Trump’s Unrequited Love for Kim Jong Un

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Protect your teeth with Remy by using the code PSTW to get 55% off your new night guard from now until the end of August with Remy Club. Subscribe and save. That's 55% off at shopremi.com slash PSTW with the code PSTW. Thank you, Remy, for sponsoring. Welcome to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, before we came in here, I just read this piece in The Atlantic. It's called The Wrong Kind of American. It's the headlines by a woman named Julia Curley. She's a former CIA officer, rose to the rank of PDB briefer. Briefed Vice President Mike Pence for a year. Worked for the Trump administration, not because of sharing their politics, but because she's a patriot. And then was driven out because I think Laura Loomer figured out that she was a trans person. She loomered her, yeah. And got loomered. And it is enraging. Yeah, people should read it. It's really good. She has a tremendous reputation. She served in the Biden administration too, but a political civil servant, served in multiple administrations. I will say, in addition to being utterly reprehensible, to target someone because of their identity like this, do we think that the non-woke national security apparatus filled with the likes of Pete Hegseth is performing better than she would have? No, absolutely not. Seems like maybe diversity is good because you get smarter people than fucking Pete Hegseth. Yeah, real meritocracy over there. Pete Hegseth, who's like doing a bang up job running the Iran war. I mean, things are going so badly and it's all sort of stuck in the same place that we don't even have a big Iran section for you today in part two. Because Pete is an idiot. But no, it's such an enraging piece. I mean, there's all these great people. There's just one story of a great person driven out of the US government because of politics. And I'm sure there's hundreds or thousands of these. It also is a reminder that it's easy to, for some people at least, to demonize trans people in the abstract. But whenever the camera settles on a person like this, who's like a human being, who's very capable, you're reminded of how grotesque that is. She's trying to do her job, serve her country. Be herself. Highly recommend reading it. We got a great show for you guys today. We are going to talk about why President Trump randomly lashed out over the weekend, started posting photos of himself with Kim Jong-un and then started screaming. As one does. I mean, you and I should do that before this publishes. People will wonder. Then he tried to cancel joint military exercise with the South Koreans. We'll explain what the exercises are, why they matter, and why we think he did this now and kind of the global security implications of it all. Then we're going to talk to you about Jared Kushner's trip to the United States. I bet he was re-upping that venture capital fund, some meetings with the Saudis or other autocrats. We'll talk about what it meant for Gaza, his conversations. We'll talk about this explosion of settler violence in the West Bank. Then secret plane rides in subterfuge by presidents. It's very hot right now because of Trump. And Natalie. And Natalie. Because of Trump basically hiding out in a catering cart in Turkey with Natalie. So we're going to tell you about the links that Russian Vladimir Putin goes to to avoid being monitored by foreign intelligence services, the media, really anyone. Amazing story in the New York Times. We're kind of basing this off of. Finally, we're going to just quickly highlight how Trump talks about parts of Africa and then why British Prime Minister Andy Burnham should probably just stop using his own cell phone. I mean, that's a good message for any political leader in the world. Yeah. Probably. Run it through your office. We'll explain why. Then you're going to hear my interview with an independent journalist named Oliverio. She broke the story about the horrible conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln. That's the aircraft carrier that's been at sea. I think she said like 265 days in her interview, like nearly nine months, thanks to the war with Iran. She talks about the toll on the sailors, their families, the fleet itself. It's unbelievably stark. Yeah. And it's a story that one thing I just want to say about, Tommy, is it kind of brings everything together in a strange way, because they're in such horrible conditions is because they were sent there with no clear mission or endpoint to their mission. The mission itself changed. Incompetent people like Pete Hexeth run the Pentagon, so they didn't kind of plan for resupply. Our base in Bahrain got obliterated by the Iranians. They had no plan B. They didn't tell us that. So no transparency led to no spotlight on this. And then they called it fake news and showed no empathy. So like all the incompetence and the cruelty and the stupidity and the rashness and like oddly, this is one of the stories that is even bigger than like people being in such squalid conditions. Some people are trying to jump off an aircraft carrier because it kind of gets at everything about this war that is just wrong. The lack of strategy and planning is head spinning. I mean, yeah, like you said, I think the Iranians on day one bombed this US base in Bahrain that is absolutely critical to resupplying any mission in the Gulf. And instead, the resupply ships are having to do like 10 day, round trip missions to get food and provisions. To like Diego Garcia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thousands of miles away to get provisions. So that's one piece. Second, you know, I saw – we'll play the clip for you later. President Trump basically belittles these concerns or complaints from these sailors saying he talked to some admiral who was like, when I was their age, I was on ships for longer, right? Like we'll explain why that's bullshit. But also, you know, I saw this prick on Fox News sort of like shouting down these sailors. Some of these – Crazy. Hunger sailors, they're not allowed on the deck. They are in steel boxes in this aircraft carrier going on 250, 260 days. Like could you imagine the nightmare? People are so fucked up by this that they're trying to throw themselves off the deck of the aircraft carrier. One guy did. Yeah. And, you know, these Fox News people who cheerlead these wars and would never fight them themselves, like at some point, there needs to be a reckoning with these people. I will just say that when you have no – because the other piece of this that came out in some of the reporting from the families and I don't know if you get this in the interview, Tommy, but like the morale when you don't know why the fuck you're fighting a war, there's no reason to be fighting the war. Nobody has articulated why. The country is not behind you. Congress didn't vote for it. Like that's – if you were like fighting the Nazis, you probably put up with being in the steel box, you know? But when you're there to open the effing strait that was open before the war, like that's not exactly the most inspiring mission. Yeah. When you feel like, you know, maybe Netanyahu is the reason we're at this war, you know, maybe – yeah, right. We're there. The current mission is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before we started the stupid war. Yeah. The whole thing is just a mess. And it's just like – it's just a piece of the cost of the war that is under-discussed, which is the toll on the U.S. service members themselves and their families. Because a lot of times, these guys can't communicate home for operational security reasons. So imagine, you know, your loved one is in this floating prison in the Gulf for 200 days and you're just sitting there wondering like, okay, is one of these Iranian missiles going to get through tomorrow? Yeah. Yeah. If it re-escalates, what could happen? Yeah. So it's a very important story worth staying on top of because, you know, things aren't going to get better for these sailors anytime soon. I mean, if they get home, it's going to be in a couple months. It's like by like Halloween. So we're going to start with a different sort of military challenge for President Trump, which is this dust-up with South Korea. So, Sunday, President Trump posted the following message on Truth Social. I'm going to read the whole thing because it's just so weird. Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, I'm not happy with the fact that the United States has long ago agreed to participate in joint military exercises with South Korea. These exercises are not only costly with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America as usual, but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile to a country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been president, has been unthreatening and respectful. Therefore, based on the fact that it's too late to cancel, I've instructed some of the military exercises. So, I'm going to read the whole thing to you. So, let's get started. question mark. I don't even understand that. I recently asked the president of South Korea if they would like to join us in the denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And they said, no, thanks. Thank you for attention this matter, President Donald J. Trump. A lot to unpack there. We'll get to that in a second. So Ben, it's not the first time Trump has whined about these joint military exercises with South Korea. It's not really clear either how much the exercises were scaled down because he basically fired off this post when the exercises were already underway, like all the assets were pre-positioned. But it's still a huge deal in South Korea, both politically and for their national security. So for context, these are called the Ulchi Freedom Shield Exercises. They're one of two major annual joint military exercises conducted by the US and South Korea. They're 11 days long. 18,000 South Korean troops are involved along with thousands of US troops. And Trump complains about these things being agreed to long ago, like they were agreed to in like 1950s, like 1953, when the Korean Armistice Agreement, was signed and established the ceasefire that's still in place. I caught up with our buddy Danny Russell earlier today to talk about all of this. Danny was Assistant Secretary of State for Asian Affairs, worked with us on Asia issues in the White House. And he was explaining to me why these exercises are actually so important. First of all, South Korea has a conscription and mandatory military service for men aged, you know, of the able-bodied men of a certain age up to like 29. So you serve for 18 to 21 months. So that means like these South Korean troops are constantly rotating out and you actually do need like real training for them, or otherwise you're just, it's the first time you're going to be, you