213. Is Trump Planning A Nuclear Attack on Iran?

Donald Trump just threatened to seize the Strait of Hormuz and claim it as U.S. territory as rumor swirl of a potential nuclear strike on Iran. Can he do it? Let's just say I have my doubts. And Trump has changed tune on North Korea again. He now claims that he's best friends with this leader. But what does that mean for the future of Ukraine? Stay tuned to find out. This episode is brought to you by eToro. A tariff, a spending plan, a regulatory change. It can all start just as the first line of a speech, but it sets in motion things that can reach far beyond Washington and unfold for years to come. That's right, Katty. Markets move on expectations, not just events. Investors are constantly weighing what a decision could mean for company sectors and the wider economy. So eToro is an investing platform where you can access a wide range of markets. And explore how political and economic developments could affect them. You could also learn from the global community of investors and see how people around the world are interpreting the same news. As with all investing, your capital is at risk. See eToro.com forward slash trip U.S. for full terms. Traditional home security only alerts you after a break in. And that's too late. SimpliSafe is changing that. Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police. They're on the way. We don't just alert. We stop crime before it starts. SimpliSafe. Plans starting around a dollar a day. Save 60% on a new system with professional monitoring during our 20th anniversary sale at SimpliSafe.com slash Spotify. Outdoor deterrence requires a SimpliSafe active guard outdoor protection plan starting at $49.99 a month. Visit SimpliSafe.com slash licenses for alarm license information. Tennessee 2-0-1-2. Welcome to the Restless Politics U.S. with me, Anthony Scaramucci. And today I'm joined by fellow ex-Republican White House Communications Director and host of MSNOW's Deadline White House, Nicole Wallace. Thank you so much for being here. And she's an awesome friend. But the one thing I will say about Nicole Wallace, which I have intense love for, is your Met fandom. You are a loyal Met fan. Okay. And we've got a lot of British football fans out here. You know, we love the Mets, unfortunately, you and me. Yeah. All the way around in the Mets. I've been through like all the stages of grief. I think the last time we talked, I was angry. And now I've moved into acceptance and I started watching again. So that's, I don't know, it's either moving through the seven stages or absolute denial. I have been in so much pain for 50 plus years. I'm just in full-on acceptance every day. And unfortunately for me, I watch every inning. But let's go to Trump for a second, okay? He's in my hometown, neck of the woods, Nassau County. He's campaigning for Bruce Blakeman, who's the Republican nominee, a MAGA guy. Who used to be a Bush guy. His brother was the- Used to be a Bush guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like Bruce. I got along with Bruce. I know Bruce forever. Both lived out in Nassau County forever. He's the county executive, the Republican nominee. And he's there at the police academy and the police are cheering this guy on, even though he's pardoning people who have committed violence against police officers. So that's a whole other weird thing, Nicole. But I want to go to. To his comment. It was a flippant comment. He said, when the war is over, we're going to declare the Strait of Hormuz U.S. territory. Pretty soon, he said. Yeah, look, he's added to the list with Greenland and I think the Panama Canal, he was also going to declare, right, U.S. territory. I think he's finding, and I think the world is finding, or maybe found already, you'd know better than me, that his words are incredible. And I think the thing with the Strait of Hormuz is perhaps one of the biggest geopolitical blenders in American foreign policy history. And I know that might sound rich coming from someone who worked for an administration whose foreign policies are still debated and polarizing in the Middle East. But I think the idea that he would say anything about the Strait of Hormuz that anybody would believe at this point is about the people that believe him. Not about the things he says. Okay, so let me play a Trumpster for a second, okay? And I want you to respond. He's a 5D chess player. He's just this magnificent maestro. I don't even think he can play checkers. Okay, okay. Well, you know, my buddy Rick Wilson says he eats the pieces when he's looking at a chessboard. Okay, but let's say he's this magnificent maestro and this is an anchoring position for his negotiating. But in the meantime, the Iranian foreign minister. Says, you know, we're a middle power that beat the American military and come to us. We'll show you how you can do it too. Look, I think you and I sometimes talk past each other when you step into the world as it is and I cling to the world. I wish it was so I talk to some people more, you