Bulwark Takes - Bizarre Trump Oval Office Event May Upend Childhood Vaccines | Morning Shots

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

Join Andrew Egger and Sam Stein (filling in for Bill) as they cover the week's biggest stories.This episode is sponsored by The New York Times.

Hey, everybody. It's me, Bill Crystal. I'm with Andrew Eager, and this is Morning Shots Live. Do I look like a younger Bill? I don't know. I don't know what Bill look like. I'm Sam Stein managing out of the Billwork. I'm subbing in for Bill, who gets a well-deserved day off. I'm joined by Andrew Eager, author of Morning Shots. We're here to talk about a lot of things. But first, we got to talk about Anthony Fauci, because Andrew is really worked up. Andrew normally hosts the show, but he's so fired up that I felt like he should just cook and I can set it up for him. Andrew, why don't you set the stage about why you're so fired up? Yeah, this is sort of strange because on one level, Anthony Fauci has been a villain of the online right for many years. He's one of the boogie men. There's been a lot of lying about him, a lot of attributing, basically laying all. of the, all of the sins of any lib-coded person, anybody saw saying anything they didn't like about

the pandemic online, all through the pandemic at Fauci's feet. It has really hit a new level recently. And it's been the last few weeks with Rand Paul and Ron Johnson, these senators trying to bring Fauci back into the public consciousness, ginning up a new two-minute's hate against him. And we've written about this. We've talked about this. what came out yesterday was some of the most just shocking and cynical and misleading and grotesque disinformation from public officials maybe setting aside the stop the steel stuff and just stuff that Trump does personally and his own sort of psychotic inability not to lie but just from anybody else the stuff that they are accusing Fauci of now and the remarkable stuff they are laying at his

feet just goes beyond basically anything I've ever seen. So yes, I'm a little worked up about it. Should I just kind of set the stage? No, I'll set the stage and I'll let you cook. That's how this is going to work today. Perfect. And folks, if I interrupt Andrew, it's only because he's just, I need to cool him down a little bit. We talked about this. Usually I host the show. If I hosted the show today, I do not know how Sam would get a word in. So this is, yeah. Don't get mad of me in the comments. I'm just trying to make this train stay on the tracks.

All right, so long story short, Foucher's obviously hauled in before Senator Rampal's committee. He pled the fifth. In the process of these investigations, they also obtained Fauci's work cell phone. And they now have access to the text that he was sending in and around the COVID pandemic. And you know how this goes usually, which is they find the most contextless bits of texts that he was sending and they're going to dribble them out. and put them out there for the right-wing commentary and the Twitterati to go nuts. And so yesterday, they put out a text from Fauci. And I think it was what?

Winter of 2021, roughly. January, 2021. Yes, very beginning of that year. So beginning of the year, the vaccine for COVID had just kind of come online a little bit. There was concerns, uncertainty around it. Like, what were the side effects? You know, they'd obviously rush this into existence, and you can't test these things on pregnant women, right? Like you can't.

You're not ethically allowed to do that. So Fauci exchanged a text where he more or less says, yeah, there is concerns out there about whether or not this vaccine may cause elevated instances of miscarriage. But that's all he says. He doesn't say I have proof. he acknowledges that there is a concern out there. And he sort of suggests that they're going to go and properly test it and make sure that that's not the case. And lo and behold, they did that. And they tested it.

They made sure it wasn't the case. There's real world data. There's investigations into this. Turns out that COVID vaccine is perfectly safe for pregnant women. But this did not stop the online right from acting as if he had basically, and I'm not even sure what they're basically saying he knew that it was going to cause something like 80% mortality or sorry, miscarriage rate for pregnant women. And then he just went with it anyway. Yeah, it's, it's what it is. What it is is it's misreadings stacked on top of misreadings, stacked on top of misreading, stacked on top of just like insane

assertions about the way the world is right now. Here is the text from Anthony Fauci. This is January 25, 2021. Do we have it? Can we pull it up or now? I don't know if we have a picture. I'm going to read it. Since many people have significant cytokine storm and fever after the second. dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the first trimester. This comes in the middle of a conversation, a text conversation he's having with a couple of other honchos at the CDC about possible avenues for, like theoretical avenues for side effects that they will need to be watching out for as they test this vaccine data. As you mentioned a minute ago, Sam, it is sort of a quirk of the way that we test vaccines and any medications in this country that typically the earliest

tests exclude pregnant women. They're just not part of the tests. There are some people who say that is a wrongheaded approach and that pregnant women should be tested for exactly this reason. We end up with this data gap for brand new medications. Yeah, but obviously the flip side of it is that you don't want to endanger babies, right? There are good arguments on both sides of this, and we don't necessarily need to get into that right now. But factually, this is what had happened. Pregnant women had been excluded from the earlier testing. So there was this data gap. The CDC had rolled out these vaccines. They had just gotten their emergency authorizations. And most people were now sort of gradually being being phased in for eligibility for these things. But because of this data

gap, the CDC had a lag time in their recommendations for pregnant women. The CDC at this moment in time was not recommending that pregnant women be vaccinated with the COVID shots. They weren't recommending against it either. There was a little bit of a dust up that the World Health Organization had said these shots have not have not yet had sufficient testing on pregnant women for us to make a recommendation. So we are actually recommending against pregnant women getting it. The CDC had had gone a different path. They had said it's available. You should talk to your health care provider about it. We don't have any reason to believe that this will lead to miscarriages, but there is this this sort of question mark in the data because of what we've seen so far at this

moment in time in early January, that was already starting to go away. And this is one of the things that these guys are pointing to as a supposed smoking gun, because Fauci got up on a public Q&A a few days later, and he said, I want to be careful, but we have now seen about 10,000 pregnant women get this shot. We have not yet observed any red flags about miscarriages. And this is the, again, the supposed smoking gun here is that they look at that text message where he mentions a theoretical association of miscarriage. They misread that just on the grounds of what it is saying exactly. They pretend that what he is saying is that there is good reason to believe that this shot will lead to miscarriages. And then they point to what he said a few days later that they have yet to see that in the data.

