Impeach Pete Hegseth?

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She installed it herself, said it was super quick, it was running in no time, she loved that the app's easy to use, she can arm or disarm the system, or check the cameras right from her phone, so she is very satisfied with her SimpliSafe. Right now, you can get 50% off a new SimpliSafe system, go to simplisafe.com slash crooked, that's simplisafe.com slash crooked for 50% off, and when you order, please write in Pod Save America in the How Did You Hear About Us survey to let them know we sent you. Don't forget, there's no safe like SimpliSafe. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's show, we'll talk about Trump's last-ditch effort to convince voters Republicans care about the cost of living, Democrats' big decision on a Republican data center bill, Pete Hegseth facing GOP critics and a possible impeachment over the Iran war, and the White House spending your tax dollars on Trump campaign ads. All right, guys. We are five weeks out from Election Day, and the numbers that may end up being more predictive than any poll are these, $4.50 a gallon for gas, $6.50 for diesel, and consumer sentiment now at its second lowest level in history, lower even than the height of the pandemic or the 2008 financial crisis. And it isn't just Democrats. Republican consumer sentiment is now down 20% since January. Which does raise questions about whether this kind of messaging from Donald Trump is moving the needle. We have the best economy we've ever had. I've reduced the prices, but they like to say affordability. But they're the ones that caused the affordability problem. I don't have to know anything about you. Your 401k has doubled in a short period of time. It's doubled. You're twice as wealthy as you were a short time ago, every one of you. And that's because of me. Have a good time, everybody. You're twice as wealthy, and that's because of me. Have a good time. That's it. That's the closing argument. So the White House is trying to limit the damage of what they've done in the last couple of years with an assortment of gimmicks now. Trump's reportedly still weighing an export ban on diesel. And in that appearance on Monday in the Oval, that was an announcement that a Minnesota company will spend $15 billion to build a new steel plant in Iowa, that could create 1,700 jobs when it opens in 2030. You think that'll do it? We'll have the midterms in 2030, maybe. I think it's a smart idea in the short term in Iowa. I mean, I was talking to a friend in Iowa today who said, like, the Democratic reaction is, do you guys remember when Trump brought the CEO of Foxconn to the White House and announced they would open a plant for, like, 13, to make 13,000 new jobs in Wisconsin in 2017? They're going to make, like, LCD screens or something. And shocker, a decade later, it didn't really pan out. It's more like, I think Microsoft now owns the land and it's just data centers. So it's kind of exactly what you'd expect. But my buddy in Iowa said that this was getting a lot of press, making headlines, like the public statements from people like Rob Sand or, like, it's a promising idea, I want more details, stuff like that. So they're kind of welcoming it. But ultimately, I think the price of diesel is what people in Iowa are really focused on right now. It's like $6.58. It's about double what it was this time last year. They're about to go into it. It's about the planting season. So Iowa farmers are really, really pissed about that. I don't think an announcement of one potential factory by 2030 is going to deal with that. Yeah, there's a poll about how many people believed they were going to get the $5,000 check. It turns out not many. Not many, right? So you've got to assume. People aren't really idiots. Right. People can look and be like, hey, it's really cool that we're going to have a new steel plant in Iowa. What a great idea. But it's not until 2030 and also, why do I think that that's something I should thank Trump for? Right. And I think people don't believe Donald Trump anymore. Even people that we would say, oh, like, we wish they'd been credulous for far less time. Like, it is happening. And you can say, like, that's like the floor, right? Like, how many people are going to believe his promises at this point? And it's just sort of vanishingly few. So I'm sure people would appreciate a new steel plant. But it's a kind of believe it when I see it situation. It certainly doesn't change the fundamental economic conditions, which are not just, by the way, like perceived this election. Like Donald Trump promised not just to not just to kind of not have diesel prices go through the roof, but to address like, you know, decades of decline and years of rising prices. He's done the opposite. How excited do you think Ashley Hinson was to be standing right behind Donald Trump for when he said he gave her one of his his famous out of touch sayings for the record books, best economy ever, as she's running in a tight race against Josh Turek in Iowa. Now she gets a video. Of her in the oval behind him where he said, best economy ever. You're all richer. I think she said something funny to like, we support your agenda, sir. Thank you for your agenda, sir. Something like that. He also promised, I think, to go to Iowa to campaign for her, which she was like, white knuckling it. He's going out. Yeah. He's like, hey, everyone, this is Ashley. She's in a tough race. She's awesome. Best economy ever. I'm going to go out and tell everyone in Iowa that when I Donald Trump giving rally speeches at this point is the equivalent of like when a dog brings you a bird. You know, it's like for these Republicans, he's like, look, look, I'm here with that bird. You want is like, fuck, I don't want that bird. Get out of the house, you know, what about this diesel ban pros, cons, and does it have any impact political impact? Do you think before the midterm, maybe short term? I mean, it sounds like they're preparing or proposing a 90 day export ban, which would in the short term would mean there's more supply, which presumably would bring down prices in the short term in the US. But long term, it creates a bunch of challenges that could increase prices permanently or not permanently for the long run. So I don't know. I think most of the industry hates it. People think it's kind of bullshitty. Maybe it'll work and drop prices a little bit. But again, like I was about to go into a month long harvest season with diesel prices at 658 a gallon in Sioux City, Iowa. Like if they're going to do this, why didn't they do it a month ago outside of weeks? We got to the election five weeks. And like, I don't know if I'm expert enough to know what the short term effects of a diesel export ban would be. But why are we in this mess? Well, because the president is a capricious buffoon who has introduced incredible instability in trade, in the Middle