Why Trump Can't Stand His Nobel Prize Humiliation

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And we will see how he does it. We'll see how he attacks Navi Pilley. I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast. It's Friday, which means it's a catch-up of the week with Hugh Dockardy, the Daily Beast's executive editor. There is no news that he hasn't read, doesn't have an opinion on. So we're going to be talking about heat headsets, the idea to stream an execution seriously. We're going to talk about John Ossoff emerging from his debate. We're going to talk about the two mics, Mike Collins and Mike Rogers, which one is standing against whom. And of course, let's go into a little bit more of Kimberly Gilfoyle's financial shenanigans and Eric Dieters, who's come out roaring against Don Jr.'s former fiancee. But Hughie, I think we have to start with the news of the day. The news of the day, Donald Trump, again, failed to get the Nobel Peace Prize. Well, Joanna, thank you for being here. Actually, before we even get into that, there's one thing I do want to say on your behalf. If you are not already subscribed to the Daily Beast, please join our growing family. We are heading for a million subscribers on YouTube. Thank you to everybody who does it. Give you already subscribed. Give us a like. Even become a Daily Beast member. There's a lot more to be done. A lot more to be said. But yes, the Nobel Peace Prize. Is there any prize that Donald Trump has wanted more? And is there any prize that he keeps not getting? Well, we'll end this morning. Who's getting the Nobel Peace Prize? And let's just say that nobody is doing that at the ceremony. So interestingly, not only did it not go to Donald Trump, but the winner, the winner, Navi Pile, who's a former UN human rights and judge at the International Court of Justice, and certainly not someone, I think, who's named trips off everybody's lips because she's been very much under the radar. She actually referred to Donald Trump when she discovered she'd won the prize. She did. And we have an amazing clip that we can show what happens. If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with the Trump. A sense of humour. A sense of humour. She's funny. She's clever. She puts war criminals on trial. I mean, she has an absolutely amazing background resume. One thing we should say is in this video, she learned that she had received the Nobel Peace Prize when she was actually at the same court in Urumberg with the Nazi war criminals were put on trial and found guilty. So it an extraordinary sweep of history. Yeah, a fantastic sweep of history actually for her to be recognised. So of course, Donald Trump claims that he should have got it because he's actually ended eight wars, though, of course, the Ukraine and Russia war continues, despite the fact he promised at the election, that he would end it in his first 24 hours. And it was really a very simple thing to do, very simple thing to do. The Nobel Peace Prize has clearly been on Trump's mind because on Wednesday, he went on one of his weaves about it. So perhaps he was hoping for a more positive end to his week than he's actually had. Let's see if we can play that clip. Last time they gave it to a young lady who's a fabulous person. And she said she didn't deserve it that I deserved it. And she gave it to me and I said, wow, what an honor. I settled eight wars. Another one is coming. I got all the hostages back. I did things that nobody else has ever done. I'm not bragging. I'm just telling you the facts. No president probably has settled any wars. No president has settled any wars. It was a lot weave. This thing it lives in his mind. And of course, we know why it lives in his mind is because Barack Hussein Obama got it. Donald J. Trump did not. And we also know that one of the things that makes this makes very clear this morning, the winner comes out and immediately laughs at Trump. And one of the obsessions that Trump has had is that the world was laughing at America before he became president. And I think people will remember when he went to the United Nations and said people used to laugh at us. They're not laughing anymore. And people started laughing at him. There is nothing that gets inside Trump's head. Sorry, Michael Wolfe. I'm not crawling in there. I'm just using the phrase. There's nothing that gets that gets up in his feelings like people laughing at him. He's going to be furious. Interestingly, a couple of hours have gone by and we have not heard the fury and you know, the anger that we expect that we expect Trump to have. But plenty of opportunities for that to come. And yeah, it does not look like this very distinguished 80. She's 85, by the way. This jurist Navi Pilly, you know, this very distinguished and respected figure is going to be in the other office handing it over anytime soon. I'm sure he'll attack his truth social sooner rather than later. Natalie Harp is probably sharpening her nails to get ready to start. Frenziedly typing his outrage. I mean, it's not been a great week for Donald Trump. Let's be honest. And of course, he was hoping he would win the Nobel Peace Prize and get it in a bona fide way as opposed to what happened to him last year when he snatched it practically out of the hands of Venezuela's machedo. And then of course, dismissed her and said she wasn't popular enough and got in bed with with the, you know, Nicholas Maduro's number two, Delsey Rodríguez. What an extraordinary turn of events. He grabs the Nobel Peace Prize from the actual winner as she's trying to give it to him and then basically cast off. Yes. And we'll see how he attacks. I've Navi Pilly. One of the things that she is being or that has led to her being honored in this way is that she expanded the definition of genocide to include rape. It was something that had, you know, we know this is one of the horrors of genocide's past has involved horrific mass rapes. And she was able on the International Criminal Court to expand the definition there. And of course, you know, rape is a touching topic for Donald Trump. He has been accused of it. He has been found liable for sexual assault. And we saw him expressing sympathy for the coronal seven who've been accused of rape. So it's an intriguing, there's an intriguing message here, I think, being sent by the Nobel Prize Committee. We're not giving this to you. And we're going to give it to somebody who it is impossible to impeach her integrity. It's impossible to impune what she has done. And unless you're Donald J Trump, and we will see how he does it. Well, I think in that weave there as well, you see his grandiosity. And I don't know if he actually believes that he's ended eight wars. I don't know if he even knows the countries that he's talking about. We know that he wasn't much of a traveler. No. I mean, he would go from golf course to golf course largely in Europe before he became president. He'd only been to Washington