And they say, well, Anthony Fauci is saying one thing in public and another thing in private. Again, that part, even just that far, it's not true. It has already fallen apart. How do they get to 80%? How do they get to 80s to figure? That's the other thing I was just going to say because this is where it goes from just wrong to like the most insane thing you've ever heard in your life. There was one study that was circulated, and specifically one sort of tendentious interpretation of one study that was circulating already among genuine antivacs cranks throughout 2021,

where there was a specific study that looked at, you know, a couple hundred women who had had adverse events happen in their pregnancies that they basically said, it's actually hard to explain because it gets kind of technical here. But basically, they looked at a specific cohort of first trimester women. They said, hey, of all these women who have completed their pregnancies, actually lots of these women, as many as 80% of this small cohort of women in this cohort of data had miscarriages, that seems really high. The problem was that the cohort of women they were looking at were women who had completed pregnancies. if a woman in that cohort had had a healthy pregnancy that had not ended in miscarriage or premature birth or something like this, that pregnancy would not yet have been completed. these women were still pregnant.

It was not yet six to nine months on. So you're looking at a data set of pregnancies for which something has gone wrong. And you're saying, wow, most of these pregnancies had something go wrong. It was just a quirk of data. This was already debunked months after this. There were politic fact articles and these sorts of things coming out in like late 2021 about this particular talking point. More to the point, not just was this one argument debunked, but we got pounds and pounds. and reams and reams of new, better data,

because millions and millions of pregnant women got these vaccines. You know, slowly at first, because of this lag time in these recommendations, but some did, and then more did, and then more did, and then more did. Meanwhile, all this data is being stringently monitored by public health authorities.

They keep looking at it. They keep kicking the tires on it for possible connections to adverse events like miscarriage. And good news, there isn't any. We're all very happy to report. They keep saying the data looks good. The data looks good. They're looking for it.

They're looking at it. And it's fine. And it's good. And we should all be so happy. We should be happy. It was an amazing thing. It was a miracle that we got these shots and they worked and they did what it said on the 10. And they didn't have these horrible events.

I mean, like the. Let's. Yes. Okay. But let me just say one other thing about this because I know. I know. I know. I know.

But, but and one other thing. I promise that people we were going to cook. So yes. But I mean, the fact that this talking point was already out there is so important in all of this because it's not like some new thing that these senators turfed up in the data where they're like, oh, my gosh, this is like a smoking gun. And that now you can kind of be like, oh, I see where you got that. It's wrong. It's unreasonable. Here's why. But I guess I see how you got there. Genuinely, what we are seeing right now is these senators in an attempt to get Fauci and make him look bad and accuse him of crime. of mass murder of, you know, a bazillion unborn babies in this country, in order to do that, they are mainlining and mainstreaming a completely discredited anti-back's quack talking point that was in, that was, you know, reserved for the craziest most lunatic parts of the right-wing internet five years ago. That is driving right-wing discourse on these matters today. So let's talk about how this starts.

So it starts with an article or with a tweet from one of the centers, but really the main article that came up that sparked this was a New York Post piece. Headline, Fowager probably warned of miscarriage risks linked to COVID vaccine while publicly claiming no issues, newly released text show. This thing gets picked up and just like wildfire spreads around the Internet predominantly on Twitter.com, X, the everything platform. I think we have a little montage, a little collage of some of the most offensive ones. Here we go.

Okay. So we have, where is that? My eyesight is really bad. I got to get glasses. Katie Pavich, who says the mandated and doctor recommended COVID-19 shot for pregnant women was effectively an abortion shot. According to new documents, just released by Senators Johnson and Paul. Again, Andrews debunk the 82% point already, but she just repeats it. Was it mandated?

I don't recall it being mandated, but I checked my history. I don't know. There were a lot of efforts under Biden to get as many people to take it as possible. They tried to get OSHA to require it things like this. Right. There was specific parts. Yeah. Years later, years later, once we had much more reliable data, there were a lot of attempts

to mandate this. Maybe some of those went overkill, whatever. But go ahead. Yeah. Okay, here's next order. Holy crap. Dr. Fauci was covering up data showing a miscarriage rate of over 80%. again, Andrew is sufficiently debunked it.

And pregnant woman who received MRI COVID vaccines in their first trimester. It was effectively an abortion shot. This is murder. Rand Paul retweeted him. We have down in the bottom, right, Mike Lee, not the most sane senator on Twitter. For Fauci and other Marxists,

was the likelihood of widespread fetal demise, a feature or a bug? We have Ron John up there, tweeting as well. I mean, this is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. I mean, this is everywhere. If you dare to click on one of these tweets, your algorithm was going to be absolutely overwhelmed with this stuff.

And it was completely devoted context. The thing that sort of struck me is like, it wasn't just that they were kind of whistling past all the other data and contemporaneous developments that were happening at the time. Literally, and this is what we got into your piece, was that the current CDC, the current Trump CDC, recommends that pregnant women get the COVID shot.

I mean, it's right there on the website. It doesn't take much to just research CDC vaccine and COVID and pregnant women. Sorry. And you'll see right there at the second to last bullet point. It says COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy has not been linked to increased health risk for pregnant women or babies. It helps reduce the risk of severe illness from COVID-19. That last point is sort of something I want to talk about a little bit is getting COVID carries risks. if you're pregnant. It does.

