Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 10/7/24: October 7th One Year Later, Biden Bribes Israel To Limit Iran Attack, New Trump The Apprentice Movie

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Krystal and Saagar discuss October 7th one year anniversary, Biden bribes Israel to limit Iran attack, writer of The Apprentice Trump movie joins.    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.com/   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Today, as we mentioned before, is October 7th. That means it is the anniversary of the October 7th Hamas attacks. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. Our producer Griffin compiled some of the most striking and shocking images from that day. You can see rockets being fired.

This is from Gaza City. You can see these images. And, you know, I don't know if you guys remember where you were or how you felt learning this news, but I just remember being absolutely shocked. Here you can see one of probably the most notable images, which is Palestinians using a bulldozer to take down part of the barbed wire fence, razor wire fence surrounding Gaza.

The way that this attack unfurled, they were able to use commercial drone technology to take out some of the surveillance systems. And there's automatic weapons trained in facing in at Gaza. They were able to take that out. Then they were able to infiltrate Israel, taking over 200 hostages. You can see this elderly woman who was taken hostage and they're driving her back to Gaza. You can also see very quickly the beginning of the response from Israel. This is, they blew up multiple apartment towers here in Gaza City. And it's also kind of heart-wrenching to see this is also Gaza City.

The, you know, most structures there still intact. Of course, now here we stand a year later and and all you would see in Gaza is scenes of just total and complete annihilation. So Hamas succeeds in this attack, I think, beyond their wildest expectations. At the end of the day, we can put this up on the screen. You have some 1,200 individuals who were killed, 695 Israeli civilians, 373 who were IDF, and 71 foreigners. Now, we've since learned that some number of those, we have no idea how many, all indications are that an overwhelming majority were killed by Hamas and affiliated groups. But some number of them were also killed by the IDF

instituting the so-called Hannibal Directive. And it appears that Hamas succeeded beyond their wildest expectations because of massive Israeli security failures leading up to that day. For one thing, you had a number of IDF troops who were repositioned to the West Bank to protect effectively rampaging settlers there. That was part of the project of, you know, Smotrich and Ben-Gavir and these Netanyahu coalitional partners. You had a group of women, IDF soldiers, who were, you know, doing the surveillance in Gaza. They were, you know were looking at spotting within Gaza and say, hey, they're planning for something big. And they were ignored and not listened to. There were actual plans that the Israeli government were able to get their hands on

in advance that they also didn't believe because they didn't think that Hamas had that level of capability. And in terms of the world stage, you know, at that point, Sagar, the Palestinian cause was basically forgotten. Trump had struck these Abraham Accords where basically the deal was we're going to make these security deals with Gulf states to effectively forget about caring about Palestinians. And that was cited as part of the motivation for Hamas to engage in this extraordinary attack on Israeli society that really shook that country to the core. Now, what we have seen since then has been just scenes of devastation and annihilation and terrifying escalation into a broadening war that even the greatest cynic, myself included, I don't think really could have imagined after October 7th. You know, anyone with a brain knew that the response was going to be brutal and barbaric because we've seen what Israel has done

in the past when they've gone in in these mow the lawn type operations. But we've never seen anything quite like this. Let's go ahead and put the next graphic we have. I believe it's D4, the number of Palestinians who were killed. To be honest with you, we really don't know. These are the official numbers. This is courtesy of Euromed Monitor. The official number is 50,292 killed in Gaza. A majority of them have been women and children. By the way, I want to say,

you know, there's this sort of shorthand of assuming that only the women and children are innocent. Of course, there are many innocent men who were also killed as part of this. But some experts, many experts believe that the number is a lot higher than this. You know, you have no ability of Western journalists, very little ability of aid workers to come in and operate and actually assess what the true death toll here is in the Gaza Strip. Let's put this next piece up on the screen. There's a group of doctors and healthcare workers that recently penned a letter about the horrors that they have seen unfolding there. And they write, this letter and the appendix show probative evidence

that the human toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the U.S. It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,000. That is an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza's population. They also write in this letter that there is effectively not a single person in Gaza who is not sick or injured in some way after a year of this just utter campaign of annihilation and this horrific onslaught. It's not that we haven't known what's going on either,

not just because of the work of brave doctors such as these, but also because of the IDF soldiers themselves who have gone around on social media routinely bragging about the war crimes that they have committed in the Gaza Strip. Let's go ahead and play, guys, D3. Al Jazeera put together a documentary that was just about the IDF soldiers who were posting through it and bragging here. They that was just about the IDF soldiers who, you know, were posting through it and bragging here. They're bragging about the burning of a Palestinian neighborhood, saying this is what we will do. Not a memory will be left of them. We will annihilate them to dust. I'm sure you've seen some of these images before. This is a Palestinian who is blindfolded and being beaten and dragged.