know, in your world, the real politic folks and in finance who have to get through the next two and a half years without destroying their businesses and their sort of standing. In the global economy and and and here's what I would say Trump doesn't know how to set up a chessboard, let alone play chess Trump is a person with no shame and no sort of pathological ability to sort of pause and reflect and so it gives him immense advantages in a lot of ways but not with superpowers or super adversaries like China. Russia and Iran and I think the fact that he lost the tariff war against China has to do with the Chinese sort of DNA's ability to turn to hardship and nationalism and endure more pain than the American economy and I think the same is true of Iran in a much more existential way. So I don't think Trump is playing chess. I don't think Trump is winning. I don't even think Trump thinks Trump is winning. But I think that the debacle with Iran is so serious people will be digging out for decades. Now, when you say that though, take it to the extent, imagine that you're the president of the United States, 2029, I'm going to stipulate that you're a non-MAGA president, so you're likely a Democrat, okay? What is the rubble that you're looking at, okay? Take me into a national security briefing, you're sitting there, likely the Strait of Horebouz is still closed, partially closed, potential tax on it. We are learning, Bloomberg reported over the weekend that there's a black market activity where people are paying the Iranians to let certain ships go through. What is that president going to be hearing, he or she, in 2029 January? I would argue that Marco Rubio will not run as a MAGA figure because MAGA will be so toxic. So it'll be a non-MAGA figure, Democratic or Republican. Nikki Haley. I don't think would run as this version. She was the runner up, if it seems like another lifetime. So a non-MAGA figure, the Democratic or Republican party, is going to be rebuilding alliances, and I think they'd have to start in Europe. I think they'd have to rebuild NATO, but I think they'd also have to go and rebuild our alliances in the Mideast. They may still think Trump is the best bet, but they don't trust us. I think we are America. I think we're sort of like a bad boyfriend. We'll always be given a second and a third and a fourth and a fifth chance we probably don't deserve. But I think the next president will spend a whole lot of time and a whole lot of capital rebuilding alliances, and it's sort of like rebuilding the rule of law. Do you go back to what you had? Does NATO become what NATO was, or are you in the region rebuilding new security packs? Some of it depends on what happens to Ukraine over the next two and a half years. Some of it depends on how far China goes. But I think the next American president is starting back 100 years in terms of rebuilding America's standing in the world. It's interesting. The first thing I would say if I was in that room, let's break up our allies between, or our used-to-be allies between those who will treat this as a one-off existential crisis for America, and they're still our allies. Let's look at the ones that now actually are really, you know what, very mad at us, and we have a 100-year hole to dig out of. Under that theory, because I do think there are some, as an example, I do think, weirdly, the UK will forgive us. I think France, weirdly, will probably forgive us. We were calling French fries "freedom fries" in '03. They sort of forgave us. But there are certain countries that probably are not going to forgive us, right? Or do you think none of them are going to forgive us? Give me your opinion. I think it depends what happens, right? Like I think if Russia strikes beyond Ukraine, I think if, you know, I don't even want to say out loud what China could do, but if China becomes aggressive in Taiwan, I think there are known unknowns, to quote one of my old bosses, that it's difficult to plan around. I mean, I guess what I worry about the most is that everyone is so paralyzed by, you know, You know, Trump is more like having like a grizzly bear president than a person. And so I think people are so paralyzed by wondering if the grizzly bear will eat us, attack us, be tamed, go back into hibernation, that they're not thinking about what you just talked about. And maybe they are. Look, I would have thought that businesses were in padded rooms figuring out how economies like Hungary's got through the first few years of Orban. But apparently, people don't do as much looking around the corner as I thought they did, as I hope they would. But I hope that there are Democrats sitting around and thinking about it. But to watch all the political actors, and I'm not sure there are. I mean, if I were in the room, I would really sort of go back to first principles about shared security. But that requires a consensus on who the adversaries are. And Trump is so, you know, snuggled in for the night with known adversaries like Russia and North Korea, that you almost before