Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 7/8/25: Trump Doubles Down On Tariffs, Tucker Interviews Iran President, Bibi Nominates Trump For Nobel

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

Krystal discusses Trump doubles down on tariffs, Tucker interviews Iran President, Bibi nominates Trump for Nobel prize.   Glenn Greenwald: https://x.com/ggreenwald Murtaza Hussain: https://x.com/MazMHussain    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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unedited, ad free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Breaking Points. Just me in the studio today, but I do have some guests to help me out with the show. In particular, I've got Murtaza Hossein joining us to talk about Tucker's interview with the president of Iran. I'm going to share with you a few key moments there and get his reaction to all of that.

And also, Bibi Netanyahu back at the White House, third time. This time, he is nominating President Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. We've got other developments there as well that we'll get Murtaza's reaction to. Then we're gonna also have Glenn Greenwald join. He has been closely following what is going on

with Palantir, with Peter Thiel. Gonna ask him if what he puts the odds at, that Peter Thiel is actually the Antichrist. So there's a lot to dig into there that is very consequential. I also wanna get Glenn's view on the Epstein flop and the cope that is going on right now in MAGA World, which I have to say is world historic.

I'm actually gonna start the show though with the newest tariff announcement, sort of like a liberation day 2.0. Trump is unilaterally announcing tariffs on a number of very significant countries. We'll get a little bit of sound from him, from Caroline Levitt and sort of parse through what is exactly going on there.

We also have updates coming out of Texas as the death toll has surged even higher now over a hundred individuals dead because of those devastating floods. We have new information about the response or failures thereof and also Ted Cruz once again you'll recall previously he was caught in Cancun during a natural disaster in Texas. This time he was in Greece sightseeing and was spotted as the floods ravaged the state and the response continued to pace. In addition, I wanna bring you some truly shocking images

out of LA as federal immigration agents performed a militarized sweep of the park. Ken Klippenstein, great friend of the show, was able to get leaked documents talking about the goals of this sweep, which indications are may not have actually picked up a single person. It was more a demonstration of a show of force that, hey, these immigration agents armed to the teeth, looking like a military occupation, they can go anywhere and they can do anything and there is nothing that the local government, Karen Bass in this case,

can do to stop them. So a lot to get to in this show. Before I jump in to the tariffs information, just wanna thank you guys so much for supporting this show. If you are not a premium member and you wanna become one, you get the show in your inbox early, no ads, you get access to the premium AMAs, you also get access to the full Friday show.

Go ahead and sign up at breakingpoints.com. If that is not for you at this point, money's tight or you just don't feel like it, if you can share the clips and like and subscribe, all that good stuff that helps us out tremendously as well. All right, so let's go ahead and get to this tariff announcement. So yesterday about halfway through the day, Trump posts these letters, sort of preposterously written letters, to a couple of significant countries announcing new 25% tariffs on those nations.

Specifically here, we're talking about Japan and we're talking about South Korea. Now, these are both countries that are close allies of the US, so it shouldn't have been that difficult to get some sort of a trade deal with them. In fact, previously, Trump had negotiated a trade deal with them. In fact, previously Trump had negotiated a trade deal with them in his first administration. And yet, because his demands have been so hard to pin down and unreasonable, they have actually been unable to come to terms.

So he unilaterally announced this new tariff rate to go into effect. And then later on in the day, we get an announcement that there are additional countries that are also having these unilateral tariffs being placed on top of them. You guys remember back in the early days, after liberation day, and when we had the pause,

we were told we were gonna get 90 deals in 90 days. So far, we've gotten two sort of outlines of a deal with two countries. So it certainly has not rolled out the way that it was originally portrayed. When Caroline Levitt was asked about all of this, sort of outlines of a deal with two countries. So it certainly has not rolled out the way that it was originally portrayed. When Caroline Levitt was asked about all of this, what it means, where we're going,

let's take a listen to what she had to say. I have the signed letters that went out to both South Korea and Japan today. And there will be approximately 12 other countries that will receive notifications and letters directly from the president of the United States. And weeks ago, I stood at this podium and I told all of you that the President was going to

create tailor-made trade plans for each and every country on this planet and that's what this administration continues to be focused on. The President will also sign an executive order today delaying the July 9th deadline to August 1st so the reciprocal tariff rate or these new rates that will be provided in this correspondence to these foreign leaders will be going out the door within the next month or deals will be made. And those countries continue to negotiate with the United States.

We've seen a lot of positive developments in the right direction, but the administration, the president and his trade team want to cut the best deals for the American people and the American worker. That's what they're focused on. And in the effort of transparency, these letters will continue to be posted to true social. They will take the letter seriously because they have taken the President seriously. And that's why the President's phone, I can tell you, rings off the hook from world leaders all the time who are begging him to come to a deal. all the time who are begging him to come to a deal.

So there you go. That is a little bit of what the official White House line was yesterday. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen so you can get a little bit of a sense of these letters. So White House sent near identical letters to the leaders of Japan and South Korea announcing sweeping new 25% tariffs on all their exports to the US starting August 1st.