You can see these images of devastation. He says, look, we're going to show you his back. He was tortured to make him speak. Lots of people say that the Israeli forces shouldn't be allowed to take phones into combat. But this expert says, listen, I'm actually glad they do because at least it gives us some window into what's happening here. And, Sagar, that's part of what has been uniquely horrifying is it's all there for the world to see. And yet, you know, our government has consistently turned a blind eye, pretend, you know, gaslit us, tried to pretend like, oh no, we care about international law. We care about these humanitarian goals. We care about US law. I mean, our government now, we've had plenty of evidence and reporting to convince everyone that our government is

knowingly violating our own laws about continuing to ship weapons to Israel, given what they have done in the Gaza Strip, specifically the fact that we have State Department reports that prove that they were, in fact, inhibiting aid, keeping aid from getting to what is now a starving population. And so now we sit here a year later, and as I said, I don't think that the greatest cynic could have possibly imagined what would unfold in that time and that it would still be ongoing now with no end in sight? I think for Israel, it was just clear immediately afterwards when Biden gave that famous speech and he's like, look, you have two choices. You can do what we did after 9-11 and you can escalate this

and turn this into a generational style conflict, which could eventually subsume and destroy you in the long run. Or, you know or you can deal with this in a more targeted manner. It was clear what they decided to do both for political purposes, but also in terms of where we stand right now with the expansion of the war against Hezbollah, against Iran. But also I think this has revealed a lot about the American political system. It's been very clarifying to me. Everyone talks about AIPAC. I think ADL may arguably be one of the organizations that I finally understood its purpose. And all that groundwork that they laid on censorship previously, working with the Facebook, Google, YouTube, and all of those others so that they could kick into gear to serve their true master whenever October 7th happened. Not only in the protest movement, but just generally. We've seen mass censorship happen all across the U.S., but most importantly,

I've just seen the entire political system become completely obsessed with this foreign nation, which at the end of the day is not that important to the United States. Hundreds of billions of dollars likely lost now from the U.S., our own soldiers, three of whom who died, don't forget that, on the Jordanian border with Syria. Also the two aircraft carriers. But the general political orientation around this conflict and the complete obsession, you probably saw that Lindsey Graham clip where he's like, I'm here in South Carolina responding to this hurricane, but we can't forget about our friends in Israel. And it's like, that was so, I don't know, I always suspected it was there, but to see

it like so openly and nakedly has been really disturbing for me. To go back to some of what we've seen unfold over the course of the past year, I mean, if you remember, if you go back to the early phases of the war, they'd engage in these long, like the Israelis would engage in these long propaganda campaigns to justify attacking a hospital, right? And it seems almost quaint at this point because now at this point,

the entire medical infrastructure has been destroyed, not to mention schools, refugee camps, everything. Everything is basically destroyed. We can put D7 up on the screen showing the number of buildings that have been destroyed in the Gaza Strip. I mean, it's just, there's virtually nothing left. Two-thirds, two-thirds of all of the structures, mosques, churches, hospitals, schools, apartment buildings, private homes, two-thirds destroyed. 163,000 different buildings damaged or flattened. A third of those actually were high-rises.

