on that could be interesting for him. Um, and then Ben stick around for my interview with Nick Enrich. He was a top global health official at USAID when Elon Musk and the Doge guys arrived and decided to, uh, destroy the entire agency. So he's a new book out called into the wood chipper, a whistleblower's account of how the Trump administration shredded USAID. Um, as mad as you are about what Trump has done to the world and all the death and destruction that Elon Musk caused, this will make you even more angry. So I promise you that it's worth it. No, it's where this is a story that we shouldn't let just go away because the consequences of it are not going away. And like, it's one of those, the consequences are growing by the day. I mean, spoiler, the, the latest count that we talked about, the interview is like 750,000 deaths as a result of USAID being destroyed. But the conversations Nick had with the people in charge of destroying USAID are like absolutely more maddening and stupid than you would think. You mean big balls wasn't a development expert? Mr. Balls was not a pro on a global health or PEPFAR. Uh, all right, so let's try to, let's start with this, what we know about Iran. So as of this recording, the Strait of Hormuz is closed. Uh, the war in Iran is not resolved. Uh, we're going to talk about it a little bit later, but we're going to talk about it a little bit later, but we're going to talk about it a little bit later, but we're going to talk about it a little bit later, but we're going to talk about it a little bit later, but we're going to talk about it a little bit later, but we're going to talk about it a little bit later. So the war in Iran is not resolved. The talks in Pakistan don't seem to be happening. I mean, we literally are waiting all day. It's like, will JD Vance get on a plane? And those sort of like the conversation all day in Washington, um, the president's statements about it all are as incoherent and full of shit as ever. Here are a few examples from an interview Trump did Tuesday morning with CNBC. Let's listen to that. You need a, at least the prospects for a signed deal today and tomorrow, or else you would resume a bomb. Yeah. Well, I expect to be bombing because I think that's a better attitude to go in with, but we're ready to go. I mean, the military is raring to go. You know, they want it to be over immediately. And I just looked at a little chart, world war one, four years and three months, world war two, six years, Korean war, three years, Vietnam, 19 years, Iraq, eight years. I'm five months. Okay. Five months. I would have won Vietnam. Very quick. Look at Venezuela. I took it over in 45 minutes. It was basically a 45 minute, by the way, a very strong military country. We can't let traders like humor put pressure on you where they say we want out how think how bad that is. I'm negotiating with these people and they're telling us we have to get out. Now we have to get out. Now we have to get down. I want to make a good deal. I'm not going to be rushed. I have all the time in the world. So we've done a great job and I don't want to be rushed by people that are really treasonous. So I try to do a little less like media criticism these days, but I feel like one follow up would have been warranted on the, Hey, I would have won Vietnam and Iraq in a couple of weeks. That, that seemed like a moment for one. It's so clear that someone made that chart for him too. You know, it's not like he just came across a chart. Uh, and, and I think what he fundamentally doesn't understand is that the consequences. Yes. I mean, objectively the war in Iran has not lasted as long as Vietnam. Congratulations. You get a, a gold ribbon, you know, lesser disaster. It doesn't mean that it's not a disaster, but also one of the things I think he's missed in this whole enterprise is that the geopolitical consequences of attacking Iran specifically are actually much bigger in some ways than some of the other wars. I mean, not world war one, but say the war in Afghanistan, you know, I don't mean to minimize that war in any way, obviously horrifying for, for the people of Iran. But I think the geopolitical consequences of attacking Iran are much bigger than the war in Afghanistan. I mean, not, I don't mean to minimize that war in any way, but I think the geopolitical consequences of attacking Iran are much bigger than the war in Afghanistan. the people who lived through it, both in Afghanistan and service members, but Afghanistan wasn't a country of 94 million people that controls the Strait of Hormuz and is a significant supplier of global energy. You know, he is set in motion. He's kind of messed with the tectonic plates underneath geopolitics and the global economy with this war. Um, and so he, he doesn't understand this isn't like some, some, something that's measured in like how many months of active conflict there are. It's measured in what it is. It's measured in the amount of people that are the repercussions of this war going to be, uh, above all for the people that have already, you know, been killed or suffered, but also for the entire global economy, the kind of thing you think that, you know, CNBC might ask about. Yeah. Yeah. Who am I to criticize Joe Kernan? So like I said, Ben, like we, we were waiting all day to see if JD Vance would make this trip just before we started recording. President Trump posted the following message on true social based on the fact that the government of Iran is seriously fractured, not unexpectedly. So, and upon the request of field Marshall, us, you know, we've been asked to hold our attack on the country of Iran until such time as our leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal. I have therefore directed our military to continue the blockade and in all other respects, remain ready and able and will therefore extend the ceasefire until such time as their proposal is submitted and discussions are concluded one way or the other president Donald J. Trump. So though I interpreted this as Trump blinking, he doesn't want to go back to war. The Iranians know that, The Wall Street knows that. Oil traders know that. That's why all the prices are down. But he's also unwilling to lift the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which sounds like it was a precondition to get Iran to agree to come back to the table. Does that sound right to you? That sounds right to me. I think there's a couple other things happening here. The first is that, first of all, remember he was saying like a week ago that the regime has changed and there are all these wonderful people in charge now? He's still kind of on that message. Well, like it hasn't. And what's happening on the Iranian side is pretty clear to me from the outside, which is that the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the hardest core element of the regime, they're calling the actual shots, right? They are the ones who've closed the Strait of Hormuz. They're the ones who are collecting the tolls. They're the ones who are firing drones at the Gulf. And so some of these kind of civilian leaders, these political leaders of Iran, may not even be able to deliver. Right. You know, what they're negotiating at the table because the IRGC are the ones that ultimately have to sign off. And they're the hardest of the hardliners. And they've got the big guns. And they've got the guns. And so, first of all, this is what happens when you kill the leadership of a country, right? So they've killed multiple people, not just Ayatollah. They've killed other people that could have been decision makers because they had more sway with the IRGC. And they've kind of finally settled on this speaker of the Iranian parliament who has some cred with the IRGC. But so on the Iranian side. On the Iranian side, you've got this split. And the IRGC is like, you know what? We can sense that Trump is afraid of this war. And so why would we make a deal that doesn't get us everything we want? You know, we want sanctions relief. We want the Strait of Hormuz to be a toll road. And, you know, maybe we'll ship out the HEU, the dust, as Trump says. But we probably don't want to make any more concessions on a nuclear program. Why should we? This guy is scared of us. He doesn't want the war. Then Trump doesn't really know what he wants. He just wants to be able to say, Clearly, he wants to get, like, the dust out, which, again, as we've talked about, doesn't change the underlying Iranian nuclear program. Just sprinkle it on a toilet seat for Bobby Kennedy. He just wants something to say he won. But because he doesn't really know why he went to war, he doesn't even know what he's really pushing at the table. You know, before the war, they were pushing ballistic missiles, support for proxies. That's all gone. Regime change. We're just—regime change. Justice for protesters killed. We're back to the JCPOA negotiation, you know. And so that's— That's all Trump knows. And then the Pakistanis probably don't even know why they're hosting this thing. They're just happy to be there. Yeah. They're just happy to be known. They, you know, made billions of dollars of investments in Trump and Witkoff's kids' business, you know, crypto business. So this is not the best recipe for de-escalation. Yeah. So I saw this BBC reporter tweeted that the Iranian delegation was basically ready to come to the negotiating table, but then everything changed over the weekend when the U.S. military fired on an Iranian-flagged cargo ship, according to some Iranian source. And that just blew everything up. And they want the blockade basically lifted. We'll get more into the TikTok of how we got there. But, Ben, I've been reading—you know, there's a great economist piece about the kind of intra-Iranian power struggle that you were just touching on. It's between elected officials. It's between the military. It's between nationalists and Islamists. And the way this kind of played out and manifested in practice was Iran sent 80 officials to the last round of Pakistan talks. Yeah. 30 of them were deemed decision-makers. And I think on a previous episode, we talked about how the Iranian delegation was stacked with experts and expertise and people had been in negotiations before. And that is definitely like the glass-half-full version of it. But the glass-half-empty version was the economist reported that the Pakistani mediators spent as much time kind of refereeing fights between members of the Iranian delegation as facilitating talks with the U.S. So, yes, it does sound like there's a very real power struggle happening and no clear way that it— It ends besides, you know, the military probably killing a bunch of people or throwing them in prison. Yeah. I mean, some of this is also probably like you want to go to Pakistan. It's been a little rough in Iran. It's true. It probably sounds nice to be in a hotel with good Wi-Fi and, like, you know, all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet, you know. That's a good point. The other thing I would say is—and this gets to the true social posts—when I was, you know, in charge of, for lack of a better term, like, you know, advocating for the Iran deal, there was a dynamic that would happen where, look, obviously, we were trying to emphasize all that we got