seven times before he became president in 2016. So it's just a sort of fascinating idea that he thinks he has ended eight wars. And we actually had, and I hope you can flash it up on the screen for those who are watching this on on YouTube, a diagram of all the wars that he says he's he's ended in countries that I'm confident he has no idea where they are on the map. And he has no idea what the wars were about. But this sense of himself as a peacemaker is fascinating, given how antagonistic he is and how vindictive and how he's used the second term for retribution of his enemies. It's actually I just want to go aside and one thing of his knowledge of geography. is that in his first term, he described two countries that most of us have never heard of. He talked about nipple and button. That was in fact Nepal and Bhutan. And then he read off a prompter, he read a country called Thailand, when he obviously meant Thailand. The whole psychological peacemaker thing, it's extraordinary because yeah, this guy is boasting about dropping bombs on Iran. He's boasting about annihilation. And he has launched more these new strikes in central and South America against drug boats, or alleged drug boats, supposed drug boats. He's called the terrorists. There's a sort of bloodthirstyness that I know we're going to talk about and relative to Pete Higgs, if it was like, he trumpen at the end of his first term, odd at a whole load of federal executions, and something that had not happened for many, many years in a sort of frenzy in the last minute. And at the same time, he's determined that he wants to be remembered for ending eight wars. And as you say, where these wars are, what happened, how they came about, how they ended, none of that matters. The number itself is kind of fungible. And he's always like, there's another one on the way. Well, it's clearly not Ukraine and Russia. That's not going to get settled anytime soon. It's obviously not Iran. That's not looking good. It's not Yemen. I don't know. Perhaps, is there one in a country that we don't know about that we've all been mispronouncing? (upbeat music) I always get up thinking I'm going to eat healthy today, but then I look at a sad bowl of salad leaves. And I think, well, that's not going to get the job done. That's when I reach for brodo. This podcast is sponsored by brodo, which is bone broth. And it's the simplest nutrition upgrade you can make to your daily routine. Try it instead of coffee in the afternoon. It's got no concentrates or preservatives or shortcuts. So it's the best broth money can buy. It was actually launched by a James Beard award-winning chef, Marco Canora, who began serving it from the window of his New York city rest on 11 years ago. 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They're the first people to discover that international diplomacy goes much better if you're doing some business deals. I'm always just mindful of how Donald Trump instead of going to Vietnam told Howard Stern that he was actually living a personal Vietnam trying to dodge catching STIs when he was out nightclubbing in the '70s and '80s and he said that was my personal Vietnam. So that's really what he thinks about being a soldier, being a war, but it's about avoiding catching an STI. There's no way that this whole thing about Vietnam, look at his age, look at what happened to people of exact with that age, look at how defining it was for those at the tip of the boomer generation. It was the thing that defined their youths and there's no way that that's not weighing on them. There's also no way that he has any empathetic understanding of war. There's no sense in which this is somebody that read, I don't know, you know, we're talking about Vietnam. Did he read the things they carry, which is most people have read either at school or subsequently, did he watch any of the war movies with any sense of that they were actually about futility? And it doesn't look that way. This is a guy that watched Patton and thought it was an inspiration and didn't read any of the more critical historical facts around it. It's all central casting. It's not, I think the thing is it's not real. And the Nobel Peace Prize is kind of similar of this because we can look and say, yes, this is exactly what winner after winner after winner has done. You know, Nelson Mandela, who by the way, Nathie Pooley was involved in defending. People like that, that's who gets the Nobel Peace Prize. And I think the sense that you get from Trump is he just wants this. It's a great British phrase I'm going to use, a bubble. Like a bubble, a bubble, a shiny object. And it's the ultimate shiny object because he can't get it. Exactly right. And of course, president Obama did get it. Yes, as you, as you mentioned earlier. So talking about blood thirsty, let's discuss Pete Hegsett's decision that he wants to stream the execution of the shooter of the Fort Hood massacre. I mean, this is unfathomable in 2026. And obviously, it would be against the terms and conditions of any regular platform. So this is something that the Pentagon is saying that it will be doing. They will be streaming the firing squad execution of an American. So let me just set up how we found out about this, which is I think really instructive about Pete Hegsett. Pete Hegsett went to San Diego on Thursday. He went to-- Oh, wait a minute. Do you mean San Diego, the city that Donald Trump said? Not much of a price to pay, Los Angeles. If the Iranians go after Los Angeles, San Diego, it's the price of pay. We cannot say Pete Hegsett is putting himself in that line of fire. Finally, a grave defense secretary waiting there for the Iranians to strike. So he went there. He was supposed to welcome back. And his job was to welcome back the crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Now, we all remember that name is now etched. And really, in the annals of shame, it was sent on its mission to the Gulf. It was kept there for the longest period of time ever that a US aircraft carrier has not docked and given people some sure relief. One sailor tried to take his own life by jumping overboard and luckily it was saved. In the whole strike group, the aircraft carrier and the destroyers and other vessels that escorted, they have admitted that there were eight suicide attempts. They-- we heard from relatives of those on board about the appalling conditions about the food. And this crew was finally steaming back to its home port on Thursday. Pete Hegsett could have just welcomed them, in fact, them for the service. But instead, he also did an interview from the flight deck with a right-wing YouTuber blogger, called Jack Pasobieck. And at the end of this interview, which was mostly Pete Hegsett complaining about the media for reporting on what had happened on the USS Lincoln, he was asked about the upcoming firing squad execution, which had already been announced by Pete Hegsett that this would be done by firing squad of Nadal