know, serving. The exercises, they're not like a war game at a think tank where it's like a, you know, laptops and a simulation. It's like essential basic training and coordination between these two big militaries. And then second, he was just talking to me about the way the pace of growth in North Korea's military capabilities over the last five years has just grown exponentially. So they've gotten real battlefield experience in Ukraine. They have a crash course in drone warfare. Their cyber capabilities have drastically ramped up and they got all this new hardware and money from the Russians. Right. And US capabilities obviously evolved too. So you really do need to like drill this stuff. And so I think the question is why kind of like given those clear security equities would Trump decide to flip out about this and hang them out to dry? Lucky for us, he kind of elaborated on his fit of peak in the oval office on Monday. Let's watch. South Korea has been protected by us for many, many years. When I called recently the president of South Korea, who I like, I think he's very nice, actually. But I called him. I said, Would you like to give us a little hand? We don't need help with Iran. But if you'd like, give us a hand with Iran. He said, No, thanks. And I said, Wait a minute. We have thirty nine thousand soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong Un, your next door neighbor. And you're not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran. That's strange. We can't go around and protect all of these countries, especially when they're not there to help us. So just for what it's worth, Ben, the US has closer to twenty six thousand five hundred troops in South Korea, not thirty nine thousand, as he said there. It's also a lie to claim that South Korea paid nothing, that Trump got them to pay three billion and then Biden kind of killed the deal. But whatever. I digress. What do you think happened here? What do you think made Trump pop off about this? And what do you think about him tying it to Iran? Divining Trump's, you know, decision to true social geopolitics on any given day is always difficult. I mean, I think there's a few things that I might point to as possibilities. The first is that he's being utterly humiliated by the Iranians. He's losing. He's being emasculated in front of the whole world. So like a bully on the schoolyard who's, you know, just got punched really hard in the stomach. He just, you know, is looking for someone else to slap, you know, like that's the most likely reason. Second is he's done this to some European countries, too. Like, he demands that they help him with the war that he started by himself for no reason without even telling them that it's hurting their economies more than ours. They're screwing the Korean economy. Yeah. A lot of these Asian economies. Yeah. We've talked about how dependent they are. You've been very good on this, Tommy. Like, they get far more of their energy through the Strait of Hormuz than we do. And then, you know, then he's upset that they don't do what, too, by the way. What are the South Koreans going to do? Tip the balance. Nothing. In the, you know, the Iran war. Because one more ship, you know, like next to our ships, like that makes a lot of sense. And then the other thing, though, that I think is actually more worrisome to me is that he's had this like accumulated set of grievances that are like kind of weirdly consistent over the decade that we've unfortunately had to get to know him very well. And it's like he's not going to get through this second term, his last term without kind of coming back around to all of them. You know, in the same way that he had to kind of come back around to like James Comey and John Brennan. And, you know, he'll come, mark my word, he'll come back around to like Greenland again and the Panama Canal. And like he's been banging this drum on the Koreans like, well, we're going to come back around to this one. And, you know, like there's a disturbing sense of like the declining man in the high castle who's, you know, powerful. Yeah. Like, you know, like, you know, like, you're powers because the other thing about that tweet that truth is you know when he would do this like shortly after he came into office for the second time it it was crazy but it was also kind of like thank you for attention this matter was a little scary now it's like fuck you dude like the south koreans aren't gonna like change and join your war on iran like there's a pathetic nature to it there's actually a little alarming because you get this feeling he's just gonna be like lashing out at all these accumulated targets he's had throughout his whole miserable life you know and if the cost is um are basically like the permanent destruction of american alliances and our standing in the world because i do want to say just one thing because there's so many things you could say about what he said is wrong um the cost that we pay like this this this note that he hits it obama also hit by the way that like we bear too many burdens it's not the fucking basis in south korea it's the dumb wars in the middle east you know like if trump was serious about not not having trillions of dollars in debt on wars that's not the kind of baked in you know presence of u.s troops and bases that have been there for decades that we get a ton out of because basically the entire global economy is tilted in our direction because of south korea and japan and europe and our network of bases and alliances and the dollars of predominant currency like that that's not all this extra post 9-11 cost of these wars he's focused on the wrong fucking problem yeah just on the why he did this now it's like the maggie haberman jonathan swan book gets at the fact that the oval office is just like this kind of like undisciplined free-for-all yes someone described it to me as a greyhound bus station where just like randos come through they just pop off about whatever maybe someone walked into his office tried to brief him on these exercises someone in there sure you're still getting screwed on this right so he like he's in a pissy mood about iran so he pops off at south korea and also threatened to bomb oman i think that's well yeah and the question that i'm curious what you think this time because the question that drew the kind of misogynist rant uh in the oval office was from a cnn reporter about did kim jong-un ask you to do this and he didn't answer it i mean i don't think he did um it's i think your center is more likely that's like buried in his briefing because i've been in the briefings where it's like and by the way the joint exercises right that sets off the guy yeah but i mean it does make you wonder like because the kim jong-un piece of this could come back to life too he may want to go back that's so i think it's a combination about being mad about losing the war this old hobby horse like you said about south korea spending and then i bet he's hoping he can get the media to chase the kind of like north korea diplomacy kind of like bright object over here to get them off of the iran stuff which sucks for him which is an unmitigated failure well it was a total failure and also it is ridiculous to claim that north korea is not threatening they were literally firing off ballistic missiles earlier this week and it's just worth saying that like trump said in that in that briefing like he basically said that kim he was asked if kim had responded to his overtures and he kind of like let the question hang in the air then he was like yeah which is probably a lie because kim has no reason to re-engage like he has money and new weapons from the russians he has this new big partnership with them he doesn't want to deal with the united states in south korea browbeating him into reform the chinese and the russians denuclearization right he basically has said like that the precondition to talking with us again is you guys stop talking about denuclearization um and i think he said like end your hostile policy with korea which basically means like don't do anything i don't like and that could be you know abandon south korea abandon japan get your bombers out of guam uh end all sanctions and meanwhile this guy's sitting on 60 nukes he can make 20 more a year he's got icbms that could reach the u.s he's developing a nuclear submarine like it's an enormous threat to the u.s and south korea and the whole region yeah what's so crazy about what he said is the threat that people surmised north korea posed to the united states through successive administrations was not the personal relationship between the leader of north korea and the leader of the united states it was just the fact that they were developing nuclear weapons that could hit our troops in south korea or japan or reach the united states or certainly reach hawaii and guam like that's the threat so he did to much media fanfare that singapore summit that got like you know he got his flowers from the media it was like the abraham accords of east asia you know like everybody touched his foot in the dmz and everyone oh look at trump amazing and meanwhile like everything has gotten worse like america has developed its nuclear weapons it's developed its ballistic missiles uh they've sent all these troops to the front in ukraine You've gotten this – Tipped the balance for the Russians in a lot of ways with the shells too. Felt like it did at the time, right? And meanwhile, let's also point out the fact that our aging president who's often described as the most powerful man in the world – I'm beginning to have some questions about that – is clearly in some kind of unrequited love affair with a 41-year-old dictator of North Korea. That's true. Because Kim Jong-un has never once like evinced any of the same affinity for Trump that he consistently – Bro, you don't read the letters. I mean this is a guy that – How dare you? Like his long-term future and survival is tied to the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party, which will be there after Donald Trump, to the Russian government and Vladimir Putin who, unless nature intervenes, will be there after Donald Trump. He makes no indication that he gives a shit about how good Donald Trump feels about him. Think of how pathetic it is. It's not just – I know there's a kind of resistance-y thing to say like, oh my god, he's palling up with dictators. He's actually not. He's like chasing this dictator of like the hermit kingdom and Kim Jong-un isn't even really doing anything in response. You don't think he's sending the occasional like spicy selfie like kind of in the mirror, the bathroom or something? He doesn't even – that's what's so amazing. He doesn't even have to. Like in the first term, he did. We don't even – I mean because I guarantee you if he had sent a love letter to Trump, he'd probably truth post that. Oh, absolutely. Motherfucker right