in the deal. So we would lean into, like, you know, they're going to submit to these intrusive inspections and they're going to ship out the stockpile and they're going to— we're going to be able to see all of their program, the uranium mines and mills and the centrifuges. All true. But sometimes John Kerry would get a call from Javad Zarif, the foreign minister, who'd be like, Hey, can you guys— Chill out. Chill out a bit on the intrusive inspections piece because it's true, but the IRGC—I mean, he didn't necessarily say it in these words, but basically it was giving him problems with the hardliners back home, right? The IRGC didn't want the deal or they didn't like aspects of the deal like the intrusive inspections where you could just show up and look at stuff. And so it hurt him in the Iranian system if we were leaning into that. Imagine if you were the Iranian negotiator and you're—you know you're— out in front of the IRGC a little bit in Pakistan. And you're like, well, yeah, maybe we could ship the dust out in exchange for this. And you know you have to sell it back home to these killers in the IRGC. And then all of a sudden you wake up on a Friday and Trump is true social posting all these concessions that you actually didn't make. The Strait will be open forever, which is not something that I'm sure the Iranians agreed to, that they're not going to enrich uranium, that Trump was posting on. The IRGC guys, I guarantee you, called up the negotiators and were like, what the fuck? And hey, maybe come pay a visit to us. And it's like, ah. And so of course they're backing out because they don't want to get killed by the IRGC. And so Trump is literally endangering the negotiators by what he's doing. I can sense that. It's a good strategy. No, it makes a lot of sense. Okay. So let's do a bit of the tail of the tape about how we got to this point. Like you said earlier, we recorded a bonus episode for the Pod Save the World YouTube on Friday about this flurry of social media activity. So please subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube to make sure you don't miss any of these bonus episodes. And also when you subscribe and you like and you share the stuff we do on YouTube, you help us get people good information when they're just searching for what the hell's happening with the Iran talks and not factual, not like propaganda. Because Ben, I made the mistake of watching a clip of Hugh Hewitt on his show interviewing Eli Lake about the latest on the ceasefire talks. It was like a parallel universe where everything was solved. The war was a triumph. They'd figured it all out. How do those guys live with the reality that that's not true? They do a lot of dust. If Obama had done this, they'd be yelling about how we left the regime in place, how they left the ballistic missiles. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. Last week, we had this flurry of claims from Trump on social media. You mentioned a few of them, but let me just read them. Iran has agreed to never close this trade-off room again. It will no longer be used as a weapon against the world. Not sure of that. One held up. The USA will get all nuclear dust created by our great B-2 bombers. No money will exchange hands in any way, shape, or form. And then finally he said, Israel will not be bombing Lebanon any longer. They are prohibited, all caps, from doing so by the USA. That one I liked. So, it was all bullshit. Iran had only announced a partial opening of the strait. And then by Saturday, they'd walked back even that partial opening because the Iranians were pissed that Trump said, well, we're going to continue our blockade of the strait. Then things escalated. Further, after the Iranians attacked two Indian flagships attempting to transit the strait, Trump called those attacks a total violation of our ceasefire agreement. And then he re-upped his threat to destroy Iran's civilization, its civilian infrastructure, by saying, if they don't take the deal, the United States is going to knock out every single power plant, every single bridge in Iran. No more Mr. Nice Guy, all caps, is how we've ended that one. The US later boarded and seized an Iranian vessel that was en route from China. The US seized a tanker in the Indian ocean. So, things just kept going. So, we're going to continue our blockade of the strait. We're going to continue our blockade. So, things just kept escalating and escalating. On Monday, Iran's speaker of the parliament and lead negotiator, Mohammad Ghalibaf, said Iran will, quote, not accept negotiations under the shadow of threats. And, quote, we have been preparing to show new cards in the battlefield. So, I was excited for like a mid-season twist here. So, Ben, obviously, my working assumption has been that Trump wants a deal or he wants the war over. He wants to punt this as far down the road as he can. So, I'm going to continue our blockade of down the road as he possibly can and just do CNBC hits and convince a bunch of commodities traders, meathead traders, that he is in fact going to fold on everything and taco or whatever you want to call it and just like not make their lives harder, not increase the oil of energy. But also he refuses to admit that he hasn't accomplished all of his goals. There will be people pushing him from the right to actually get the HEU. I've zero doubt, I've zero hope that the Israelis will actually adhere to this demand that they never attack. And they're still in Lebanon. Lebanon again. Yeah. And they're still occupying Lebanon. We'll get into all the details of that later. So I don't know, man, this is as clear as mud, but how do you see this playing out in this moment? I think if you look at the Iranians, they know they don't have to give much. In some ways they could choose to give nothing. And the war just kind of freezes. I think what they want though is money. They want either unfrozen assets, like we heard rumors of $20 billion. They want either probably more comprehensive sanctions reliefs. they can just sell oil without it being sanctioned. They want to tax the Strait of Hormuz in perpetuity. They just want revenue. And what will they trade to get that? They will not trade away their ballistic missile program because they've just demonstrated how much they need it. They're not going to trade away their support for proxies because it's kind of existential to them that they have these proxies. And they're not going to say that they'll never enrich uranium. They're not going to say, we won't have a nuclear program. So I think what they had to trade away is the dust because the dust is not, frankly, that important. Which just isn't dust, by the way. It's not dust. It's enriched uranium. It's highly enriched uranium. It's so weird that we have to call it dust because he has to say that he obliterated the program. But anyway, because fundamentally, that means nothing to them. They still have centrifuges that they can operate. If they choose to have a covert nuclear program, they just take those centrifuges, underground, and accumulate more dust. So I could kind of see some deal where they ship out the HEU and, I don't know, maybe they promise not to enrich uranium for some period of time. Which, by the way, that promise is worth nothing absent rigorous inspections, which I don't think they're going to submit to. And so then Trump says he got the deal of the century. It's so much better than Obama's Iran deal, even though it's going to be probably a lesser version of the Iran deal and it'll be like. The dust for some sanctions relief in the war's over. For 15 years instead of 10 or something. And if you think about. Yeah, but it'll be a phony. They can say 100. They've learned that deals are fungible. They've learned that. So to them, any deal they make is a deal for the duration of the Trump presidency. It's a two and a half year deal and they'll reassess at that point. Or maybe they'll just cheat and have a covert nuclear program. And so you could see this world in which Trump declares victory because he got the dust out. Well, in the Strait of Hormuz, it was open before the war was open. Again, measure that against what he said at the beginning of the war. There's going to be regime change. We're going to obliterate their nuclear program. We'd have to end their ballistic missile program. We're going to destroy their Navy. Well, clearly we haven't destroyed their Navy because they've closed the Strait of Hormuz with a bunch of speedboats. So he's not achieved the things he said he would. And it was totally unnecessary to launch this war, kill all these people, upend the entire global economy, permanently lose the Gulf states as people that are reliant on the United States and on and on and on. Was all that worth it to get the dust out? Does anybody in America even care about the dust? Which, by the way, had already been dusted as far as we were concerned based on Trump's claims. Well, and the question is, and I have a question for you, Tommy, is like, this is a Hugh Hewitt question, is like, will the right-wingers accept? Because that's a total capitulation to the Iranians. Yeah, I think that where they're, what they will tell themselves, the story they'll tell themselves is, look, he destroyed all of, you know, Isfahan. He destroyed all the nuclear facilities. It will take a generation to build them back. They have no revenue. The military capacity is, you know, a fraction of what it once was. Therefore, that is some big win when it's like what everyone has always said about military efforts to shut down Iran's nuclear program. It's like you can set them back, but you cannot permanently take it away or solve the problem. And I think they'll convince themselves that the problem has been, you know, has solved as much as it could have been. What I think we know in reality, there could be like a garage somewhere in Iran with some nuclear centrifuges spinning that's enriching, you know, uranium to the grade they need it to be. They're just in this fantasy world where this is a game of risk. Because I think the most important thing we've learned from this war is that the demonstrated capacity of the Iranians to close the Strait of Hormuz. Is worth 10,000 ballistic missiles. It's worth, it's worth far more than support for Hezbollah. You know, like, and they can't, whatever capabilities Iran lost, they gained a much bigger one and showing that just firing a few drones at some tankers and threatening to the Strait of Hormuz gives them control of the global economy. So congratulations, Hugh Hewitt and Eli Lake. You've just empowered the IRGC more than anything that has happened since the 1979 revolution. Another Trump win. Except for maybe the Iraq war, which empowered them significantly. So this is the second time that the neocons have given the IRGC a gigantic win. You can pronounce in a slow fermentation process that can be easier on your belly and richer in nutrients and antioxidants. Plus all items conveniently bake in 25 minutes or less with no thawing required. 