Hassan. Nadal Hassan murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, absolutely horrific worst-terrorist attack on US soil after September the 11th. He had been in touch with Anwar Al Alaki, the American bond creature of hate. And he appeared to have been inspired by him. We don't-- nobody believes he was directed. He was basically the archetypal lone wolf terrorist attacker, but American bond. This was not, you know, kind of from foreign soil. He had been a psychiatrist in the American army. For his career, he was a Jew to be shipped out to Afghanistan. And he went and shot 13 people. And at the time, it became this conservative talking point that the army did not charge him with terrorism. Now, we-- there's no point in real litigating this. He was found guilty. And he was found to be eligible for the death penalty. And then he was given the death penalty. Death penalties did not happen under Obama. Trump won, did not move on this death penalty. Death penalties did not happen under Joe Biden. He was fiercely opposed to death penalty and commuted many of the sentences on death rule. That left Nadal Hassan as-- a very unusual prisoner. Normally, on federal death row, you are under the ages of the justice department. But Pete Hegseth certainly has his own death row with its own person on it. The military have not done an execution since 1961. This is something we have never seen. And, you know, I was going to say in our lifetimes, there are people obviously, there are people watching this who date back, but, you know, who are, I'm sure, more senior than I am. But we have never had in the United States a firing squad execution in the military systems since World War II. And we have to look back even further for other examples. So Hegseth got on the deck and in this interview, and he's kind of wearing kind of fake uniform, let's be honest, Pusobic asked him what about this. And Hegseth suddenly says we are going to make sure that people see it. And he doesn't quite elaborate on it. So obviously, everybody, including ourselves, our reporter Lauren Hartley was immediately in touch with the Pentagon. And they said on background, a Pentagon official says it will be live streamed. And she told me this and I was, you know, my jaw was on the floor. The idea that there is going to be a live stream of an execution. First of all, Joanna, you're right. It's completely impossible for any normal platform to do it. If we try to do that on YouTube in which we are, you know, we're many people are watching us, that breaks us terms of service. We would be, we wouldn't just be, you know, suspended or we'd send a nasty email. We'd be deleted, they would never want, they would never allow us to upload a video ever again. It's, well, and Congress would be up in arms. Yes. And it would be up in arms. It would be, I mean, this is of such barbaric imagination. It's incomprehensible. And it takes us back to a dark moments in American history, the last two public executions. There's some sort of historical doubt about what's classified as the last public execution in the United States. The more high profile of the two of them, and you will not be surprised that this happened to a black man. In 1936, in Owensboro, in Kentucky, the execution of Rainier Bethia went completely wrong because the executioner turned up drunk and people, there was a crowd who watched this spectacle unfold. Of course, there were doubts over the integrity of the trial. And it was so bad that the state of Kentucky decided at that point to abolish public execution. Given that we've just also had a terrible week, where Christopher Pike was twice injected and woke up four days later and said, where am I and who are you to the people in the room? I mean, what happened with the execution that you're talking about that went wrong? The executioner turned up drunk, but what was the plan to actually execute the prisoner? - This prisoner was hanged and the news round his neck and because the executioner was drunk, nothing happened for this extended delete and eventually a share of deputy stepped in and caused the gallows to, you know, the four to open and the draw and therefore execute the prisoner. The next year, there was another kind of public execution in Missouri, that's it. And you know, this is something that we're both from the United Kingdom. Charles Dickens led to this practice ending in the United Kingdom. That's how long ago it is. - Well, public executions take place where they take place in North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. - Iran, Iran, Iran, I mean, how could I forget? - Afghanistan, we believe because the Taliban is back in power. They were famous before 2001 for absolutely horrific public executions and Somalia, there appeared to be public executions there. It is largely an ungoverned space for this has been happening. Yeah, public executions are horrific. And the other thing, you've mentioned all those countries, they don't live stream them. - Do we think that Peter Hegseth was drunk when he suggested this? I mean, Peter Hegseth is a man who was intoxicated when he was running two veterans of fairs organizations and promised that if he got the job in the, as the Secretary of Defense, that he would stop drinking. - I'm going to advance a theory that, no, I don't believe he was intoxicated. In fact, I believe what he is is intoxicated with power. And I think this, this, you know, absolutely jaw dropping announcement has been condemned widely as you can imagine by human rights groups. Hillary Clinton has just been tweeting about it this morning saying it's beneath the dignity of our country. I think this is a conscious effort by Peter Hegseth to position himself to run for president. What we know about what will happen, the army has regulations on executions. Those regulations, this 17 pages of them, they date back to 2006 and they've not been updated and they make crystal clear that executions are by lethal injection and are not public. It's spelled out in these, these regulations they were adopted by the chief of the army staff and the Secretary of the Army at the time. They haven't been overturned, they haven't been updated. So it's almost inevitable that somebody is going to go to a court, a military court and say that he's not following army regulations. This is not going, this is illegal. It's almost inevitable that that, if that gets appealed, maybe it ends up in front of the Supreme Court. It kind of puts a Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas in a bit of a spot. But, you know, even the most, you know, Brett Kavanaugh Conservatives are hardly going to say, "Yeah, let's have public executions." Yeah, I can't see even Amy Komi Barrett agreeing with that. Amy Komi Barrett is a devout Catholic and the Pope is very, very clear that execution is not good. It's not allowed, it's not Catholic doctrine and conservative political conservative Catholics in this country have managed