Like, it does carry risks. Is that just not factoring into this conversation online, Andrew? None of it is factoring in. I mean, like, you say that I, you know, you read a couple of those. You're like, Andrew has sufficiently debunked this. But I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of all of the stuff that's crazy about these. It's you and Medi Hassan just basically pushing against an avalanche of disinfo on line right now. Yeah, I mean, I mean, have these people walked outside a day in their life?

I mean, like, do any of these people remember? even slightly what it was like to live through the pandemic and the insane moving target that all of this stuff was. I mean, like, the thing that really like just makes me berserk about this story is what those texts from Fauci show in that moment is that in fact, the public health authorities were doing exactly what these people supposedly wanted them to be doing. It's exactly, it shows them doing exactly what they're being accused of not doing. It shows them carefully monitoring the data. It shows them, you know, thinking up any potential risk to pregnant women, two, two, you know, fetuses to unborn babies, that any particular potential risk that could be out there, anything they can think of. They're like, we have to be watching for this.

We have to be watching for this. There's this concern out there. There's that concern out. Pause for a second. Pause for a second. Because one of the arguments I've heard not just from the cranks on the right, but from leftists is that, well, if you should have publicly disclosed that this was something he was looking into. And I'm like, why would he do that? There was no data to support it.

You got to actually test, run these accusations and these theories before you come out. And, you know, the risk obviously is you come out and say, look, we're looking into the possibility that this vaccine might have adverse effects cause miscarriages. And then suddenly, like, you've actually spread the information that is erroneous. Yeah, these people, I mean, these people live in a fantasy land. I'm sorry. The idea, the idea that what responsible public health messaging looks like is for Anthony Fauci to get up there and say, we are carefully monitoring this vaccine for any potential adverse effects we can think of that it could, in theory, have. Some things we've imagined that it could maybe do, we don't know, include miscarriage. Maybe it'll kill you.

We don't know. That's possible. We're going to watch out and make sure it doesn't like they're going to rattle off, you know, a list of nightmare scenarios that no data has ever suggested is a link between at a time when like people, people throw around the idea that like these guys are encouraging vaccine update, vaccine uptake as though that's some kind of dirty thing. I'm sorry, this vaccine ended up lifting us out of the pandemic without these side effects.

It was good that they were encouraging vaccine uptake. It was also good that they were monitoring the vaccine to make sure that no bad things were going to happen alongside of that. I mean, look, that impulse, the thing you're mentioning, it's not just some leftist people, there's some kind of institutional right, the sort of Normie Republican types who do this thing, too, where they're basically saying, you know, ultimately this sort of mass distrust and all this disinformation and misinformation and stuff, you have to lay it more or less at the feet of these institutions and the human failures you've seen from these institutions.

And I get why people say that. I guess I'm sympathetic to that on some level. It is insane whistling past the graveyard about this particular thing in this instance. It's like a psychological crutch because it is nice for people to be able to imagine. I think you're being too generous. I don't like, look at, we'll get to this topic in a little bit. Hold on. You've talked a lot.

You've talked a lot. You're going to come up 80% of the way through my point. It's nice for these people to say, I'm not going to steamroll you a lot, but let me just say this. It's nice for these people to be able to believe that if only Anthony Fauci had like done this, slightly better or that other thing slightly different that this giant wave of lying about him wouldn't be happening. And because it's, because it's, it's like, it's disconcerting to realize how much just straight up malicious lying drives discourse in this country. People don't want to think that. They want to think, well, if Fauci had behaved better, this wouldn't be happening to him.

But it's wrong. It's misguided. It's, it's like baby thinking. It's just not, it's stupid. I don't like it. I grow up with people. I agree with you. But I think of being too kind because I don't think it's fair at all to argue that Fauci has this responsibility to just open the books everywhere at all times to make sure that like, you know, your wild conspiracy is something that he's looking into. The thing, and we'll get to this later because I still want to stick with Fauci and the COVID storyline. But like the thing that really gets me angry is around autism and vaccines. Because here you have a group of people who've basically taken up this debunk theory, decades-long debunk theory, and they're, you know, constantly raising questions about whether autism is caused by vaccines.

And, you know, they're not doing like the placebo trials and all stuff. And then they're like, well, you know, it's really the CDC's fault for the lack of trust in vaccines because they're just not transparent of. It's like, no, you guys have been sowing this distrust for decades. You're the ones who caused it. And then you turn around and say, well, it's up to the CDC. see to really show us the books to make sure that my crazy theory is not true. Yeah.

Look how this works. Yeah. I mean, like, like, hopefully this is not like an insane example. Donald Trump has these theories about forest fires, right? He's like, we mismanaged the forests. We should have cleared out more brush from before. You know, these forestry practices are partially to blame for all the stuff that we have going on.

What we are seeing from these like Fauci people right now is like if, if some people who were saying that were also like serial arsonists. They're going around actively lighting all these forest fires, you know, for years and years while also saying, you know, it's really this big forestry issue, you know. They really have nobody to blame but themselves. Like, that's where we're at with this stuff. And by the way, I don't want people to get the wrong idea. I do not agree that that that mode of analysis, that like, you know, clean up your own house institutions thing. I understand that as an argument.

I think it applies for some elite institutions. I think there are places where that argument has been fair to make against, you know, the media at times or, you know, higher education at times, whatever. It does not apply here in the Fauci situation. It's never applied here in the Fauci situation except on a couple of little things, like that one early masking recommendation that people have been signing out on ever since. And like the fact that he poo-pooed the lab theory too much. I'm sorry, these are small ball compared to all this other stuff.