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Go to quince.com slash world for free shipping and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. Go to q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash world for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash world. One group that didn't get a win here is the Iranian people. Let's talk about what life is like for them right now to the best we can. So the estimate you see in terms of civilian casualties in Iran is about 1,700 people. I think we should assume that that's a massive undercount, but that would only be the direct death toll and that is far from the only impact. So the Center for American Progress put together a report that talks about the human environmental costs of the war. That includes the US and Israel. The Israeli airstrikes that released these toxic chemicals and pollutants into the air. Remember when the Israelis bombed this big petrochemical facility, it was raining like acid for days on people. God knows what that did to civilians. There have been further erosions of Iran's healthcare infrastructure, which is already under enormous stress before the war because of anti-government protests and decades of sanctions and mismanagement. And then Iran was experiencing this massive water shortage, again, before the war. That has gotten worse because at least one of their desalination plants was bombed. And then on top of that, Ben, let's say the Iranians have dealt with an almost total internet blackout since the war started. And I would just ask anyone, imagine any modern economy running without an internet for two months. It's impossible. Every business is screwed, right? And so on top of that, you have the US and Israel targeting major industries like petrochemical and steel. You need those industries to rebuild the country and also to get the revenue to rebuild the country. I saw one analyst told The Wall Street Journal that the disruption to the steel industry put at risk more than 5.5 million jobs within Iran, and then another 1.2 million at risk because of impacts on the chemical and pharma industry. And so again, to sum it all up, there were all these protesters who Trump said he was going to rescue who are now staring down the barrel of a more hardline regime. They traded the older hominy for the younger hominy. The IRGC is more entrenched. And life is just exponentially worse for them. A disaster. Disastrous economic situation somehow got worse because we bombed the shit out of them. Yeah, I think that we live in this world in which our news cycle focuses on this place when the bombs are falling, and then it's the same impulse as Trump. Trump kind of reflects the worst aspects of America. It's a common thread with Trump. If I can just get this off the television set, and actually to him it's the television set for most of us, it's our phones, then we'll think about other things. We'll think about, I don't know, the ballroom or the next war against Cuba or whatever. But I think what you're reminding us is of the people inside of Iran, like this war is going to be with them for a very long time. It's going to show up in deeper poverty, deeper repression, maybe health effects of some of these things that have been done, that millions of people will, and actually millions of Iranians were also displaced. Millions of people's lives are worse because of what Donald Trump did. And that's the kind of moral outrage that's sometimes missing. You know, when people talk about like democratic opposition to the war, that's about like he didn't ask Congress the right way, like what about the fact that- It's not about the briefing. Yeah. He just fucked over like millions of Iranians and- In perpetuity, by the way. Gulf Arabs and Lebanese and the US civil service members who died or were wounded, their lives are never going to be the same. And I think we kind of have to remind ourselves of that human cost. I think the other thing that'll be interesting is, you know, there's a world in which protests resume. You know, life is shitty. You know, we're not going to be able to do anything about it. We're going to be able to do nothing about it. Floor of support. for both Israel and Trump because people who actually care about their Christian faith are going to be upset about this. It also is a very dangerous gateway to a certain kind of anti-Semitism that is one of the older kinds of anti-Semitism. Well, the Jews are the ones who killed Jesus. Exactly, exactly. It's very dangerous. And again, it's Trump and Bibi that doesn't just justify it in any way. It shows why these kinds of wars are so dangerous for anti-Semitism because they lead people in those directions. Yeah, and again, the cost to civilians on the ground in Lebanon has been unbearable, right? I mean, there's the direct casualty number, but then there's the million people who have been displaced and the people who came back to their homes that have just been leveled. We reached out to Doctors Without Borders to see kind of what they're experiencing on the ground in Lebanon. And we got this note from an emergency physician, Dr. Tianmin Din. Let's listen. I need people to understand what the injuries looked like that we were seeing before the ceasefire. Now, beyond the acute injuries, we're looking at a generation left with lifelong disabilities. I visited a young woman a few days ago in ICU who we treated when she came through the emergency department. She'd been walking along with a friend when both her legs were blown off. She managed to survive her initial injuries, but when I visited her a couple of days ago, she was hooked up to dialysis because the muscle destruction from her injury was so extensive that it had been started destroying her kidneys. I also recently visited a migrant woman who'd been a patient out of clinic for years. She was injured in one of the very first strikes in the South, and she's still in the hospital. She's bled into her brainstem and spine. She's paralyzed. Her home is destroyed, and the people who would have cared for her were killed in the same strike. We are also seeing an overwhelming number of people whose health needs were neglected during the war, either because they couldn't reach healthcare or their doctors were displaced, or hospitalization. Hospitals had to shut their outpatient clinics to direct resources to trauma and emergency care. Yesterday, our clinic diagnosed a young pregnant woman with a baby who had died in utero. Imagine having a fully formed, wanted, and loved baby and having its heart stopped because the healthcare system had collapsed. These are complications that if they get caught early, they can be treated, they can be delivered safely by C-section when there's a functioning system. But there isn't one. So, look, you often hear people say, well, you know, the IDF military campaign in Lebanon is the most justified of all their actions because there is this real threat from Hezbollah and from rockets, et cetera. And it's like, okay. But there is a flip side to that argument about the human cost for people living in Lebanon who have no association with Hezbollah, probably hate them. And that's some examples right there. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that strikes me in listening to that clip is these people and doctors at that border, as they've been, in a lot of difficult places and you could hear her voice like breaking. Yeah. And it's the same thing we experienced in Gaza. Like the scale of this destruction is not normal even for a war because you hear it in her voice. Like the things that are happening kind of go beyond there was a civilian casualty event, you know, because again, this gets it. Why is this, why is it necessary to go after the health infrastructure if you're targeting Hezbollah? Like it just, clearly this war went well beyond, targeting Hezbollah. Either because there was no targeting or because it was indiscriminate or because there was really objective to kind of paralyze the Lebanese society while you take Southern Lebanon. Now, the other thing I want to say, Tommy, and I'm going to say this at the beginning, many thanks to the world though, Lebanese American who sent me some wonderful Lebanese olive oil. Okay. Because, you know, she was- It's not this word I was expecting. Grateful for our coverage of Lebanon. But actually the reason I make this point beyond just thanking that person is, Lebanese, the Lebanese I know, hate that their country is only seen as like this war zone. Like if it's- It's like this beautiful cosmopolitan city. Yeah, if it's on the news, it's because Hezbollah and, you know, rubble in Beirut. Right. And what the olive oil reminds me of, this is this incredible place. One of the prettiest places on the planet. It's one of, yeah, it's this gorgeous country. They produce wonderful things. They like have wonderful artists. I mean, it's worth naming this because there's something dehumanizing about how we kind of like, you know, the camera only turns on these places to show like rubble and then a commentator talking about Hezbollah. You know, like it's like the vast majority of Lebanese, including Shia Muslims, are not like Hezbollah operatives, you know. No, just normal human beings. Beirut is usually like an incredibly cosmopolitan city, not just a bunch of rubble from Israeli bombs, you know. And so the erasure of the humanity of people, cannot be a consequence of the war. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be this way. It's a bunch of political choices made by political leaders. All right. Let's turn to just the broader problem within the administration of the failure of diplomacy and the role I think you and I both believe that corruption has played in all of it. So Trump, when he has diplomatic problem, he does not send experts as we've discussed. He sends his idiot son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his idiot golf buddy, Steve Woodcoff. And the issue is not just that they're in over time, over their heads, which they are, they very much are. It's that they are corrupt. They have these huge financial conflicts of interest. And we basically have no visibility into the specifics or how those conflicts of interest might impact their decision-making, especially we're talking about the Middle East, right? And Jared Kushner's got all this golf money. So let's just go through the examples because we've talked about this before, but I don't know if we've done like a comprehensive kind of like corruption conversation recently. So Kushner is this floating envoy. He meets with the board of peace. He meets with the Russians. He meets with the Iranians. He's in Gaza all the time. He's talking to the Israelis and the White House. They talk about Jared, like in this role, he's making this big sacrifice because he doesn't take like the White House salary. And don't, for those who might have been, who might believe this bullshit, Jared is an unpaid volunteer because volunteers don't have to make FX disclosures and release their personal financial disclosure forms. So we only know because of previous press reports that Jared's investment firm, Affinity Partners, has made $2 billion from the Saudis. And he got hundreds of millions more from the Emiratis and the Qataris. We also know that at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, Jared was ostensibly there as Trump's Middle East envoy, but he was also soliciting funds for his firm. The New York Times said Jared was trying to raise another $5 billion for his