This is significant because the previous deadline was tomorrow, July 9th, and so there had been some confusion about whether that was going to be a hard and fast deadline. They're now pushing that to August 1st. There is continued confusion about whether the new August 1st deadline is actually a hard and fast deadline. So we'll have to see what ultimately pans out there. But let me read you just a little bit of these letters

because it is certainly trademark Trumpian language and sort of preposterous that this is the way that the President of the United States communicates with significant nations around the world in any case. One of them reads, this is the one to the Prime Minister of Japan, "'Dear Mr. Prime Minister, it is a great honor for me to send you this letter

in that it demonstrates the strength and commitment of our trading relationship and the fact the US of A has agreed to continue working with Japan despite having a significant trade deficit with your great country. Nevertheless, we've decided to move forward with you, but only with more balanced and fair trade in all caps. Therefore, we invite you to participate

in the extraordinary economy of the United States, the number one market in the world, weirdly capitalized there by far. We've had years to discuss our trading relationship with Japan and concluded we must move away from these long-term and very persistent trade deficits, in caps for some reason, engendered by Japan's tariff and non-tariff policies

and trade barriers. And then he goes on to describe how we will be unilaterally implementing these 25% tariffs. Let's go and put the next piece up on the screen here to show you the rates that were announced yesterday on these countries to go into effect on August 1st. You've got Cambodia, 36%, Thailand, 36%, Bangladesh, 35%, Serbia Serbia 35%, Indonesia 32%,

Bosnia 30%, Tunisia 25%, and then you've got Japan and South Korea at 25%. In addition, he says that any retaliation will be met with increased tariffs. So he said, if any of those countries increase their tariff rates vis-a-vis the United States, then that additional amount will be added on top. So needless to say, these are quite high rates.

These are significant tariff rates. It's easy to become a little bit inured of this stuff at this point because we've had them on and off again and back on and we're taking a pause and we've got a deadline and we've got a new deadline coming in, but I think it's worth just wrapping our minds around the fact that if you're talking about 25% tariffs on significant trading partners like South Korea and Japan,

that is going to have a significant impact on the economy. And economists will tell you, very likely to raise prices on those goods coming in from those countries. Not to mention what companies do when they have an excuse to hike prices. They hike prices. So very possible that all that comes down the pike. Not to mention the continued level of extreme uncertainty about what any of this is, what any of it's going to be,

where we're ultimately going to end up. And as I said before, part of the reason why countries like Japan that have a very close relationship with the United States, why even they were unable to strike some sort of a deal with the Trump administration is because they basically came and said effectively like, okay, well, what do you want from us? And no one can really answer them. Some of these nations have effectively zero tariffs on the US, but because Trump feels like

we have a trade deficit with them, that that is just ipso facto, an indication that something is unfair about the relationship, and so he has to put these tariffs in place. So that's kind of the top line of where we are. I mentioned before that there continues to be questions about, okay, we had the July 9th deadline.

Well, that's tomorrow. That's now being pushed down to August 1st. Is it gonna be the August 1st deadline? Trump got asked a couple of days ago about these deadlines and how hard and fast they are and what they mean. And he was perplexingly confused himself. It really raised some questions about how much, even in this area on tariffs, the area where he seems to be sort of the most engaged and the most enthusiastic in terms of his administration, really raised some questions about how plugged in he is even to this sort of centerpiece of his economic agenda.

Let's go ahead and take a listen now to A4. — Mr. President, do the tariff rates change at all on July 9th, or do they change on August 1st? — What are you talking about? — Tariff rates. Do they change on July 9th or August 1st? — They're going to be tariffs. The tariffs are going to be the tariffs. I think we'll have most countries done by July 9th, yeah. Either a letter or a deal. — But they go into effect on August 1st.

So you can see Trump there saying, oh, I think most of the countries will be done by July 9th. This was just a couple days ago that he got asked that. And he said, oh no, I think it'll be done by July 9th. Again, tomorrow is July 9th. And we now have this announcement that no, actually, in fact, we're pushing that deadline off to August 1st. And you can see Howard Lutnick having to jump in to sort of try to clean things up and say,

well, I mean, July, sure, Mr. President, but actually, they go into effect on August 1st. So, you know, there seem to be significant parts of this administration that Trump has just checked out from. He seems completely checked out from the immigration piece seems to have just been completely outsourced to Stephen Miller as one example where he has become incredibly powerful within this administration.

He also appears to be Stephen Miller very powerful even within foreign policy decision-making. But I really thought that terrorists were the one piece that Trump was really super engaged with. This is a guy that is playing golf on a lot of days, which is kind of extraordinary, given that you would think that this would be a very busy job.