East, in the supply of oil, just adding one more layer of unpredictable market forces, long term help, of course not. What it does in the short term, who knows, but it's all being swamped by the fact that there is a ongoing war in the Middle East he can't get us out of. So whatever gimmicks he tries to pull in the next five weeks, I can't imagine it making that much of a difference. Yeah, I think, I mean, look, we've all been there. You're trying to solve a problem that people don't perceive that you've succeeded in fixing the economy or that you're fixing it fast enough. And so you go to the policy people and you're like, what can we do to sort of move the needle here? Perhaps with a phone and a pen. Throw in a bunch of stuff. Well, yeah, ideally you'd start these things a year in advance of the election. And you'd also do something that maybe actually made a difference. And at the very least, you do stuff where you're like, the way that you frame it is, and we're not there yet, but we're fighting hard to bring down costs, and we're gonna take on these companies, their price cut, or whatever you say. This message is so inconsistent that it's like, we're gonna do this thing, we're gonna diesel ban, and we're gonna open up this thing. But also, it's the best economy ever, and you're all rich. It doesn't really make a lot of sense. Yeah, it's always selling, it's always marketing. But I mean, a lot of people listening are like, well, how do I care about diesel? Diesel increases the price of everything. It's trucking, it's freight trains, it's ships, meaning small boats. It's farming and tractors and construction. It's home heating prices in the Northeast. It's military vehicles. This is touching all these different parts of our economy. And we export 1.25 million barrels a day. So you could, I guess, stop doing that, but it's not exactly like, it's not like we're gonna increase supply that much. No. Speaking of fuel, you know what powers Crooked Media? What powers Crooked Media, Jon? Our subscribers. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which is a good reason to head on to crooked.com/friends to become a subscriber today. You get ad-free episodes of all your favorite podcasts, and you help support independent pro-democracy media, of which we are one of the few outlets left. And that engagement, it's a renewable resource. Republicans in Congress are also hard at work at. pretending they suddenly care about the cost of living. This week, the Senate will vote on a bill that would direct states to, quote, consider, consider requiring data centers to pay for their own energy costs. Just think about it, you know, ponder whether you might be willing to gently nudge AI companies to maybe possibly pay for the vast amount of electricity that they consume. That's what this bill does. It's brought to you by Ohio Republican John Husted, who has been getting hammered by Sherrod Brown for giving $2.5 billion in tax breaks to data centers in Ohio alone, which the Republican Senate campaign committee has said is an, quote, anchor hanging around Husted's neck. They said it's the biggest threat to his reelection in a very close campaign. Would love to hear what they think about this new data center soundbite we just got from the Republican speaker of the House. Let's listen. I've had several tech executives and lawmakers to be clear say that the information against data centers, that pushback against data centers, that is coming from China. Yes, it is a Chinese PSYOP. I really believe that. It's not a conspiracy theory. I think they're pushing those ideas. How like someone unpacked this for me. If he sincerely believes that, what is like one of the pieces of evidence that this is a Chinese PSYOP? Where is this coming? Where do they think this is coming? This is just a guess, but I think what they would say is so there's there's some people who are Chinese are pushing like fake accounts, sock puppet accounts, but they're like making things go viral. I don't know. Maybe they're what? It's crazy. Like bot farms, I guess. I guess there's like, like the word PSYOP, like we just got to everyone stop using it. It could become just sort of like just the things you don't like are all PSYOPs now. Fine, whatever. People got like people got bored of using the word conspiracy and they just said, right. Yeah. So sounds cool, I guess. Yeah. Greg Abbott has shifted on this. We're just in Texas talking about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of Republicans realize that there's headwinds against it. Maybe it's true, right, that in the same way that Russia didn't invent American political dysfunction, but took advantage of it by by fanning the flames of it. Maybe China does see advantage in kind of drumming up antipathy towards AI in the United States. It wouldn't change the fact that these companies have gone about this in the most ham-fisted and kind of arrogant way that dismiss the concerns of people and that they've tried to. Buy and sell politicians to get around persuading people that they might want these data centers in their communities. The objections are very real from people who, A, don't want these things in their backyard and B, have come to expect that the benefits that accrue to the largest and most profitable corporations in the world in the world do not kind of redound to the benefit of the broader community. And that is not something China can convince us of whatever he is seeing or claiming to see or wanting to believe is true. So Republicans, they have recognized that they have a data center problem. Many of them were championing, you know, data centers for years now and offering all kinds of tax breaks and incentives. Also, to be honest, some Democrats, too. And now everyone realizes there's a problem because all the polling has come back and it's unbelievably unpopular. And so they're deciding they're trying to do something belatedly. So the House passed a version of this Houston bill, and it passed almost unanimously, 417 to 3. But the Senate Democrats then blocked John Thune's effort to pass it by unanimous consent. And Chuck Schumer called the bill a fraud. Though, as of now, we're recording Monday, the caucus still seems to be mulling over whether to try to deny Houston the points and open themselves up to being labeled obstructionists. So what do you guys think of this? What are the Senate Democrats do here? So first of all, it's not clear that this bill would do anything for Ohio, right? Ohio has a different set of rules that already go beyond what these voluntary rules would be. So he's just trying to do a stunt messaging win that he can go campaign on. And I don't see why you would you would help a Republican fighting for his life in the final home stretch before an election, get a fake victory that he can go run around the state pretending proves that he's some advocate. So like, that's where I would start if that's about trying to have an alternative bill. I don't know what the right thing to do is. But it is clear that the idea that you should like, whatever the vote in the house, because this bill doesn't do much. So it's an easy yes, whatever. Like the question is what you do right now. And if sure, it certainly wouldn't be helpful to share Brown. So I don't know why we do Houston's politics for him. I just find it hilarious that like the Houston campaign thinks that voters are ever going to learn about a procedural vote on a bill that does nothing in the Senate about a data center just feels like such a dangerous thing. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. Heinrich tried to pass his, his tougher bill by also unanimous consent. The person who blocked it was Bernie Moreno, also of Ohio. So I would just I mean, I don't know how all the procedures work here. But Schumer should just, I assume at some point, they'll get to try to put an amendment on the bill. And they should just amend the bill to be like, Oh, no, no, no, instead of consider, you must require. And then when they say no to that, say, well, Republicans voted against requiring data centers to pay for their electricity. And then it seems like the whole thing blows up in their faces, but I don't know. Pod Save America is brought to you by Bowie. 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Yeah, you got the AI chatbots maybe giving you some therapy. Yeah. How about some real bots? Yeah, I mean, some humans. Some real humans. They're trained and educated at BetterHelp, and all you have to do is you can do it from the comfort of your home, which is great. So sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com.psa. That's great. I'll see you next time. Bye. now we know the Australian government's websites and They tried to tamper with federal government websites in the United States. Both companies have now said that they've paused either the development or training of their latest models. And on Monday, Florida's Republican attorney general asked a state court to force OpenAI to pause development. But Trump and most other Republicans are still against any kind of AI regulation whatsoever. Same with AI leaders like NVIDIA's Jensen Wang, who had this to say about dealing with runaway AI on Monday. We hope it's an engineering problem. I believe it's an engineering problem. I know it's an engineering problem. And we all need to hope that it's an engineering problem. If it's not an engineering problem, it's not solvable. Oh, OK. Hope, need, I know. Pick a side there, buddy. Did you guys hear him on Ezra's podcast? I have not listened yet. I am going to listen to it. It's troubling, frankly. It's really. He's like, he tries to be like the sunny optimist, but you're just like, wow, you're really out to lunch on this shit. Or you're just trying to fool us all. He yadda yadda yads around a lot of important factual points. He's like, well, if I were a, you know, OpenAI CEO, I would simply not deploy into the world unsafe technology. It's like, well, actually, the Hugging Face incident happened to the Testing Face dickhead. That's the problem. Dude, they're all doing this. Like, this is what the all-in guys all do this to. They're like, just don't ship it. Don't ship it. Don't ship unsafe things. But they hadn't shipped it. The big takeaway for me from, like, the Hugging Face and, like, this endless series of announcements about new hacks and websites and government is that, like, OpenAI is a totally irresponsible and reckless company. And this is the kind of shit you would expect from, like, a couple of research assistants at a university, like, messing around as grad students. It's not the most valuable company in the world creating a technology they tell, like, fundamentally reshape life as we know it. So, like, hopefully that this current pause is actually going to be a real one and not two weeks like last time was supposed to be, right? Do we know how long they paused around Hugging Face? I think it was two weeks. Yeah. And we don't even know. Like, look, they keep putting out these announcements. We're pausing testing. We're pausing development. But all of this is just taking their fucking word for it, which is not what we should be doing. And the Jensen Wong comments there, like, they get at a pretty fundamental debate about AI. I was talking to Jason Goldman, who we used to work with at the White House, a tech advisor to Obama. It's like, is AI a normal technology or is it something new and different? If it's a normal technology, you can use current skills to manage it and put guardrails around it. Like, even if it's traditional. If it's not, we need new science and new scientific advances. And until we have those, it's not going to be safe. And for what it's worth, like Dean Ball, a staffer at OpenAI who worked for Trump, tweeted, I think it's primarily a science problem and that it's possible to make progress in that science. But no, while there is engineering we can do today to improve AI safety, it is not fundamentally an engineering problem. So there's a lot of, like… Sometimes we treat it like a normal product. Sometimes we treat it like an abnormal product, as you're saying. And if you just, like, put a box around it and just, like, call it… They've been trying to do that and they can't. Right. But, like, forget how it does what it does, that it's a large language model, that it's this new and genuinely novel innovative technology. And just, like, think of it as just a tool or a utility that's been developed that, like, look, I don't know how software works when it's normal software. It just does stuff, right? And you found out that this company made this software and it is doing all of this. It's doing all of these crazy things. You'd say, well, that's irresponsible. You are responsible for what your software is doing. You've made this software. You clearly don't understand its risks and you're allowing it to do all of these dangerous things. And then that quickly goes into the ways in which it's abnormal, which is, well, it's agentic and is it conscious? Is it its own thing? Who is responsible? You are responsible, right? Like, we're not going to resolve the definition of consciousness and certainly this idea of alignment. Like, I wish everyone was a little bit less confident about their opinions about, like, the nature of consciousness and what… What it means to be aligned with humanity. But that doesn't even matter. But that's my point. That has no bearing on this whole debate. Just, like, you are responsible for what you are programming. It is programming. It is code, whatever else goes into it that makes it novel. You are responsible for it. You are aware of the risks. And what happens now, you are culpable. In the same way that if you were shipping nuclear material across the country and slowly but surely, you're like, oh, yeah, a little fell out in Detroit. Actually, it's been dropping off on all of