fund. I assume most of that would come from the Saudis if he had his druthers. Bloomberg reported that 99% of all Affinity Partners assets belong to non-US investors. So that's the little we know about Jared. Eric and Don Jr. recently announced they're gonna work for a drone manufacturing company, which later merged with a publicly traded Trump company that owns golf courses. So that makes a lot of sense, Ben, is totally on the up and up. Forbes estimated that between, from 2024 to 2025, Don Jr.'s net worth went from 50 million to 300 million. Eric's went from 40 million to 750 million. And Barron Trump, who is a college sophomore, is estimated by Forbes to be worth $150 million. All of it tied to cryptocurrency stuff. And then finally, Ben, I know you've heard of Truth Social, but did you know that its revenue does not just come from spammy ads for mail order brides and Chinese peptides and things of that nature? They also, well, we'll do it a little multiple choice game here. What business did Trump Media, the owner of Truth Social, get into recently via a $6 billion merger? Was it A, Orbital Data Center? B, Fusion Energy? C, Non-Woke AI? D, Anti-Woke Legal Services via its acquisition of Liberty Legal, which is an anti-woke legal services company for patriots who don't want their case law to be totally gay? All right. So in my mind, it's probably Orbital Data Centers or Non-Woke AI, and I'm going to go with Non-Woke AI. Sorry, my friend, it's Fusion Energy. Really? Yes. Yes. The Trumps recently got into the fusion energy business. The conflicts of interest are so massive, the media barely covers them. Do you see the reporting the other day that's like Jared Kushner's conflicts are barely mentioned in the reporting? Yeah, that was good. Yeah. And it's like, this is harming our national security, and it's kind of just not part of the conversation. First of all, we should say there is a highly evolved network of corruption between Russia, the Gulf-- the US far right kind of MAGAverse, Hungary. There's just a lot of money that kind of swashes around this space. And what's interesting is Jared gravitates to all the places that are the most corrupt. Yeah, interesting how that works. So the hotel deals in Serbia, like probably one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, and an extension of Russian interests in a lot of ways. Or obviously, he's vacuuming up money in the Gulf. Pakistan, as I mentioned. Has a partnership with World Liberty Financial, controlled by Trump and Witkoff kids, to launch a stable coin, right? And so that's why the-- why else are the talks in Pakistan? So the point is that Jared is negotiating issues that are directly related to the interests of these countries that are paying him in the countries that are paying, if not him, his family members, and is simultaneously raising funds for his business. business while he's negotiating. negotiating. And I think what is so grotesque about this is, sure, like in some ways, this is kind of how business is done in parts of the world. Like there's a lot of corruption, you know, there's some big commercial deal and there's some money that exchanges hands under the table. But what Jared is leveraging is literally the U.S. military. Like the U.S. military is an instrument of his corruption. Our capacity to sell weapons to the Gulf countries or to protect the Gulf countries or to go to war with the opponents of the Gulf countries is directly related to both his diplomatic portfolio and probably the reason they're writing checks. And so it's just a higher scale corruption because he's not trading like small, it's not like, hey, like, you know, we're going to do a soybean deal and I'm going to get some money under the table or Hunter Biden. I'm going to get a $50,000 a month retainer from Burisma to sit on their board and hopefully get influence to the big guy, Joe Biden. No, this is like billions of dollars that are being paid because he has the power of the U.S. government behind him. And it is a shame on the U.S. media that they don't name that. That should be in the first paragraph of every story. It should be. It has to be. And not for like partisan reasons, because like, how are you informing your readers? Tell people why. Why is Jared at the table? Why is he at the table? Why are these talks failing? Why do we keep reading that like Jared and Steve Woodcock didn't understand the substance? So the nuclear negotiation. Oh, right. They're not nuclear scientists. They're there because of corruption. And like Steve Whitcoff's son, Zach, is the co-founder of World Liberty Financial. Yeah. The crypto firm that like it sounds sure sounds like a big scam or a Ponzi scheme. Like, you know, who's you know, who's mad at World Liberty Financial recently then is Justin Sun. Remember that crypto billionaire that pumped billions into World Liberty Financial? Wow. What a coincidence. Right at the same time, the SEC investigation into one of his companies went away and now he's accusing them of fraud. Yeah. Yeah. This guy's attacking World Liberty Financial. The Qataris gave Trump the plane. There's the real estate deals all across the world. And you got like, you know, remember, what was it, the Gaza peace agreement event when some world leader is like, hey, Trump, can I get Don or Eric's phone number so I can call about the deal? Yeah. Yeah. No, the president of Indonesia, one of the biggest countries in the world, is like, hey, can I get Eric Trump's phone number? What do you think that's about? To get his advice about how to deal with development in Aceh in Indonesia? Like, no. I mean, and this, you know, there's so many things happening. And this is all, like, just happening on the open. I mean, one thing, I've heard you guys begin to talk on PSA about, you know, the Project 2029, like what happens if Democrats win. Like, the accountability goes so far beyond Donald Trump senior, you know, like the combination of the fraud and crimes that are being committed and also the need to have laws that prevent this kind of corruption is got to be like one of the first spate of executive orders from a Democratic president. Totally agree. And then, of course, you have all the inspector generals at all the agencies that might be providing, like, watchdogs of this. They closed the, remember they closed the DOJ kleptocracy task force. They stopped enforcing FARA, which is the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which is try to prevent, like, you know, foreign agents from buying influence in Washington. There's been a bunch of reporting recently about this friend of Trump's from, like, the 80s and 90s named Paolo Zampoli. If you read about this guy. Fucking guy, man. The one who knocked on his ex-wife or something to ICE. This dude was boys with Trump in, like, the 80s and 90s. He was, I think, a modeling agent. Now, Trump made him the special envoy of the president of the United States for a global partnership. Has a very Epstein ring to. Yeah, we're buddies with Epstein. And he told the FC, whatever people see me, they want something. They want access to the president. I tell them, buy Boeing. If you want to make the president happy, buy Boeing. It's the simplest thing in the world. It's like just talking about access trading. Can we say one other thing about this, which is that the stock market, it's been extraordinary to watch this, first of all, because there's an irrationality. You see it kind of going up. Part of the problem is Trump looks at that as a useful metric. There's two problems. One is clearly someone is doing massive insider trading. And there's been the BBC has a great investigation. People should look at that. They've accounted for all these trades before Trump makes an announcement of people essentially betting on Trump making that announcement and making hundreds of millions of dollars. And it's happened repeatedly on both Iran and on tariff. 15 minutes before two social posts. And so somebody is. It's clearly profiting. But the other thing is, the market is just a bullshit indicator for how the economy is going for people, because it's a bunch of fucking traders sitting in front of computer screens, betting on currencies, betting on the price of oil. So even if you're going to get fucked and they're going to be oil scarcities and your gas prices are going to go up, they can still make a ton of money on trades by just betting where the currencies are going to go. And the prices we're all seeing reported daily in the news are like futures prices, usually, which are which often are less than the actual. Price of a barrel of oil. If you were to, like, pull up to Kuwait and like throw one in the back of your truck. It's just the whole thing is corrupt. Capitalism has kind of reached its late stage Frankenstein monster, you know, where it's just a vehicle for people like this to grift off of us. You know, I think it's great that we're betting on when Maduro is going to be deposed. Some insider can make hundreds of thousands of dollars on Kelshi some. Yeah, you couldn't be a Trump insider. You can be like a, you know, a special force. I'm not. Trying to pune them. But like, of course, you shouldn't have that. There's a lot of people. Yeah. A lot of people know when things are going to happen and they can make money off it. Yeah. All right. Well, that was nice to get that off our chest. By the way, if you guys want to support a media company that will always report on Jared Kushner's corruption and the Witkoff family's corruption, please consider becoming a friend of the pod subscriber. 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Use WORLD to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. All right. Let's talk about corruption over in Europe. So last week, there was this historic election in Hungary where after 16 long years, a right-wing populist named Viktor Orban was finally ousted after losing the parliamentary elections to a party led by his former ally, Peter Magyar. It was an election that focused on anger about corruption and frankly, anger at Orban's total failure to deliver for his country. Many supporters of democracy writ large are hoping that this election might provide a playbook for how to defeat other authoritarian creeps like Orban and also that it might be a bellwether that might help us just kind of see the future and determine which direction Europe is going to go because there's a lot of far-right parties that have been doing well. So that brings us to Bulgaria, Ben. They just had an election over the weekend that seems to have some of the same dynamics at play. Four months ago, there were these major protests against corruption and the economic state of the country, which forced the former government to resign the progressive Bulgaria party, AKA PB. They just won an election. in a landslide victory on Sunday with 44.7% of the vote. leader is Bulgaria's former president, Ruman Radov. Now, that's more of a ceremonial position, but he is a former fighter pilot. He commanded the Bulgarian Air Force. And he's sort of an interesting character. Like Orban, he took a bunch of pro-Russia sounding positions. He opposed Bulgarian military assistance to Ukraine. He's criticized EU sanctions. But there are questions about whether he's just sort of like