And so it was just interesting to me to see him even so sort of perplexed by the question that was asked, and so out of sorts on what the answer would be about when this deadline is, which again is pretty significant question, given that he was asked this just days before that deadline was due. So let's go and put the next piece up on the screen

because this is significant as well. This was the market reaction yesterday, the Dow slides more than 400 points. That's a significant market drop. I haven't taken a look at the futures yet this morning to see where we are. Oh, it says S&P 500 futures rebound from sell-off as investors bet that Trump tariffs will end up lower than what he announced. So Wall Street appears to be taking the taco bet again. And given the ups and downs of this policy, it's hard to blame anyone for

thinking like, okay, sure, he's doing Liberation Day 2.0 and announcing these very high rates that would be extraordinarily disruptive if they actually go through. But are they actually going to go through? Who the hell knows at this point? In addition, there was also a significant shot taken at the so-called BRICS nations contained in this as well. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen. This is from the Wall Street Journal. So they say Trump steps up his

fight with BRICS nations. China and Russia push back after US President threatened to place tariffs on countries embracing the policies of the group. I'll read you a little bit of this article from the Wall Street Journal. They say, President Trump's threat to put new tariffs on countries embracing the policies of the BRICS group has added fresh uncertainty to global trade, prompted pushback from Moscow and Beijing. Trump posted on social media that countries aligning themselves with the, quote, anti-American policies of BRICS will be charged an additional 10% tariff on top, of course, of whatever

he decided he was going to charge them. The threat appeared to be a response to a statement put out by the group of emerging economies whose members include Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and others that took a swipe at Trump's policies. The threat comes as his administration faces a crucial week for reaching trade deals. The BRICS group, it goes on to say, has long sought to present itself as a multilateral counterweight to a U.S. dominated world order, although internal divisions and differing political and financial frameworks have hobbled its quest for expanding its geopolitical

influence. So they have actually all been meeting at a summit in Rio de Janeiro right now. They put out a joint declaration that said they had, quote, serious concerns about the rise of unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures. So that may have been what prompted this exchange from Trump. But, you know, there is a real concern that the world will move away from the United States of America and the dollar as the global reserve currency. That would be an incredible reckoning for this country and for this economy where we are used to having what's been called the exorbitant privilege

of having the dollar as the world's reserve currency. That effectively means that the rest of the world is financing the debt and the deficit that we have accumulated now over years in which the one big beautiful bill will expand even further. I am not someone who is big, I'm not a big deficit hawk, I'm not one of these how you pay for it kind of people, especially because we see the way that that rhetoric is always

used just to take away social safety net programs that benefit the poor and the working class and never to question, for example, the massive now trillion dollar defense budget that only ever goes up and up and up, nor is it used to question how we're going to finance the extraordinary giant multi-trillion dollar tax cuts that are being given to the wealthiest among us, the people who least need such assistance. However, if the world truly does move away from the dollar and that is part of what, you know,

the BRICS have sort of set up to do, it's part of what Russia and China have been looking at, alternatives, you can hardly blame them, given how chaotic and unreliable the United States is at this point, you know, if that actually does happen, it will be a significant reckoning in this country. So in any case, you know, the irony here of Trump protesting what the BRICS nations are doing is that with his insane unilateral trade war on the

entire world, he is only hastening the arrival and increasing the logic of those countries that would want to move away from the dollar as the world's reserve currency. So that of course is the irony here. Last thing I've got for you is Peter Navarro got asked about the original promise of the 90 deals and 90 days that had been pledged.

We were gonna see deals being made at a pace we'd never seen before. There were gonna be so many wins, we'd get sick of winning, I guess. And here is what he had to say about what happened with those 90 deals in 90 days. 90 days in 90 days. I'm very happy.

I'm very happy. I am very happy with where we're at. We have had a global baseline tariff in place of 10%. We're collecting billions of dollars of tax revenues that are going to pay down for tax cuts. We've got continuing no-sheet negotiations, and I think this is great. Because the rest of the world has it so good

that they're dragging their heels, but the president will not allow that. That's why the letters went out. That's all I'll say. So obviously just a bunch of nonsense, spit and cope there, needless to say. But, you know, just to wrap this up, it all goes back to like, what are we even doing here? You know, there's never been any clear explanation

of what the goal of these tariffs even is. Originally, remember we were told when they were being put on Mexico and Canada, that it was about fentanyl. Then we were told at times, oh, this was about bringing back manufacturing jobs. Well, so far from what we've seen, this has been devastating actually to manufacturing, especially when coupled with the rollback of industrial policy that was actually put in place by the Biden administration. You're going in the wrong direction in terms of manufacturing jobs.

At times we've been told that this was about, and Peter Navarro talks a little bit about that there, this is about increasing revenue into the United States Treasury. Well that goal is actually directly at odds with the goal of increasing manufacturing jobs because if you're reshoring, then you're going to have fewer goods coming in, being imported, then you will be decreasing the tariff revenue over time. So those two things are at odds. You know, Trump seems fixated on the idea of us having a trade deficit with any country, even though in some instances, and we talked about the nation of Lesotho,

where it's like they're a poor country, so they just don't buy that much in terms of goods from us and we buy diamonds and other sort of like natural resources from them, there's just naturally going to be an imbalance in that trade relationship. It doesn't mean they're ripping us off. So we continue to have this central question of like,

what are you even trying to accomplish here? What even is the goal here? How could you even measure whether or not this policy is successful when we've never ever gotten any sort of consistent answer about what this thing ultimately is for? In terms of his defenders, I feel like they've just sort of given up on trying to explain this, given up on trying to defend the ins and outs and the ups and downs.