And we had reporting from Plus 972 Magazine early on about how part of their impetus, part of the strategy here, was to intentionally target civilian infrastructure with the idea of if we cause enough pain to the civilian population, then maybe they'll rise up against Hamas. Obviously, there is no predicate in history of that actually happening. What happens instead is that they hate you more. And what happens instead is you create more people who want to kill you and who are terrorists and have a militant ideology. But that has not stopped the campaign of utter annihilation because Bibi Netanyahu and the rest of the Israeli government establishment, they needed to bring some win. After this

tremendous security failure, they needed to bring some win to the Israeli people. And the win is basically like blood and death and destruction. That's the wind. And that's why you see their soldiers bragging about it without impunity. I remember all the conversation about like, why don't they just take their phones? You know, why are they doing this? And it's because it's popular. These soldiers who post these things, they are celebrated at conferences throughout Israel. They are cheered. This is finding exactly the audience that they want. And the other goal is for Israel to, in the very clinical terms, reestablish deterrence, meaning prove that they can be even more brutal and barbaric than anyone else in their quote unquote neighborhood. And so that's what we've seen. Just to give a sense of the grim death toll and horror unfolding there,

Euromed Monitor put together this map of mass graves within the Gaza Strip. What you see is some selected number of unmarked mass graves that now exist in the Gaza Strip. There are over 120 newly established mass graves across the Gaza Strip. It's a landscape of death. That's what it is. And we've watched it on TikTok. We've seen it in our social media folds. We've seen it sometimes, occasionally, few images on television. You know, watch Al Jazeera or other non-Western media, you've seen these images. So no one can say they didn't know what was going on. No one can say that they weren't aware of the level of atrocities. And yet, you continue to have the US government pretending like they don't know and like, oh, this is just Israel defending themselves,

which is utterly preposterous. Now the war has expanded. There have been threats from the beginning of effectively we're going to turn Lebanon into Gaza. And the Israelis now making good on that threat. You've had in just the past couple of weeks 2,000 Lebanese killed. We don't know how many are Hezbollah, how many are civilians. We do know there are quite a large number of women and children also among these deaths. We also know that in just the strike that was used to take out, I shouldn't say strike, the strikes that were used to take out Nasrallah, who is the head of Hezbollah, they dropped more bunker buster bombs in that one strike than we used in the entirety of the Iraq invasion in that one strike. Over 80 2,000-pound

bunker buster bombs to get one guy. So the bombing of Lebanon continues. The bombing of Gaza continues. And, you know, in terms of the—there was a lot of conversation early on about the quote-unquote day after in Gaza. You could put D9 up on the screen, you know, they're finally becoming pretty clear about what the plan is here. This is Giora Island talking about how this new plan that is gaining a lot of traction within Israel of, hey, we're going to close off all of northern Gaza and we're going to say you have to leave. So once again, these people have been displaced before. Now, you know, let's displace you again. Let's ethnically cleanse this whole area. And if you don't go, we're just going to assume you are a quote-unquote terrorist, and we're going to

murder you. And once this area has been cleansed, then we can come in and assert control. Of course, we know there have been conferences, you know, attended by Likud party ministers and other government allies in which they're planning out specifically how they're going to resettle the entirety of the Gaza Strip. You have a huge invasion in the West Bank. You have even they're talking about, hey, let's establish a buffer zone. Let's go ahead and take some of Lebanon's territory while we're at it. And so again, the most cynical projections of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and all the rest, at this point in time, undeniable that whether that was the goal at the beginning or not among everyone, that is certainly where things are heading. And we also shouldn't lie that those plans have widespread acceptance and support within the

state of Israel. And yes, there is protest within the state of Israel because the hostages at this point have been completely forgotten, completely erased from Bibi Netanyahu even pretending to care for them. But has there been outcries about the brutality with which Palestinian civilians have been treated about this massive death toll, about the campaign of complete annihilation? Not much. Very little. Very, very little upset about that. Especially compared to Ukraine, right? In terms of the way that initially the U.S. support for Ukraine and all that was sold to us. So I think that there's a lot to be said and revealed about U.S. foreign policy and our own objectives and also about the

realignment of the world on the Ukraine and Israel front and the way that our own words will be looked at in the future. But a lot of it really just comes back to this whole idea of, like, what American power is used for, what the American media is used for, what our own politics are captured by, and then very inconvenient facts and others that count against that that are just dropped and that are not emphasized in favor of something that is just a very clear agenda here in the U.S. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary

results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating

stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait.

Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of

my husband at the cold case. I've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking.

Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution.

But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. We're facing, you know, bombing of Beirut and we're facing this massive escalation vis-a-vis Iran.