posturing for the election or whether he's really committed to these positions or whether he's more of a pragmatist than Orban ever was. I guess we'll find out. But Radov's win was bigger than what the polling anticipated. His coalition should have a majority in parliament now. The former prime minister and the Gerb party, I love the names of these parties overseas. The Gerb party came in second with like 13%. The liberals got like 12% or closer to 13% too. Ben, any thoughts on sort of developments you've seen in Hungary since we last talked and how you might interpret the elections in Bulgaria from over the weekend? I think first of all, in Hungary, Peter Magyar has been as aggressive as you could possibly have wanted him to be in signaling that he's going to go after urbanism. And people may have seen these videos of him literally going on state television, which did not allow him to appear the entire campaign and being like, my first fucking thing to do is going to be shut your ass down. You know, like, I mean, it takes some guts. It'd be like, you know, going on, you know, CBS News, Barry Weiss and being like, yeah, we're shutting you guys down. I'm not like a big fan of like censoring the media, but like walking into state TV and saying to your face live on air. This woman like, you're full of shit and now it's time to pay the piper. It's kind of funny. And by the way, it's hard to overstate the extent to which Orban turned this. I mean, he literally would not allow Peter Magyar as an opponent of his to appear on, you know, so this goes beyond Fox News. This was literally state media. So I think Magyar is fully justified in doing what he's doing. He's signaled he's going to go after the corruption, including Orban's family members. He signaled that he would arrest Bibi Netanyahu as a war criminal if he traveled to Hungary. I mean, everything the guy says sounds like he's going to take a sledgehammer to Orbanism and the corruption that undergirds it. That's good. You know, the potential bad is there's a bit of a strong man persona in Magyar in doing this, and I don't know what he's going to build in his place. So we'll see. But so far, so good. But I think what we're seeing in Bulgaria is a broader problem. There's two issues. One is just like, whether the far right, do they have the momentum or not? And you can find now evidence that they don't. Orban lost. Maloney's backtracking away from Trump. Or you can find, you know, looks like they're maybe getting a foothold in Bulgaria. Slovenia, which we talked about that election, where the progressive actually got the most votes. It appears that the, you know, creepy far right guy, Jansa, is the one who's going to be able to form a government. And I think the problem for the EU is all Russia needs is one spoiler. I mean, they have that in Slovakia. This guy Fico is like that, too. You know, one country where people are probably just pissed about prices, because people are pissed about prices everywhere. And so they vote out the incumbent progressive party, and then the kind of pro-Russian party gets in. And then all of a sudden, they're like, putting sand in the gears of the EU on sanctions on Russia. It speaks, this is not sustainable. Like, if all Russia has to do to like, fuck up the whole EU is just find one relatively small Central Eastern European country, where there's an anti-incumbent mood and kind of surf it into having obstructions. Now, none of these people are going to be able to do that. They're going to have to do it. None of these people can, it's important people know this. None of these people can take the role that Orban did. Like, Orban was an absolute hub for far-right activity, for corruption. There's rumors that the Russian money was going to the Hungarians and then going to CPAC. You know, like, he was bigger than just like a vote for Russia's interest in the EU. But I do think that this speaks to a problem where the EU has to get away from like, unanimity of decision making, because they're always going to have some pain in the ass leader in some country. Definitely. Definitely. But yeah, I agree with you. It does look like a bit of a mixed bag in those recent elections. But there's also like interesting soundings. Like, Nigel Farage was asked about his relationship with Trump last week. And he said, I happen to know him, but that's by the by. He's the guy that basically lived in the lobby of that Trump hotel. Oh, he's just kissing his ass nonstop. Lord David Frost, the former Brexit negotiator, was more critical. He said Trump was heedless of the moral element of leadership and undeserving of support. He said, a moral line has to be drawn somewhere. And this week, Trump went beyond it. That was in an op-ed. In Germany, we've talked about the AFD party, the neo-Nazi party. They're distancing themselves from Trump, especially the Iran war. And then Marine Le Pen, who's like a longtime ally and supporter of Trump, told the French media that Trump's moves in Iran were erratic and the consequences would be, quote, catastrophic. So again, like, it's just this weird place where the far right is willing to be critical of Trump on Iran in ways that, inexplicably, Keir Starmer, the Labour prime minister in the UK, with a 50-point underwater approval rating, will not, even though every time he does, it seems to benefit him politically. I just can't make sense of it. It tells you, and we said this last week, that Trump is the best thing going for anti-far right politics, because he's such an albatross on these people that they're running away from him. But to your Keir Starmer point, if the fucking AFD can figure out that one way to boost your numbers, you're going to be in trouble. You're going to be in trouble. Is to stand up to Trump. It's pretty extraordinary that Keir Starmer can't seem to draw the same lessons. Yeah, like, look, I guess in fairness, it's easier to be in opposition. And when you actually have, like, government to government relations, and you're managing this special relationship, like, sure, there's some way Trump could punish you. I just think, I think political malpractice. I think, I've tried to be charitable. I don't believe what I'm saying. Yeah. Tell the fucking king not to go on the trip. That would send a message. Yeah, George Maloney had no problem saying to Trump, yeah, like, why is King Charles, like, you know, don't come here. You know, like, you're pissed about this war. I mean, Britain gets a significant amount of its energy from Qatar that's now offline. Like, that's going to screw over a bunch of people. Like, I just, there's no, what are you getting? I mean, actually, let's just look at it from the other standpoint. Like, what is Keir Starmer getting from being kind of scared of his shadow? Getting called not Winston Churchill. Getting called Neville Chamberlain on the reg. Yeah. Yeah, it's going great. Trump's going to take the king to, like, a monster truck rally or something. Oh, my God. What if he'll go to the ultimate fighting event? That'll be fun. Maybe he can be a part of Joe Rogan's, like, pilot psychedelic program. Take a little Ibogaine? Yeah, take a little psilocybin MDMA journey. That sounds like more fun. The Ibogaine shit. No, no, I think you, let's, I'll be in the other clinical trials. I'll be in the MDMA one. I will take, you and I can take King Charles. Is Camilla going to come? I'm sure she's going to come. We'll take them to the sphere. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll see if, like, Dead & Co. will kind of run it back. Just run it back. Have a good-ass time. Yeah. Okay, we'll solve that one. So, let's find two more things. So, we're going to talk about the latest from Cuba. I don't, the New York Times and Axios reported that a senior delegation from the U.S. had visited Cuba for negotiations. It's, like, the highest level talk since the Obama administration. Those talks were reportedly about, like, economic reforms, getting them to a market-based economy, releasing some political prisoners, not regime change. The talks have been primarily with President Raul Castro's family, not with the president of Cuba. So, again, he's going to regime change himself pretty soon, but his kids are included, including his grandkids. His son, Alejandro Castro Espin, who is known as the one-eyed man because of an eye injury from when he was in Angola. Ben, I know you know this guy. He's been part of them. Then there's Raul Rodriguez Castro, who is supposedly Raul's favorite grandson. He was, like, his body guard, his body guy. He's, like, the keeper of Castro's phone and controls, like, messages that come to and from him. He's also known as the crab because he was born with a sickle. So, on one hand, these guys have awesome nicknames. Imagine if, like, the Obama kids were known as, like, the crab and, like, the one-eyed man. I would say I probably spent, I'm not kidding, over a thousand hours with Alejandro Castro because we'd have these marathon multi-day negotiating sessions, or at least hundreds of hours, several. And, look, I'll say, like, yeah, he lost an eye in Angola. You kind of notice it. I mean, there's something in there, you know, but there's a fundamental unseriousness to how they, you know, I never was, like, I'm off to meet the one-eyed man. You know what I mean? Like, these people seem like they're fucking kids in a movie. It's, like, it's the same way that Cash Patel likes to, you know, work out at Quantico. Like, there's a fantasy camp element to them giving these nicknames of the crab and the one-eyed man. That's the first point. The crab is not a nickname that I would want. No, no. Or the one-eyed man, for that matter. No. The crab has got an insinuation. What are these talks? What is happening? What's happening here? So, I think what's happening is. Do you think that Iran is making them pump the brakes on this shit as, I guess, by threshold question? Because, like, they know it's not going well. No one has any bandwidth to do another regime change, at least not militarily. So, like, what is the path? How do you slow the roll? I assume that what they want is some. So, what's interesting is they clearly think Venezuela was a huge success. Trump talks about it a lot. And, look, the problem for Trump is, sure, he got Maduro. Delcy Rodriguez is in there. She's cracking down on all her opponents. And purging all the Maduro loyalists to install her own. Including Maduro people. But she's still a, you know, socialist, you know, strong woman. And I guess we get some oil occasionally from them or something. But here's the problem. Like, most Americans just don't give a shit. Like, no American's like, you know what? My life is the supposed Maduro. - Right. in Miami. So then I think they look at Cuba and they're like, well, we could do that, right? Like we could get rid of the leader. But here's the problem, they don't have oil in Cuba. And so I imagine the potential deal could be, I'm sure the Cubans would be willing to open up their economy, they were before with us. And what Cuba has is real estate, right? So they have beachfront property, quite literally, like the whole north coast of Cuba facing Florida, beautiful beaches, or beautiful keys. And you could say in a very corrupt way, hey, the Miami Cubans can come