I'm sure you guys have seen that meme where it's like Trump puts the tariffs in place and they say this will bring back jobs. They take some off again and they say this is the art of the deal. I think they've just given up on talking about it altogether because anytime you go in hard for whatever the current plan is, three days later, there's some other new plan that you're having to turn around and now justify. So that's where things are.

What is the goal of this policy? Who knows? What is it going to accomplish? Who knows? Is the August 1 deadline now real? We don't know. Are these new tariff rates, which again, would be really significant, extraordinarily high

and I don't want people to lose sight of how disruptive it would be economically if these actually get put in place on Japan, South Korea and other trading allies, we don't really know. So that's where things stand. All right, very fortunate to be joined this morning by Martaza Hussein of DropSight News. He's going to help me cover a couple of topics here.

Great to see you, Maz. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, of course. So we mentioned on the show yesterday, Tucker Carlson recorded an interview, a sit down interview with the president of Iran. There were a few different moments that I thought were interesting. First of all, I just, I think it's important to hear the perspective of the Iranian government, how they're viewing all of this and, you know,

what their position is, which is something you very rarely hear in Western media. So I thought this was significant for that reason. But let me start off by getting your reaction to this particular clip. Tucker asked the president of Iran, do you plan to reenter diplomatic negotiations? And of course, previously these negotiations

that the Trump administration was engaged in, which seemed to have some possibility, at least before they drew a hard line on zero uranium enrichment, seemed to have some possibility of coming to fruition. The Trump administration then comes out and admits or claims that they were using those negotiations as a ruse to create an element of surprise for Israeli attacks on Iran.

So that's the backstory and the context. Let's go ahead and take a listen to a little bit of this exchange. Do you have plans to reenter negotiations with the United States, with envoy Steve Wittkopf or anyone else? And if not, what do you think will happen? We see no problem in re-entering the negotiations. But before that, I have to remind you that because of the atrocities by the Zionist regime, by Israel, not just against my country, but in the whole

region. We are now facing a crisis. The people are facing a crisis that we need to put it behind ourselves. Our commanders were off duty. They were spending the night at their homes with their families, but they were killed. And this is considered a war crime according to the international law because they were off duty, as I said, or our scientists were also killed and assassinated along with their families and their wives and their children.

They were also killed. Pregnant women, children, they were killed in the atrocities, in the attacks of the Israeli regime. Just because they wanted to kill one single person, they had to demolish and destroy a whole building. And as a result of this, a lot of innocent people were killed. There is a provision for the restarting the talks. How are we going to trust the United States again? How can we know for sure that in the middle of the talks,

We know for sure that in the middle of the talks, the Israeli regime will not be given the permission again to attack us. So he says there, how are we going to trust the United States again, which I think is a pretty reasonable question, given not just this most immediate diplomatic ruse, but the fact that previously we had a deal with the Iranians that the first Trump administration backed out of.

Yeah, unfortunately, it's been very difficult for the U.S. to engage in diplomacy with Iran for one primary reason, I would say, which is Benjamin Netanyahu. And for over a decade now, Mr. Netanyahu has been working to insert himself and sabotage effectively any form of meaningful diplomacy between the U.S. and Iran. He sabotaged the Iran nuclear deal, and he himself takes credit for doing that in 2015, or later in the Trump administration deal that was signed in 2015. And most recently, the U.S. and Iran by no means seem to have exhausted their diplomatic

talks over the nuclear program under the second Trump administration. But in the middle of that, Netanyahu intervened. He launched a surprise attack on Iran. There's conflicting reporting about the level four knowledge that the U.S. had about this attack. But, you know, ultimately it was Israel who attacked. And it's very difficult to continue negotiations after, as the Iranian president said, there

was this, you know, killings and very provocative attacks in the Iranian capital, Iranian nuclear sites, which affected the very subject of the talks that had taken place between the US and Iran. So I think that he kind of has the understandable perception that if the US engages in talks with the Iranian gang, which is very plausible, and the Iranians seem to want to do it, who can guarantee that Netanyahu won't intervene again? He'll attack the Escalade, maybe. He'll kill Iranian political officials and do whatever it takes to avoid any deal taking

place with the U.S. and Iran. And I think Netanyahu's main issue is actually not Iran's nuclear program. I think he just doesn't want there to be a deal between the U. Iran. He wants Iran and the US to remain enemies and the sanctions to stay on and things like that because that makes it easier for him to achieve his goal of escalating gradually a direct confrontation militarily between Iran and the US, which ultimately leads to regime change or heavy destruction in Iran, even if it requires the US being at war in that country at some point in the future? Yeah, I think the nuclear program is largely a pretext, not to say they don't care about it at all, but mostly what Netanyahu's interest is in is in Iran being a weakened or even failed state, because he doesn't want any sort of regional rival power to check his