These are not the reason why people are saying that 80% of vaccinated women miscarried after they got these shots. Two things, and then we can move on. First, I want to put up the Alex Berenson tweet because if you don't know who Alex Barrinson is. Oh, my God. This is a pressure. Alex is one of the great Fauci critics of our time.

He was an early skeptic about CDC protocols and he's been a very big critic of RNA vaccines. And you talked about dining out. He has dined out. Even he saw through this one. This is in response to Katie Povic's tweet. about the COVID-19 shot causing miscarriages. He writes, this is fiction. If it were true, the birth rate in mRNA countries would have dropped to near zero in 2021

in 2022. Please don't lie about this. It's too important. So that just gives you sense. Kudos to Alex, I suppose. Sure, but he's spitting in the wind, right? 70,000 views on that tweet. I mean, like millions and millions.

How much are on Katie's? Seven million, I think, last time I looked. I'm going to look it up. You haven't had any problem talking. Let me look it up. You talk. I mean, that was the only thing I was going to say is just like this has become a new conventional wisdom on the right in like overnight. It took 24 hours for this to congeal as a thing that everybody knows about Anthony Fauci that he lied about these shots and he caused all these women to miscarry.

And this is just, it's completely fabricated. It's like eight lies, stacked, you know, standing on each other's shoulders, wearing a trench coat. And everybody believes it. now. Yeah. So Katie's tweet has 4.5 million. Slight disparity between her and Alex. She also is retreating people who are pushing back against Alex, including someone named,

I don't know who this is, Ashley Moore, who's responding to Alex with the exact same point that you talked about. Respectfully disagree. Any skepticism by public health officials should have been disclosed so pregnant women could make more of an informed decision. They didn't have the data. What are he supposed to do? I mean, it just flies in the face of, like, like, the whole point.

point of these apparatus is that these people are trying to be the public face of this data gathering operation. Fauci's tech should have been live streamed to the public. You should have no product because people don't have some hidden Gnostic knowledge about what these shots do and don't do. What they have is a scientific method for good, reasonable, accrual of data, analysis of data, and dispersion of data. The fact that the fact that Fauci imagined that this connection could exist should and did mean nothing to anybody unless it was later backed up by some data. And they should have been kicking the tires on that data. And they were kicking the tires on that data. Again, it just, it all went the way it was supposed to go. But like, people imagine that

it's weird because like public trust in these authorities is the lowest it's ever been. But in a weird way, it's all predicated on this, this understanding that these people are all knowing, that they have it all, you know, like that. That gets me to my question for you. Like, what is the actual, if you extend this logic to the, it's lot, if you extend this to its logical endgame, do they believe that Anthony Fauci was kind of this bloodthirsty satanic figure who was like actively trying to kill babies? Like, is that really what they think? I don't know about who they is here.

I'm sure there are a lot of people who are saying prosecute the guy, jail the guy, you know. I'm sure a lot of people would say, well, no, I'm not going to go that far, but plenty of them are. I mean, that was that Mike Lee tweet. That was that Mike Lee tweet. That's what I'm getting it. Mike Lee's like, is this a feature or bug? You have people who are like prosecute Fauci, jail him. He needs to be behind bars, you know, worse. Like death for Fauci. Yeah, think about the, this just not to put too fine a point on it, but that that bit of though,

is it a feature or a bug? The suggestion there from sitting U.S. Senator Mike Lee is that Anthony Fauci, the guy who, you know, he didn't single-handedly pulls out of the pandemic or anything like that, but he worked very hard to land the plane of the U.S. pandemic response with great success. he is just speculating, I guess, kind of as a joke that that maybe what Fauci was actually up to was like sort of rubbing his hands in this sort of gleeful, sinister way that he was going to trick a lot of women into miscarrying their babies. That just is so fucking evil and bad, right? I mean, just like his brain is rotting out and falling out of his ears and his soul is, you know, long since departed from his body. I don't know. What do you say?

What do you say about it? These, these, the, the other thing. And another thing. I don't know. I don't know. I was just, my point is merely that if you take Mike Lee's logic, he believes that Anthony Fauci actively wanted to see the deaths of, you know, fetuses. Yes.

Millions, millions of them. Because he's a Marxist. But why? Why would you want that? Marxists are evil. I don't know. There's no. There is no why.

None of these things have any deeper substructure. They're just doing a two-minute hate against one of the approved villains of the day. I don't know what to say about it. It's just that's that's all it is. All right. It's everywhere. We got to move on. We are 25 minutes in, which is great.

I thought we'd go 40, but I'm being told we need to move on because we have other topics. Luckily, it's the same kind of topic, though. Oh, my Lord. Yesterday, Donald Trump had an event. at the White House where he unveiled an executive order, long-rumored executive order, effectively breaking up the childhood vaccine schedule. You usually get one shot that's combined five shots. Trump decided he's going to break it up, although it's not clear that he actually can do this. We'll get into a little bit where he wants to just have five individual shots for your children.

We can play the video of Trump talking about the reasons why, but it more or less comes down to he thinks there's a lot of liquids. going into the baby at once, and he just doesn't think that you should put a vat of liquid in the baby. So let's listen to our president, talk about vaccines in a very educated and enlightened way. At one year, you should have five separate visits for vaccines, all in the same day. And I saw this early on, and I've seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination thing looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child's, body and bad things happen in many cases because this is an explosion this is an epidemic Sam you have some kids you've probably been to some pediatrician appointments in your time you ever you ever see any of this uh you ever get any of this uh soda bottle vaccines uh at any of those visits

what kind of soda bottle we talking about because there's different sizes that's what first came to mind I mean are we talking about a can I don't think you said can like that's that's a can he said bottle which is bigger. Either way, no, you don't have that much liquid. No, no. It's idiotic. I don't think he's ever gone and seen his kid get vaccinated. I don't think he knows what he's talking about.