to kind of quietly get away with it, but making it a public thing is bad. My theory is that Peter Hexist knows this is going to be blocked and he is going to make it a cause-deliberate, either in office as secretary of defense or if he is getting booted after the election. And I know there is some skepticism that that might happen. I know Michael Wolff thinks he's actually more likely to stay than to go right now, but either way, he has just given himself epic amounts of publicity and an epic amount of appeal to a particular base. Yes, I was going to ask you if the midterms go badly for the Republicans which by, at least by the polls and goodness knows the polls have been wrong before, but if the polls are right, there will be a shellacking for the Republicans in the midterms. Donald Trump will probably look for someone to blame because that's what he does. And Pete Hexarth, he's already said in public that Pete Hexarth sort of persuaded him to try the war in Iran. He's sort of distancing himself from it or at least he has done. So it's possible that Pete Hexarth would be a sacrificial lamb after the election in which case he's established a base and a connection with the mega base for his own platform for 2028. And as you say, this becomes a cause-deliberate. Yes, and it is worth remembering that the Dalhasaan, this was a celebrated, a celebrate, it's a horrible word, but this was a, this was already a case that was a cause-deliberate that in that conservative mega id, it's in there, it's in the lizard brain, people will remember it. And I think for Hexarth, this opportunistically is a great talking point. Particularly if he gets fired, if he doesn't, it's still great as a talking point among that group. And I think I can't see it as anything other than absolutely barbaric. And I kind of feel like it's hard to imagine that many right-minded people, right-thinking people would not take that view. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about an appeal to a base. Yes, and also no one's saying that Nidal Hassan, who strangely was a psychiatrist, is a good guy here. Do you think that Pete Hexarth's old employer, Fox News, would run the footage if the Pentagon streams this? Does the footage get run by Fox News and the other news channels, do you think? I would say absolutely not. I think even if you are thinking, this is an amazing piece of television, you are also, if you're Fox News, if you're any of these thinking, there is no prospect of Democrats not going after you, of people suing you, of difficulties just unwrapping and unwrapping, for weeks, years to come. The one upside of this would be, absolutely, we know what we get in audience. Of course, it would get in audience. After that, there is only downside. There is nothing that is going to be good about it. And obviously, the key broadcast networks of NBC, ABC, CBS. have licenses which can be, you know, standard, there are fundamental standards that can be enforced. And there's no great word for this. What are we going to call it? A pornography of death or something? There's no way that that is something that people are not going to be absolutely outraged would be that could even be considered to be on their screens. I think the fact, to me the fact as they present themselves right now are that this is not going to happen and that dilemma is not going to come up, but that Pete Hegseth is going to exploit it to his own ends. I should say by the way that many of Pete Hegseth announcements, in fact, don't even get airtime on Fox News. There is a conspiracy theory among MAGA that he has been banned from his old network. Land from his old network. Well, I wonder if he was also trying to distract from his workouts. He is, I mean, I'm convinced that he wanted to be secretary of defense because he just wants free training, free gym time. Every time you see them and he's sort of straining on some kind of obstacle course trying to look as if he's super buff and I'm like, why are you wasting our time and the military's time by running around pushing up weights and trying to do pull ups? It's ridiculous, but he didn't look as if he was in the best of business this week. No, and I'm sure you'll remember Joanna, it was like time, I don't know, 10 or 15 years ago when military training fitness was incredibly trendy and people were doing it in urban parks with former members of the military. Pete Hegseth has, as you say, he's got real ones on hand and we've got an amazing clip that shows what happened when he got a workout. We should have said it to the penis. We really should. He reminds me of when my younger son was four. He got some camouflage gear, which he put on. He got some army camouflage gear. He put it on in his bedroom and he said, can you see me? Can you see me? And he was convinced that he disappeared. Pete, we can still see you. Even if you're in camouflage gear, we can still see you. It's just remarkable. I'm a slightly aging runner, Joanna. I run a bit and every time I do a five care, whatever each time it's like, oh God, it's getting worse for me. So I would have sympathy for Pete Hegseth, but he brought that on himself. You know what, let's have that clip again. Let's play that clip one more time. Let's play it one more time. It's Friday. We need something. We need a laugh at the end of this week. Let's see it one more time, please. Oh, it's fantastic. I've got chariots of fire in my mind. Okay, so last night, lots of debates, lots of debates. We're recording this on a Friday morning. By the way, I just want to refer people to tomorrow's inside Trump's head, where Michael Wolfe and I double down as Donald Trump would do on Pete Hegseth. And we go into his background. Why is he like this? Also, what is, what does Jennifer Hegseth think about them live streaming and execution? I think we need to know, she's a former Fox News producer. They met on Fox News. We should find out, is this the two of them channeling their desperation for ratings? I wonder. Anyway, we should we should find out what Jennifer thinks about this. But last night was debate night. And in Georgia, it was Mike Collins versus John Ossoff, the Democratic hopeful. It was, well, it was Mike Collins versus John Ossoff. I think a debate is a generous term. Other people have called it a merger. It was an extraordinary hour of television. John Ossoff, 39, we have seen him dismantle Trump pointies. Mike Collins, we've got a picture of him up on screen right now, to those who are watching it, you will be surprised to learn that Mike Collins is only 59. He looked like a man who had been torn apart and he really was. John Ossoff is, you know, John Ossoff is the sitting senator, which always gives you an advantage. And he came in and he started by saying this is going to be the trial of Mike Collins. And he hammered Mike Collins over what is an absolutely extraordinary set, a track record that Mike Collins has of proximity to vital anti-Semitic white