These are some of the, you know, massive bombing campaigns that are going on right now. Israel bombing the city of Beirut. You have a huge portion of the Lebanese population at this point that is also completely displaced. And again, you again, US government saying this is all fine and Israel has a right to defend itself. Reminder, Hezbollah and Lebanon had nothing to do with October 7th, and yet here we are. So where we are now is basically waiting to see how Israel is going to respond to Iran's response to their latest provocations. And there's all this debate in the US about which assets should Israel strike. The Israelis promising some sort of overwhelming response, which could

certainly plunge the entire region into a war, which would certainly drag us into that war, given that the Biden administration has made it clear that we would back up Israel on that front. Joe Biden, who's barely sentient at this point, got asked about Israel potentially striking Iranian oil infrastructure, which would obviously be quite significant given how much of the Iranian economy is reliant on that oil infrastructure. Let's take a listen to his less than impressive response. His answer is, I think that would be a little anyway. Yeah. Cool. Great. Great response there, Mr. President. His brain is completely cooked. Like, it's crazy. The whole thing is totally nuts. And, I mean, it's one of those where his both fecklessness and his dementia are, like, the worst case scenario at this point because it's both a blank check and an incoherent ability to articulate any boundaries or any of that.

Like even a more pro-Israel president, I'm just convinced, would be at least somewhat more like sentient in his command of the facts here where this whole like, oh, well, we're discussing that. And anyways, it's like, what are we possibly doing here? He just bails out mid-sentence. Yeah, it's crazy. It's absolutely crazy. Especially in the context of, put this next one up there.

Because this is so nuts. From, I mean, the report is here from the Jerusalem Post. The U.S. to give Israel, quote, compensation if it hits acceptable targets in Iran. So instead of withholding any resources in response for not doing what we think that they should do with our weapons, we would instead, Crystal, pay them and offer them a, quote, compensation package if they do what we desire. And also, even though, by the way, in this response, these weapons will be ours, these planes and all these will be ours. If they do hit it and there's a response, we will be the ones who are ultimately incurring the cost. So that seems like plenty of compensation

if you were to just ask me. And why should the Israelis take this seriously? They're like, we already get everything we want from you. What more can you give us? So no, we're good. We got everything we need and we know you're going to continue to ship us everything we need. So we're going to do whatever the hell we want to do because that's what we've been doing the entire time. We also got some troubling answer from Donald Trump about whether Israel should target Iran's nuclear facilities, lest you think that we have a better, less hawkish, more anti-war choice on the ballot this fall. Let's take a listen to what he had to say. Biden says that Israel should not target Iranian nuke facilities. What are your thoughts on that? What should Israel respond? I mean, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard. It's the biggest

risk we have. The biggest risk we have is nuclear. I mean, to make the statement, please leave their nuclear alone. I would tell you that that's not the right answer. That was the craziest answer. Because you know what? Soon they're going to have nuclear weapons, and then you're going to have problems. And he, of course, has always been extremely hawkish when it comes to Iran assassinating Qasem Soleimani, something that J.D. Vance once criticized him for. That's true. That's why he's a good choice.

Yeah, I haven't heard that critique from J.D. Vance in a while. What's he supposed to do? He's supposed to critique his running mate? Obviously, the belligerence towards Iran continues to this day, even going beyond what Joe Biden has said would be appropriate in terms of an Israeli response. Also worth just taking note that the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon continues. We can put this up on the screen. Lebanese authorities have said that those Israeli bombs have killed 50 health workers in the past four days as Israeli fighter jets continue to attack medical facilities, mosques,

and other buildings that they claim are being used by Hezbollah militants. Same playbook as what we saw with regard to Hamas. Just claim, oh, they've got an office in the hospital, so we're gonna take over the hospital, we're gonna destroy the hospital, we're gonna displace all the civilians there, we're going to take over the hospital. We're going to destroy the hospital. We're going to displace all the civilians there. We're going to arrest the doctors, etc. Same playbook here. The civilians are being used as human shields, quote unquote. The mosque is really a Hezbollah militant officer, etc., etc., and so that's where we are. The last thing that I'll point out here, can put this up on the screen, is it's not, obviously we're not causing Israel to pay any sort of a price for what they've done to the Gaza Strip or throughout the region. But this was an interesting note picked up here in