I think this is highly damaging for obvious reasons. Now, let's just step back. They had tried to do this already. The courts intervened and stopped them from doing this. This is sort of their attempt to get around the court decision. it's not clear how you can do this. Obviously, the states are going to fight it. They're not going to say, oh, yeah, okay,

I guess we have to, like, spread out these vaccines. And then on top of that, it's not clear that even if they wanted to do it, that they can do it because, and Jonathan Cohen's going to write about this for the breakdown. Subscribe to the breakdown. Subscribe to the work. They don't manufacture single shots of the MMR. Sorry, MMR. The measles.

But yes, I'm getting my vaccines confused. They don't make single, they don't manufacture single shots. So that said, it's damaging. I mean, he is spreading distrust in vaccinations. There's plenty of people who look at this and say, oh, my God, the President of the United States said, I shouldn't do this. I'm not going to get my kid vaccinated. And we're already in the biggest measles outbreak in a long time. I think the last two years have been the most, whatever, since we got the vaccine in place.

So there's real damage that's going to come from this. Yeah, yeah. I mean, as far as the actual practical effects, hopefully they will not be large. I mean, like we have already seen a willingness from in the past, these sorts of recommendations from the CDC were extremely important. And they tended to drive actual policy on the ground because the major medical associations and the doctors and things knew this was like gold standard research, gold standard recommendations. They would tend to follow them. We've already seen a rupture here because these guys know these agencies are right now run by cranks and crackpots. We do not want to actually set our policy this way.

So the major medical associations have gone a different way from the CDC, from the president of the United States. It is very possible, even likely that on the ground there's going to be very little impact to the way you take your kids in to get vaccine. But I will say the potential danger is if they try to treat this as more. than a messaging thing, which is already bad enough. But if they actually try to, the way they have tried to really push the envelope on a number of other policy things, if they really try to use the levers of government to go after the company that manufactures the current MMR vaccine to try to force that off the market or something like that, then, you know, we don't know yet whether they're going to do that. But you could see this as a prelude to that. That would be real.

I think, yeah, I think that's one real problem. The other real problem is our states, that have wanted to do just this, and they've been stimmyed, but now they can turn around to the court and say, hey, look, there's an executive order. I've got to follow it. And then you're back in this situation. I think Idaho is one of those states, for instance. It does, you know, I was, you put this in Slack too,

but we have been talking about it. I think Conan and I have been talking about it separately, which is, you know, we've been so focused on RFK as this anti-vax lunatic force that we had forgotten that Trump is also, you know, a believer in this stuff. Especially around autism. He's been a long time, like,

he's a long time freak out about autism, rising autism rates. And especially around childhood vaccinations, which he's been perplexed at how much fluid is going into the child. And this really just underscores it. Because they did this. I mean, this was at Trump's behest.

This is an executive order of Trump's behest. I will also know, they waited until they got the CDC director confirmed by the Senate, like literally days after. so that she didn't have to deal with this shit. They know it's bad. So why do it now? Like, they know it's bad politically,

but Trump's just obsessed with this stuff. And so, hey, 84 days before the midterms, let's just have a vaccine conversation. Yeah, I mean, the other thing they got was one more really important vote out of Bill Cassidy to confirm Todd Blanche, right? I mean, that was just days ago. That's true, too.

That was the last thing they really needed out of Cassidy, at least for a little while. So you could make the argument that perhaps there was some strategic, strategic thought to this too. But yeah, this is the thing Trump has been Jonesing about forever, right? I mean, like, this was what brought him and RFK Jr. together as political figures. I mean, people forget Kennedy thought he was going to get a really top vaccines-related post in Donald Trump's first term. And then Trump kind of kicked him to the curb at the last second.

Well, Trump didn't kick him to. Advisors told Trump to kick him to the curb. They thought it was way too much. Right. I think the reporting was that Trump wanted it and he just got talked out of it. Yes, yes, yes. But then this is also what we have seen this time around where, you know, Robert of Kennedy, Jr. came out of the gate so hot on vaccines and he was maximally disruptive. He fired everybody

on the different vaccine advisory committees. He was getting in there promising to unearth the cure for autism within a number of months or, you know, to unearth the causes between vaccines and autism within a number of months, monkeying with the vaccine schedules already last year. White House advisors told him to cool it and he did. We have not heard so much from Robert of Kennedy Jr. This year and that comes specifically from the White House. But we have since gotten reporting, I believe this was in the Wall Street Journal, but maybe I'm wrong about that. But good reporting that suggests that is how the White House's political operation feels about all this stuff. It's not how the president feels at all. Even though RFK Jr. has scaled back on some of his, you know, really

public-facing efforts to chip away at America's pediatric vaccine schedule, the president has been saying, what the heck, Robert, what a ripp. Where's my vaccine autism stuff? Yeah, he does bring it up. when Bob is there. He's like, why is it taking so long? It's like a piece of reporting that Trump has told advisors that if Kennedy does not unearth the connection between vaccines and autism, his tenure as HHS Secretary will have been a failure. That's how the president feels about it. And this order yesterday, of course, was not Kennedy. Kennedy was there, but this was an executive order. This is coming right out of the big house. The president believes incorrectly that vaccines cause autism. And when he's not

busy, screwing up other stuff, he makes some time, carves out some time to screw up issue too. I want to play a little. So the event was both alarming, but it was also equal parts surreal. There was a video, Trump appeared to just completely pass out at one point during it. And then, I mean, that's true. Like, I'm not actually a believer that Trump passes out. And these things I think he just gets tired of glasses out, but he's kind of awake. In this one, it looks like he actually is asleep at various points. And then there's this woman who was there. I think her name is Jamie Franklin. She was a mom. who was concerned about vaccines.