in here and own this land and develop hotels on it. Maybe they're throwing a Trump Tower or two and a golf course. And maybe Miguel Diaz-Canal, the president of Cuba, he goes, you know, he's the Maduro in this scenario. And they try to find some Delce Rodriguez type person that the Raul Castro is. Okay, kind of taking the place. The problem with this is, first of all, Diaz-Canal doesn't run Cuba. I mean, that's evident by the fact that they're- Not even talking to him. He's not even in the way that Maduro ran Venezuela. Like he was never, Raul's been the kind of, you know, emeritus leader of the country. The military's got a deep interest in the economy because it's a sanctions economy and they control a lot of stuff. And Diaz-Canal is kind of an apparatchik who's kind of the front man. So I think that the Eli Lakes of the Cuban hardliners know that just getting Diaz-Canal out doesn't change that regime at all. Like it just means a musical chairs in the president's seat for what, a real estate deal? And it's kind of like, why did we go through all this? What we like- Yeah, to what end? We did a fuel blockade. We killed Cubans literally because there were power shortages at hospitals. Like we've killed Cubans with our sanctions in the recent months so that like some, Miami Cubans tight with Marco Rubio can like invest in real estate. Cause I don't know what else Cuba can concede. You know, if they're not becoming a multi-party democracy tomorrow, which they're not going to regime change themselves, there's not much for them to concede. They can release political prisoners and, you know, again, like give property to Americans. But like, I just, what is this all about? I don't know. How does it help Americans? And once again, like, it seems like through these talks, the administration is further empowering the next generation of Castro's- The crab. So we're just empowering, yeah, the six finger guy and the one eye guy and rinse, repeat. I don't know, man. I guess hurry up and wait and we'll keep watching. Final story, Ben. So long time listeners to the show know that we have issues with some of the people in the administration, but that we're huge fans of FBI director, Kash Patel. He is eminently qualified for the job. Very competent. He's a great leader. He's an expert in all facets of law enforcement. And so it was shocking to me, personally, to learn via a recent report in the Atlantic magazine that Kash is not nearly as popular within the FBI itself as he is with us on this show. So according to this report, Kash Patel, the FBI director, he's routinely drunk on the job. And by the way, this is a 24/7 job. He is, the piece says that on multiple occasions, his security detail had trouble waking Kash up because he was so shit-faced. And in one instance, they had to make a request for equipment used by SWAT teams to disarm the FBI. And they had to make a request for equipment used by SWAT teams to disarm the FBI. And in one instance, they had to make a request for equipment used by SWAT teams to disarm the to break down doors. So that is drunk. I don't know that I've been that drunk in a long time. I guess he didn't have, what's that product you guys? Z-biotics. Yeah, he just didn't have the Z-biotics. He needs like 400 Z-biotics next time. You could help him out. We could ship him some Z-biotics. I'm happy to help him out because, again, I'm a big fan. The Atlantic piece reported that meetings with FBI staff have to be scheduled around his hangovers and that he is, quote, erratic, suspicious of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary evidence. Seems like bad tendencies for the FBI director. He's also incredibly paranoid about getting fired to the point where he flipped out about some random IT issue and thought it meant that the White House had locked him out of his accounts. Now, this paranoia might be justified. The article says that senior White House officials have had conversations about who might replace Cash. We also saw Minecraft head Dan Bongino leave his job as deputy to go be a podcaster again. So, Ben, I mean, this is not the first report that outlines all the ways that Cash Patel is kind of a joke and treats the job like it's fantasy camp. There was his request to go jet skiing at a conference of our closest intelligence-sharing allies, the Five Eyes. We know that Cash uses the FBI's private jet to fly to Italy for the Olympics, to fly to Pennsylvania to watch his girlfriend sing at some low-rent wrestling contest, to fly to a place called the Boondoggle Ranch. I love that you always include that one. I love the Boondoggle Ranch. Can we go? I'd like to go to the Boondoggle Ranch. If I can get us a ticket, will you go with me? It sounds like the country. Is that the kind of place where that guy shot Dick Cheney or Dick Cheney shot that guy in the face? Yeah. If you and I go, that'll be us. But, like, this is the first time I've seen the argument that the people in the FBI think Cash Patel is a threat to national security because of his mismanagement of the role. Now, the counterargument you hear is, like, look, every minute Cash Patel is designing his, like, FBI Punisher logo challenge coin is a minute he's not, like, fucking up ongoing FBI operations. I'm not sure. I buy that. I see a pretty big opportunity cost here. But what did you make of this article? Oh, I have some thoughts, man. So, first of all, I love that he's suing the Atlantic for $250 million. $250 million. When Lorian Jobs owns the Atlantic, so I think she can cover the legal fees. Yeah, just dig it in the couch for that. But also, what's interesting about this is that we saw the guy, like, shotgun a fucking beer at the Olympics with the hockey team, and he looked like Will Ferrell in old school. Like, remember when Will Ferrell shotguns for a spear? And he's like, oh, yeah! Like, that's exactly how Cash was acting. It's just, like, it was activating all the, like, alcohol. Break the tank. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, it is completely believable that this guy, I mean, we know he was at, like, Rouse. Remember the, I think maybe when Charlie Kirk got killed or something? He was at, like, you know. Tweeting out wrong information. He's always in Las Vegas. It's something called the Poodle Club. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you don't go there to drink seltzer. No, no. He's not the kind of guy who orders a club soda on the plane. He's the kind of guy who's getting the two, you know, bottles of wine, you know. Two travelers. But, so, it's eminently believable that he's a drunk. And to be serious about it, like, you remember, Tommy, like, when shit happens, like, the FBI director. Remember the Boston Marathon bombing? I just left, but yes. Okay, so you just left. So, Bob Mueller was, I mean, rest in peace, was in the fucking situation room for, like, hours, you know. And he's briefing Obama, and he's on the phone with agents in Boston. And he's managing up and down and around, and he's briefing Congress. Like, shit happened on the regular where- And there was stuff like that we never learned about. Like, ongoing investigations that were so sensitive that, like, the White House people were never briefed that they're managing. Yeah, like, that is a 24-7 job, literally. You will get woken up in the middle of the night and asked a question like, who do we have to notify about this? Or, can you call your counterpart in this other country because there's a terrorist plot and we need- Someone at the FBI director level to call the head of MI5 or something. Like, shit like this happen all the time. So, if he can't function on the job because he's hammered for hours at a time, like, that's dangerous. I'd also say, like, what is Kash Patel even doing in this job? Because, like, what is his vision of the FBI? Because all that seems to get him geeked is to have, like, ultimate fighting people come and train agents or to change the logo. Like, he has no vision of, like, how to reform the Bureau. Like, he's not even- He's so incompetent and people are so innocent that he's not even persecuting Trump's opponents because he's too incompetent to do that. I mean, and then the last thing is, I read the piece and it kind of explains to me, Tommy, I don't know. Remember when he was, like, posting, like, through the Charlie Kirk investigation? Like, we got the guy. He's in custody. Like, it felt like drunk tweeting. Totally. It was. We've all been there. Absolutely been there. But when I've done it, it's usually been, like, I'm at the end of a dinner that's not that interesting. So, I start looking at my phone. I've had a few and I'm like, ah, I'm going to tweet about this. I'm not the FBI director. No, usually for me, I'm going, I'm walking back to the main stage at Coachella. The molly's wearing off and I just want to weigh in on the Hungarian election. You know? Yeah, you run out of things to talk to Katy Perry about. So, you're just going to weigh in on the Hungarian. Katy does want to hear your takes on the Hungarian election. So, you're going to share it with your millions of followers. The honeymoon phase is over. All she wants to talk about is Bieber. All I want to talk about is Orban. It's just like, I got to tweet it out. Group, one organization that seems to have kind of grasped who Cash is, is whoever made this Lego movie about him. I don't even know if it's the Iranians anymore. They're all getting credited. I think this is a meme now. Entirely a meme, but whoever made this one had a good-ass time with it. Let's watch. Oops, total bust. Olympics, hockey, locker room champ. FBI jet to Milan, you absolute tramp. Mossad, honeypot, girlfriend trap. Alexis Wilkins, Israel clap back. Iran, Hatcher, Gmail, pics go viral. Family shots and hockey spiral. Freaking blackouts, paranoid freakouts. Am I fired? Meltdowns, what a leak out. Purging the pros, installing the bros. The whole bureau's burning. We didn't start the fire. It was always burning. Since the world's been turning, we didn't start the fire. No, we didn't start the fire. Maybe AI is good. I mean, we found a good use for it. Yeah. I mean, the amazing thing about that is that there's every single narrative about cash, because we've been covering them all on this podcast, is somehow in like a one-minute video. Yeah, how do they do it? I mean, he does have crazy eyes. Him getting hammered at the Olympics. The Flavor and Podcast guys call him Cock-Eyed Cash. Yeah, him posting the wrong guy was caught and Charlie Kirk. Like, everything that this guy's done, like, they can just grab that and within like an hour, like, churn out like this AI video that's honestly like pretty interesting to watch. Now, they always have the Israel control thing. They always have. So, they always have, you know, Alexis Wilkins, a girlfriend, is Mossad Honeypot. But, yeah, man, it couldn't happen to a better guy than Cash, I have to say. I wonder. I wonder if there'll be a Kalshi market on how long it takes her to dump him after he's fired. You know, if he can't have a SWAT team guard her. Actually, notes on the IRGC Lego video. Worked that in there. They left that out, that there's a SWAT team that basically provides security for his girlfriend. Come on, guys. Do better. Do better. IRGC. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whoever made this. Wow. Good stuff. Anyway, hopefully Trump fires Cash Patel. Yeah. He's on a firing spree lately. It's just self-evident that this guy. Anyway, you know, maybe the point is it just, things just haven't been the same since Bongino left. Yeah. He's holding the whole place together. Bongino was holding the place together. He's holding it all up in his shoulders. With his gigantic. Minecraft head. Square Minecraft head. Okay, that's it for the news portion of the show. But please stick around for my conversation with Nick Enrich. We talk about his book, Into the Wood Chipper. It's a whistleblower's account of what it was like when USAID got dozed by Elon Musk, his idiot friends, and presumably, reportedly, allegedly, a whole bunch of ketamines. So stick around for that. This podcast is brought to you by WISE, the app for international people using money around the globe. When it comes to sending money abroad, many providers claim to offer free fees and competitive rates. But don't be fooled. This can be code for inflated exchange rates. 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This is true. You can use it. You always get the best exchange rate. You can use it to buy stuff. It could not be easier. If you're going to multiple countries, try WISE. Especially when the dollar is going to be worthless pretty soon. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. Terms and conditions apply. Right now, the midterms are the biggest story in American politics. But however they go, the Democratic Party is going to have to do some serious soul searching. Join us. Washington, D.C., November 5th through 7th, the second annual CrookedCon. It's going to be the Positive America hosts and some of the smartest people in politics. We're going to try to answer some big questions. Stuff like, if we won, how did we win? If we lost, how could we possibly have lost? And with 2028 around the corner, where do we go from here? If you believe in democracy, community, and fighting for the future, now's the time to grab your tickets to CrookedCon 2026. Head to CrookedCon.com. Go to CrookedCon.com to get your tickets now. Once and save through October 27th every time you shop. Restrictions apply. My guest today is the former Bureau of Global Health's Director of Policy Programs and Planning for USAID. His new book is Into the Woodchipper, a whistleblower's account of how the Trump administration shredded USAID. It's a very evocative title, and I assume one where you needed much less ketamine to come up with it than Elon did. For his famous tweet. Nick Enrich, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Great to meet you. So let's start by just, you know, kind of talking about a bit about your time and work you did at USAID pre-Elon. You were there for over 12 years across four administrations. What did you focus on and what was your proudest accomplishment? Yeah, so I was, as you said, the Director of Policy Programs and Planning for the Global Health Bureau, which was essentially the CFO, COO position of that bureau. My job was to make sure that we had the resources we needed for global health and that we were using them as efficiently as possible to achieve our health goals. And, you know, my job was to come up with ways to make things better. And I think that's where I was the most proud. One of the last things, sadly, that I did in the last administration was come up with a new global health policy for the agency. We had actually never had one before for our whole global health sector. And we thought that this would be a great opportunity for us to come up with a new policy for the agency. And we thought that this would be a great way to get a little bit more efficient in the way that we would administer our programs. I also had a list. When I heard Doge was coming in, I had a list of things that I wanted to do to improve the agency that I thought would be the kinds of things that Doge would be excited to hear about. Obviously, quite naively, because I never actually got a chance to share any of those ideas. So, like, far from battling these guys, you were like, oh, I got some ways to make this place more efficient. Here's my literal list of things we could do. To, you know, make money go further. Yeah, they were called the Department of Government Efficiency. And, you know, in the abstract, it sounded like a good idea. But the reality was it was no such thing. Yeah. So let's talk about that reality. So by now, I imagine everyone listening knows how this story unfortunately ends. It's Elon Musk and a bunch of, like, young, arrogant kids from the tech world just rampaging through USAID and destroying it. That decision alone is estimated to have already led to 750,000 deaths just so far. So but I think listeners might not fully grasp just how careless and ignorant the people in charge of this process truly were. Can you recount for listeners a story you tell in the book about what a couple of Doge staffers said to you after most employees at the agency had been placed on administrative leave? Sure. That it wasn't until after most of the employees were placed on administrative leave or fired that I was given the opportunity to explain what we even did in global health. So I just gave a quick overview, talked about the infectious diseases that we worked to stop, our work to help save newborn babies and mothers, and a few other of the just top line highlights. And it was I was kind of met with a stunned silence from the leadership of USAID at that point. And the chief of staff of the agency kind of like looked at me and said, wow, I had no idea you did all that. When I think of what USAID did in global health, I just assumed it was, you know, abortions. What is your. What is your reaction in that moment? How do you even address a comment that ignorant by someone who's supposed to be the chief of staff at the agency? It was very difficult to decide whether to laugh or cry. I knew I didn't want to argue with him because I knew that wasn't going to get me anything and get me anywhere. But it just betrayed this extraordinary level of ignorance. And to think that these were the people that had made the decision to get rid of all of our staff before they had any idea. What the work was that the agency even did was shocking. Yeah, truly shocking. So there was this moment where Elon and the boys come in to USAID. It's clear they're going to destroy some parts, but it's not clear yet if they're going to like completely upend the entire agency. I mean, ultimately, they got rid of what, like 83 percent of all programming and folded that into the State Department. And so before USAID was was fully gutted, you decided to author and then released to the media some memos about the impact to become a whistleblower. Can you tell listeners what you put in those memos and how you made that decision and whether you think it made any like did anybody read your memo? Did anyone rethink what they were doing? Well, so what I put in the memos that there were three memos. The first was to describe everything we had tried to do to restart our lifesaving programs, which was something that Secretary of State Rubio had promised was going to happen as they tore down USAID. But yet they didn't let us restart any of our programs. And in fact, they stopped us at every possible turn. So that was. The first memo, the second was about how they decimated our staff and really just traumatized the workforce for the six week period in which I was responsible for global health. And then the third memo documented what the impacts were going to be of the cuts to USAID, including potentially up to two point six million lives lost per year and tens of millions of mothers not being able to receive emergency life, life saving care and numerous other other issues. Did it make a difference? Well, USAID was still destroying Some of the contracts that had been terminated that were necessary to do our most lifesaving projects were actually restored in the few days after my memos were released. But that was about it. I had kind of hoped that this would light a fire under Congress or others to be able to shed some light on exactly what was happening there. But unfortunately, the end of the story is not a happy one. Yeah. Marco Rubio is a real villain in my view, because he was once a huge supporter of USAID and its work. In fact, I've heard you say in other interviews that people at the agency were a little bit relieved when he was named Secretary of State, because his record suggested that he understood USAID, he understood the value, and that he might support it or protect it. Why do you think he completely turtled on this and reversed himself? And what's your take on Rubio now? Yeah, I mean, he did certainly did not live up to the expectations. The estimation that I and other staff at USAID had thought we were going to get, which was a longtime staunch supporter of foreign aid and development. Instead, we got lies. We got Rubio saying that no one has died as a result of the cuts to USAID, which was just blatantly not true. And he went further and blamed the USAID career officials for being insubordinate, for not restarting programs that his own team was preventing us from doing. And look, maybe. You know, he got lost somewhere in the connection between the waiver that he allowed to restart life-saving programs and when that was not allowed to actually be implemented by Doge. But this is the problem when you hollow out an agency of all of its expertise and replace it with completely, you know, incompetent and unknowledgeable and unqualified buffoons. There was this chaotic period, right, where, like, Trump takes over. Elon comes in. Doge goes to USAID first. There's, like, a freeze on programming. Then they say, oh, life-saving stuff will continue. Then it's clear that that's not happening. Like, now that you have some time and space from that period of time, was the chaos lying? Was it people not really knowing, like, what the left hand was doing to the right? Or, like, what was happening there? Like, what was all the competing statements and the confusion and the kind of bullshit that was coming out of the Trump administration's leadership in the. Yeah, I mean, certainly there were lies and there was cruelty to an unbelievable degree. But I think the thing that people maybe underestimate the most and maybe what has the most relevance for other agencies, perhaps, is the level of sheer incompetence that we saw. These were people who were not just unknowledgeable of global health or international development. They had really no idea how government even works. And, frankly, they were. They were really terrible managers of people and projects. So, you know, they had been tasked with an unreasonable assignment to dismantle, you know, an agency that delivered foreign aid over six decades. And you can imagine things are going to go wrong with a project like that. And when they inevitably did, the people who were in charge just had no idea how to fix those problems and ended up just making things worse. It was a lot of, like, table smacking and yelling at each other and not understanding what was happening. Because they had already gotten rid of most of the experts that would