you get to the security piece have to reestablish the adversaries and the threats. So the, you know, Oman and Iran are negotiating, they're trying to get a memorandum of understanding together to manage these straight. And the president says, and I'm going to give you the quote, I'm going to bomb the blank out of them. If they get in the way of our negotiations, I'm going to bomb the blank out of them. So, and again, one of our allies, Oman has been one of our consistent allies on the Saudi Peninsula, Arabian Peninsula for 70 plus years. Is he going to bomb one of our allies? Or like, how do, what do you think the diplomatic chatter is now? This is just inane nonsense spewing. It used to be the American president had levels of authority and things that were said from his mouth were calculated. But now people are just like, oh, I don't know. I don't know. Just say, okay, just the ravings of a, of a madman or how do you think people are reacting to that? Well, look, I, you know, the man better than I do, but I guess I would guess that he wants to have at least like to me, his peer group, when he says things like the country's so hot, it's because when he's at Mar-a-Lago in the omelet line, people tell him the country's hot. They're crypto people. They're people that paid to have access to him. And I don't think that those people would tell him that. Tell him that the country's so hot. If you were to open up another front in the Middle East, I think it's predicated on sort of the, the, the enemy of our ally being the only one we're bombing back to the stone age, which is I think his quote about Iran. I don't personally think he's going to start bombing Amman. I also think that at some point the chairman of the joint chiefs is going to have to say, we don't have the munitions to open up another front and start bombing another country. I, I, I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think that's going to happen. I don't know. I would hope that somebody would say, um, you can't win. I think that what he is addicted to is winning and the flexing of American power. I don't think he's necessarily addicted to a widening war, but again, you would know better than me. Yeah. I see. I, I think that first of all, the crypto guys, cause I'm here at our crypto conference, they're not happy. Okay. Because they did everything that Trump wanted them to do. And guess what Trump did? He rug pulled every one of them. The legislation never got passed. Uh, he figured out a way to conspire with his family members to take $800 million for themselves out of the industry. And so if anything, they're the walking talking statement for, uh, the bait and switch of Donald Trump. And so our allies are also bait and switch by him. And we'll talk about South Korea in the second half, but I, I just find that this rhetoric and him always saying, you know, the war is, Sunday night. We're de-escalating. We're minutes away. He said it last Thursday. We're days away from a negotiation settlement, Nicole. But we're 60 days into the memorandum of understanding that he signed in all places Versailles. And by the way, that's got to get extended now because nothing's happened. And this is the first time in my life that I believe the Iranians more than I believe a U.S. presidential administration because they're saying, hey, no negotiations are happening. Sorry. Don't know what you guys are talking about. Well, they're also saying we're about to begin a military offensive against you, which doesn't necessarily mean bombs dropping in New York City, but it does mean on our allies and on our troops in the region. And I think back to all the mistakes that I was a part of in the Bush administration and the idea that Republicans- Republicans are so silent and so neglectful and so dismissive. Mistakes that are leading to injuries and death of our service members is just an unbelievable marker of how decimated the Republican Party is of courage or first principles or of caring about the men and women of the military. I look, pulling the rug out from under people who believed him is to me just too much of a psychological riddle. Like, why did you believe him, right? Like, why did anybody believe anything he said? In the first term, he lied 35,000 times and then the Washington Post stopped counting. But I, you know, again, this is, this is sort of our only ideological divide. You understand the world as it is. And I still long for the way it should be or could be. Well, I want, I want the world to be the way you want it, Nicole. I'm just trying to live with as a business person and somebody that is analyzing this. No, you're right. You're right. And I'm wrong. I mean, I, I, I'll eat this, but I, but I would say to your, to your question about who to believe, um, I think Trump tells us every night who to believe, uh, and it isn't him. I mean, the idea that we even talk about that as the way we try to understand American foreign policy, he's sitting up there in the middle of the night and I don't know why he's up all night, but