She was invited there. She's wearing a nice scarf. She looks nice, but she's bobbing around, like, honestly, a robot. I don't want to begrudge her. It's a weird situation to be there, but she's bobbing like a robot. And this whole thing ended up having this very Wes Anderson vibe to it. We'll play this video. I'm going to probably demand that we play it a couple times, but let's play it first.

No, it's really funny. All right, yeah, let's do it. Look, you have to find humor. these moments. No, I agree. I'm not even sure I've seen this one. If we don't find humor in these moments, if we don't have humor, what do we have, Andrew? All right, let's watch the video. What you have given is parents a choice, autonomy, a decision making over how they want the vaccines given to their kids. I mean, I believe fundamentally that many vaccines are important. I've said measles, for instance, the measles vaccine is important if we want to take control of the measles

outbreak. But at the same time, we shouldn't be keeping kids out of school because they have made different decisions than other parents. Our European colleagues... Okay, that wasn't even the best one. There was a better one where I got to find it, but can we play our girl bobbing a little bit more, too? We have that video? What you have given is parents a choice,

autonomy, a decision-making over how they want the vaccines given to their kids. I believe... Yeah, that's funny, I guess. No, no, no, one second. All right. I've put it in our production channel. There's a specific video I want involving RFK.

Even the screen grab of it, I would take. But as that gets ready for a debut, if you have thoughts on Donald's. It's a funny picture. It's a funny picture. I don't know this woman from Adam. I don't know the first thing about her. I hesitate to make her.

Maybe I'm just so mad at everybody else that it's like. Oh, I'm not fine, fine with her. She can, Bob. Shekin Bob? That's fine. Okay, here's the real video. Hold on. This is the real one I wanted to play. Disease is universally recommended for vaccines from 17 to 11. Okay. And establishing distinct categories recommendations based upon the scientific evidence. For people, keep the thing up.

For people, because obviously, this is both on audio form too. Here's Arborov, Kenny Jr. holding a stack of papers trembling tremendously. Trump is totally sludged over. His head is just completely off to the side. He's bored out of his mind and he's tired. And Jamie is just absolutely bobbing. She's having the time of her life, Bobbin. And it does create a bit of a Wes Anderson vibe.

Yes, this one is a Renaissance painting. Let's have fun. Yeah, that is very much a Renaissance painting. And look, you have to try to find some slivers of joy in these dark moments. All right, we've got to go to break. On the flip side, we're going to be talking about pretty remarkable. New York Times, sorry, Washington Post story, Washington Post story about Donald Trump jetting off his jet in a catering truck, leaving reporters and White House staffers as decoys

potentially getting hit by Iran. It's all coming up after the break. This is brought to you by the New York Times. The amount of money that the Trump family has made since Donald Trump's gone back to the White House has become a defining feature of Trump's second term. This week, the New York Times investigative reporter, Ross Boutner, published a piece on yet another example. So this summer, Gurin Bobby Zow, who was a foreign national, came out of nowhere and bought about $100 million worth of tokens from Trump's World Liberty Financial. Who exactly is this guy? Well, Ross followed the money. He searched through confidential documents and court records and conducted dozens of interviews to help uncover who exactly Bobby Zow really is and what he was really

they doing investing in Trump's cryptocurrency? The reporting you depend on like that is what this show depends on. And it starts long before the headline. It's not just the Times. It's the journal. It's ProPublica. It's your local newspaper. Anywhere reporters are still working a beat. They gather all the facts. They find the story. They talk to all their sources and they distill it all down so you can learn what matters most in just minutes. And that's what journalists do to keep us informed. So, wherever you seek it out, nationally, locally, support fact-based reporting. Do you support fact-based reporting? Yeah, I like this new thing where we have ads with news in them. I feel like I I think I missed that particular New York Times headline a couple days ago. So I learned something

from the ad. And it wasn't just about like a pocket hose or something like that. You know, I'm upset you mentioned pocket hose, a little bit of a diversion. They haven't been advertising with us all that much recently. And I'm sad about it. out of because as everyone knows, I'm a huge truck. I'm a huge pocket hose fan. And in fact, I need a new pocket hose because the one I've had for like four or five years now, it broke, finally, which is good. Just to be clear, the life of a hose is not indefinite. Like, they break. And, you know, when your kids are pulling them a lot, sometimes it breaks. I've, I've, I've loved my pocket hose. All right. You don't need to give them a whole other ad. I think,

I think, uh, I just just saying, I like, if they're watching, if you're watching, send me a new one. Okay. Like imagining that boardroom meeting where we're like, wow, that Sam Stein, really enthusiastic pitch man, but I feel like, like he's sort of becoming the center of attention here. We need a slightly more boring guy to advertise the podcast. He's too into us. I can't take this. All right, let's talk about this story. So the post breaks this insane bombshell story. Basic gist, Donald Trump, when he's flying back from, he was in Turkey. And he gets a threat from, there's a credible threat that Iran is going to target Air Force One. He's already on the Katari one, like the new one that he's been

gifted. He's going to switch to the former Air Force one, which is just sort of the actual Air Force one. But then in a little bait and switch, he gets off the plane while no one is paying attention, boards a food truck, a catering cart that had like kind of gone up to the level to just sneak him out on the other side and goes into a smaller military aircraft, leaving everyone behind, unbeknownst to them, they all assumed he was on the plane, including the reporters. And there's like a bunch of different elements to this that we can unpack. But to me, I mean, the deception is crazy, obviously. The inability of this Katari jet to be up to snuff so that the president can use it is obviously a scandal.