have been able to help them do it. Ah, that's a, yeah, great way to run a railroad there. Get rid of all the people who understand the building and then try to dismantle it. If you had, like, two minutes in an elevator with Elon Musk in that period to explain to him what he did and the impact it had on the world, what would you tell him? You know, somebody said that the image of the world's richest man killing the world's poorest children is not a pretty one. And I would like. I would love to convey that. Because I do feel like the destruction of USAID had nothing to do with improving efficiency or fighting waste or realigning foreign aid with some, you know, the new president's priorities. This was the just destruction of an agency for the sole purpose of satisfying the ego of a billionaire. And it's something that I'm still quite angry about, as you can probably tell. Yeah, I can only imagine. I mean, I'm sure you're, like, waking up every day to read these insane. These insane tweets from this, like, ketamine-addled monster who seemed to just take glee in harming the agency, upsetting employees, being an asshole. It just must have been horrifying. Yeah. I mean, there was a day where I think he tweeted over 40 times between, like, 3 and 4 o'clock in the morning about USAID. And this was on a Sunday night. And on that Monday morning, there were. Some of my colleagues were asking me, Is it safe for us to come in the building? I mean, he's calling us criminals. He's calling us a ball of worms. He's calling us evil. And, you know, I didn't really know what to tell them. I mean, the good bureaucrat I was, I said, Well, we haven't gotten guidance to not come into the office, so we should still come. These were kind of my normal tendencies that I had to fight against. And what took me so long to decide that there was no way that I was actually fulfilling my oath as a civil servant. And I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing, what I was being told to do. And that's why I eventually felt like I needed to stand up and say something. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to remember back to those days where he's essentially accusing USAID of being, like, a criminal organization and evil. And I mean, just the vindictive nature of the attacks was, you know, shocking and baseless. So let's just look forward a little bit. A lot of voters genuinely don't want to spend U.S. taxpayer dollars overseas, whether it's on a war or development. They think it's a waste. You know, isolationists, nationalist arguments against foreign aid or foreign spending that can frankly be really convincing. But I do think some of those people could be persuaded by national security arguments in favor of foreign aid. So in your opinion, what are some ways that destroying U.S. aid is hurting our national security now and making Americans less safe? Yeah, I mean, there's several ways. The first is specific to infectious diseases. And that's the one that keeps me up at night because I think the short. Shortest term threat is from a new disease or an existing disease that we're no longer able to detect coming to our borders because we are currently flying blind when it comes to an early warning system that we had previously set up within USAID to help countries detect and treat and respond to outbreaks before there was any chance of them spreading. And now those systems have been ripped up and we have no idea. We're basically conducting. Biosafety and biosecurity policy by crossing our fingers and hoping. So that's the thing that scares me most. And what we saw when we would get issued these warnings to the Doge team and the political appointees as they were tearing it down was just that they couldn't understand. So when I tried to explain, for example, that when they froze aid, they froze clinical trials, testing new drugs for drug resistant tuberculosis, that these were our antibiotics of last resort. And when we interrupt treatment of those, it allows for the potential development of new strains of an airborne infectious disease that we no longer have any antibiotics to treat. And when I would say that, I told that to to the leadership at USAID. And they told me they asked me if I could make Barney style slides to explain them in a way that non health experts could understand. Barney style. Barney, like the purple dinosaur, the children's dinosaur. That's who are those for? For Trump? I guess I don't know who they were for. I mean, it's it's it certainly was for nobody that was going to be making rational decisions about national security. Yeah, that's unnerving. I'm trying to imagine what a Barney style briefing about drug resistant tuberculosis looks like. I don't want to watch that show. I could tell you that much with my kids. But OK, continue. That's horrifying. That's an awful image. Yeah, so so that that's sort of the. The most immediate threat that keeps me up all night, the longer term, you know, USAID was the embodiment of American generosity, and I think it really was preserving partnerships in ways that are done so much more efficiently and effectively than you'll ever see from what can be run out of the State Department or the Department of Defense when we try to lead by coercion and the use of force. I mean, I think it was General Mattis. You know, the last Trump administration said that if you cut foreign aid, you're going to need to buy me more bullets. And I think that's really true. President Obama said that for many people around the world, USAID is the U.S. And I think that's right, too, because a lot of people, the only engagement that they ever had with the U.S. was through the generous support that we offered them under the banner of from the American people. And I'm I'm afraid of what's going to happen in the world where that no longer exists and they don't have that image. Well, no, luckily, everything else is going really great. And we have kicked off this catastrophic regime change war in Iran. We had a president tweeting, you know, praise Allah on Easter and insulting all Muslims and all Christians at the same time. So I don't I don't really know what could go wrong there. OK, so, again, looking forward, like you, you couldn't put USAID back as it was if you wanted to. Right. Because all the infrastructure and partnerships and expertise, it's gone and there's just no way of kind of like fixing. That. But the next Democrat who who wins the presidency is going to win. want, I imagine, some sort of reformed, updated version of USAID. Do you have a sense of kind of a back of an envelope kind of sketch of what that might look like? Or also, is there anyone like a group of experts out there somewhere kind of trying to rethink USAID for that next iteration that hopefully we could get through Congress or get done and get back running? Yeah, I mean, I actually maybe am more optimistic than you. I believe that USAID could be rebuilt and not that difficult in not that difficult of a way. And frankly, I think it should. Again, let's not think that it was torn down because that was a good idea or that it wasn't working or anything like that. The reality was, as I mentioned, it was torn down by people who had no idea what it actually did. The counter argument is to keep it where it's now being tried to fold into the State Department. And I think that's a problem for several reasons. First, I think it ends up having. You know, for the same reason that we wouldn't just suggest combining the State Department and the Department of Defense, which are two separate pillars of foreign policy, so too is development, which is a third critical policy, a pillar of foreign policy. And we're already seeing what them trying to run foreign aid out of the State Department is major problems because of that tangle as they try to kind of shoehorn it into their transactional diplomacy. Where they exchange the idea of HIV treatment for millions of people in exchange for access to critical minerals, for example, which is just, it really kind of defeats the purpose of everything that we've learned about how development policy works and builds partnerships over years. So that's one piece. The second is, as I mentioned earlier, having an independent agency that is the face overseas of American generosity is symbolically important. And that flag, and that logo of the handshake and the for the American people, I think is important for projecting American goodwill and generosity overseas. And I think that that on its own has value. Personally, I find that folks who say, well, you know, it's over, USAID is done and nothing's coming back. It's kind of like a lack of boldness and a lack of creativity that sort of allowed USAID to collapse in the first place. And so, you know, I think that's a big part of the thing. So I'm hoping that the next administration, even the next Congress is looking forward to boldly taking on the rebuilding of USAID. And I think it's something that is not a hard lift. I think it's very popular overall when people understand what it is, right? It's less than 1% of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. And with that amount, we've saved 92 million lives over the last 20 years. So I don't think it's a hard sell. I think it's just, you know, it's a does require the political willpower to say, look, this is what we want. And there are ways to make it better. It doesn't have to be exactly the same. Like there are some valid criticisms of USAID and there are ways that we can use this opportunity to make it less likely to foster dependency over time, more likely to partner more closely with local organizations, have a little bit more flexibility in the earmarks that Congress has set for us so that we can address overarching problems. Rather than kind of stay shoehorned. There's tons of ideas that I would love to talk about for anyone who'll listen. But where I stand is we need to rebuild USAID. All right. Well, let's hope that others in Congress share your optimism. The book is Into the Woodchipper, a whistleblower's account of how the Trump administration shredded USAID. Nick Enrich, thanks for doing the show. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks again to Nick Enrich for doing the show. And I have a feeling that we're going to be talking about a lot of things. We're going to be talking to you before next week, guys, because Wednesday maybe is a deadline still. We don't know. J.D. Vance, peacemaker. Yeah. And maybe J.D. will go to Pakistan. That's a long flight for J.D. Vance. Also like the security requirements. Like it was dangerous for our diplomats to be in Islamabad. Like I can't imagine what goes into, I mean, you want to talk about cost of war, like the cost of securing J.D. Vance in Islamabad has got to run into the tens and tens of millions at least. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's about it. And- By the way, I love Trump. I love Trump. I salute you, Chief of General Staff of Pakistan. Like it's so cool. Fucking war criminal general. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks for your help. State sponsor of terror, like, you know, LT, like, you know, Lascaux-Taylor. Wild. Like, anyway. I'm sure the Indian government loves that. Yeah. 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