if any celebrity athlete or celebrity actor or celebrity musician only posted on social media in the middle of the night, sports center would be up talking about what's wrong with him and whether he's going to go on, you know, personal leave, um, entertainment tonight. You know, those journalists on the mental health, public facing signs of the icons in their industries. And we are on the American president. Let that sink in. Oh yeah. Well, he's a necessities, right? Well, just us though. Like, like any other figure at the top of any other industry would be analyzed as having something wrong with him. If the only way we knew what he was going to do as, as it pertains to travel and policy or middle of the night postings on an obscure website. Like if someone, if some icon in sports or entertainment, we're only posting on, you know, on social media, we're only posting on, again, not Twitter, not Instagram, but some obscure social media platform that they owned and sold to people who could make money off it. Like we would have incessant conversations, but there's so much baked in to Trump's insanity that of course we believe Iran over Donald Trump. They don't act as crazy as he does. You know, it's stunning to say that. I mean, they, they, they've embedded themselves very well. They use their mosaic defense doctrine to stay in power. And created a playbook where people will look at it and say, okay, I got it. We just have to outlast the American military for four to five months. And they have nothing to do after four to five months, I guess, unless they're going to deploy nukes. And so this is a good segue because Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is now being called Marjorie Taylor Brown by Trump because Greene turns to brown when it wilts. Okay, this is Trump's febrile and childlike mentality. She broke from him because he said, no more forever wars. We're in a forever war. You're going to get the Epstein files. Hey, lady, I'm in the Epstein files. You're not going to get the Epstein files. So she broke. She left the Congress early, but she's tweeting. I mean, this is what she did yesterday, Nicole. So she's tweeting that she is hearing and quote unquote, it's real. I'm not speculating. This is right out of her Twitter feed or X feed. He is talking about a Hiroshima or Nagasaki-like event in Iran. Okay. So she provided no evidence, however. I want to just stipulate that. And she also said there's no confirming statement or anything like that. But what are your thoughts about her saying that? What would compel somebody like her to say it? And what are your thoughts about the president potentially using a nuke? And I want you to channel what you were saying to me before we started the podcast, Nicole, about what you think. the president and his fraidy cat nature. Well, a person you and I both know told me after a term one visit to India that he didn't eat the whole time because he was afraid of stomach upset in India. And so I think a president that doesn't want to, you know, have diarrhea isn't about to launch a nuclear war when the response is usually mutually assured nuclear destruction. I also think that, and you know this better than me, but even in the White House, in which I, sometimes the things that are most alarming happening behind the scenes are aired out publicly to kill them internally, because the best way to kill something inside is to have someone on the outside do it. And so one of the patterns that's very obvious to a former communicator is that something that is being debated and maybe viewed as intractable or someone on the inside is like, I can't fucking believe we're having this conversation is to leak it to someone on the outside and to know for sure that people that Trump still listens to, and the media will kill it, is more effective than trying to prevail in a meeting. I don't even know where they have these meetings in Trump's orbit. The sit room seems to be taken over from managing the fallout from the Epstein files, but wherever they do it. debate foreign policy. Maybe it's at the tank at the Pentagon. That's where normal people debate foreign policy. Wherever those meetings are happening, sometimes you use a cutout like Marjorie Taylor Greene or some political ally to sunlight it. That's one of the things we used to say and get people on the outside, inside the media ecosystem. He probably still listens to what you say, not me so much, but to try to get Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly losing their mind over Trump dropping a nuke. He catches wind of it, and then he'll go in and kill it, backing up the internal actors trying to kill it in an internal debate. That's what it looks like to me from the outside. I really don't think that he will drop a nuke because I hope that there's still someone around that would say the response would be retaliatory. Yeah. Well, listen, but also it would make him a full-on war criminal. It would make the United States effectively the government. The government of the United States