Breaking News from Pod Save America - Tommy Shreds Ben Shapiro For His Insane Take on Trump and Iran

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Tommy Vietor discusses Ben Shapiro attacking Donald Trump on Iran and Israel. Photos courtesy of AP Photo Archive Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thanks, yours too. What does RAV stand for anyway? To me, it's the remarkably advanced vehicle. Really? To me, it's the runway approved vehicle for its amazing style. What about remarkably adaptable vehicle because of its versatile cargo space? Or really admired vehicle? Oh, or really awesome vehicle. It really is the recreational activity vehicle.

The stylish 2026 Toyota RAP4 Limited. What's your Rav for? Surprisingly, Ben Shapiro is attacking Donald Trump. I'm going to explain why. And also why, again, surprisingly, I think I'm Team Trump on this one. So we got a clip. We're going to watch part of it. We'll pause.

And then I'll explain what's going on here. So a kind of shocking story from Axios yesterday emerge that suggested that President Trump had cautioned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call last week, not to take any action that could jeopardize negotiations between the United States and Iran on a new nuclear deal. Okay. So first of all, I have a question. Israel is not involved in those negotiations.

So why should Israel hold off? First of all, Israel is getting briefed on these negotiations. So you guys might have heard of Steve Whitkoff. He's Trump's like real estate buddy, golf buddy, who's become his international emissary. He's negotiating with Hamas over Gaza and with the Israelis. He's negotiating with the Iranians. He's flying to meet with Putin all the time. Weirdly, he's doing it all by himself with no experts, not even a translator.

So I don't know. The whole thing is very sketchy. But Israel is getting briefed on these negotiations. But the reason Israel should hold off is because if Israel bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, that will almost certainly lead to a massive retaliation by the Iranian military. And that would come in the form of them launching drones and missiles and God knows what. And we saw a version of this happen back in April of 2024. Iran fired over 300 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones at Israel. And the United States played an absolutely critical role

in defending Israel from that attack. U.S. Navy ships were firing interceptor missiles to not knocked them out of the sky. There were U.S. fighter jets like F-16s and F-15s that were scrambled to shoot down Iranian drones and missiles. And the Biden administration at the time pulled together this international coalition that includes Saudi Arabia and Jordan to coordinate this response. And the net effect was that almost none of these missiles and drones actually hit Israel and it saved countless lives. So that's why Israel needs to hold off here. They need Trump to be fully on board and prepare to defend them if they were to take. military action against Iran. Real question. Israel is the country most under threat from Iran,

not the United States. Okay, so if we're going to take the full scale J.D. Vans' isolationist realist position, shouldn't the United States just sort of wash his hands and walk away and say whatever happens happens? There's no such thing when it comes to igniting a massive war in the Middle East between Iran and Israel. Also, just like the United States has about 50,000 U.S. military personnel in the region. If Israel launches attack on Iran, Iran, there's a very good chance that Iran could view those U.S. military bases as a place to retaliate. And on top of that, there's diplomatic facilities and embassies all over the region. And there's something like 200 or 300,000 Americans living in Israel proper.

So there's no walking away from this. There's no washing your hands if you're in the United States when it comes to a war between Israel and Iran. It would be a massive event, a huge war, and one that could drag on in spiral for months, if not years. But I notice that's not what's happening. Instead, these so-called restrainers inside the administration, they're not attempting to restrain the United States, which is already restrained. I promise you, my 100 percent certitude is that President Trump is not going to authorize a bombing rate on the Iranian nuclear facilities. Whether or not we should, I don't think it's going to happen.

Great news. I mean, thank you for this in breaking news from Ben Shapiro. I would love it if President Trump was hard opposed to launching a massive war against Iran. It would be a terrible, idea. It would only set back their nuclear program, maybe a year, maybe two. But the net effect would probably be that Iran would kick international inspectors out of the country. We would have no visibility into their nuclear program going forward. They would view it as an existential task. They would need to create a nuclear weapon to protect themselves in the future. And they would likely end up pushing even harder for a nuclear weapon. So the fact that President Trump thinks that this is a moment for restraint is very, very good news, and it's very telling that it makes Ben Shapiro angry.

That's just the reality. So why is the restrainer team inside the Trump administration trying to stop Israel from doing that thing? Why? With what bad deal? Iran keeps saying openly they will not stop enrichment. And yet the United States is so desperate for a deal, what, for the sake of a deal? The Iranians know this, which is why they're pushing. Okay, so this right here gets at the heart of the actual policy dispute in the Trump administration right now. So if you roll back the tape to the Obama era Iran nuclear deal, that deal said Iran could never have a nuclear weapon. It reduced their stockpile of what's called low enrich uranium by 98%.