away. Show it to everybody who comes by. So it's kind of – it's actually kind of pathetic that this guy can't even like get Kim Jong-un to pay attention. It is quite pathetic and also just like two other big picture pieces of context. The first is that this flare-up from Trump about these joint military exercises happened as we're learning that the USS George Washington, which is one of America's 11 total aircraft carriers, is getting taken out of Japan and sent to the Middle East to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln. We get into all the reasons why in the interview. But that means that the United States – The United States is going to have exactly zero of its 11 aircraft carriers in the Western Pacific. And so that means we just have like a reduced capacity to respond if the Chinese do something on Taiwan or the North Koreans do something stupid. And it comes after the U.S. pulled – it was the THAAD missile defense systems out of South Korea. I think that was last year. It might have been this year. No, some of it was for the war in Iran. Yeah, some of it was for the war in Iran. And then second, a couple weeks back, we talked about that nuclear deal that Trump had offered to the Saudis. Danny pointed out to me today that, you know, that – The initial deal allowed the Saudis to enrich nuclear material and that South Korea has been trying to get that kind of deal offered to them for about 25 years. So now they're dealing with a stronger, richer, emboldened North Korea, a weakened, distracted United States, and Trump ranting about the U.S. troop presence in South Korea once again. And so you've got to be sitting there – like if you're some general in South Korea, you've got to be sitting there thinking, OK, by the end of this guy's term, we might have no U.S. troops in the Korean Peninsula or a bunch. What is our security guarantee? We should maybe be talking about getting a nuke ourselves before it's too late. Yeah, and to connect some of these threads – because South Korea has choices and they could just decide, you know what? We don't like the Chinese that much but we're right next to them. They're going to be here. The Americans are totally unreliable and we better just start cutting some deals with the Chinese like right quick or else it could be kaput for us. And look, you may like – Roll your eyes and say, yeah, I don't care. I mean let's connect some of these dots. He is destroying the relationship with South Korea potentially. He's threatening to bomb the shit out of Oman at the same time that he's demonstrated to each of these countries that having a U.S. military presence may be more dangerous than not having one, right? He's threatened to invade NATO territory. If all of a sudden countries feel like it's more dangerous to be friends with the United States, it's not just that the United States can be kind of annoying or elect a crazy person every now and then. It's literally dangerous. It's literally dangerous to have your security tied to the United States. It is going to – and that's kind of already happening. It's part of what's sending the world into this tailspin of instability. And as we've also been pointing out, if it starts to look like – because that is why the dollar is a reserve currency. Like the reason the dollar is a reserve currency, that's why we get to have trillions of dollars in debt. That's why even as expensive as shit is, our standards of living are way higher than they should be and they are in other countries because we can spend more than we take in. Of the debt that accrues from the dollar as a reserve currency? Well, if suddenly the thing that undergirds that, which is the US military and its global presence is unraveling, like shit can get very real here for Americans. Like I'm all for like drawing down base presences where it doesn't need to be including parts of the Middle East. I'm all for spending no money on stupid wars. But if you're dismantling things like Japan, South Korea and Europe and you're not anywhere in the Middle East, like – Everything changes pretty quick. Also, J.D. Vance is out there saying like, I don't know if it's good for the dollar to be the reserve currency. He's like, what are you talking about? Good luck servicing that debt, man. Yeah. Which by the way, like keep an eye on the yield on the 30-year treasury right now. Like bonds are going crazy right now. There's a lot of bad things happening in the global economy. Yes. I mean like I know we've raised this a few times because this is like the – this is the thing underneath the tip of the iceberg because again, you may wonder why we have trillions. We have trillions of dollars in debt that we can seemingly carry around. Well, it's because countries have to buy our treasuries because they have to deal with us as a hegemon with the dollar. And this is the kind of stuff that is just chipping away at that iceberg. Yep. And the system works until it doesn't. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. 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He's the guy who solved the war in Ukraine, ended that one, negotiated an end to the war in Iran, got that one done. So now he's back in the Middle East checking on Gaza. He's just sort of a global emissary for peace. Jared met with officials from Hamas on Sunday in Egypt, which by the way, I'm glad he's doing that. And I hope that Democrats just remember that going forward. And meet with anyone they want. I don't care if they're labeled a terrorist group or whatever. Trump did it. Jared Kushner did it. I don't give a shit. Jared Kushner can meet with Hamas. But if a Democrat like goes on Hassan Piker. Asymmetry. Yep. There you go. Jared also met Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for about four hours on Monday in the Netanyahu meeting where Nikolai Mladenov, the high representative for Trump's Gaza Board of Peace, and then Tony Blair for some reason. Jared said he met with Netanyahu to clarify like misconceptions. And correct misinformation about Trump's 15 point Gaza peace plan that remember Trump announced and then Netanyahu immediately rejected. So Jared says he assured Netanyahu that, quote, the U.S. doesn't expect Israel to refrain from taking action against imminent threats by Hamas. A Board of Peace official later said that, quote, there will be no IDF redeployment from Gaza until Hamas is fully disarmed and all of Gaza is demilitarized. So we don't know what's going to happen here. Hamas seems to have agreed to kind of like a phased disarmament approach. But now the Times of Israel is reporting. The Board of Peace might nix that approach. So it's just not at all clear what is going to happen going forward. Regardless, Jared did a rare TV interview while in Israel, which gave us a window into his thinking and some of what he talked about. Here's a bit of what he said on Fox News in this interview on Monday. Let's watch. For Israel, we think this is a win win situation because if Hamas actually gives over the weapons and the tunnels, you know, willingly over the next 60 to 90 days, that obviously would be the elimination of a huge security threat for Israel. Almost an unthinkable achievement. And if they don't. If they don't fall through now on their commitment, everyone will see that that they're not genuine about peace and then Israel will have a lot more support from the U.S. others to go and finish the job in the appropriate way. So, Ben, I found those comments incredibly ominous because it's like, OK, basically Israel gets a pass on living up to its end of the original ceasefire bargain. But if Hamas doesn't immediately capitulate and hand over all its weapons, which obviously we want it to do, but I can understand sort of their thinking here, Israel gets to finish the job, whatever that means. It sounds like kind of green lighting them restarting the conflict in a major way. Yeah. And I want to say, like, if you could if you're going to be like a Nepo baby Kushner, like better to just buy the Lakers than try to insert yourself in Middle East peace. What a sweet gig. Seems like his brother had a better life plan here. It's extraordinary to me that the last two weeks we've talked about this utter humiliation where they announced this huge breakthrough in the implementation of the so-called ceasefire terms leading to the demilitarization of Hamas very predictably and very publicly. Netanyahu is like, nope, we're not going to do this. And Jared, instead of going over there and saying, yes, you are, because we've fucking provided you with every weapon that you dropped on Gaza. We're going to cut you out. You dragged us in this dumb war in Iran. He goes over there and it's like, thank you, sir. May I have another? We're now accepting your frame of this exactly. And if Hamas doesn't do everything that you direct them to do with Israel doing nothing, then we could go to full scale bombardment of Gaza. I mean, that's kind of what he suggested. And listen, again, as we've said a million times in the show, not a fan of Hamas. I think they've done more damage to the Palestinian people than almost any other organization. You know, terrorist groups, October 7th is unjustifiable. Attacks on innocent people are unjustifiable. But that should also apply to the Israeli side, because as Jared is giving this interview, the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gavir said, quote, I think targeted assassination should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night, not just those who pose an immediate threat. There are people who are who are not worthy of life. They shouldn't live. They're not even people. I mean, that's the quote. That's the context. They're saying, go finish the job. You've got people like who don't like it when you say that Israel is committing genocide. And then you have the national security minister of the current government of Israel making genocide, the most genocidal statement imaginable. Right. And that's what's happening like before our eyes here. And again, just on this Hamas point, would I like if Hamas just disarmed out of the blue? Sure. But that's not how this works. Like even the United States and all these other parties understood that you were going to have like any diplomatic agreement, like a phased approach where each side takes steps together. So Israel has to withdraw as Hamas verifiably demilitarizes. And then a peacekeeping force goes in to fill the security vacuum. That's not what's happening anymore. What's happening more is that they tried to do that plan. Israel is the only one that vetoed it. And now they said, OK, if Hamas doesn't do something that they're clearly not going to do, which is unilaterally disarm while Israel is occupying more of the Gaza Strip and not letting assistance in, then Israel can just kill as many people as they want. Like that is that's not diplomacy. That is just like Jared taking dictation from