have to have a trial at the Hague. It would have incalculable consequences for the United States, and many people now would put us in the rogues gallery of North Korea and Russia and China for these types of things. But I guess my point about it coming up, she's hearing it, I believe, and you could correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe she's hearing it from somebody. I don't think she just goes out unilaterally and wakes up on a Sunday morning and says, let me make up some stuff about what I'm hearing- No, I agree with you. In the White House, right? So you think that, okay? And so then the secondary thing is his state of mind, okay? So I know from people inside the White House, he talked about nuking Iran and Trump won. General Mattis thought he was crazy. Rex Tillerson used words that were worse than that when they came out of the White House Situation Room discussing it. F-ing moron, right? Right. Exactly. And so now he's talking about it again in Trump 2. Yeah. You don't think he wants to do it because of the consequences associated with it. But this is a weird guy. This is a guy that has this narcissistic compulsion towards power. It's not impossible, right? You can't have it at a zero, right? You can't say this is a 0% chance that somebody like Donald Trump would use a nuclear weapon in a theater capacity somewhere. 0%? Yeah, no, I wouldn't, look, I wouldn't put anything at zero. It was my first point about the Strait of Hormuz. Like, I don't think you can figure out how we get out of this until you know how it ends. So I wouldn't put anything at 0%. What I would say is that Trump always wants what he wants, right? Like, that he's prosecuting Comey isn't really a Trump story. You know better than me. He wanted to do this in 2017. No question. It's a Todd Blanch story because Jeff Sessions doesn't allow him, Rod Rosenstein doesn't allow him, Bill Barr doesn't allow him, even Pam Bondi. Makes it difficult. It's a Todd Blanch story. So he may have mused about nuking people in the past. It becomes sort of a Mattis Tillerson story. Tillerson called him an effing moron. Mattis ultimately leaves for cause, but it's over something else, not his desire to drop a nuke. It's over his policy around the Syria-Turkey border. We're abandoning allies, Kurdish allies. But there were people around him with lines. I think we know Hegseth doesn't have a line, but we'll find out if Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Cain does. And so that's what I think the nuke story is. It isn't about Trump. He thinks these are his toys and he'll play with them if he wants. And it's not even that I think he won't do it because of consequences to innocence because, I mean, I doubt he's even seen Oppenheimer, right? It's too long, too complicated. He'd be like the person that stops it and has to ask, you know, whoever, yeah, Natalie or whoever, what just happened? What just happened? So there's no way he has any understanding of the consequences to humanity. But in terms of the consequences to himself, I don't think he would be scared away from something by being a war criminal. I think he would be scared away from doing something like that by someone who says no. Interesting. Yeah. Because by the way, when he is pushed back, he always relents, you know, and when the courts push back on him. Correct. He relents. When Tillis pushed back on him, he relented. Correct. And, you know, they got rid of the weaponization fund and all that other stuff. We're going to take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about some of the things that we're going to talk about Trump in South Korea and the splitting of a relationship with the South Koreans that we've had for 80 years. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer. Welcome back to the Restless Politics US. I'm joined by Nicole Wallace. Caddy K is off this week. We'll see her next week. But you can see me and Caddy K in a city near you. That's right. You got to go to therestlesspoliticsus.com. Buy your tour tickets there. Tickets are selling fast, thank God. But we want to see you and we'll be answering your questions from that live stage. So please think about it. All right, Nicole, let's go back to Trump and South Korea. So yesterday, the president decides that he's going to be in South Korea. He's going to be in South Korea. He's going to be in That his good friend, who I want to stipulate he's met with for a total of five hours in a diplomatic setting, that his good friend, the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, put a propaganda video together of Trump bowing to him and subordinating himself to him. That's his good friend. And so as a result of his good friend and that relationship, he wants to slow down the joint exercises between the South Korean military and the American military, which we are obviously always done for deterrence. We've always done for military preparedness, but also for deterrence. And before I let you speak, I want to add one little thing to the ointment here, one