significant at this point, regional ambitions. There was another section I wanted to get your reaction to that I thought was really interesting. You know, as the whole debate was unfolding about whether or not we should get involved in a hot war with Iran and what was the threat to U.S. interests, etc., routinely people who were in favor of us, you know, going all in for some regime change operation in Iran, they would talk about these death to America chants and say, how can you allow this regime to persist when they want all Americans to be killed when they're out there chanting

death to America? So, Tucker actually asked him about those chants, which I thought led to an interesting exchange. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. Americans are afraid of Iran, and they believe that Iran would like to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon. They see video of Iranians saying, death to America,

describing our country as the great Satan. What is your opinion of that? Should we be afraid of Iran? I believe that this is a very wrong impression that anybody might have of Iran or the Iranians. I would like to remind you that Iran has never invaded another country in the last 200 years. When they say death to the United States, it doesn't mean death to... They don't mean death to the people of the United States or even to the officials of the United States. They mean death to crimes, death to killing and carnage, death to supporting killing others, death to insecurity and instability.

Iranian killing an American, have you ever heard that? Or a terrorist that was Iranian and he carried out a terrorist attack against the Americans? No, it was your president who confessed that the Americans created ISIS in our region, and they were responsible for this wrong image that is portrayed of religion or the Muslims in the world. This is not death to the American people or to the officials.

Death to crimes and atrocities, to bullying, to the use of force, and anybody who would like to become an accomplice in the crimes that are perpetrated by others. Maz, what did you make of that response? Well, you mean, to be clear, it's not a great slogan, to be honest. It's kind of a lend itself to negative interpretation just on its face. That said, I think it's also important to be aware that in Iran, in the past,

this slogan of death to X thing has been used for many different purposes. And Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's political campaign some years ago was talking about the price of potatoes and the slogan became Death to potatoes because the price has been very high. So you know, it seems like it could be some cultural misinterpretation, but yet, you know, still the Iranian government since 1979, and I can go in the long history of the events for that, but it has defined itself as opposed to being America's presence in the Middle East. And as Sheehan said, they associate that presence with oppression or war or sanctions and all these other negative things, not just directed at them,

but directed at others as well too. So they have defined themselves in opposition to that ideologically. And you know, it makes it difficult or harder than it would be otherwise to engage in diplomacy with the US because you have at least at the rhetorical level and the symbolic level, this opposition definition against the US. And people have actually asked Iranian leaders about this before, this slogan, and including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, even Iranians have asked this and it's been discussed in Iranian television quite a bit. And they kind of give the same answer every time.

And they kind of say it almost like, you know, of course we don't mean hostility to Americans or to America as a country per se. We're talking about certain bad people in America or certain things that the US is doing in our region, which we don't like. So, you know, people can take that explanation on its face. I still would say that it's really probably not an advisable kind of slogan to use because

for this reason. But that's what they mean. I think it's reasonable in the sense that there's no U.S. security officials who think that Iran is trying to destroy America or using nuclear weapons against America. That's not a serious sort of contention that anyone who follows the subject thinks. But, you know, there is this historical and rhetorical tension between the two countries, which makes it difficult as well to overcome people like Netanyahu or others who would like to engineer direct confrontation militarily between the two. You know, there was another point, and I didn't pull this particular clip, but there was another point where Tucker was asking the president about their nuclear program and whether they

were developing a nuclear weapon, whether they wanted to develop a nuclear weapon. And he indicated that this was all just an invention of Netanyahu effectively, and the Israelis, he specifically pinned it on Netanyahu and said, like, listen, there's actually religious prohibition against developing nuclear weapons. We have no interest in it. What did you make of that particular comment and that framing? So the current supreme leader of Iran has said before,

he's issued a edict saying that nuclear weapons are against our values, they're against our religious beliefs, they're like evil weapons, we don't want to introduce them to the region or use them and so forth. So that is a position that they've taken before and that they've continued to hold. We really know in a sense what that means per se. But I think that's very clear if you look at Iran's behavior over the last 20 years.

They haven't been rushing to get a nuclear weapon. They could have gotten a nuclear weapon many, many times in the past. North Korea got a nuclear weapon sometime in the last 20 years in World War II. The Iranians have not tried to develop a nuclear program for the purpose of getting weapons. They've done it for a different purpose. They've done it to give themselves leverage for the removal of Western economic sanctions. They never enriched the uranium up to weapons grade. They enriched past the grade which is used specifically for energy, but they kept it in like a gray zone. They never treated this seriously as a weaponization program in a way that endangered

them. Because if you were going to have a nuclear program at all, and you're in bad terms with the U.S., you're opening yourself up to scrutiny. And you can either, in my opinion, I think most people would agree with this, you either go all the way and develop a nuclear weapon and get it to turn to protect you, and then no one can attack you, and then you're like North Korea, and people have to deal with you if they don't like you, or you can give it up entirely. Getting a nuclear latency, having a program enriching it, but not weaponizing it, kind of gets you the worst of both worlds. You're attacked by the Israelis, you have sanctions, you have your pariah, everyone's mistreating you, but you don't actually have a nuclear weapon. So they can't, you actually

defend yourself or deter people from attacking. And I think most security experts have assessed also that the Israeli attack that happened last month would not have happened had the Iranians developed a nuclear weapon. And they may or may not do that now, but their policy, I think it actually is true. They have inside nuclear weapon to date, but it hasn't really gotten them much. It hasn't gotten them in a very bad situation where, as I said, they have worse of both worlds.