Al-Monitor on the sidelines of a Gulf meeting. Saudi foreign minister said, we intend to close the book on disagreements with Iran forever and develop relations between us like two friends, Iran and Saudi Arabia, erstwhile arch rivals buried the hatchet in 2023 following a Chinese-mediated rapprochement. The deal helped to reestablish diplomatic relations as well as give Saudi Arabia some protection against attacks by Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis. However, Gulf states remain spooked by comments made by US PresidentS. President Joe Biden that Israel's in discussions to attack Iranian oil installations. Gulf leaders worry that their own energy assets

may now be exposed to Iranian tit-for-tat proxy attacks by Houthis as well. So, I mean, basically, they're looking at this gloves-off approach from the U.S., the fact that Israel is, you know, just operating with absolute impunity, they're becoming worried about their own assets, they also have to worry about their own population, which is very, very pro-Palestinian. And so the Chinese and the Israelis have helped to accomplish something that would have been seen as far-fetched previously, which is this Saudi Arabia-Iran rapprochement. Yes, and I think it's actually quite interesting because it just highlights what I was talking

about earlier about the diplomatic realignment and how things can be really working against the U.S. If you consider all the damage that was wrought to our reputation, both with the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent fallout of that, the Israel situation has turned it up by 50. It also just shows you the stupidity of thinking that you can resolve all of this just through some grand power politics with the Abraham Accords. Like the Saudis are going to act what's in their best interest. And everybody always thinks that they're all real politic. No, they have to satisfy the most Islamic hardcore population in the world. And their population is looking on WhatsApp at what's happening in La Gaza and in Lebanon every single day. That's why they're here in this partnership with Iran.

So if you think you can just buy the Saudis off or any of that, it's just not going to happen. There's nothing about their past foreign policy that indicates that. And if anything, it's just further isolating us from any potential to be able to resolve this or whatever in the future. And it also tells you that where for years they were some of the most belligerent people against Iran. But in this case, look what they're doing. It just tells you about where the US falls on the side of this as well. So it's terrifying. Yeah. I don't think the US or Israel is probably excited about helping to foster this new alliance. And there's a lot of other things that long-term are gonna be a problem for Israel. There's polling domestically within Israel, some quarter of their

population is just thinking of leaving the country because Bibi Netanyahu has helped to make it a much more dangerous place in spite of all of the rhetoric from Joe Biden about how it's the only place Jews are safe. I think Jewish Americans are probably much safer, not probably, definitely much safer on these supposedly very dangerous American college campuses than they are in Israel right now. So you have a significant portion of the population, especially among secular Jews, who are thinking of leaving. You've had a massive economic hit. You have a country that is increasingly becoming more hardline and more isolated on the global stage, where increasingly we are their only friend. Even Macron in France briefly floated an arms embargo

before completely collapsing. But the fact that you see even that being floated at this point from a European country is noteworthy in and of itself. There you go. All right. All right. We're going to go and get to Gabe Sherman, who is standing by, a fantastic media reporter who has now, he's out with a movie, The Apprentice, about the origin story of a man we all know and some love, Donald Trump. Let's get to that. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies

were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right.

It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today.

Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case,

bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission.

This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. So we're now joined by Gabriel Sherman. He is a Vanity Fair special correspondent, also author of the New York Times bestseller, The Loudest Voice in the Room. And as I just mentioned, is out with a new movie on the origin story of Donald Trump called The Apprentice, which will be

in theaters nationwide this Friday. Welcome, Gabe. Nice to have you here. Good to see you, man. Thanks for having me. Let's go ahead and take a look. We got a little bit of the trailer of this movie to give people a little taste. Let's go ahead and take a look at that. Yes. This is Donald Trump from Mr. Cohen. Thank you so much. Donald who?

One, two, three, four! Roy Cohn, nice to meet you. Are you Roy Cohn? You're brutal. If you're indicted, you're invited. I know I'm done. You have a big ass.