supremacists. And that's just his family. That's just his family. We've got to play, in fact, this is the this is the moment to play this clip. Let's play the clip. Let's play the clip. Mike Collins is attacking your voting rights, but that's not a surprise when you consider who Mike Collins is. This is a man who cheered on a group of young men who were mocking a black woman on a college campus with monkey sounds. If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a Billy Club. I mean, first of all, who's held the term Billy Club? Exactly. I was just going to say such a great, such a great you saw of it. And to mention John Lewis in Georgia, you know, this is the reference is so perfect, so emotionally resonant. And the problem is that Mike Collins, this isn't, this isn't a wild accusation. This is based on reality. John Collins, Sun and Law is a white supremacist. John Collins, Sun and Law tweeted a vile meme as one way to one thing to call it, which was anti-Semitic and said, oh yeah, my wife, my wife made it for me. Mike Collins has a selection of campaign volunteers and workers who earlier Esposito revealed this week. I've been associated with performer members of an explicit white nationalist group. That national group. That white nationalist group had been set up by a guy who said, I'm a fifth generation member of the KKK. Mike Collins has never been in a position before, like this, for John Oswald, went after him and went after him. And at one point, the moderator started to ask the questions as well. And I said, what do you tell your daughter and what do you say at the family dinner table about these white nationalist links? And his response was to say, that's my family, which is not the response you want to hear. Why do you think he agreed to this? Because we know that John Oswald has emerged over the last year in particular, as, I mean, your word was dismantle. I think of him almost as a, I mean, it's as if he's fileting a fish when he confronted Pete Hegseth in one of the hearings when Hegseth was asking for 1.5 trillion, he brilliantly attacked Jay Clayton. He's been put in charge of national security, Donald Trump's choice for national security. And when Clayton wouldn't say that Trump had lost the 2020 election, Oswald gave it a beat. And then he said, isn't this humiliating for you that you can't say it? Isn't it humiliating? And Clayton just sat there like a fish gaping out of water. I'm mixing my metaphors there, because I'm thinking that basically John Oswald stripped Clayton of a backbone. And of course, now Clayton has just been put into run AI. Yes, super intelligence. Yeah, national security. We know who thanks to John Oswald. There's one thing he doesn't have is super intelligence. He looks like a fat, sweaty old man. And this debate, this debate last night was Mike Collins. It was absolutely, it was forensic, it was clinical. Why on earth did Mike Collins turn up? Well, the simple reality is Mike Collins is down on average in the polls at the moment. He is down nine points to John Oswald. Now, to put that in perspective, John Oswald won in a runoff by just 45,000 votes. It was a tiny sliver of victory. And in six years, he has turned that from being somebody who had to go to a runoff against a deeply flawed candidate, David Perdue, a man who'd been caught red handed trading stocks during COVID. He turned that round into this astonishing lead. For a time, we thought of as a deeply Republican state in Georgia, clearly recently become a bit purple. But he's turned that into this externally. If you're Mike Collins, your only chance of any take down of John Oswald would be to have a debate. But you have to be intellectually prepared. And you have to not have more baggage than, I don't know, GFK arrivals. Yeah. I mean, it was also interesting because as we know, because of John Oswald's spilting at with Jake Layton and with Pete Hegsett, he's really emerged as a democratic, I guess you could say darling. We've seen clips of him. Yes. And he's done short bursts in select committee hearings when you've only got five minutes for questions. Here he was exposed for an hour and he totally demanded the stage. He's up against a weak opponent, however, Mike Collins is not someone that really brings very much to the table. He also looked like he was gasping for oxygen, and as you say, he's 59 years old, and he'd aged by the time the hour was over. So I think there will be a lot of sort of, you know, huge size of relief about John Ossoft, that he appears to have really what it takes to go the distance should he become a candidate in 2028. Oh, there's no doubt that these this debate sets him up if he wants to run in 2028. It sets up this that Georgia, if the Republicans had planned to keep spending money in Georgia, I think it's very unlikely that they would do anything other than pull it out now and move it to places where they need to shore up a struggling incumbent or a struggling candidate like him in South Carolina. This was no doubt about it the strongest, and also, you know, it wasn't it wasn't just that it lasted an hour. The clips of it this morning are huge on social media, because John Ossoft is such a good orator that he speaks at a cadence that appears to be perfect for Instagram, for Facebook, for Twitter, for social media, and that of course will only grow momentum for him. But he was not the only person, of course, you just said you're on a debate last night. In fact, it was battleground state after battleground state. So let's move to Michigan where Abdul Al Sayed was up against another mic this time, Mike Rogers. Exactly right. He does $2.7 million in Florida, my guy. Yeah, I'll talk about it. Do you know what? Did you sell your yachts? I'd never owned a yacht in Florida, brother. Oh, really? Well, you had two of them. Let me tell you this one thing. Two yacht mic. Two yacht mic. How do we feel about that? That was a good, that was a good in there, Al Sayed. He's also, again, extremely good for social media. This younger generation of politician coming up now who understand that the audience is not just in the debate room or on the television that's broadcasting it. It's out there on social media. Well, you know, after saying he does 41, Mike Rogers. And again, I have to say, there seems to be a pattern here. Mike Rogers is only 63. He doesn't look great. He also aged in the hour that he was facing Abdul Al Sayed. I think this was quite a lot. Now, this was a much closer debate. And this race is much closer. While Ossoff is, you know, somewhere around between seven and nine points on average ahead of my Collins. The polls in Michigan are putting El Sayed ahead by maybe a point, maybe two points on average. There are some that are showing him not head at all. There are no, there are no polls in Georgia that are doing say Ossoff is going to win in Michigan. This is a real battleground, a real battleground state. And El Sayed has been a controversial and at times