Netanyahu and repeating it on on Israeli television. Yeah. Jared just is fully on board with the Israeli side. We're not doing an Iran section today, because, again, like I said, nothing's really changed. But Kushner did tell Fox that, quote, we are having very positive and active conversations, probably more robust than it's ever been with Iran. And then on Tuesday, Trump posted on Truth Social, quote, there are no talks or conversations with Iran. So I don't know if he was just slapping down Jared, if Jared was lying or what the hell was happening there, but just notable. The one guess I'll make on this and RIP the MOU that was supposed to end the war in Iran that achieved precisely nothing. My guess is whatever talks are still going on are basically Qataris or Omanis or I don't know, maybe even these Pakistanis that have been involved talking to the Iranians and then talking to Americans. And Jared is so like the center of his own world. But even if he's just getting read out on those talks by like I'm guessing here, I don't know this to be true, but like it feels like if if he's getting a readout from like the Gulf, he's like, yeah, we're in really active talks, you know, like when. Meanwhile, Trump is threatening to bomb the shit out of Oman, this troubleshooter in the region, right? The Omanis, you'll recall, and this bears saying, like, they're the ones that helped us get some Americans out of prison. There are three hikers that randomly decided to hike into Iran, got detained. Oman got them out. They're the ones who hosted the initial talks that led to the Iran nuclear deal. Like they are notoriously kind of this, I don't want to say Switzerland because it's even more active. They're this kind of, you know. They try to facilitate. They try to facilitate peace talks and they try to get along with everybody. Trump's saying we're going to bomb them. And that's good for us that we can do. If it wasn't for Oman, we wouldn't have had a venue to have talks. And by the way, Trump has taken advantage of that, too. And now we're threatening to bomb them. Do you think that's going to make it more or less likely that they'll go along with Iran's scheme to toll the Strait of Hormuz while giving Oman a cut? It's crazy. Pretty sure it's a lot. Yeah. And so while Gaza is stuck in this kind of nightmarish limbo, things in the West Bank are steadily getting worse. So the U.N. counted a minimum of 1380 attacks by extremist settlers in 250 Palestinian communities in the first seven months of this year. Also, according to the U.N., over 1100 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7th. Most of these incidents get no media coverage. But what's happening in the village of Kusra actually broke through. It's worth just talking about why for a minute. So if you haven't followed the story, the gist is that earlier this month, these terrorist Israeli settlers decided to hold a bunch of Palestinians hostage in their own homes. They cut off water and power to several Palestinian-owned homes on the edge of Kusra. They set up roadblocks. They camped out outside of the home, just as menacing as humanly possible. And during this siege, settlers actually blocked an ambulance from getting to the home to rescue a sick two-year-old. Now, they block ambulances all the time, but doing it to a sick two-year-old is disgusting. I think another ambulance got in and got the kid out. But give me a break. They also blocked activists from getting to these houses to provide food and water after the residents had run out of food and water. So they're trying to starve and kill kids. IDF soldiers were called in to disperse the settlers. They were instead spotted hanging out with them, praying with them. And they basically only evicted activists who were trying to help the Palestinians. But what's different in this case is that one of the homes is owned by a Palestinian-American who lives in Ohio. He had cameras kind of like live streaming and filming everything. That footage got pushed out to international press. It got international attention. So after a couple of days, the IDF got sent in again. They finally got the settlers. But as soon as the IDF left, the settlers came back. That led to the IDF starting a larger kind of messier operation, which cleared out some of the settlers, but not all of them. But it's almost kind of like beside the point because this is just temporary. And these settlers are hell-bent on this kind of like messianic mission to ethnically cleanse the West Bank. The U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, actually weighed in on the Kusra siege on Twitter. And he referred to the settlers as terrorists, which was surprising from him. But he also tweeted the following, Ben. Settlers are not the problem in Judea, Samaria. That's the West Bank. Unsettlers are. A very small minority who do great damage to Palestinian families in Israel. Real settlers like Yisrael Gans, governor of Judea, Samaria, condemn the actions of the few. Let's hope the media gives attention to this and balances their stories. So I think it's worth kind of highlighting that tweet as a jumping off point because of how unbelievably wrong it is. This is not an issue of like a few bad apples in the settler community. As a friend of the pod, Jasper Nathaniel wrote, the violent settlers are the tip of the spear of the state-backed annexation process. So the settlers have backing from senior members of the Israeli military, some of whom are settlers themselves, from top political aides or top political officials like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gavir, who is the most kind of openly genocidal political leader, is also a settler himself. Smotris is a settler. Yeah. And then on Friday, Ben, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that, quote, all responsibility for enforcing civilian matters and maintaining law and order in the West Bank will be transferred to the police, which is actually a huge deal because it would constitute a big step towards Israel annexing the West Bank. I think that might sound counterintuitive to listeners, but under international law, the occupying powers military is responsible for security in an occupied territory because that occupation is supposed to be temporary. When you transition to like civilian police, that's de facto applying Israeli law to occupy territories. And it goes against the law. So I think that's a big step forward. It goes against the Oslo Accords, which say that it has to be Palestinian security forces or the IDF. So, Ben, I'll pause there because the question I have is, do you think this is exploding in advance of the election this October when everyone is kind of trying to outright wing each other? Or is the story worse? And is this kind of like the settler movement trying to complete annexation in the next two years while Trump is still president? I mean, I think it's actually both. The first thing I want to say is that I saw the Huckabee tweet. I also saw a lot of people online who are usually kind of rabid defenders of Israel, like condemning this one instance. I fucking hate that, man. Like, you're going to virtue signal, you're going to act like you're concerned about settler violence by taking the most high profile incident that is most obviously bad and condemning it, but you have nothing to say about- And it involves an American. Yeah, and it involves an American. The 1,100 people who've been killed, the systematic repression of Palestinians, the systematic demolition of Palestinian homes, the systematic abuse of Palestinian prisoners. - Humiliation. you get to pop up online and see like, see, I'm even-handed. I have very little patience for that. We have to see that this is a systematic effort. Netanyahu has spent years saying what Huckabee said in his tweet, which is that, oh, there's some juvenile delinquents. He always uses language like that. There's just a handful of bad apples among all these other virtuous settlers as if it's not a systemic issue. The reality is the two people, they're most extreme in the Israeli government, Smotrich and Ben-Gavir, are the two people most focused on the West Bank. Smotrich is literally the leader of the settlers and he's the finance minister. He's very much in charge of making sure that the people in the West Bank, the Israeli settlers get what they want. Ben-Gavir is in charge of the police as the national security minister. When this is shifted, if it's shifted to the police, that's not good. I think what people have to reckon with, including Democrats, is no, it's not like- We're going to get through one election and it's just election season. These are people who believe profoundly. I mean, just calling it Judea and Samaria gives away the game. It's not the West Bank. It's not Palestinian land. It is ours. They want it as soon as possible. They see a win of opportunity with Trump. They see a win of opportunity with Netanyahu. This West Bank story is not going to go away. There's going to be more violence. You cannot cast this as some isolated extreme incident. This is just the one that popped up above the transom because it's an American and it was live streamed. It's not going to go away. It's not all the rest of it. Yeah. I think we're going to return to this again soon in the coming weeks. I think it's an unbelievably important story. It's one that needs to get more focus because it is urgent. I think there's a ticking clock here. We've talked about Jasper Netanyahu's coverage over Infinite Jazz, his sub stack. It's really worth reading that if you want to learn more, but we'll definitely should put a button in this and come back to it soon. Last week, Ben, we talked about this Trump secret flight home from the NATO summit in Turkey. The decision to- Secretly use the press and his own staff as human shields and make them unwitting decoys for Iranian missiles. I'd be thrilled to learn that would happen to me. After that story became public, the New York Times had this amazing story with the headline, for Trump, secret flight was a stunning ruse for Putin, a regular Tuesday. It dug into all the ways that Putin and his paranoia and the way he uses lies and deception and subterfuge to avoid threats, hide where he's located. It was a great story. I think it's going to be a great story. I think it's going to be a fascinating and interesting and worth kind of digging into. So a couple of great anecdotes from this story. Putin just routinely lies about when meetings took place. And so reporters have had to resort to studying plants in the background in his office to see when the leaves have wilted as kind of like rough timestamps for the meetings. I think that's fucking brilliant, by the way. Yeah. They also look at the haircuts of the other officials in the meetings and then compare them to their other public events to like see if their hair has grown. Putin is also believed to have