But like, I can't get over the fact that the White House and the Secret Service were like, okay, there's a huge credible threat to Air Force One. It's so serious that we cannot let the president fly in our first one, but we'll let the reporters in the way to staff flying our first one. Yeah, do we have, do we have that video of I don't remember. Should we, should we play that real quick? We could play. Yeah, yeah. There wasn't a security concern. No, no. Do you know why they had us close our window blinds?

That was. Well, yeah, because you're probably on a dangerous way because it, because it, this leaves. these bags that we have to do. I think that Iran was possibly thinking. Well, I mean, if they asked you to close your windows, probably they didn't ask me to close mine, but if they did, I would have done it. Were you aware of any credible threat by Iran against her first one? I have a threat all the time.

I'm number one on their list before you. But if I go, you go. Right? So perhaps something you want to change the amount of visits. Professions. The ease of which he lies is amazing. If I go, you go. Actually, no.

in this case, it's just us going. And then also the window closings, that doesn't, in rea, in retrospect, it made no sense whatsoever. What are they, like, looking through, they got, like, binoculars and, like, looking through the windows for the right one to hit, like, didn't make any sense.

I don't know. I do not want to weigh in on any of these specific elements, just because I don't know anything about this stuff, right? Like, like, it doesn't seem, I will say, it does not seem to me crazy to think that, like, maybe there's a, there's a threat here that, that doesn't rise to the level of, like, we can't let this plane take off, but that's sort of like a precautionary thing where you

move the president, you fly him out of the country in a way that you don't expect. I mean, like that seems fair. At the same time, obviously, it's not exact. I mean, Donald Trump never been sort of notorious for his human sympathy toward journalists or the people who work for him, any of this stuff. Those comments there are insane. I like the video. I mean, it's just so surreal because there is actually video footage of the moment.

Yeah, we can play that too. Yeah, like, let's just do that because he gets into this, what do you call it? Like a catering cart. Let me just be clear, because Andrew's right. I don't begrudge Trump for switching planes. Like, you absolutely have to switch planes if you feel there's a threat. I think it would have been a national calamity and a huge emotional psychic and political shock, civic shock to the country if something horrible had happened, I think people are,

you should not cavalierly dismiss that. All right. So like that that's all true. I just like I feel like the report is probably deserved a little bit more. We're talking about like revealing information of risk. This is like a little bit. This one seems to hit hit them. I do not I do not think. I mean like again, we know we know nothing about what the nature of the threat was other than what's been reported. But I do not think they take that plane off if they think there's a genuine strong chance that somebody shoots a missile at it with a bunch of White House staff and reporters on board. I mean like just they would keep the plane grounded. Right. Like am I am insane? Am I insane? No, you're probably right. It just seems also they didn't review, but they didn't, yeah, well, whatever. Let's play the video because the video is kind of interesting of Trump trying to get into the cart. All right. So there he is for those watching. He's already boarded Air Force One, the old Air Force One.

He's walked up those stairs. And you can see they put a square on the cart truck, the catering truck, which is on the other side of Air Force One. Meanwhile, the media is boarding on the other stairs, which are at the back, the catering truck is pulling away from the plane. unbut not to them, Trump's on that bad boy. It's still going. And then it's pulling up at the rear of the military aircraft. No one can see. Let's play one more time. It happens so fast. Trump, let's play one more time, please. Okay, here we go again. Trump, he's boarded. He's going on the plane.

Door closes. Catering truck is right there on the other side of the plane. It's got, it's elevated so he can get onto it. Now as the media is boarding in the back of Air Force One, the truck is pulling away from Air Force One, and it's driving to the military aircraft. What is your vision of Trump in a catering truck look like? This is what is so magical about the story to me, because it actually does seem like on the merits this was the right thing to do. I think it's good that we have these sorts of procedures in place to protect our top people, you know, when they're traveling in dangerous areas. You know, kudos to the Secret Service. Kudos to everybody for coming up with this plan. And at the same time, it's just so funny to imagine. Trump, like, in the back of that thing, you know, like squeezed him between the chafing dishes, you know, like. You think he was sampling the food? Yeah, I bet he was. Maybe.

There probably shouldn't be food left on it, right? They just used that truck to stock Air Force One. But maybe they left him a little booty bag. Who knows? I suppose. I bet they had a few snacks on there. Probably Diet Coke for the big guy, just in case he needed it. He needs it.

He does need. He loves his Diet Coke. So there's two other things to talk about with respect to the story. One is that just coming up. I know, right? Like, it's been a month since the NATO summit, which is where he was, and he's flying back from. And they just kept it secret. Like, they never disclosed any of this. Don't they have, I feel like they have an obligation to disclose it. They should be disclosed it. You don't, why?

Teams fine. Teams fine. I don't know. Like, every, every strategy you used to keep the president safe, you use it once and then you burn it by telling everybody about it. I don't know. It seems fine to me. Okay. Some reporter you are. All right, too. I don't have reported the story. It's a great story. It's an amazing. amazing scoop. Reporters generally like to have as much public information out there as possible on the locations and the threats against the president and the possibility that their own colleagues' lives

may have been in danger. I think it's a good scoop. I'm glad they reported it. But it sounded like you were saying that they had like some obligation to say after the fact that they didn't lose it. The American public deserves to know. The American public absolutely deserves to know if the president had to get out of his own jet for safety precautions. Yeah.

Yeah, I can see that. It's also, Air Force One is not his jet. You know, okay? Like, this stuff actually does matter. American-Bubba absolutely deserves to know that. All right. Secondly, is the Katari jet. That bad boy is just not ready for prime time.