Route 66 all the way across the country. Whoopsie-daisy. We're going to take a break. We're going to take a two-week break from shipping nuclear material. But I think it's even a little more complicated because, like, whether or not it's, like, conscious or alive or has feelings and that whole debate, there is, like, the critics of AI call it a stochastic parent, which means it just, like, repeats back stuff we said but in a randomized way. And, like, that has been proven wrong. That hasn't been true for years. It's a very powerful stochastic parent, but it's stochastic in that it involves, like, unpredictability and random variables and chance and probability. In other words, they create a thing. They create the large. It's a language model. And they don't really know how it works. And they don't know what the outputs are going to be and all the weird things it's going to do. And so if that is kind of the threshold situation, like, how do you create safeguards for something that is so inherently unpredictable and that you don't really understand? This is why. And, look, you get this from the right and you get this from some people on the left, which is, like, these people should just be more careful. And we have liability laws on the books. And we should just be holding. We should just be holding them responsible. And they shouldn't ship the product and all that kind of stuff. It's like, no, no, no, no. First of all, it's not about shipping the product yet. They're trying to test these models and what they thought was a sandbox. And they thought they were doing it right. And they fucked up. And clearly, like, even when they have the sandbox right, it still get out of the sandbox. Because some people were like, oh, well, they didn't set up the sandbox correctly. It's like, no, no, no. On Hugging Face, they did set up the fucking sandbox correctly. And it still fucking got out. So they don't. The problem is they think they're being careful. And then they do a test. And then they have the rogue agents that escape everywhere. And then it's mayhem. So, like, what do you do about that? You can't just have companies be like, well, I'm going to try to do better next time. That's why you have independent regulators. You have people in the companies watching them, watching the testing. You slow it down even more. But you have to have everyone slow it down at the same time. Because you can't just have a couple companies saying, like, well, we're going to slow it down because we've set it voluntarily. But, like, Mark Zuckerberg is going to do whatever the fuck he wants. And Elon Musk is going to do whatever. He's going to do whatever the fuck he wants. Like, you can't have a situation like that either. Yeah, well, it's also like, why is all this happening? Well, because they're balancing safety against their aggressive need to win. And clearly that is, you know, too heavy on the scale. And by the way, like, put aside the frontier models and what happened with Hugging Face and all of this. That's what's happening with the actual deployment of the models for customers. They're having terrible consequences. You guys talked about this last week, that a model was. They're helping somebody plan a mass shooting. You have teachers, like high school teachers across the country, like kids are turning in slop. It is taking the teachers hours to figure out just what's real and what's not. It's like having these terrible downstream consequences, which they will claim to care about. But the reason they don't have they're pushing these models out anyway is because they're trying to make money. They're trying to prove that this is a viable business. So they're all weighing their own sort of corporate goals. Against the reckless and dangerous consequences of moving too quickly. And they are choosing to they are choosing to do this too quickly and assuming that because the technology is novel, because they can claim it's agentic, because it's stochastic, whatever they're going to claim about it, that somehow they're not responsible. And we just have to, like, assert from the beginning that they are responsible for the consequences of the software that they are putting into the world, regardless of the of the philosophical rhetoric they put around it. Right. But it's I've heard this a couple of times, like, well, you know. Airlines wouldn't just put planes in the sky that they know are going to fall out of the sky because that wouldn't be economically advantageous for them. It's like, right. It won't be economically advantageous for them if their planes fall out of the sky. But then the planes will have already fallen out of the sky and the people will be dead. So, like, you can say you must be responsible for your things like that. Yes, of course, it's important to have liability laws in place. But, like, that doesn't alleviate the rest of us from trying to regulate it on the fucking front. And it's also like you must be responsible for your model. Like, yeah, OK, that's why we have regulations, because we don't trust them to be responsible. And also plane crashes aren't catching. Right. You know, like the nuclear comparison or whatever. But like the idea the idea that like whatever the benefits that they like, there is a serious and real small risk of something quite catastrophic. We all like whether people want to be confident about denying it or confident about saying it will happen. It obviously exists. Whatever share you claim. It exists. It exists. And the goal is to push that to get away from that risk. And they are just not serious enough about about what that requires and not honest enough about why some of these other like analogies don't apply, because we don't get to go back and fix it. If we cross some threshold, we didn't realize we crossed. The companies aren't filled with perfectly rational economic actors. They're human beings that screw stuff up and make mistakes and are like venal and dishonest sometimes. And like I think what drives me. A little crazy, but all this is just it feels like we're going too fast for no good reason. Yeah. What is the downside to waiting six months? There's not some China. There's not some cancer cure right here that we're about to pull down. If only we can get to AGI. It is the gerbil gerbil China bullshit. And then, you know, it's like, OK, so they beat us. They have a slightly wider claw. No one even knows what they're beating us to. It just it makes me crazy because no one can actually define what AGI is or super until like so it's just crazy, you know. It's like, OK, well, I don't know what it is, but it's like, OK, I don't know what it is, but it's like, OK, I don't know what it is. by ZipRecruiter. 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No wonder four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. But you've got to go to ZipRecruiter.com slash Crooked to post your job for free. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash Crooked. Oh, and if you forgot where to go, don't worry, you'll hear another ZipRecruiter ad soon enough. Pod Save America is brought to you by NetSuite. There are seemingly endless facets to running a business. And in some industries, AI is changing all of them. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of the business management suite trusted by over 40,000 companies with AI woven to every tool that you're already relying on. It surfaces insights when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks, and problems and lets you seek comprehensive answers to complex questions about your business in the same way you would seek advice from a colleague. But technology is only part of the story. 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But beyond that, don't you guys just, wouldn't you kill to be like a fly on the wall for this dinner with Dario, the biggest fucking nerd computer guy, right? And he's sitting there with Donald Trump at 10 o'clock at night having dinner at the White House. What did they talk about? The same garbage you hear at a rally. I'm sure he was doing the weave ranting at this poor guy, just sitting there silent. Apparently it works because now there's like an AI meeting at the White House this week and Dario finally got invited, even though he's like been on Grata there. I think there's a lunch with all the tech CEOs on Tuesday. I think you probably couldn't invite Amadei to the China state dinner because Dario Amadei. Well, no, they also oppose. They have all, they're in favor of all these export controls and stuff to China. So the Chinese would probably hate him. Like, I think it's probably good that they're talking. There's not this like cold war. It's also, from Trump's point of view, it's an indication that the government really likes Anthropic and uses their code across the national security space and are probably pretty hooked. on it. So it does seem like the cold war maybe is ending between those two. Yeah, I think I will say like, what, what is China going to beat us to? Like, I, I do like, no, we don't want a Chinese authoritarian government to have the most advanced surveillance technology to kind of surpass us in these technologies and kind of hit some kind of threshold of growth that we can't catch up to. Like, I get that. Going to steal ours anyway. But then, but then it's like, I don't know. I've been thinking like more like, okay, there's actually, we're competing against two countries. One of them is China, and the other is the artificial intelligence country that doesn't yet exist. And we're just trying to win against both of these countries. Speaking of philosophical arguments. Yeah. That's how I think about it. So anyway, good luck to us. One thing the Senate's not voting on this week is the Pentagon funding that Pete Hegseth keeps pushing. He wants a budget increase of more than 40% plus another $88 billion to cover the Iran war so far. It's no longer just Democrats who are opposed to this funding. Here's the latest. Semaphore headline, quote, Republicans fuming at Hegseth as war costs build. They're also pissed at how Hegseth's handling the war. NBC News broke the story on Sunday evening that eight Marines on an American ship were wounded by an Iranian missile strike earlier this month that the administration just didn't bother to tell anyone about. The anger at Hegseth is so intense that Democratic senators are now thinking that if their House counterparts want to impeach Hegseth, a reminder that Thomas Massey was already forcing a vote on this, that the Democratic Senate will not stand in the way. Who's up for a Hegseth impeachment, huh? Good use or bad use of a congressional majority? I'd say, first of all, if you haven't, worth reading the Massey impeachment recommendations because, boy, are they persuasive. He makes a really good argument. I think there's a really, there's a, it is, it is, it is the smartest to me version of an impeachment case to basically start with Hegseth. First of all, he is been one of the biggest advocates for the war in Iran. He is the, like, the face of, whether it's the, the extraditional killings or this sort of idea of take no mercy and sort of violate the rules of war in Iran. I do think the war is incredibly popular and to make him the avatar for it is a good idea. Like, I'm open to arguments against it, but I'm like, fuck yeah, impeach this asshole. Yeah, I mean, the asking for $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon is wildly unpopular. I think 60% of the country is unpopular. I think 60% of the country thinks that's too much money in recent polls. So, you know, I'd like to highlight that. Nate Silver's polling average has the Iran war at 58% opposed, 33% are in support of it. But even that, I don't think gets to the extent of how unpopular the war is because of the way it's driven up gas prices and diesel prices and like inflation everywhere. So I hope Democrats do a ton of oversight hearings about the Iran war to drive attention to it because I think they're lying about the casualty count. I think the Pentagon is lying about the cost. I think they're lying about the cost of the war. I think they're lying about at least covering up the amount of damage to like bases in the region. Theoretically, impeachment is a better way to get like documents and subpoenas and stuff in practice. They'll just resist them every request. So like, I don't know. I don't know whether that's better than impeachment is better than just a straight kind of set of oversight hearings, but it's something they should absolutely do something. It should be top of the list. Yeah, I guess the question is, so like, what's the ultimate goal? Ultimate goal is to end the war. And so say, Democrats won the election, take back Congress. And now Trump does what he also said. There was there was reports over the weekend today, I think, too, that, you know, Trump has been telling people like, oh, maybe after after the election, he'll resume the war in Iran. Right. He's been saying, by the way, he's been saying that repeatedly and saying that he's going to get a deal with Iran after. Right. Yeah. So he's going to keep bombing and get a deal. Yeah. But so say Democrats win. And so then what are the options to try to end the war? Well, the first, the low hanging fruit will be they'll all do the war powers resolution again. And then they'll they'll still, you know, they'll pass the war powers resolution. And then Trump will say, fuck you. I don't care. I am not going to abide by that. So then I guess the question is, can you do something with funding, cut the funding off for the war or you have the Hague-Seth impeachment? I guess those are your two options. And ideally, you'd want to, you know, sort of cut funding off if you could. But like, that's probably a hard vote, too. But, you know, one of those two things I think the Democrats should probably pursue, because if you