three identical offices at his various residences so that no one knows exactly where he is. Imagine if like, you know, Obama had an Oval Office in like Chicago, right? Identical. I guess he does now. So journalists, like they look for little discrepancies, like the seams on a wall or like a door handle to try to like ID the room. In 2023, a member of Putin's personal security service defected, gave testimony to like another, you know, country security service and talked about what it was like to travel with Putin and set up comms for him. The AP kind of wrote up the transcripts of this. And he said that since the war in Ukraine, Putin is almost exclusively traveled by train because he doesn't like that airplanes can be tracked. He said that Putin doesn't need internet access. When he goes to places, he doesn't ever use a cell phone. He said the quote, "In all my service, I've never seen him with a mobile phone." And quote, "All the information he receives is only from people close to him." That is, he lives in a kind of information vacuum. I think that kind of tracks with what we've heard about him getting bad information, leading to bad information, bad decision making. Yeah. And then finally, CNN just had a great story on Putin's personal train, which according to leaked government documents, runs on secret tracks. There are secret stops all over the country at secret stations that can't be found on a map. And the train includes a gym and a spa, which, you know, looked pretty sick to be honest. So Ben, you know, a lot of this like got worse during COVID and the isolation there. I think Putin made people quarantined for two weeks before meeting with him. But I can only imagine how paranoid he must be. Now with all these Ukrainian like deep strikes into Russian territory and how much worse it will get. I do think there's an opportunity for the next US president though to bring back the White House train. That would be sick. I'd love to ride on that. It's kind of funny, but it's also kind of terrifying because when a leader is this paranoid, I mean, this doesn't give a huge vote of confidence how Putin feels about public opinion towards himself, right? He goes a lot less places. He's never very rarely in public. It's very staged when he is. But he's never very rarely in public. But he's never very But I mean, when a leader like gets more and more out of touch like this and more and more isolated and is living in this kind of alternate reality that has been wholly constructed, they do more rash things. You know, I mean, the most famous example of this, right, is Hitler in the bunker, you know, when he still believes he's commanding all these armies and he's just sitting there taking drugs and, you know, watching everything burn above ground. And the reason I say that is because we already know from like some pretty good reporting, we'll never really know what was in Putin's head, that what contributed to his decision to do the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was in part his isolation and people only telling what he wanted to hear, him sidelining people, told him anything different. We've talked about the concern about escalation. Like does Putin try to do something in Europe? Does he try to do something in the Baltics, in Moldova, or God forbid in, you know, anywhere, but also in like Poland. Anthony Comegna: This kind of isolation makes that more, not less likely. Like if you're this cut off from public opinion, you're this cut off from the consequences of your own decisions. There's no accountability loop. There's no real information getting to you. Like that's my concern. And also by the, it points to why we're worried about Trump. I mean, I'm not saying Trump's there, but this is why you don't even want to open the door to like catering carts to, like once your leader can just disappear, like it opens the door to weird shit happening. I mean, you made the joke last week about like, maybe he's saying, you know, you know, he's saying, you know, he's saying, he stopped by to see Putin. I don't think he did. But the point is, is that the more, like the president can just go off grid, like the weirder shit happens. Jason Brennan: No, it's not good. It's not like we can't normalize lying to the White House press pool for any reason. It's just like not acceptable. Also, you know, there's been a lot of coverage recently. We talked last week about these Ukrainian deep strikes on wild berries, the kind of amazon.com of Russia. It's clear that like, those are really having an impact. They're bringing the war home in a way. Anthony Comegna: That even the oil and gas strikes haven't done, because I didn't realize that Putin had managed to kind of reroute oil and gas flows to major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg and kind of prevent like his inner circle or kind of the elites from feeling the pinch of like waiting in four hour lines for gas or something like that. But I don't think he's been able, he can do that with the wild berries strikes. And it's like, it just, this feels very escalatory right now. Anthony Comegna: And then we're about to go into, to another winter for the Ukrainians, where I remember last year, like the whole conversation was about people basically freezing to death because Putin had blown up all the energy infrastructure and people couldn't heat their homes. So yeah, this is just, we're just heading in a very dark place over the next year, even if the kind of Ukrainian side feels like it has got some momentum right now. Anthony Comegna: Yeah. Just because they can hit stuff deep in Russia with drones doesn't mean that it can't get worse. I mean, it means it very well may get worse. Before we take a break, as you guys probably know, in less than 80 days, voters are going to have a chance to stop the Trump agenda in its tracks, at least in Congress. Vote Save America is on a mission to take back the House of Representatives, starting with the 12 most beatable Republicans who are up for reelection, who are called the Crooked Dozen. Vote Save America is your guide to practical, no bullshit actions you can take to help kick out these terrible members of Congress, the Crooked Dozen, and win other key races this fall. Go to votesaveamerica.com, learn how to get involved right now, up until election day. It only takes a moment to sign up at votesaveamerica.com. Anthony Comegna: This message has been paid for by Vote Save America. Votesaveamerica.com is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. Anthony Comegna: Pod Save the World is brought to you by SimpliSafe. Here's the thing about traditional home security systems. They're all designed to be reactive rather than preventative. They trigger after the window breaks, after someone's already inside, after the police arrive. We don't have to tell you that it's too little too late. SimpliSafe is the first system designed to stop a break-in before it even begins. Anthony Comegna: They have smart AI-powered outdoor cameras that detect suspicious activity at the perimeter and alert live US-based agents to step in. SimpliSafe's agents assess the threat, intervene through the outdoor camera to scare off trespassers, and call 911 dispatch. Anthony Comegna: Our CEO has a SimpliSafe installed in her home. She did it recently. She said the installation was quick and easy, and the system was up and running in no time, that all of the components have worked great and smoothly, and the app itself is really, really easy to use and just intuitive. Now she has a peace of mind. Anthony Comegna: And knows that she is protected by SimpliSafe. SimpliSafe has been protecting your world for 20 years. Celebrate their anniversary with us and save 60% on your new SimpliSafe system at simplisafe.com/crookedworld. That's 60% off at simplisafe.com/crookedworld. Plus, when you order, write in our show name 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. Anthony Comegna: Keep it listeners. Louis Vertel here. I have something I've been dying to get off my chest. Anthony Comegna: Dr. Robbie is is the real villain of the pit. There, I said it. Okay, but that's not actually the big news here's the big news emmy nominated television host nina parker is officially the new co-host of keep it that's the confession the dr robbie thing was just you know me needing to say someone out loud okay shots fired and i hear you're dr robbie and i raise you sex in the city wasn't really a show about finding love it was a humiliation ritual on bad friendships the clothes were cute though oh yeah the choo-choo in the opening credits really cute every week nina and i will bring you an inside look at all the pop culture drama the hottest takes you can handle and honestly maybe some you can't plus celebrity guests galore we're gonna guide you through gorgeous wreckage of pop culture we are unpacking the biggest stories in tv film entertainment news we're gonna go all the way to gen z from youtube taking over the horror genre to olivia rodrigo redefining pop music and then we're gonna also talk about maybe you partying with madonna a little bit oh yeah that one time at the abbey it was sweaty but in a good way new episodes drop every wednesday on youtube and wherever you listen to podcasts you speaking of um that kind of paranoia uh russia's parliamentary elections coming up from september 18th to the 20th on monday the supreme court uh held this ruling barring this political party uh yabloko from participating it's like the oldest liberal party they're openly against a war in ukraine they have no chance at winning no one thinks this will be a free and fair election but putin apparently got so spooked by an online campaign encouraging people to support them vote for them as a way to like kind of legally vote for them and they're like dissent that he must have just engineered this bullshit legal takedown of this little-ass liberal political party. It doesn't suggest a confident leader. When you can't tolerate the most minuscule dissent, it tells you everything about how confident he is in the – I mean I don't doubt that there's still some people that like Putin in Russia. But when people point – and this has been a hobby of mine for a long time, Tommy. But when people point to public opinion polls in Russia, like somebody fucking called me on the phone in Russia and was like, do you approve of Vladimir Putin's job as president? Saying no feels like not something I would do. Never, ever. And also like when your entire – when you only consume state-run media, that's highly effective. I think it also suggests that maybe his personal popularity is higher than United Russia's, like his political party, right? He's not on the ballots, parliamentary electors. Also, you had highlighted this story about kind of Russian interference in – was it Belarus or Moldova? Moldova, yeah. Did you want to talk about that at all? Yeah. I mean I thought