trouble, trouble some candidate for the Democrats. Those issues came up again last night. He was asked about Israel and he was asked about Iran. How he handled himself on that stage. He was faster. He was younger. He was punchier. I think anybody watching this would say, it was a punch up. It was a fight. It was a brawl. It kind of liked any substance. The Ossoff one was a prosecution of a flawed candidate, but also have got lots of lots of detail in about what he would do about the flaws of Trump's economy, about the difficulties that people feel. And in Michigan, those things, when they got mentioned, were much more in the context of two guys having a fight. So I think there's no doubt that the take away the winner of this battle was El Sayed. He looked sharper. And the question there is, does he convince the people that we're unwilling to, we're reluctant to vote for him? And that's much harder to tell. And fair to point out that Mike Rogers was a popular congressman, although he fled to Florida at the moment, his congressional duties were finished. He did. He bought a house for $1.6 million. Well, he claims he didn't have any yachts down there, but it did have a boat left. I don't know what you have a boat left for. If you don't have a yacht, who knows? But it's interesting. The interesting thing about Mike Rogers was a prominent Michigan politician for a lot of time. And this is an election in which it's pretty clear that being a prominent politician may actually run against you. He had thought, you know, to some extent, probably not wrongly in terms of what has happened in the past, that having had a lot of exposure to the people of Michigan over a long time would be a good thing. Abdel El Sayed has been able to put a lot of that round his neck. He raised issues from Mike Collins' past, including privacy and surveillance. Mike Collins chaired the House Intelligence Committee in the late 2010s. And there's a notorious moment in which warrantless surveillance that was being done by the Bush administration is raised. And he says, well, if you don't know your privacy has been breached, then that's not a problem. Now, that quote has been around for, you know, multiple years. But El Sayed was able to situate it with this outcry, which is particularly strong in Michigan and a few other states about flock cameras. People feel that they are being spied on. And Abdel Said was able to tie that to his record. So having this record, you would have thought in the past would be a strength. He'd been on TV. People knew he was a congressman. People would say, oh, yeah, I trust that guy. And instead, Abdel Said was able to prosecute his record and pitch him, as it were, as a candidate by pointing to what he'd said in the past. And that's a pattern that we've seen across the country that people quite clearly are responding to an idea of change. So we've got John Ossoff, a democratic darling. We've got El Sayed, who's been more problematic for the democratic party, but he's emerging as more of a darling. And we'll certainly emerge as a darling, if he can win Michigan. Wither James Tallerico, James Tallerico, now ahead in the polls over Ken Paxton, Ken Paxton, of course, Donald Trump's candidate. He put him in there over the right wing, John Cornyn, because John Cornyn had displeased him. Ken Paxton, possibly the worst candidate currently running, even his own party impeached him when he was attorney general of Texas. But James Tallerico has been missing in action for the last few days. What's happened to him? James Tallerico, last seen in public, or in person, on September the 28th. He came to New York to do a fundraiser. These candidates come to New York all the time. There's a load of billionaires, they're right around here, and they are willing to give money. There's much more money available in New York than elsewhere, so people come here. And that's when he was last seen. After he got back, he went to an urgent care, his campaign have said, and he has the flu, and he has not been seen since. Now, this is problematic, right? Tallerico is a very successful candidate so far. He's only 37. He's been a member of the state house. He has a credibly charismatic presence. He has an amazing amount of money that he has raised. And he's obviously up against this deeply flawed candidate, Ken Paxton, a man who, by the way, this morning, the fourth leak of a tape of him saying stupid stuff has come out. Oh, what was this morning, so I missed it, because obviously we had, we've had a couple, not least him blaming the president, and saying that the Trump appelluser was a disaster for him, and that his numbers had gone down. And since Donald Trump was putting himself on the ticket. Yeah, so this morning, the guy cannot stop himself being taped. This morning, he is discussing John Karnan and saying that John Karnan wants him to lose, and revealing, and there's one of his Aids reveals in anecdote, that John Karnan, in fact, told somebody else, yeah, he wants Ken Paxton to lose so Republicans learn a lesson. Now, sure, Ken Paxton wants to know this, but he doesn't want everybody in the wider world knowing that John Karnan wants him to lose. And instead, you know, this tape is crystal clear, clearly taken an iPhone, really close to him. I don't know, does the guy not realise he's being taped all the time? Can he not just shut up? However, we have a, you know, Huston Dallas San Antonio, the deep blue parts of this state, now have a problem that James Towerico is not expected to be seen until Sunday, so he's been out of action for 12 days. And maybe he's lost his voice. Do you think it's possible he's lost his voice? Do you think it's possible he's experiencing enormous stress? Because there's a lot writing on him at this point. He can't have imagined when he embarked on this, that the campaign would become quite so high profile. There's no world in which he anticipated this. You know, this is somebody that the momentum started for him when he went on Joe Rogan. And Joe Rogan had the mod because Joe Rogan lives in Texas, that projected him into this sort of podcast world he was incredibly fluent. He could not of expected that he'd be running again somebody so flawed and he could not have expected the money to flow and he couldn't have expected that Barack Obama would be on the phone to him. So yeah, that sounds incredibly stressful. They do talk a lot. I can understand that. I'm sympathetic. There's talking here is giving me a sore throat. And to those in the comments who point out I like the sound of my own voice, you're not the first, my mother got beat you to it. So you can be sympathetic, but come on. You know, this is a chance to flip Texas and you've vanished. What? What? Well, let's give him a he, let's give him the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume that flying to New York, he caught some sort of bug on the plane. He went to urgent care. They've said to him, take a week to just get better