On the other hand, I'm sure they're looking at, for example, Libya and saying, well, when you give up even the latent threat of potentially developing a nuclear weapon, that's what ends up to you, you know, happening to you. So getting rid of it altogether, even if it gets rid of this, you know, this particular pretext for getting bombed and attacked, doesn't mean that Israel and the United States are going to ultimately leave you alone. Exactly.

Giving up, capitulating and doing what the US wants right now, or what Israel actually wants, about acceding to a full dismantling of any enrichment capacity, the nuclear program itself, the Libya option, as it's called, is not a very attractive option. It's very dangerous for Iran, actually, because what it could be interpreted as is, well, you're capitulating, you're weak, let's keep pushing our advantage further and let's keep this bright wild, there's blood in the water and take it all the way. So I think that people who say that,

well, you know, things can be fine, we can give up and we can trade and things like that, there's a very, very risky, contentious and dangerous position. I don't think that, I think the Iranians very much are thinking of what happened to Libya and Walmart, Qaddafi and so forth when they think of this option. So, you know, I think that ultimately nuclear rising also is not a very attractive option some ways too. It's very dangerous, very expensive. You have to open yourself up to a whole different

range of problems as a result of that. But the Iranians have two very onerous options. It's not really a good option on the table right now. There was the possibility of a mutually beneficial agreement where they stayed and had limited enrichment under international monitoring. The US and the Trump administration initially suggested that they were okay with that. But again, there was this Israeli veto.

There was a Netanyahu veto which took place, which said that no, no enrichment can happen. People in the U.S. who were sort of aligned with the new conservative camp successfully inserted that condition into later rounds of negotiation. So they kind of posed off the ability if any enrichment happening at all or any deal really happening at all. So now there's two options, which is the Libya option, which would probably lead or could lead down the road to more war between the US and Iran, a regime change war, or this nuclear addition, which could invite a preemptive nuclear attack by Israel or the US to try

to stop that. It could attract other forms of attack. And then if they do it successfully, you have to modernize your nuclear program. You have to expand it. You have to develop it all throughout the country. So you're starting a marathon, you're not ending it. And that's very risky as well, too, and very costly. So I think that, as said, there's two very, very onerous options.

I think it's very unfortunate that diplomacy was killed in 2015 by Netanyahu, and then again more recently under the second Trump administration, because that would have been better for all sides. It would have avoided a US war with Iran, and it would have avoided Iran having to fight the US and Israel, and all the casualties have taken place on both sides as a result of that. So, you know, I think that now we're in a much more dangerous and fraught phase of this conflict we're entering.

Let's go ahead and turn to Netanyahu's visit to the White House yesterday. Obviously all that we're discussing with regards to Iran, that's part of the backdrop here, also the continued genocide in Gaza, these daily aid massacres, ongoing ceasefire talks, which don't seem to be developing very effectively at this point. That's some of the backdrop here.

And let me go ahead and start with this clip of Netanyahu there, sitting across from each other at the dinner table. And Netanyahu makes a big show of presenting Trump with these papers where he says he has nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize. Let's go and take a listen to that. Express the appreciation and admiration, not only of all Israelis, but of the Jewish people and many, many admirers around the world for your leadership, your leadership of the free world, your leadership of a just cause, and the pursuit of peace and security which you

are leading in many lands but now especially in the Middle East. He forged the Abraham Accords. He's forging peace as we speak in one country and one region after the other. So I want to present to you Mr. President the letter I sent to the Nobel Prize Committee. It's nominating you for the Peace Prize, which is well deserved. And you should get it. Thank you very much. This I didn't know.

Well, thank you very much. Coming from you in particular, this is very meaningful. Thank you very much, baby. Thank you. Thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you. It's a great honor. And if we can put B7 up on the screen, these are images.

So basically at roughly the same time that this whole you should get a Nobel Peace Prize conversation is going on. This is the aftermath of tents being bombed by Israel on the grounds of a school shelter. This was happening while Netanyahu was arriving at the White House. Of course, it's Israel directly bombing these tents of displaced Palestinians. And it's the United States of America

that is providing both the bombs and the diplomatic cover for these sorts of horrors to continue. So it's just, it's so grotesque. I mean, you almost want to laugh at it, and the diplomatic cover for these sorts of horrors to continue. So it's just, it's so grotesque. I mean, you almost want to laugh at it, but it's such particularly grotesque sort of example, Crystal, as you pointed out. The second place in Gaza right now is so horrifying. It really is a genocide. And we're seeing it live streamed in a way which we've never seen any genocide in the

past depicted and shown to us in the real time. And I think that in Netanyahu's case, he's being cynical and smart in a way. He's taking advantage of Trump's vanity. And you could see when Trump was given the envelope with the nomination, he almost responds, you know, auditory response. He ate it up. No, Netanyahu played it exactly right. Yeah, he liked it. So, you know, ultimately, this is an attempt to sort of,

it's almost depressing, to be honest, the way that personalities can actually, individual personalities can drive politics in a sense. And Netanyahu knows how this game is played very, very well. He's been around in Washington longer than Trump has, really. He knows how to change, manipulate the levers of power. He knows how to manipulate his interlocutors. He knows how to push Trump's buttons, so to speak. So you know, Trump, he's actually the first person to nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.