that what was interesting about this is that in addition to like this was a pretty methodically reported story and it tracks the things that I've heard. Sure, they were interfering in the election online and all these other ways. But they also had like training camps set up. In Serbia, right? In Serbia where people were doing like military operations, like sabotage type operations, training with weapons. Like it suggested like an ominous risk of the kind of typical Russian interference tipping into violence and really trying to kind of destabilize countries. And it's the playbook that you fear. It's the playbook that they used in eastern Ukraine before the invasion that people have long thought if they did that in the Baltics or in Moldova, like things could really escalate quickly. And so that's what caught my attention is like this wasn't just like another troll farm operation. This is like there are guns involved in this operation. Yeah. And also it just gets at a shift in tactics you've seen, which is like Russian sabotage operations don't necessarily mean sending some grizzled GRU veteran to another country to stage a thing. It's like them offering tons and tons of people in a country like Moldova money on telegram if they'll do some sort of thing, which they disguise what it is, what the goal is, who's behind it. And all of a sudden, you know, some 17 or 18 year old kid is like buying a quadcopter drone at Walmart and flying it at some target or taking surveillance. Yeah. You know, he's getting arrested or implicated or does, you know, in worse, does something really bad. Well, and they also hit like some of the power generation that goes into Moldova, like causing blackouts. Like they're clearly trying to destabilize the government, made the government unpopular. They can't keep the lights on. But that just speaks to this like slippery sloper on where, sure, first you were just had troll farms, but now we're at the point where we're like, you know, you're bombing the electricity generation for a country. And if Russia decided to do that, it would be like, what are we going to do about it? And, you know, we're like, we're going to have to, you know, we're going to have to, you know, we're going to have to do something. We're going to have to do something. And, you know, we're going to have to, you know, we're going to have to do something. And, you know, we're going to have to do something. And real war like starts, that spectrum starts to get a little hazy, you know? Yeah. By the way, have you seen these stories in the photos about how all the rivers in Germany and other parts of Europe are at such low levels that they can't even fill like barges to transport goods? I was reading that the Financial Times estimated that it could, this drought, this climate change driven drought could cost like 150 billion euros. It's like staggering. It's hot. And people don't want to talk about climate change. I get it. We keep hearing how people don't want to talk about it, but it's fucking hot. And when things get really hot, like things like this can cause irreversible damage, like nuclear power plants not being able to operate. So the other day, Ben, two more things. So the other day, Trump made some comments about Somalia. That were not necessarily surprising coming from him, but were just like shockingly racist from a president of the United States. And I think the worst part was they got almost no attention or media coverage. So we just asked our team here to pull together a few examples like this, just to show how vile and frequent this shit is from Trump. Let's watch. They come from, let's say as an example, Somalia, they're not smart. They have no aptitude. They have nothing going and they're telling us how to run our country. I don't want them. In our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks. It's devastated. It's crime ridden. It's a mess. It's a disgrace. A backward country, probably the worst country. Somalia is a third world, maybe a fourth world nation. It's not even a nation. It's just people walking around killing each other. It's filthy, dirty, disgusting, dirty. They come to our country, low IQs, and they rob us blind. Nineteen billion dollars in fraud that was stolen, by Somalian bandits. Can you believe that Somalia, they turned out to be higher IQ than we thought? Why is it we only take people from shithole countries? We always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they're good at is going after ships. They come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch. We don't want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it. It's just like the evolution of it is just amazing. Remember like the quote about quote unquote shithole countries was like a report in the Washington Post that the White House denied. And now it's just the thing he says at rallies. You know, the racism is so open. When people look back on the Trump era, one of the things that is going to be most baffling and repugnant to people from history is the fact that we even had some kind of debate. kind of debate about whether Trump is a racist and whether racism is central, central to the MAGA movement. You were scolded in 2017 if you called him a racist. Yeah. You didn't understand the grievances of white working class people. Like this is, this man has one kind of language that he uses to describe people that are black and brown that is different from the language that he uses to describe anybody else. And he, you know, Somalia is the kind of most acute example of it, but it's how he talks about Haiti. It's how he talks about most of Africa. It's how he talks about neighborhoods in American cities that are predominantly black or brown. It's how he talks about immigrants in this country. It is fundamental to his political identity. And the fact that it is so normalized that we've gone this far backwards over the course of this decade, I mean, this is a man who has banned all refugee admissions to the United States, except white South Africans who are the like legacy apartheid people. Who get like a white nationalist welcome kit. Yeah. I mean. It's like a, like a whitewashed, literally like history of our founding. Yeah. And what does he know about Somalia? Like, does he know any Somali, Somali people? And what, what, it is an odd fixation actually. And bear in mind that we're committing violence. We're committing violence. We're committing violence there. Trump, Trump has ramped up drone strikes there. Nobody talks about that. It's just normalized that we just kill people occasionally there. And, and, and then Trump, you know, runs down their country. Is this because he doesn't like Ilhan Omar? It feels like that's the most of it. Which is bizarre. Like there's a single member of Congress who happens to have origins. And by the way, the people he's talking about who are refugees have been through so much more than he's ever been through in his life. And most of them are just people that want to be safe somewhere. Yeah. Well, look, she's black. She wears a headscarf. She's Muslim. So he views her as like an easy political target. You know, he's just like the most I just, yeah, I do just hate how like the backlash to wokeism has kind of smokescreened some of this stuff. And I think now we're living with the discomfort of like, wait a second. It's like we were saying at the very beginning of the show about the trans woman. Like, I don't like, can we talk about this again? Like we don't have to make the culture war is the leading political argument we make, but I, it's going to be look a little strange that like this man just says these things on the regular. And it's like, we all decided we, you know, I think it's important and good to like call him out when he's racist, just like call out the lack of human decency and the treatment of individuals. And that's why like the story we talked about at the top, the Atlantic piece by Julia Curley are so important because like it should, it, human being. It's like she puts an identity and a human face and a human story on the impact of these bigoted policies. Yeah. And there's a way to do it. I mean, can I very quick detour? Because I know you like Rob Sand, governor, candidate in Iowa. Looks peculiarly like you. Yeah. I've been separated for it. But I went to a few town halls, wrote about them for the New York Times. And it was funny. Somebody raised this in a question. They said, can we just get back to being a state where we treat people nicely? And I don't care what color they are. I don't care where they came from. It was like a very powerful, simple Iowa statement. And I thought one of the things that Rob Sand did that was so interesting was he did validate this woman's concern. People are here playing by the rules. We should give them a chance. But he cited Bob Ray, who was a Republican governor of Iowa, who was very conservative on some things, but very pro-refugee. And there are these refugee communities in Iowa. And he's like, remember Bob Ray. Remember we didn't have to use these issues to divide each other. You just had a Republican governor who was a decent guy. You got to find ways to appeal to people like, do you want this? You can have a lot of things that I disagree with and not do this. There's a way to kind of avoid the culture war while still making that fundamental appeal to decency. And I thought Rob Sand did that pretty well. That's good. Finally, Ben, every new world leader makes a couple of rookie mistakes. You usually just chalk it up to inexperience. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham had his own little, you know, welcome to the NFL moment after Politico reported that he had been exchanging text messages with someone that he thought was the White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles. Spoiler alert, it was not. Burnham says he figured out that something was off pretty quickly and that it was a quote, minimal exchange of information of zero consequence. And then he like reported it up the chain immediately. But it seems like this incident spooked number 10. And it was also not the first time someone had like gotten Susie Wiles' phone book and it had been impersonating her to people. The Guardian then reported that at least three UK cabinet ministers have had their mobile numbers published online. And it's also just worth noting that this is hardly the first time we've seen a politician kind of tricked like this into having a conversation with someone that said they were someone else. In 2024, then Foreign Secretary David Cameron did a video call with someone pretending to be former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. It was not. In 2018, Boris Johnson, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, spoke over the phone for 18 minutes with someone pretending to be the Armenian Prime Minister. And then in 2022, these two Russian, like they call themselves professional prank callers, but they seem to have some ties to the government. They got the British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace on a video call, and they tried to bait him into saying some very damaging things. Here's part of a clip that they released. We would like to continue the nuclear program in order to protect ourselves from Russia. It's a difficult question, but we think to start it. Okay. But do you think, I mean, I think more than being neutral, Russia would really hate that. For sure. We know this, of course, but it's one of the questions that we're interested in. It's a difficult question. Clearly, he's trying to get him, bait him into being like, yeah, yeah, get a nuke. No big deal. For what it's worth, you know, the British government said at the time that the video had been doctored when it was released. I'm sure it was. So, Ben, like the easy fix here is for Andy Burnham just not to do any more official business on his personal phone. Have that for family, have that for friends only. If that, route everything else through the number 10 switchboard, even though sometimes they get got, but at least then you can blame someone else. But can you imagine how much worse this shit is going to get with AI making it easy to generate like realistic video and just clone all of our voices? Like we're screwed. Yeah. Andy Burnham getting calls from some scammers saying like, you know, we have your friend or something. Right. I will say, by the way, just first of all, Andy Burnham has delivered as a much better political communicator than Keir Starmer, just kind of watching it. Like jury's still out. We'll see how he does policy-wise, but like he's raised the bar. I look, just get rid of the personal cell phone though. I mean, we went through this. Obama didn't want to get rid of his BlackBerry famously. He was allowed to keep one, but they went to these extraordinary lengths where he had like a fake name and only a certain list of people were allowed to be in communication with him. Like you can, you can allow a political leader to have some capacity to be in personal communication with both staff and friends without just like keeping your cell phone, you know, and like your, what, WhatsApp number that is easily taken from you. I will say my favorite ex British prime minister story of the week, Tommy was the video of Boris Johnson singing pink pony club. I don't know if you saw this. No. What is that from? This is an Instagram that was posted by Boris Johnson's wife. I will say this. Is he doing cameo now? Yeah. Well, as someone who was, had a lot of chaperone in my house because I've got two girls, you know, you know, you watch an artist grow through that cycle where they're the cool new outsider to like world famous superstar to like, it's not good if Boris Johnson's singing your song. No, you don't want that. So chaperone's going to have to like come up with some new, you know, more counter-cultural material. That's a good one to denounce chaperone. You can, you can talk shit about Boris Johnson. He doesn't even know the words though. So maybe you got that. He doesn't really know the words at all. Does he? Uh, he just knows pink pony club. And West Hollywood. Right here. We're right here. Yeah. We're here. Uh, shout out to count bin face for giving it the old college try against Nigel Farage. Like 10,000 votes. I'm a little sad. I, I DM'd count bin face a long time ago to say like, uh, are you doing inner, any intergalactic media outside of the UK? And I never got a response. How do you feel about in your, you know, uh, forties DMing a man who won't trash can trash can on his head. Surprisingly good about it. I would do the same thing. So I'm in the exact same boat. It just, that's less a commentary on you and more commentary on how politics has changed. Cause if someone told you like, Hey, like, you know, where politics in the world are going to be in 2026, we're all going to really want to talk to a guy who has a garbage can on his head because he's running against Nigel Farage, who will no longer be a marginal figure. He'll be like a likely future prime minister of the UK. Yeah. That's where we're at. Good stuff. Everybody. And Boris Johnson singing pink pony club. And we got Donald Trump as president. Yeah. Well, yeah. The biggest glass house in the world. We know. Yeah. Uh, all right. We are going to take a quick break, but when we come back, you're going to hear my interview about the horrible conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is this aircraft carrier that's been deployed at seas for like 265 days because of the war with Iran. Uh, so stick around for that. Positive of the world is brought to you by Quo. Missed calls and slow follow-ups are silent business killers. And one of the easiest ways to leave money on the table. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo spelled Q U O the business communication system built. So you never miss a call. Your entire team can handle calls and texts from one shared number. So no more missed messages or dropped conversations. Everyone sees the full thread, allowing your team to reply faster and make your customers feel truly taken care of. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2 with over 3000 reviews built for how modern teams work more than 90,000 businesses from solo operators to growing teams, rely on it to stay connected, professional, and consistently reachable. Quo works wherever you are right from your phone or computer. Keep your existing number at teammates and minutes, sync your CRM and let the call routing handle itself as you scale. It's easy calls, texts, voicemails, transcripts, and contact details all in one clean view. So your team always has the full picture. It can show up for every customer conversation, ensuring a seamless and more personalized experience. Your business is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free. Plus, get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash world. That's Q-U-O.com slash world. You won't find anywhere else. Get $15 off your first purchase at thirdlove.com with code podcast 15. Keep it listeners. Louis Fortel here. Dr. Robbie is the real villain of the pit. There, I said it. Okay, but that's not actually the big news. Here's the big news. Emmy nominated television host Nina Parker is officially the new co-host of Keep It. That's the confession. The Dr. Robbie thing was just, you know, me needing to say it somewhat out loud. Okay, shots fired and I hear you're Dr. Robbie and I raise you. Sex in the City wasn't really a show about finding. It was a humiliation ritual on bad friendships. The clothes were cute though. Oh yeah, the choo-choo in the opening credits. Yeah, it's really cute. Every week, Nina and I will bring you an inside look at all the pop culture drama, the hottest takes you can handle, and honestly, maybe some you can't. Plus, celebrity guests galore. We're going to guide you through gorgeous wreckage of pop culture. We are unpacking the biggest stories in TV, film, entertainment news. We're going to go all the way to Gen Z, from YouTube taking over the horror genre to Olivia Rodrigo redefining pop music. And then we're going to also talk about maybe you partying with Madonna a little bit. Oh yeah, that one time at the Abbey. It was sweaty. But in a good way. New episodes drop every Wednesday on YouTube and wherever you listen to podcasts. My guest today is an independent journalist, entrepreneur, and Navy veteran who covers the military, defense policy, and veterans affairs, Natalie Oliverio. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. You wrote an article for the Military Times last week where you revealed some very disturbing details about conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is the aircraft carrier that's been stationed in the Middle East for a very long time. Can you walk listeners through, who maybe didn't read the story, like what the conditions were, what these families were concerned about? So the biggest concern were mental health concerns. We have heard reports of several family members telling us about their service member struggling to the point beyond their breaking point. One sailor was reported to have jumped off the flight deck with a life vest on and about an hour later was recovered. And it was designated by the Navy as a crime. A mental health issue, right? Not a suicide attempt. There are other reporting firsthand from service members who, one, had a spouse attempt to go overboard, and two, had a spouse that was one of the people on watch who stopped to pull this individual back towards the deck. My God. I mean, can you survive a fall off an aircraft carrier like that? How tall are these things? You can. I would say the flight deck's probably like 6'2". If they were climbing to the top of the mast, it may be like 200 feet. But, I mean, I've only been on a guided missile destroyer personally, and I have jumped off on swim call. And, yeah, you can absolutely survive that jump. It's what happens after. It's being left in the middle of the ocean, potentially in the dark, and all the dangers that exist with that. Yeah. What happens when an aircraft carrier can't get to port? I believe it was 2.5. 200 days is the latest stat with the Lincoln. What maintenance is not happening? What is the impact on, you know, military readiness and just quality of life for the individuals on that ship? Yeah, it's actually, it's close to 260 days. Wow. It's getting further and further. And so, the biggest supply is food, right? So, the photos that have been all over the internet and social media of the food, like the mystery gray meat. This is not. This is not new news. This has been reported. The USA Today broke it in April, and they were showing, you know, strange mystery meat, boiled carrots, strange food items that you would not expect to see. We saw reports of sailors saying they hadn't had milk in three months. They were eating dry cereal for breakfast. And to the naked ear, maybe that doesn't sound like that big of a deal. But we're not talking about one bad day at sea. We're talking about extensive strain and overextension and pressure under load over time, day after day after day. And a lot of people don't know that junior enlisted sailors cannot even go topside on an aircraft carrier. So, there is a large population on that ship who have not even seen the sky. They literally have not gone outside in months? Months. Jesus. Months. Months. Months. It's a mental toll on the healthiest, most fit for duty, always ready shipmate. It doesn't matter who you are. On a human level, you need food. You need rest. You need your basic needs met in order to be fit for duty, no matter who you are. And I've heard, you know, people who have served on aircraft carriers talk about hearing loss associated with, you know, if you're on the runway and, you