You got to work on that. Your face looks like an orange. You have to be willing to do anything to win. All right. So for better or worse, this is a man we all know very intimately at this point, more than we ever wanted to know about him. So what did you want to communicate in this film that we don't already know about Donald Trump? Yeah, well, it's a great question. I think you talk about things that we know. That really, I think, was referring to information. I think

what's so revelatory about this movie is that it is an experience. This is not about if you want to learn facts about Donald Trump, anybody can read Wikipedia and find out information. This movie is a really emotional rollercoaster ride about how he came from his kind of anonymous Queens background and set himself on the course to becoming president. how Roy Cohn, played brilliantly by Jeremy Strong from Succession, taught Donald Trump the lessons, molded his personality in a way that he displays every day today. The movie ends in 1987, so it doesn't touch anything to do with current events. But over these two hours, you see all of the lessons that when you watch the news today, you'll have an entirely new understanding of how Donald Trump, why and how he talks the way he does. It's really the ghost of Roy Cohn speaking through Donald Trump. Yeah, it's fascinating.

I've recommended your book at the top of our show today, The Loudest Voice in the Room and with this movie. Could you talk about some of the lessons maybe that you brought from reporting for so many years on Roger Ailes into Donald Trump and that monoculture era, how they both of these two characters kind of formed to become so influential. Yeah, I mean, both are obviously Ailes and Trump are larger than life. You know, I think what they're both sort of Shakespearean characters who, you know, have these operatic rises and falls. And Roy Cohn, who was Donald Trump's mentor,

is one of the most significant figures of the 20th century. His shadow continues to loom over all of us today. The scorched earth politics, the zero-sum politics, the idea that you never admit defeat, you never back down, and you always counterattack. All the things that we see transpiring in our politics today are the lessons that Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump. So I really think this is a movie where you go on this crazy rollercoaster ride with these

two characters through the gritty underbelly of New York City in the 1970s. And you see Donald Trump slowly over the course of this movie going from kind of an insecure, awkward son of a real estate heir, a real estate developer, to becoming this kind of egomaniacal personality. It's an incredible transformation. And Sebastian Stan, from all of the Marvel movies, disappears into this role as Donald Trump. I got to know Sebastian well during the shooting. And when I was on set, it was like, it was really uncanny because I've spent a lot of time with the real Donald Trump. And there were just moments where I forgot I was even watching an actor. So Donald Trump is obviously the most divisive figure in American politics,

but one of the most divisive figures probably in political history. How did you not navigate the politics of this? In other words, like, is this just a movie for resistance libs? Or do you think that there are some Republican Trump supporters who might get something out of it as well? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. And I think it's a question that kind of animated this entire project when I started writing it in the spring of 2017. Um, I wanted to write a movie that was a film, not, not propaganda, not, you know, it wasn't trying to advance one side or the other. It's a movie where I, as a, as a writer was trying to understand what is the, what is the backstory? How did this person who, you know, is looming so large in our life on our TV screens

every day, where did he come from? What are the forces that actually shaped his personality? And so, you know, there are parts of this movie where, you know, resistant hashtag resistance members would be, you know, saying why this movie is too sympathetic to Donald Trump. And I'm sure there's aspects of the film where, you know, people in the MAGA world will say that it doesn't, you know, fit their image of Trump as the second coming. like a movie character. You know, it's so interesting about our politics today where things are so polarized, because if you take, you know, look at these kind of legendary, iconic movies that tried to capture a certain subculture or a world like The Godfather, per se, right? We don't say, is The Godfather an

anti-mob movie or a pro mob movie? We all talk about it as this iconic movie. And these Michael Corleone and are these larger than life characters? And that's what I was trying to do with this film. I think of Donald Trump, regardless of what you think of his politics, is he's this epic character that has changed the culture. And so I think he's worthy of a cinematic treatment in the same way that any other, you know, great movie character is. Yeah, totally. I totally agree. I think he sees himself that way in some aspects,

which is why I was interested. Let's put F2, please, on the screen. As the movie has debuted, they've apparently sent a cease and desist letter to try and block the film's release. What do you think is behind that exactly? You know, as you said, you've interviewed Donald Trump before. You spent time around his people.