They had a ship it all out of the country. And they were subject to extremely intrusive inspections by experts at the IAEA. In return, Iran got some sanctions relief, but they were also allowed to enrich uranium at a low level at a purity of 3.67 percent for 15 years. Now, this gets a little technical and wonky, so I'm just going to shorthand it. But the gist is low-enrich uranium can be used for medical purposes and for a civilian power generation. You have to enrich uranium to a high level of purity, to 98% purity, for it to be considered weapons-grade and useful in a nuclear weapon. So Steve Wickoff, again, the golf buddy turned diplomat.

He did an interview a while back where he said that Trump could be okay with a deal where Iran is allowed to have this low-level enrichment capability. after that interview came out, he got smacked down by Marco Rubio and a bunch of others. He was made to quote tweet himself saying, actually, I was misconstrued or misquoted and Iran cannot have a nuclear capability. Now, the important other part of this is that for Iran, having some sort of a uranium enrichment capability is a red line for them in these negotiations. They said it over and over again. So this is where, you know, things are coming to ahead.

And so when Trump warned Netanyahu, not to go into. do anything about Iran, just trust us. Okay, listen, I will trust that President Trump will cut a good deal if he continues to maintain the Trump 1.0 stance, which is no nuclear enrichment at all, no nuclear facilities at all. That was something that three weeks ago, the Trump administration was saying, President Trump himself, again, I'm with Trump 1.0 on this, not Steve Whitkoff and J.D. Vance 2.0. So what that is saying there is that he could only be for a deal that he knows Iran will never agree to, right? He is de facto saying, if you take Iran at their words about what their red lines are, what they can agree to, what they can stomach and push through their system, because they have

politics too. Ben is saying he can only accept something here that will never happen. He is de facto blowing up the possibility of diplomacy. And this is what you're seeing from a lot of hardliners. They're taking these super hardline maximalist takes with the goal of preventing Trump from ever getting a deal done. Donald Trump 1.0 killed Congress. Sem Soleimani destroyed the Iranian economy and held them in check. Then Joe Biden came in, reversed a bunch of that stuff. And you got October 7th and a vast regional war. Why wouldn't we just go back to Trump 1.0? That is the foreign policy that actually shaped the Abraham Accords. Why is that not the thing? Instead of calling the prime minister of Israel and telling

him he needs to restrain himself on Iran. Okay. So a bunch of things to unpacked there. First of all, this idea that Joe Biden led to October 7th is total bullshit. There is a growing body of evidence based on documents collected by the IDF, the Israeli military in Gaza that suggests that part of Hamas's goal in the October 7th attack was to prevent a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which would have been seen as an extension of the Trump-era Abraham Accords. It wasn't because Joe Biden was nicer to Iran all of a sudden. Now, what were the Abraham Accords? Those were normalization agreements between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. I won't get into all the details.

But the key thing you should know there is that none of those countries were at war with Israel. You know, they were like, people call them peace deals sometimes. They were not peace deals at all. They were like exchanges of ambassadors, direct flights to, like things that are fine, that are good, but they were not like ending conflicts. A deal between Israel and Iran would end a war. A deal between the U.S. and Iran could end the possibility of a war over their nuclear program. That seems like it would be a good thing.

That's something that someone who wants to be America first that wants to stop the U.S. military from getting involved in conflicts overseas should want. Now, bigger picture, what's so frustrating about this is Trump pulled out of the Obama-era JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal in 2018. He could have just stayed in it and renegotiated it and made it tougher and declared that it was his own. but he pulled out. And the net effect is that Iran's nuclear program has now reached the point where experts believe they have enough Eurituranium for five nuclear weapons, and they could get to that point within about a week or two. They could get to eight weapons in two weeks.

So Iran is closer to getting a nuclear weapon than ever before in history because Trump pulled out of the JCPOA. And now folks like Ben Shapiro are trying to prevent a deal like that from happening again and that will inevitably lead to conflict. So that is why I am team Trump when it comes to this fight. Thanks for watching this POTS of America YouTube exclusive. Look, we're trying to build a progressive media company here. We are way behind people like Ben Shapiro, conservatives, when it comes to followers on YouTube. Why does that matter? Because people search for political news on YouTube all the time and the algorithm serves them up stuff from Ben, TPSA, a bunch of right-wing outlets and they're not getting good, credible information from a progressive perspective like

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