run on we should end this war, then, you know, people are going to expect that you at least do everything within your power to try to end it, even though they will know that Trump is still president and, you know, you don't have full control over it. Yeah. Not to mention, I think one of the one of the reasons, one of the one of the one part of the Massey impeachment document is the fact that we went to war without congressional authorization. And what these funding measures are, are authorizations after the fact. So, look, you have to interrogate that. And part of that is, yes, put the secretary of state in charge of the war. And part of that is what was going on behind the scenes with these extradition killings. What was going on when they decided to launch this war? Why did the justifications change so much? Like all of this is a tool to to unlock a lot of the kind of information that, to Tommy's point, we just haven't had access to, including their deliberations and the fucking 15 reasons they used to justify the war in the opening days and since. I was thinking about how, you know, 2006, obviously the last midterm, the Republicans got absolutely nothing. George W. Bush's war in Iraq. And then after that election, Don Rumsfeld was out. That was that was that weekend after. So, you know, it is now for Republicans were so mad. They were like, well, you couldn't have done this six weeks. Right. Yeah. Now, for Trump, it's like, you know, it's it's Pete Hegseth. That's his boy. All right. It's not like a not like a Kristi Noem situation or a Pam Bondi situation. But you would think that'd be the that'd be the easiest move for him. Right. Well, yeah. But the other part of this is get Hegseth in front of a Senate committee. He's going to think he's such hot shit. He's going to be so cocky and arrogant about it. And it is going to be so revealing. And he's going to be he's going to be such a bad witness. Yeah, I think impeaching him probably does galvanize NAGA support for Hegseth and probably emboldens him to run for president. So, you know, that's the political world we live in. But I agree. Cut off funding and do everything you possibly can to end the war. If it's impeachment, do it. If it's funding votes, do it. Whatever it takes. It's a disaster. On the subject of Trump's mastery of foreign policy, his ambassador to China, David Perdue, made this eye-opening claim over the weekend. But President Trump continues to say, hey, we sell arms to other people around the world. He actually asked President Xi would he like to buy some at one point. I'm sorry, what? What? Seems like a big deal, Tommy. Trump basically was like, oh, I haven't heard about that when he was asked about it in the Oval today. Which made it all even weirder. Like when I first saw the headline, I thought that's weird and crazy, but it has to be a joke, right? Like maybe he's kidding around. But then you figure out the source is Purdue, who's in the meeting and the ambassador. And he doesn't talk about it like he was kidding. And then Trump, when he was asked, he wasn't like, oh, I was messing around. Or so like saying to the Chinese, well, if you abide by the world, the international order, maybe one day we could be partners on things. He just was like, no, maybe he thought I meant Taiwan. And like the context is the Chinese are sorry. The Iranians are using Chinese satellite imagery to blow up. Our base is the Gulf. They're keeping these articles about the Chinese intercepting and stealing F-35 component parts to, you know, figure out how to use like the stealth technology or whatever. Like, don't steal it. Just ask nicely. I'll get to the Chinese are hacking into all of our networks and all of our classified networks. I guess she's probably thinking like, buddy, I got your weapons for free. Don't worry. We're good. But it was a baffling thing to say. It's also it's so it's illegal, right? The State Department said it's illegal. That can't happen. That we that we're not. Yeah. We're not going to give them weapons. Even if we wanted to. It's crazy. Meanwhile, we're like, you know, the Trump administration is still like holding up weapon shipments to Taiwan. Yes. So imagine imagine that signal. It's like he's he's offering weapons to Xi, but he's not even sending weapons to Taiwan. Poor Taiwanese are like, what? Man, they cannot. They cannot believe their luck with Trump. That's if you're you're you're heading back to you're heading back to China. You're on that plane. You're like, I have all the things that could have gone right for us. This fucking guy. I cannot. So, you know, it's like we have a thousand year plan. And in these four years, we're getting so much fucking business done. You're like, also, that granite was beautiful. You're debriefing your staff and the staffers like, sir, I just I think you misspoke. You said that he offered to sell you American weapons. You almost you almost you got to assume that they're going to be like, are we getting snowed? Is he that stupid? Are we like, is it are we missing something here? I don't know what's going on with this. Amazing. Amazing stuff. Pots of America is brought to you by Z Biotics pre-alcohol. That is a product I will not have a drink without. As you all probably know, as John knows for sure. Sure. 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Try for yourself today and if you're unsatisfied, they will refund your entire order. No questions asked. Head to zbiotics.com slash crooked. Use code crooked for 15% off your first order. That's zbiotics.com slash crooked. Code crooked. Let's talk about what's happening on the campaign trail. Trump's schedule remains a bit of a head scratcher for this late in the cycle. It is, let's see, it's Monday, September 28th we're recording this. That is late. We are almost in October and this week Trump will be in the well-known swing states of Oklahoma and Alabama before heading to Ohio on Saturday for an event with John Husted. This is after a weekend when he traveled to Tennessee for college football and Illinois for a golf tournament while also using our tax dollars to broadcast these quote-unquote public service announcements all across the country. This is the final battle with you at my side. We will demolish the. Deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will route the fake news media and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all. So that appears to be an exact copy of a spot the Trump campaign ran in 2024. The only thing that changed. Is the disclaimer at the end, which now reads paid for by the U.S. government. White House put out a statement saying that these are quote clearly not campaign ads but quote a reminder for Americans to love their country. Thoughts? If you're going to steal my money and use that in the illegal campaign ad could at least be like a good spot. You know, that's not an effective ad. You know, now that you say that. Just an old man walking