and then give it your all for the next two weeks before the actual midterms. Anyway, James Celerica, we wish you a speedy recovery. We interviewed him on the Daily Beast podcast. I want to say four or five months ago now at this point. And he actually had a sore throat when we interviewed him. Now I'm remembering we interviewed him in the evening there. It was after a fundraiser that he'd had. He came on. It was quite late for us. I think it was 830 for him in the evening. So perhaps he's just run himself ragged and he needed a bit of time to recoup. Well, you're, I think you've been very sympathetic, Joanna. I'll just say that. Well, let's hope it's not the plague, the plague. The plague. Well, that was a good test for you in Russia this week. Thanks to, and you know, funded in part, but this plague brought to you by RFK Junior, who allowed money to go to that lab. Oh, RFK Junior, back with measles. It's just remarkable, isn't it? More cases of measles since, I think collectively, the mid 1990s at this point, five people have died of measles, a disease that had basically disappeared from America 25 years ago. And it's come roaring back under the ages of, of RFK Junior, still junior as Michael Wolf always jokes at 73. Our final story is poor, hapless Marco Rubio, who has flown to Greece to give his sermon on the mount. Okay, okay, he was standing in front of the pan, they're not actually the mount, but he's giving his, his defense of Western culture. He's essentially raising his hand and saying, I am going to be running. And this is about the future of our century, and it will be decided in the next decade about Western values. And I will be your proponent of Western values. And what does he get asked about? He gets asked about the ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Gilfoil, formerly married to Governor Newsom, formerly engaged to Donald Trump Jr. And now, well, now in the pocket of Eric Dieters, please explain, please explain. For those of you who haven't been following this story, it's just, it's crazy. Even by macro terms, it's crazy. What an extraordinary odyssey, Kimberly Gilfoil, you've covered some of her accomplishments. The one that we all know is that amazing moment in 2020 at the Republican National Convention, and we can play it now. Ladies and gentlemen, leaders and fighters for a freedom and liberty and the American dream. The best is yet to come. I mean, that is, she looks so awkward doing that, doesn't she? She just looks so awkward. It's a vita, it's a milder Marcos. I mean, it's just, it's amazing. And she ends on a flat note as well, which is sort of, there is probably a Greek rhetorical term for what she did. She has been made ambassador to Greece after her split from Donald Trump Jr. Some people said it was a constellation prize. Other people said slightly more darkly, it was to get her the hell away from Mar-a-Lago. Well, I think that was Donald Trump that said that, and Donald Trump was saying we have to get her out of here. But the problems and challenges of being an ambassador normally are getting on with the locals, learning the local language. None of that has been a problem for Kimberly Guilfoyle. The problem is that her former sponsor, a man who gave her hundreds of thousands of dollars this week, Eric Dieters has released a cache of texts and signal messages and documents and contracts which have blown open this extraordinary scandal in which she told him how to wire $100,000 to her to pay off credit card debt without being caught. Just to be clear, this was to pay off her credit card debt as she was going through Senate confirmation hearings. Yes, because she said her view was that these debts would stop her from being good firm does ambassador. So Eric Dieters is a businessman, a former lawyer, conservative top radio host in the greater Cincinnati subbarbs. He lives in Kentucky. He has run for office in Kentucky. He is now a man scorned. He wanted Kimberly Guilfoyle's help to boost a court case which he has been bringing for many years on grounds of alleged medical negligence by a doctor. That doctor went to Pakistan where he has not been extradited. He wanted the US government to exploit the guy. The doctor is normally defended by an insurer. That insurer said, well, the doctor, in fact, we cannot get involved in this litigation because the doctor was willfully committing misconduct. We only cover non-willful misconduct. The insurer is ultimately owned by Berkshire Hathaway, the Warren Buffett's, would vast conglomerate. This story has tentacles. This guy needed he felt. He's had helped from mega-world to push this case. This case would obviously make him rich by winning it. That's how these compensation cases work. What he wanted to do was to get exposure. He wanted to get in front of people like Donald Trump. Kimberly Guilfoyle apparently seemed to have helped him do that. He wanted to be on Tucker Carlson's podcast and he said that if he got in Tucker Carlson's podcast, he would give Kimberly a million dollars. Tucker Carlson of all people was asked about this and said, that sounds nuts. It does. It is. So they had this arrangement before she was going to be confirmed as ambassador. The exchange text, the exchange signal messages, among the messages are her telling him, please don't text, please use signal, signal deletes the messages. He was screenshotting all this. He obviously knew something was up. Then finally, she's in front of the ambassadorial, in front of the senate for her confirmation and she is asking him for this $100,000 and he is furious because he didn't get anything. He didn't get anything that he asked for and he went last week or the week before to Susie Wiles, among others, saying if you do not get me a meeting with the IRS and take some action on the things that I keep asking for, I'm going to publish all these and he did. It's amazing. He also is a bit of a musician, a bit of a true bador and he'd written a song. He refers to himself as a Kentucky outlaw because he was struck off as a lawyer in Kentucky, a judge decreed him as basically chaotic and anarchic and so he's re-organized himself, I guess you could say, or recalibrated as a Kentucky outlaw. He's written a song called Kentucky Outlaw and another request he had of Kimberley Gilfo was to get the lyrics in front of MAGA musician Kid Rock because he saw Kid Rock as an outlaw too and Kimberley failed there. So I wonder, I mean this is the most egregious pay-to-play story one can think of and unusual in that you've got one party just giving up all the goods so we can see the text, we can see the text from Kimberley saying honey, I just need you to wire me this money and him saying, hey my wife's going to go nuts if she sees that I've sent you $100,000 and then you have Kimberley saying you are going to cost me my ambassador shit because she knows that this is not going well for her. This story was in the Wall Street Journal who only last week did another