little fly to the ointment. The North Koreans have deployed 50,000 troops in Ukraine to support his good buddy, Vladimir Putin. So this is a rejection of 80 years of national security and State Department and Department of Defense strategy in Asia. And what say you? I think it's an abomination. I think in normal times it's an impeachable offense. I think it reminds me of a cop. When I worked for Sarah Palin and we were trying to prepare her for debates as not as someone who didn't know enough, but as someone who was running on a ticket with John McCain, foreign policy obviously meant a lot to John McCain. And we tried to explain what the six-party talks were in case she got a question about six-party talks. And she sort of, you know, had obviously never thought much about North Korea. So we showed her the satellite image, North Korea, and she said, why is it dark? And we said, well, Kim Jong-un is, you know, a murderous reporter. We showed her the growth charts, you know, how much smaller North Koreans' kids were than the kids in Korea. You know, the brutality of the North Koreans has been obscured by the freakishness of Trump's obsession with Kim Jong-un. But he's brutal. He's shot and murdered family members. He's a hideous threat. You were probably in the White House when John Kelly, I think, felt like he was personally walking the line between Trump starting a war with North Korea. Fire and fury. Correct. I had just gotten fired. And then on August 3rd, Trump said that he was going to evict fire and fury on North Korea. And General Kelly was like, okay, this is absolutely crazy. From the outside, and you correct me if I have this totally off base, the love affair is sort of the best bad alternative to what was warmongering on Trump's part. And a lot of people around Trump, I think, were very worried. Worried he was going to start a war. I was working at the Today Show at the time. I remember going on every time they fired a missile. And I think that everything with Trump is like an overcorrection. So the love affair probably wasn't the intention. I also think I read somewhere that one of the things he took to Mar-a-Lago when he took classified material was his correspondence with Kim Jong-un. The obsession with Kim Jong-un and the personal affection he has for a murderer is a sign of something, again, that would be impeachable in normal times. And so I, in like the 10th year of covering the Trump story, try to step back and look at it, one, as the threat that it represents, and two, the indictment that it is of the party I was once a part of. I'm sure that none of them have gone to microphones and indicted the conduct. I'm sure that none of them have reached out to people in South Korea and said, hey, we'll make sure this doesn't happen. We'll make sure these happen. And I can't imagine that there is someone like Mark Milley who's brave enough to sort of stabilize our alliances when Trump is saying these things. So I think it's a really, really, really fraught and dangerous thing that he's done. right now, which is something I follow because I'm in the business community, is the Ministry of Industry. Their effective Secretary of Commerce landed yesterday at Dulles Airport. His name is Kim Jong-Kwon. And why did he land there? He's working on a trade deal and he's working on a potential tariff reduction. And there's a lot at stake, right? Because there's $350 billion of goods that flow between the two countries. Most of our televisions here in the United States are now produced in Korea, as are many of our washer machines, et cetera. And so I feel like Trump was dropping this bomb for a couple of different reasons that had a few layers to it. Number one, Putin, you're my buddy. This guy's your buddy. I'm just signaling to you that we're buddy, buddy, buddy, right? Sort of like a menage a trois. How gross is that? So gross. Especially the image of the three. Yeah, I had to just throw that in there just so people are driving in the car, they may have an accident or something. And the second reason is he wants to pummel, again, one of our allies. And that's what he's been doing around the world. He's going to do a beat down to the Canadians, a beat down to the French, a beat down to the UK. And so now he wants to do a beat down. And listen, he definitely has a point. And General Kelly himself, who, as you know, fired me from the White House, but we've become very close friends. General Kelly would make the statement to you that, hey, when we do these shared operational exercises, if Trump is making the point that our allies should help us share a little more of the expenses, that's a point that should be well considered. That's the only point. But what he's doing here, to me, is sending a signal again to China. He's moved our aircraft carriers out of. Asia. And he's sending a signal to China that, hey, I'm a regional power. You're a regional power. I'm looking for a multipolar world where Russia has its component of the world. You're going to have your component of the world. And I'll