know, planes are taking off around you all the time, it's obviously incredibly loud and can damage your hearing. Right. There's real concern about exhaustion and lack of sleep and what that does to your sort of mental awareness and capacity to react to events. Can you just talk about, like, the risk and the dangers involved in these jobs on a good day and the way they are magnified with the deployment of this length? If you can imagine an air traffic controller who hadn't slept more than six to eight hours between drills, between your workday, between any watches that you're standing, any other ancillary responsibilities or collateral duties, there are only so many hours in the day. So you're stretched. And the last thing you're going to get is sleep, let alone peaceful sleep. You don't just knock off to your rack and let the. You know, the water hit against the ship and go to sweet dreams situations. You're worried about what's happening when you close your eyes. This is a combat zone. This is an active deployment. And so that fear of uncertainty is already hard enough. Add on mental load, brain fog, lack of nourishment. I mean, it is hard to put yourself in those shoes and we tend to look away from what's difficult and we don't understand. We don't know how to console military families. We don't know how to offer them anything right now. And so the pain is still there and the suffering is still there. Regardless of how resilient our sailors and our military are, there is real suffering on the other side. The Navy's ability to resupply the Lincoln and other ships in the region has been greatly impacted by Iranian attacks on the U.S. base in Manama, Bahrain. Can you talk to listeners about what it means when you lose a logistic? Hub like the Navy lost in Bahrain and just sort of the impact on the ability to conduct the mission? Absolutely. Losing that supply hub in Bahrain was essentially losing the most important resource for that strike group. So now they have to travel five days each way out of their way to get some of the same supplies. That's a 10 day round. That's a 10 day round trip effort now because our headquarters of Fifth Fleet is not that supply hub anymore. Secretary Hegseth and the secretary of the Navy, they denied your reporting. And then President Trump had this to say. Let's watch a clip. The Lincoln has been out there for a period of time, good period of time. But over the years, we've had him out there much longer. I was at a group meeting and an admiral came up to see me over the weekend. And it was at a big group meeting. And he happened to be an admiral retired. He said, I've been on ships that are out there much longer than that, sir. And I know people on the Lincoln. They say it's beautifully maintained and beautifully taken care of. And other people went out and they found out to be true. It was fake news reporting from CNN. So I'm just wondering what your response is to those comments just on a factual basis and whether you've heard from any military families about how they feel about hearing your reports denied or President Trump suggests like actually everything's great. Yeah, it's unfortunate. And really, really sad for a lot of these military families. They're sad when they hear this because this is not just the president, Donald Trump. This is our commander in chief, the man in charge of these beloved service members. And when you're a family member, you don't get a handbook on how to deal with this. You don't get a class, a master class on how to survive deployment at home and how to mitigate all the things you feel when you hear things in the media and you see things you know are true from your service member, someone, you know, or your trusted resource. It is scary. One military spouse told me that it is infuriating to hear the commander in chief speak this way when her husband is literally suffering on a floating metal prison. That is how one spouse feels. So for that spouse to hear they're fine, they've been out much longer. It's a beautiful ship and it is a beautiful ship. Here's the thing. If he's talking about shifts that have been out there. Much longer, pretty sure he can only be referring to the USS Gerald R. Ford, which just completed an actual historic deployment, breaking a record that was Vietnam era. So, and between Vietnam and may 2026, the longest carrier deployment record was broken by 326 days on the USS Gerald R. Ford. So I'm confused by that statement. I know. Our families are too. And to have that kind of brush off that, well, I talked to so-and-so who knows more than these families know. And to be said that these families should be told that they're, they're not really suffering. They're not concerned. It's, it's really, it's really hurtful to them. And we already ask a great deal of our military families here at home. And it's sad to see leadership not supporting them. Yeah. And in the, the Ford, I believe. And in the Ford, I believe. positioned in Asia in case something bad happens. Let's say China makes a move on Taiwan or the North Koreans do something stupid. What's the impact on military capacity and readiness when you move that carrier from Japan to the Middle East? So number one, the South China Sea is unattended to right now. Our Western Pacific Command has literally set off for the Middle East. With that command, there is a whole battle group in tow. One of those ships is the USS Benfold, which at the end of July, just a couple of weeks ago, was left powerless for four days in the water. And they are directly supported by the George Washington carrier. So without the carrier there, they have lost their biggest resource, right? In case that happens again. They were towed into Subic Bay in the Philippines, and they also went to Yokosuka, Japan, and now they're back out. So the problem has been remedied, but we're talking about four days. Just a drift? A drift in the water, right? So just that alone. I mean, imagine we're talking about a guided missile destroyer, maybe 330 to 350 people. You've got like two female birthings, maybe three or four male birthings. And that's below decks because the war rooms are on the higher parts of the ship. So I really can't imagine just those conditions. Alone. And that's not even mission oriented to the consequences that we could potentially be facing by making this kind of reroute. Yeah, that is terrible. The United States has 11 aircraft carriers total, but they require serious maintenance. It can put some out of commission for a very long time, especially if the fuel rods have to be replaced. We're talking about nuclear energy. What is the status of the fleet right now? And what are these long, kind of grueling missions? Due to the Navy's capacity to deploy these aircraft carriers in places where we need them? That's a really good question. And it goes along with a part of what we were talking about earlier. So the Navy's own optimized fleet response plan lays out a life cycle of 36 months. That includes maintenance, workups, training, and it allots for eight month slot of time for deployment. That's one deployment. Every 36 months. Okay. So you can already see immediately where the gaps are in that plan. So I'm, I've not seen anything pointing to some kind of an update or newer guidance. I'm seeing our own processes not followed. Trump reportedly ordered the Navy to go back to steam catapults to launch these aircraft instead of the magnet based systems. That will cost billions of dollars. He's also reportedly wants to change the design of the aircraft carriers. So the command center has moved to the center of the ship. I think that's purely for aesthetic reasons. He wants it to look like older models. What is the impact of this kind of meddling? And I'm old enough to remember when Barack Obama was criticized for kind of micromanaging the Pentagon. This feels like micromanaging on a scale that would not go over very well within the Navy, but correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think you're wrong at all. I question, is this the best use of our funds? Because we're having trouble paying for our current veterans, our current service members who are about to become veterans and the future service members who will be our future veterans. We're not, we're not balancing that, that checkbook, right? So this kind of a cost, I'm not sure what the end goal is. I haven't done enough research or seen enough reporting on the value of steam versus our current fleet plan. So it's interesting, but I don't think that from what I know in the Navy, I don't think that they're very supportive of that idea. I'm guessing you've done more research into the actual value of steam over magnets than the president has in this instance. Natalie, where can folks find your work, follow you, get more of your reporting? Absolutely. I am a Pentagon correspondent at Military Times, so they can find my work there. I'm a Pentagon correspondent at Military Times, so they can find my work there. I'm also independent journalist for the War Horse News. And so we stand by the stories that we tell, the reporting that we do. It means a lot to the readers and the viewers, and we take that very seriously. Well, thank you very much for telling these stories. I know it's probably very hard and scary for these family members to come forward and talk about what their loved ones are experiencing. I mean, I worry that they could be afraid of retaliation or punishment in some sense, but it takes a lot of courage. And I think, it does really suggest how dire the situation is that they would even do this to begin with. So thank you for your work. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Thanks to Natalie Oliverio for joining the show. And thanks to you all for listening. And, you know, if you're still listening, subscribe, download, refresh, follow. Like, five stars, reviews, all that stuff. We love you. Thank you. Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Alona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Banerjee. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffitt, David Tolles, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Keep It listeners, Louis Fertel here. Dr. There, I said it. Here's the big news. Emmy-nominated television host Nina Parker is officially the new co-host of Keep It. The Dr. Okay, shots fired, and I hear you're Dr. Robbie, and I raise you. Sex in the City wasn't really a show about finding love. The clothes were cute, though. Oh, yeah, the choo-choo in the opening credits? Yeah, it was really cute. We're going to go all the way to Gen Z, from YouTube taking over the horror genre to Olivia Rodrigo, redefining pop music, and then we're going to also talk about maybe you partying with Madonna a little bit. Oh, yeah, that one time at the Abbey. It was sweaty, but in a good way. New episodes drop every Wednesday on YouTube and wherever you listen to podcasts.