story about Kimberley Gilfo where it became clear that she had threatened a group of Greek ministers suggesting that America will be able to undermine the Greek government as they were trying to do in Romania at which point the Greek energy minister who she was meeting with took Umbridge at this and told her that actually it was the Greek people in their democracy who would decide the future of the country not America. So she's obviously been throwing her weight around too. Yes, an ironic that she was lectured on democracy in Greece because that's where Marco Rubio went to talk about the birth of democracy. This whole story is so crazy. It's not even the only bad leak out of the embassy this week. We also learned that she has been accused of being a diva of extraordinary mistreatment of the embassy staff, that she demanded one of them get out of bed and get her ice cubes at 4 a.m. because she was partying. She had two of them demoted as drivers because she didn't like how they take a left turn. And she has been spring champagne and shouting abuse and it's an extraordinary, now I just say the United States ambassador to the Hellenic Republic, that's an official title. You could get a prize if you could name any previous ambassador and you would certainly get more than a prize for being able to name a scandal. This is strategically actually kind of an important country, it sits between Europe meets Asia, it used to sit on the boundaries of communism and capitalism and. Well, and also where it meets the Middle East, right? Yes, and there are huge American strategic interests in Greece and stability, but all of that. For years, this has been a very, very stable relationship that Greece has had through the American ambassador. And now we have absolute chaos, the Democrats are going to be all over this. She tried to get this debt paid off before she was in front of the Confirmation Committee. But Jamie Raskin, who is going to be, if there is a blue wave, will be an absolutely key figure in the Democratic House, points out that the rules begin when you are nominated. So everything that she did during the period when she was nominated, and when she went to, as she texted this guy at one point, ambassador school, everything is open to scrutiny and the Democrats are obviously going to scrutinise this and they are going to have the opportunity to get to get Eric Dieters in front of them. They're going to get all his files, clearly. I think he's probably trying to send them them now. And they are going to be able to open, they are going to seek to open up Kimberley-Gill Files books. And I think very tellingly, the last 24 hours, there has been stone-called silence from MAGA about Kimberley-Gill Files. So where does this leave her boss, Marco Rubio? Marco Rubio has just been in Greece, as we said, he's made his opening gambit for his own presidential run, we're assuming, 2028. He's completely undermined by all the questions from reporters because this story is breaking and clearly timed to be as disruptive to Marco Rubio as possible. She is his employee. He works for him, he is Secretary of State. Shouldn't he have fired her by now? Well, obvious, I mean, the obvious answer to that, Joanna, is yes. But here's Marco Rubio's problem, he has had been stuck with a series of ambassadors who come directly from Donald J. Trump. This scandal, unbelievably, there's another ambassador involved in it. One of the things that Eric Dieter's wanted to get was access to a man called Billy Long. Billy Long was a MAGA congressman, he was then made IRS commissioner, and this is a point when he was IRS commissioner, he was trying to get Kimberley-Gill Files to get him a meeting with Billy Long. That's one of his grounds of dissatisfaction that Kimberley-Gill Files didn't pull off what he wanted. She simply failed to deliver on any of Dieter's requests. It might actually be her best defense that she didn't do anything, she just took the money. But Billy Long is now the ambassador to Iceland, so we have two people involved in this scandal. There's another scandal this morning unfolding in the Middle East with Tom Barrack being accused locally of aiding a friend's business deal. Their ambassadors caught up in difficulties around the world. Because they want to belge him, put cash petals, a girlfriend, I should say fiancé, congratulations to her, Alexis Wilkins, on stage to celebrate July the 4th. There's this craziness of ambassadors. They are obviously not what Marco Rubio would want to have a serious and sober people pushing his view of the world, but all of them were imposed from Marlago by Donald Trump. He can't really fire them without inviting Donald Trump to fire him. He obviously went to Greece to position himself. These glorious shots, the sunset behind him, the golden light on the acropolis, the references to Greek civilization, the linking of Greek civilization to the United States, the United States' independence and democracy. It was made for television and nobody is playing it, nobody is looking at it again. He took that camera crew in the crane and he got asked about Kimberly Guilfoyle, he's got to be fuming, but he's pretty stuck and also, as her boss, that's who the Democrats are going to summon in front of a committee and I don't know, do you fancy your chances again to join us off and people like that? Marco Rubio, they've going to have an absolute ton of evidence handed to them by our editors and he's, you know, what's he going to do, he's going to go through the bum book against John or soft, what's he going to say to him? You know, this is really not a good place for Marco Rubio to be in. He clearly, you know, Marco Rubio is a major figure, I'm sure he can survive this, but it's going to be embarrassing and why is he not fired, or what, because he can't. And people say that nobody's laughing at America, it's like a comedy, a new, it's a new episode of a comedy every day, Hugh, it's always, it's always a trip catching up with you, but this week, well, what a week, what a week. What a week. There's so many things we didn't discuss that I know I can't wait for Marco Woolf on Pete Hexeth, because there is so much there. And I know you're going to be talking to Carl Anderson as well on Sunday. I am. I am. So, Hughie, we'll regroup next Friday or being well, and I will see you back in the office on Tuesday and everybody have a wonderful holiday weekend. And, you know, if you need to cheer yourself up, rewatch those clips of John Ossoff from last night's debate on Pete Hexeth being lapped. Or Pete Hexeth being lapped. I'm not saying I would have done any better, but I'm not running the wall department. Hughie, have a great weekend. Thank you, Joanna. Big thanks to our production team, Ryan Murray, John Romero, Rachel Passe, Heather Passaro, and Neil Rosenhaus. So, the good news is, we have so many bee-beast tier members now, there are too many names to read out and we really appreciate your support.