What's the impetus behind the cease and desist? Well, two things. First of all, he hasn't seen the movie. No one in his campaign, to my knowledge, has seen the movie when this letter was released that you're putting up on the screen. This was hours after the movie had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. So that was the first time anybody outside of our filmmaking team had seen this film. Donald Trump clearly hadn't seen it. So this was just sort of sight unseen, firing off a letter. And in fact, I was kind of laughing at the time because it was an instance of really life was imitating art because in the film, Roy Cohn teaches young Donald Trump the

number one lesson, which is always to go on the attack. And so this cease and desist letter was the perfect real life example of that. What I think is going on there, I mean, he hasn't seen the film. So, you know, they're launching this attack without really having any real information. So I hope, I guess my wish is that people reserve judgment and they're welcome to weigh in, but weigh in after you see the movie. Don't just attack something that you haven't seen. Sure. I know you say that the film ends before the current political moment, and the film focuses on kind of the psychological forces and character influences on Donald Trump's personality. But I wonder if you also put thought into the cultural moment that also helps to enable

Donald Trump's rise to become, you know, very unlikely president of the United States? Yeah, that's a great question. I think the movie, yes, it explores this intimate relationship between Roy Cohn and his protege, his apprentice, Donald Trump, which is the, you know, inspiration for the title of the film. But it really also exposes the system, the system of corruption and the rise of media and tabloid culture in New York City in the 1970s and the 1980s, which Donald Trump really learned how to harness. There's this great scene in the film where Donald Trump's mother is reading a New York Times profile of Trump, which was the first major newspaper profile of Trump that was published in 1976. And she's sitting with him in the family living room and she's reading how the New York Times writer compares Trump to, quote, Robert

Redford and how good looking he was. And I was struck because that scene is based on the actual real article. I just quoted verbatim from what the New York Times wrote about Donald Trump in 1976. So the irony is that, you know, Trump bashes the media. Trump attacks the failing New York Times. And yet this movie really shows how the mass media culture of the 1970s and 80s was responsible for building up the myth of Donald Trump. I mean, Donald Trump benefited from the media. You know, I want to run by you this theory that I have about Trump and his evolution since he burst on the political scene. I mean, he'd been sort of in the political scenes before this, but in 2016. In 2016, he's very clearly like a product of the tabloids, right? Sensationalist,

right? Outrageous, but kind of finger on the pulse still, but in this very tabloid way. In 2020, he feels more to me like sort of like Fox News grandpa. He's been swimming in the circles of traditional mainstream conservative Rupert Murdoch media. And then now he feels to me like Twitter under Elon. And there's a whole New York Times analysis. We actually pulled it. We can put it up on the screen. But they did a whole analysis of his speeches now versus 2016. And it's longer now and it's angrier and it's more rambling and whatever.

And they frame it as a question of age. That is probably part of it. But I also feel like it's also a question of the type of media that he's consuming and playing into, perhaps as much as it is a question of his age. Yeah, I mean, I think you just have sort of chronicled the last, you know, almost decade of Trump's performance as a public figure. We, you know, when I spend a lot of time with him, I found him to be, you know, obviously, you know, very aggressive. And, but he's, I think the one thing that really enabled Trump in especially his early political rise in 2015, 2016 was he was funny. I think, I think humor and, and, and comedy, um, really

underpinned all of, you know, and helped to soften his, you know, scorched earth, um, style of politics. And I think unfortunately what has happened, um, over time as he's gotten older, or perhaps as he's only just, you know, sort of consumed right-wing media is that his speeches have become less there, you know, there's, there's a less of a lightness or a comedy to them. It's just pure rage. It's pure anger. And that might appeal to the really core MAGA base. But I think the things that made Donald Trump appealing to people who didn't follow politics so closely in 2015

was the sense that he was making politics entertaining. And he's just, if you just judge him as a entertainer, he's less entertaining now. He's not as good of a performer as he was, you know, five, eight years ago. So I think you're onto something. And I read that Peter Baker piece in the New York Times very closely. And I thought the analysis was fascinating how he's using angrier words. They're longer. His sentences don't track. So if he, in fact, does not win the election in November, I think one of the takeaways would be that he was just less of a skilled communicator. I think Donald Trump's communication power was so central to his rise.

And if he doesn't win, it will be a sign that his communication power has faded. Yeah, I think that's a really good insight. Well, I'm excited to see the film. It's out on, what does it say, Friday? All theaters? Friday in movie theaters. Please tell your friends. All right.

I'll be there. I'll be watching with all my AMC credits. So there you go. Thanks for having me. Okay. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Yeah, great to have you, Gabe. Thank you. Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate you. Take advantage of that discount if you can. Otherwise, we will see you all tomorrow. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

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