take Venezuela with Delcy Rodriguez. What are your thoughts on that? I think it's totally against US national security interests. And I think we may live in a world where you have to speak a different language to garner vast majorities of the American people. But I think that. The American people still understand that we are more secure with our allies. I think most Americans who go to a baseball game in the summer stand up and salute the veterans of World War II. I love when they have veterans of World War II. But often, they're veterans of Korea or Vietnam. And it is still a point of national pride that the United States of America stands with the good guys. I think it's important that we understand as Americans that there's sort of nationalism and isolationism. Isolationism coursing through other countries, especially other European countries. That's important to understand. But no one is taking up the alliances that keep their own country safe and shoving them in the wood chipper as quickly as Donald Trump is. And Donald Trump either has no capacity to understand that when it comes to NATO, we're the only ones that have cashed out of the NATO alliance bank after 9-11, right? We're the only people that asked for something back. I think that no one has been able to explain to him why Korea is our ally. No one's been able to explain to him why it matters that Japan and Korea are able to trust the United States of America. So I think if you don't understand why our alliances matter, then you don't care about being friends with the enemies of our allies. And I think it's been taboo to criticize Trump's total stupidity for a decade. So I won't do it. But his total unwillingness to become informed about the reality of the United States of America is a reason we have allies is going to be one of the gravest national security threats to our country in our lifetime. 28 months to go, Nicole. So we have still a full car lease of damage and activity that can happen. In 28 months, you can do heavy damage. Totally. Let's talk about Kim for a second. I feel like he's played Trump like a Stradivarius. Am I wrong? And he's also played Trump against China, right? The other thing is, imagine the brain trust between Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and the Iranians. And we know there's been reporting in the Wall Street Journal that the Russians are aiding Iran in targeting America. We know that the Iranians and the North Koreans and the Russians are sort of in this axis of, I don't even know what you'd call it, of despots and authoritarians. And the idea that they don't share best practices in terms of how to work over Donald Trump would be foolish. And so we consider intelligence. And one of the debates you and I had was, you know, what's worse, Bill Pulte, someone who seems to believe the crazy shit he spews, or Jay Clayton, someone who probably sees the world more like you and I do, but says the crazy stuff. We view intelligence in terms of who we install to run our agencies. But Russia, North Korea, and Iran have had 10 years now to really have Trump's number. And someone who's this compromised financially, who's made $2 billion since he's returned to the presidency, is obviously someone who can be bought and leveraged. Well, I think it's more than that, but yes. Well, right. That's what he's disclosed. Someone who is so hell-bent on blowing up Todd Blanch's nomination to keep in place a settlement with the IRS that keeps him from being audited or investigated prospectively is someone who's obviously afraid of examination of his finances. So if you're the intelligence agencies of any one of those, you're going to have to be very careful. And I think that's what we're going to have to be careful about. Those three countries, you know a lot. If you can put your heads together, you know enough to absolutely get whatever you want out of Donald Trump. I do this with Katty a lot. We're in an intelligence briefing, you and I, and you and I are the agency, and we're sitting there with the president and Marco Rubio, and we show them satellite imaging, and we show them proof that the North Korean ballistic missiles, which were delivered into Russia, are being fired upon in Ukraine. And so if there are Western, European, potentially American special operators in Ukraine, they're under assault by North Korean ballistic missiles. And Trump looks at the two of us and says, I'm with the Vladster, man. I'm with Putin. I think that's right. How do you handle that? You're in the agency. You've worked there 30 years. You're there to protect American interests. The whole mantra of Americanism over the last 82 years has been to protect freedom all around. The world, because an assault on freedom somewhere is an assault on freedom everywhere. And now the president of the United States is saying, hey, you're telling me, remember what he did in Finland? Oh, you know, I believe Putin. You know, they're telling me this, but Putin's telling me that, and no reason for me not to believe Putin. But we