down the hallway. If you're going to take my money, go ahead. Put it behind that. That's Donald Trump saying I'm going to kick out the communists. And the Marxist is like, well, you've had a couple of years. What have you been doing, buddy? Yeah, it's they're not really helpful campaign ads. So go for it. He's sitting on what? Four hundred million dollars that he won't spend except on ads that kind of puff himself up. This is what he's using tax dollars for illegally. Nobody nobody willing to say no to him on that so that he gets to see it on television. I assume while he's watching, they spend more than government spent already more than three hundred thousand dollars just on this version. There's a couple of these floating around according to ad impact. And that one aired on during SNL, Fox News Sunday and college and NFL games. You can see it on the plane when we were on our way back on all the football games. Yeah. Yeah. And that's yeah. Like I said, that's on top of the earlier Trump, the government funded Trump. It's just very illegal. I'm just quite confused as to how they think they can get it. I mean, I guess because Republicans don't care, but it's just sort of a shocking decision. It is a shocking. It's I guess I should be focused on the illegality of it. It's also just. It's just wild to me that they think that putting paid for by the U.S. government on that ad is going to do anything at all to help Republicans like it's just like, go ahead, air that everywhere and then put paid for by they should just pay for by you, the taxpayer. Yeah. It's actually. Thank you. Pretty baffling. Right. It's not an ad that's going to move the needle there. They have a huge financial advantage. They don't need it. It just seems brazen and cheap now. Right. Yeah. Just like. Just trying to save a few dollars on ads, you're going to end the election with hundreds of millions of dollars unspent. You're not running for anything. By charging the rest of us for an ad by saying that you're going to kick out the Marxists and the communists from government. And that's it. That's all it says. It just seems like a little like kind of I don't know, just a little small petulant act of dominance. This just to stick it to us. It's just strange. It's nuts. So we've wondered aloud why more Republicans and tough races, which is a list that's growing by the day, haven't done anything to criticize this historically unpopular president. Who may cost them their jobs. One of the few Republicans who has Florida Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar. We talked about this before. She cut an ad gently, I would say, criticizing Trump's deportation campaign. She found herself over the weekend on the wrong end of about a dozen truth social reposts from Donald Trump himself. This was on Saturday night. This is what he's doing on Saturday night. He also had additional posts talking about Morning Joe's ratings. He's complaining about that as well. But one of his reposts on Salazar read, quote, We need a new Republican to replace Salazar. Again, the election is in five weeks. She is a frontline Republican. You guys think Salazar and her campaign expected that kind of response from Trump? And how much do you think they care? They had to have expected it. I mean, you just can't cross him. He doesn't care about you. He doesn't care about his majority. He just cares about himself and his own ego. So they must have known. They must have known. They just didn't know. They just didn't know that this was coming. Maybe they think it's helpful. A little brushback. Maybe he thinks it's helpful, by the way. I stood up to the president. It's hard to tell. It's hard to tell. Because her ad is so, like, look in the list of Republicans willing to criticize Trump, it stands out because they're such like feckless little weenies. But the ad itself is very much like, if only someone would tell Donald Trump that he's being let down by his viziers, you know, it's like he's he could do such a he he's so amazing and yet he's failing in this one small way. We better let him know. So it's very, very neutered. And so, yes, like he can he can go off on her. Maybe it helps her politics a little bit to get in a fight with Donald Trump. Maybe he's aware of that. I don't know. Well, here's the interesting thing. I was thinking about, like, maybe maybe he didn't do it because he thinks it helps her. Maybe he do it because he's just a pissy asshole. Mike Rogers, Ashley Henson, a couple other Republicans have broken with him on the war now. Mike Rogers has also said, like, oh, we should have a safety regulations, which is funny because he's never been for those before. Broke with the president on that. And he hasn't done anything to brush back or to attack Henson, Rogers, anyone else who's broken with them. Kind of wonder if it's just like because this is around immigration and that's his pet issue or maybe like Stephen Miller got him going on this one. Maybe that's what I don't know. You could always break with him on foreign policy in the first term. Even Lindsey Graham would like constantly fight with him about, like, keeping troops in Syria or whatever it was. And you just tell he didn't care, you know, like invade here, invade there or whatever. You like do what you want to do. But yeah, immigration like that's his passion project. The interesting thing about Houston is that Houston was one of the. the few Republicans willing to go to that midterm convention. He's now having Trump come to Ohio. So whatever they're seeing, they are clearly desperate to try to get whatever harm it does to have to be associated with Trump. They're clearly very worried about just getting the base to turn out for John Houston. Yeah, I mean, and it makes sense, right? Like share in 2018. It's a midterm electorate. Sherrod wins in 24. It's a presidential electorate. Sherrod loses. And so you get more voters in Ohio, which is now a redder state. You get more voters out that usually vote in those elections that have voted for Trump in the past. And John Houston wins. You don't, then Sherrod wins. So they probably think they could, I'm sure he's in a like ex-urban rural area that he's going to sort of get people going there. All right. There was another White House video making the rounds that wasn't paid for with our tax dollars, as far as we know anyway. Let's play the clip. This is from the deputy chief of staff of the White House, Dan Scavino. And his former golf caddy, Dan Scavino, now the deputy chief of staff of the White House. That's an AI-generated video of Scavino, his wife, Eric and Lara Trump riding a gold luggage cart through the White House while popping champagne. A little Trump cameo at the very end there. What do you guys think? Was that like the pit bull? 2000s club song. Feels like. Yeah. Very, very cool. Very topical. There's a loneliness to it. That like, oh, this is what life is. This is the life I'm imagining. Look at how