The Pakistani government nominated him for a Peace Prize a few weeks ago as well, too. Knowing the same sort of vanity and the desire for this award that Trump has. And I hope, I'm not very optimistic, but I hope that in some sense, Trump lives up to the award which he's seeking, a Nobel Peace Prize, and at least declines to engage in further confrontations, in the sense with Iran. But, you. But irrespective of that, he's doing nothing to stop what's going on in Gaza. He's arming it. He's green lighting it.

He's giving a political cover. And he's also helping to bring it to a more extreme stage, where potentially the population of Gaza will be expelled from the territory entirely. That's what the Israeli government's saying now. It's what Netanyahu talked about in this meeting as well, too. And I think that is a very, very grotesque and dire escalation of the situation to what you can call full-blown ethnic cleansing.

Well, that's a good segue to the next clip that I have for you to react to because Trump got asked if the, quote, Palestinian relocation plan, also known as ethnic cleansing, which Trump had floated, of, hey, let's get all of these Palestinians out of Gaza so that me and my billionaire buddies can come in and develop this beachfront property. People call it Gaza Lago. Is that still on the table, he was asked. And he actually pitches the question over to Netanyahu

to get him to respond to it. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that exchange. Is your Palestinian relocation plan still on the table? Is there a plan? Has there been any progress in finding countries that would set out? Yeah, Bibi, why don't I let you answer that question? Mr. President.

Wait a minute, wait, he's gotta answer the question. I think President Trump had a brilliant vision. It's called free choice. You know, if people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave. It shouldn't be a, you know, prison. It should be an open place and give people free choice. We're working with the United States very closely about finding countries that will seek to realize what they always say, that they want to give the Palestinians a better future.

And those who, and I think we're getting close to finding several countries, and I think this will do. Again, the freedom to choose. Palestinians should have it. And I hope that we can secure it close by. And we've had great cooperation from surrounding, meaning surrounding Israel, surrounding countries, great cooperation from every single one of them. So something good will happen.

Freedom to choose, Maz, who could object? Yeah, you know, this is the thing. Basically, he's saying freedom to choose, but the actual variable here is you can stay and starve to death and be killed or leave in that sense. It's not freedom to choose. It's duress, extreme, extreme duress to try to force people out. What they're doing now is they're trying to concentrate. This is the word that they actually use themselves, concentrate the population in a very small southern strip. And I suppose eventually it makes life so difficult and so hopeless over a long period of time

that piecemeal people can be gotten out of there. And I think that, you know, regardless of what Trump is saying, there's not really any country which is going to take millions of people. It will destabilize any of the regional countries. People get very angry. They believe in the two-state solution on paper. These governments are around Israel as well, too, and this could put an end to that forever. What they may try to do is try to get a thousand people out here and there over a long period of time and gradually make Palestinians so miserable in this place that they send them somewhere else in the world that may take them. But I'm skeptical that any country, as I said, has agreed to take large numbers of people. There've been people floating in the Israeli government, sending them to Somaliland or

Sudan or Congo or other places like this. And this kind of is reminiscent of, you know, I hate to use the analogy, but in World War II, the Madagascar Plan that Germany thought of sending the Jewish, undesirable Jewish population inside to Madagascar, just sent them far away, somewhere in Africa, somewhere far away, someone have to hear about them. That's the way that they're talking about the subject. And again, this is not people leaving under free choice is the way Netanyahu was framing it.

They're trying to give them a choice. You can die, you can starve, your family can be killed here, or you can go somewhere. We don't have to hear about you again. And you won't really have anything over there either. But that's your choice. You can die or you can leave. That's ethnic cleansing. And his framing of it, which seems to portray it in a more benign way, couldn't be more

further from the truth. That's a really, really terrible and monstrous thing happening right now. And it's very unfortunate. It's very shameful, I think, that the US government is public facilitated. And again, when Trump talks about this, it seems like you, I think, that the U.S. government is public facilitated. And again, when Trump talks about this, it seems like you've deferred the whole policy to Netanyahu. It seems like Netanyahu is running U.S. Middle East policy because he didn't even get an

answer to it. He just said, well, Mr. Netanyahu, what do you think about that? And let him effectively define what is U.S. policy on the subject. He did the same thing when he got asked about whether a two-state solution was still possible. He said the same thing. Oh, let me give the question to the best person in the world to answer that, and pitched it over to Netanyahu, who, you know, gave some answer about how, well, of course, we'd love them to have the, you know,

ability to govern, but he said, we will always make sure that we have the ultimate security control. So, effectively, the answer there is no, which has been, which is nothing new for Netanyahu. I mean, this has been his life's project, political project is to make sure and guarantee that Palestinians never have a state of their own. And he's used any sort of tactic that he possibly can in order to effectuate that outcome.