Like, what the hell? Which is fine, right? I mean, like, as far as he's concerned, like the president, what Trump really cares about is getting to have it forever, right? And it doesn't have to actually be outfitted to serve the president's needs to sit there looking cool in his presidential library later. But that's not the one. Didn't you see that? I thought Eric Trump said that that's not the one that's going to be in the presidential library.

Really? Oh, I didn't see that. Huh. Let's pull it up if we can as we talk. I believe Eric Trump told NBC News that he, that they were not going to put the Katari jet in the library, that they were going to do the one of the original Air Force ones, which makes no sense to me, unless they're leaving the Katari jet for the next president. But that doesn't make sense either. Like what's where does that? check go? They're just going to

liquidate it? Are they going to strip out copper wiring and fill it on eBay? I legitimately think they plan on Trump just using it on a post-presidential basis. It would be a remarkable, here we go. Okay, look at man. He's just pulling shit up. Plans seem

as clear cut as unorthodox. After he leaves, President Donald Trump said the Katari gifted plan that he has used as Air Force One will be displayed at his new presidential library. But that idea appears to be scrapped. President son Eric Trump told NBC News in a text message Tuesday that the plane at Qatar donated to the Defense Department this year for president travel isn't the one that will go to the library complex in

Miami once Trump leaves office. No, quote, quote, no. That's not the plan at the moment for Miami, Eric Trump wrote. His comments are a twist in the saga of the lavish plane, which Trump just deemed as an appropriate emblem of American prestige in which the tractor sees as an unseemly exercised presidential power. So either there's one of two options here, or there's three, suppose. Eric Trump's just totally misinformed. It has no idea he's talking about. Can't roll that out.

Two is they take the Katari jet and don't put it on display and he uses it. And then three is Trump will display an old Air Force one as leverage, which Matt says is actually going to happen. And then we don't know what happens with the Katari jet. This is wild. That's psychologically so interesting. I don't know whether this is true. This is just like a possibility that popped into my,

mind. It is kind of funny to imagine that maybe after all of this, Trump finally gets his hands on the Katari jet, and then it becomes kind of this embarrassing thing. You know, he has plainly been aggravated that, like, he's been flying it, and then he's been realizing as they're flying it, that there are these security features that it's missing, and he's had to switch back to the other one. Maybe some of the shine has come off the Katari jet for the president. Maybe maybe he's back to thinking that the old Air Force ones are actually the cooler, more prestigious ones. Yeah, it's like, I'm not putting no two-bit, you know, Kmart Katari Jet in my presidential library, I'm getting one of the real ones and you people figure out. Hear me out. Maybe this is what happened. Just hear me out. Maybe he

looked around and said, wait a second. The Katari Jet doesn't have a door on the other side if I need to get into the catering. He's obsessed. The man's addicted to like sneaking around in the back of a catering truck now. He had the time of his life. I want my catering cart off ramp. What the fuck? I thought this came with a retrofitting. All right, before we go, we have one more thing I want to talk about, and we'll do it briefly because we're getting along here. Man, yeah. Story dropped this morning that the Office of Legal Counsel,

which is the White House Office of Lawyers, has put together a new memo around executive privilege of presidential communications, and more or less what they're doing is they're saying that presidential communications, executive privilege will now apply with private advisors, so long as the communications relate to official presidential decision-making, involve or reflect communications with the president or his director of advisors,

and are confidential. This is a, I think, underappreciated EO, if that's what it is, because, and Chuck Todd was right to point it out. I don't know if we have Chuck's tweet, but Chuck says, so the White House is trying to extend executive privilege to private citizens that communicate with the POTUS in the White House, legally dubious for sure. But the mere existence of this memo is the White House.

House acknowledging a future with congressional subpoenas targeting the private sector who did quote unquote deals with Trump and his family and friends. And I think Chuck absolutely nails it. The White House does not want Congress sniffing around all these companies that donated to all these shady accounts or that gave Trump, you know, 12-carat gold, you know, microphones or whatever the fuck is adorning the White House. And we'll see if this is enough of a cover for those companies to say, nah, we're not doing it.

I'm glad they're thinking about this stuff. I'm glad they're flowing a little. You know? It is. I hear you because they know that their time's up and they see the writing on the wall. Is that it? That shit's coming. Shit's coming.

And it should. We'll see. Okay, we got a hot egger today. I'm so glad I got to harness this. You know, we should harness. This could fuel a couple data centers in and around the country. So we need to figure out a way to convert. People are ready for my Data Center, take.

I don't want it. I've done 53 minutes. I'm exhausted. Enough. All right, Andrew, pleasure is always, my brother. Hey, let me say, thanks, Sam, for coming on because I shanghide Sam into this because bills off today. So we had a good one.

Thanks, Sam. I appreciate it. It's always a pleasure. And folks, we make promises all the time to do crazy stuff if you subscribe to the feed and YouTube. The other one, the other day I said I would wear my Riesling hat. I'm a big fan of Riesling wine. I don't know if you knew this about me, Andrew.

If we got to, what was it, 250 subs off the video, we did not reach 250. But if you want to try 250 for this one, just hit that subscribe button and we're monitoring the data. And if we get to 250, I will wear my reselling hat on air. It's a really important hat. You'll love it. You're supposed to be, like, excited? I don't know. I was thinking about the things to offer them.

That's all I had. I'll come up with better prizes. All right. If not, subscribe to our substack, which is where you get great writing from Andrew and others. It's really honestly a great deal. And you support mission-oriented journalism and you become part of an incredible community that has conversations just like this. Till then, take care.