good things are when we're on our carts, popping our bottles. Just an incredible closing argument. It's just, my question with all these things is why? You wake up, it's September 26th, you post a weird AI video of yourself with like two of the Trump, and Eric pushing you on a cart. Well, also, you don't just post it. Like, I assume someone had to create that with AI, right? We're not quite at the moment where you just speak to the AI and be like, "Hey, I want a cool. " You're spraying your famous teetotaler boss with champagne. Is that what you do at work, Dan Scavino? You hose down Donald Trump. Why are you on the luggage cart? Did you just win the Stanley Cup? What are we doing here? This is a Xi Jinping. What are we possibly celebrating? It is sort of this dreamlike AI fantasy. Like, there's something, it's like, you know, popping, champagne is a celebratory image. It's ultimately an unpleasant act, right? You're like, you know, at key moments, you know, you're celebrating with your boys at the Olympics, whatever, you spray, fine. But like in daily life, you drink the champagne and have a nice time, I would say. It's just sort of this strange, like, kind of, I don't know what, there's such a sadness underneath the evil of what it is to be part of this organization that's always popping through. That's how I take it. I wonder if he's thinking, like, "Oh, this will get the base going, right? This will troll those libs, and then our people will get excited." It's like, do you think your people will get excited? Do you think people are laughing at this anymore when they're, like, paying fucking, you know, $5 for gas? You're paying, like, five bucks for gas, and you wake up and you see a video of the golf caddy hosing down Donald Trump with champagne with your tax dollars. Like, this is the kind of stuff that, if it happened in real life, would, like, lead to the guillotines getting constructed on the South Lawn. You know, like, this is some real Marie Antoinette, let them eat cake stuff. The French Revolution started for less than this. It's done. You're in power. You're in charge. You're responsible. You're the establishment. You're supposed to be working on kicking out the communists and the Marxists in the deep state. That's what the ad just said. The other ad. It's very short. It's very stupid. But it's so tone-deaf that you just have to wonder why and how did this happen. I'm going to retweet it every day. I'm just going to make it mental. He's very defensive about it. Is he? Is he? Well, he tweeted some other one. Some other, like, they did, like, the hangover style. Oh, great. Like, all these dumb things that happened at the She State dinner that includes keg stands and, like, pulling out Marco Rubio's teeth. It's supposed to be, like, a shot-for-shot ripoff of the hangover. But again, it's like, no one wants their president doing these things at a state dinner. I mean, maybe it's just for yucks, but people are mostly pissed in this country. That's funny. I thought from that other ad that we're kicking out the communists, but instead we're just partying with them at the state dinner. Yeah, we're just getting wasted. And potentially arming them. And offering them weapons. Yeah, potentially arming. What did Trump do? Well, he started arming the communists, which was, again, a surprise. He rolled out the red carpet for them. Showed them some guns. Showed them his granite. Yeah, showed them the granite, the iconic granite. And then they popped champagne, and then they posted an AI-generated video about them, which, of course, you know, we're sharing the technology. And one of the images in this other video that someone posted, then Scavino also reposted, is Trump and Xi looking hungover with their tuxes undone at the Lincoln Memorial. Maybe people would think that's funny, but Donald Trump famously does not drink and does not think it's funny or cool if you drink. Remember when he yelled at Kash Patel? Yeah. Chugging beers at the Olympics? I just think if you're using AI to prove how good of a time you're having, you're not having a good time. Right. You're not having a good time. You're not at the house. You know? Yeah. Are we having fun yet? Kind of a thing. Okay. Oh, actually, we have one last clip. This is some breaking news from our friends over at The Five. An important story. The Chiron, for those who were just listening, is sex workers thriving under Zoran. With the prostitution. Well, it's something that a lot of people aren't talking about in terms of quality of life issue. I don't know if we have photos of what's going on in that area, but how overweight the hookers have become. Have you noticed that? I have. It's insane. It's like, I worry. I worry. I mean, I'm not a big fan of the sex trade, but it does seem that if you're going to sell your body, you should make it appealing for the customer. You don't understand the capitalistic tendency. I mean, come on. It's something to look into. I find it, you know, kind of sad. If I lived in that neighborhood, I wanted to live there. I wanted to live there. You went deep on this issue. Are you guys all noticing this? No, my friend. We are not. You should bail on that. And then he like wisely was just like, "Now I'm not going to say anything more." It's like, Gutfeld lives in this space between comedy and angry guy that's just really hard to suss out. Yeah. Doesn't land with me. And he also, well, it's like all of his bits on The Five are all very prepared. Yes, he's so scripted. Like to the last word of it, you know, and he's like trying to, he's like doing the whole thing and then. He's working out his material for the later episode, I assume, which I respect. Oh, right. Which I respect. Yeah. He tries some stuff out. I forget there's just Gutfeld. Yeah. No, that's, yeah, that's what's. Anyway. At their late night show. Man, they're a little, they're struggling for topics over there with The Five. Because Trump is unpopular. Jesse, even Jesse is sick of doing the culture war stuff. There, yes. He's bored of it. He can't get his dander up anymore for trans swimmers anymore. He's sick of that. Well, right. Well, and these guys are charged with going after Zoran, but then every time Donald Trump gets within like five miles of the guy, he tries to bang him. Yeah. But they're confused about their marching orders. Yeah. Trump's a Gracie Manson. Speaking of sex work. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Speaking of overweight prostitutes. Yeah. Our president. Perfect. Yeah. Well, that's all we got for today, guys. That's our show. Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday. Everyone have a good week. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Faris Safari, with Reed Chirlan, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Heathcote, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, David Tobin, and the entire crew. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.