Yeah, you said that very well, Crystal. This is both two things, those lifetime projects are preventing Palestinian state and bombing Iran. And- And his own political power, that would be the third, yeah. And his own political power. And he's seen in Trump sort of like a cipher through which he can accomplish these goals,

that he's alongside. You know, and that's the Biden was also giving him as much support as he could as well, too. These are both very pliable and supportive administrations in the U.S. I think the most important thing here is actually in the historical context, if you look at Netanyahu's career, he's fanatically wanted these things for a very, very long time. Whatever beliefs Trump had or Biden had, they seem much more malleable, they seem much more breathing, you could say, or they dither to a degree. When you have someone who's financially committed to what they want, and they know exactly what it is, and they're absolutely driven to get it, and you have an interlocutor, someone

on the other side, who is unsure even 10 percent, I would bet on the person who knows what they want getting what they want. And that's Netanyahu in this case. He knows he wants to bomb Iran. He knows he wants to stop the Palestinian state, expel the Palestinians. Trump doesn't seem to know what he wants as much. He defers Netanyahu, even though he has questions to the press. So I would expect Netanyahu to win in this scenario, to get what he wants.

And I think it would say that Netanyahu is almost running these policies in a way in the US. And it's unfortunate, but it's what appears to be the case. Yeah, which is not to take away agency or blame from Trump because he's the one who's outsourced the policy to Netanyahu, but to say that ultimately, our interests are not being reflected here whatsoever. Let alone forget about the interest of Palestinians. That doesn't even enter into the equation.

It's all been outsourced effectively to Netanyahu. And actually, that's the last piece I want to ask you about. Let's put B6 up on the screen here. This is one of these Axios reports from Barack Ravid. So this is something that has been leaked to him, either from the Israeli officials or from the American officials. In any case, they think that they can get Trump to give them a green light to attack Iran again.

They say that Ron Dermer told officials in closed briefings, he came away from a recent visit to Washington with the impression Trump administration would back new Israeli strikes on Iran under certain circumstances. One scenario would be an Iranian attempt to remove the highly enriched uranium inside the damaged facilities. Another would be if the Iranians start rebuilding their nuclear program. They go on to say that Dermer met last week with Vice President Shanty Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and White House Envoy Steve Witkoff. And so I think this speaks directly to your point of these Israelis know very much what they want to do. And so what they feel like they can do is create this framework of like,

well, you know, this is this whole 12-day war, peace situation. This is great for now. But obviously, if Iran goes back to building nuclear weapons, then we're going to have to go back in. And then as we know from the last time, the last war with Iran, you know, mere weeks ago, there was no actual change in Iranian nuclear development. There was just a pretext that was created of, oh, now's the time we have to go and this is urgent. So there's nothing to stop them again from producing some sort of intelligence estimate that, oh my God, Iran is rushing to a nuclear weapon. Not to mention that they may well do that at this point because the logic that this war on them from Israel and the US has created is one that

would lead you logically to conclude, I guess I have no choice but to develop a nuclear weapon to give myself some sort of protection against these maniacs. I think the real purpose of this war last month was actually not to stop the nuclear program, as we didn't, as you pointed out. They still have a problem they can reconstitute in a year or two. It's not a huge impediment. What they really are seeking is to make it normal to bomb Iran.

They want to make it like Iraq in the 90s, where the US and other countries could bomb the country whenever they wanted. They can gradually weaken the country, weaken its sovereignty, undermine it and so forth, such that maybe in 10 years from now, after that's been done, we bomb Iran all the time and we fight them all the time. You can say, well, we'll just do a regime change then. Let's just take it one more notch further. I think it's about turning up the temperature gradually. That was the purpose of bombing Iran in this case. And when they're saying we want a green light, it's not saying like give us permission. That's not the whole question of what it's about. They're saying, you know, you need to provide us support. The US arms is taxing, gives fuel for

them, it gives logistics and intelligence. It's saying that you're committing to being part of this future operations. It's not just about Israel, it's about the war could not have happened without very, very intensive American support at all levels, logistical, tactical, strategic, very, very practical weapons and logistics and so forth. It's saying these promises and guarantees, I interpret them as saying that you will commit to giving us that support in the future. Because without that, Iran's very far away from Israel. They can't really carry out the attacks.

They can't really do anything they're doing without American, very intensive American backing. So I think that Netanyahu is basically looping America into a forever war with Iran, but he's doing it in a slow, gradual way. Whereas you get the commitments first, the original attack, then you get commitments with further attacks, and then 10 years from now, who knows, you could see an Iraq-type situation gradually develop where the US is forced to ultimately do regime change, maybe put boots on the ground, so forth.

And none of us ever really knew how it got to that point. We weren't paying attention to what was happening today. But I think that's what NetNOW's aim is, and that's what the administration is gradually allowing itself to be roped into. I think, unfortunately, that looks very likely. All right, Murtaza Hussein, thank you so much for joining me this morning, helping make sense of all of these things. Thanks, Crystal.

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