have definitive information to call that the North Koreans are trying to kill our friends, and we have no reaction to that other than let's reduce our military. We have no reaction to that other than let's reduce our military. You know, as much as he doesn't understand, again, a chapter you probably know better than me, saying to General John Kelly at Arlington, I don't understand why they do it, what's in it for them, believed to be a direct quote. I think the only agency more opaque to Donald Trump is the CIA. You know, when they die, the star's on the wall with no name. So their service to the country is anonymous in life and in death. I think that the CIA generally views their job as getting the facts. To be honest, I don't know that this meeting would ever happen. I mean, I don't have any evidence that the CIA is in front of Donald Trump with any regularity. It wouldn't happen, but it is in the brief. And he's probably not reading the brief. Correct, correct, correct. But the brief is letting him know, and they're leaking it to journalists, okay? They're trying to prove the case, right? It's probably in the hands of lawmakers. My sense is that the CIA is not particularly leaky even now. This goes back into two things that you keep saying, right? 28 months. We've got to get through 28 months of this. And then the 100-year deficit, the 100-year hole we're in in terms of our alliances. And when Trump came back, I was really fearful. And we're in a two-journalist household, right? So I was really, really anxious personally. I've now become more anxious globally, right? And maybe that's a coping mechanism. But I'm more worried about all these things you're talking about today. What's going to happen in Taiwan? I have a brother who lives there, and so I'm more worried about what's going to happen in Taiwan. And I'm more worried about what's I consume a lot of news about. And my sense about Taiwan is that maybe China feels like they're getting enough from Trump. They can do that whenever. But my sense about the intelligence about Russia and North Korea aligning to kill Ukrainians is that that intelligence exists, and Trump knows about it and doesn't give a shit. My sense is that that brief has been briefed to him. He knows, and he doesn't care. Well, that's a tragedy of it. I think it's a tragedy, but I think it's one of many tragedies. I think it was a tragedy when he humiliated Zelensky and kicked him out of the Oval Office. I think it's a triumph that Zelensky is now building new alliances in the Middle East. East because they suddenly need the technology that Ukraine has developed to protect itself from Russia to now protect themselves from Iran, who's aligned with Russia. I mean, I think the question about Trump eating the chessboards is so interesting because he has no ability to understand that shitting on Zelensky in the end doesn't really hurt Ukraine as much as it hurts America because we're now not the first country, the first technology, the first power to be called on to help innovate a solution to protect our allies in the Mideast from Iran. I just put a piece out on our military preparedness and the mistakes that we're making in our military industrial complex, but we're going to be here, Nicole, you and I. Okay, we've got 28 months to go. Okay, I just want everybody to know I'm taking my statins and I'm taking the fish oil tablet, whatever I need to do to stay here to fight it through the next 28 months. I want to really thank you for joining us on The Rest is Politics, you guys. Thank you so much for having me. I'm such a fan of the pod. It's so good. And no one can fill caddy shoes, but thank you for letting me be your guest. Well, you've been terrific and she's going to be back next week. But in the meantime, guys, you can check out the final episode of our special on J.D. Vance. We're talking about how Trump consistently humiliates J.D. Vance. So you can sign up at therestispoliticsus.com to get access to that. Thank you, guys, and we'll see you later in the week. Everyone who enters Donald Trump's orbit believes they're the exception. I love Donald Trump and I am very loyal to Donald Trump. But in the end, they all end up in the wood chipper. So what makes J.D. Vance think he can survive? He didn't start out as a believer. I'm a never Trump guy. I never liked him. And you said he could be America's Hitler. I can't stomach Trump. Then something changed. After the first year of President Donald Trump, we are rebuilding the American dream and we're taking back this country. Trump's fiercest critic became his most. loyal defender. Have you said thank you once? The president is right. I wasn't always nice. He looked like the future of MAGA. But if history tells us anything. That's exactly when Donald Trump turns on you. If it doesn't work out, I'm blaming J.D. You better be careful, J.D. This is the story of how J.D. Vance became Donald Trump's heir and why he could end up as his next victim. Sign up to become a member at therestispoliticsus.com to hear the full series.