MTracey podcast - Holy Day livestream with Batya Ungar-Sargon

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

After being effused with excessive praise, I get a chance to ask Batya about something that’d been bugging me for the past year. Namely: does she care to revise her April 2025 description of Trump as the “21st century FDR,” because Trump, like FDR, is purportedly “socially moderate, anti-interventionist, and committed to America’s blue collar workers as the backbone of this country.” Because that description never made much sense to me! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mtracey.net/subscribe

We're live. Oh, I was going to crack some racist jokes. I was just saying, I wonder, there's probably not a lot of overlap between our followers because I feel like there's so much siloing going on and we're not really in the same silo. I just love your work. And so it's kind of awesome to get this cross-pollination going. I'm not sure most people would be thrilled to cross-pollinate with me given the biological origins of that term. Okay, I'm just tweeting out the link to the stream.

Oh, awesome. I should do that too. You don't really have to. I'll retweet it. Okay. Oh, no, then I have to go into my mentions. Don't forget it. Always a cesspool.

Forget it. I can't, I can't handle this. Okay, okay, I just put it out. Okay, awesome. Yeah, so like I said, I broke the Sabbath to be here. And this is the holiest of all Sabbaths for the Christian religion, the religion of Christianity. You might be familiar with it. We can go back to a precursor of Christianity and ask, why is tonight different in all other nights?

And the answer would be because Donald Trump has said praise be to Allah. Michael, come on. You didn't think that was funny at all. Like, no part of you chuckled. I'm not finding him really amusing much anymore. At least when he's threatening some kind of escalatory military action. Of course, he can always crack a joke that's funny. He has some wise cracks that still make me chuckle.

But when he's talking about blowing up the whole of Iran, which he is... To me, that was a de-escalatory joke. We're going to get to that, though, because we're definitely going to talk about that. because I know that that's one of the areas that we don't agree. But can I ask you a bunch of questions first? And then we'll... Yeah, yeah, sure. Okay, awesome.

I mean, I am risen. So what else am I here for? Okay. So one of the things that really draws me to your work is that you don't seem at all... Like, bother either... You neither are bothered. by criticism, nor are you pleased by opprobrium? It's like you kind of are, you're like a pure, like the platonic ideal of what a journalist is supposed to be. And I think my, like,

you just really has gone downhill. You're just so iconoclastic in the way that you just, there's just this sense that whatever you think the truth is, that is the thing you are saying. And neither bothered by the immense amounts of criticism. get nor in any way please by the most you know the times that people are like whoa this is real michael tracy was right about that so i guess my first question to you is when you're sitting down to write a piece or to to put something a piece of journalism out there does a part of you is there anything in you that wants to convince like do you have a feeling of like this is where the nation is at this is where they need to be they're getting this wrong like to me the top the big stories that i first noticed

you on were 2020, you know, Summer of Love, George Floyd rioting, you were out there. It was like, CNN was lying all day and it was like, you're jalopy, you know, in the background, like getting the real story out there as these cities were burning. And then, of course, the Epstein. And we'll get into both of those. But in both of those cases, did you have a sense of, like, wanting to impact the discourse and change the way the nation thought about these issues? Or were you just like, I have to tell the truth because I am Michael Tracy, like, tell

me about what it feels like when you're putting this work out there? No, I never have a conscious intent to make any kind of holistic change in public attitudes, meaning I have some sort of pre-existing ideology that I want to align the rest of the nation with, and perhaps I can do that by doing a particular kind of journalism or covering a particular subject, in part because I actually don't even have any sort of totalizing ideological. view in that sort of way anymore. When I was younger, I had certain approximations of that. I guess you would say that would be more seen as progressive or whatever.

But as the years have gone by, I think whatever remnants of a political ideology that I did have, meaning political ideology in a classical sense or in a sense that most people would understand of political ideology ideology to consist of. That's sort of tapered off more and more and has been supplanted by what, for better or worse, does seem more like just a quintessentially journalistic worldview. That obviously applies to what I do journalistically, first and foremost, but also characterizes the rest of how I perceive the world, meaning I don't have any kind of rob-based program that I have enough confidence in.

politically that I would try to impart on everybody else. And in fact, I'm more and more wary of ideological vigor, you know, or those who claim that they have sweeping ideological answers to things, whether that's left, right, or anywhere in between. So the 2020 riots, that was, again, probably just a pure journalistic. impulse, which conveniently enough for me allows me to just

do stuff that I would be interested anyway and then figure out a way to cleverly monetize it. So it's a nice gig, I guess, if you can get it. Because I had a very strong sense that

what we were being shown algorithmically or even within the mainstream media precincts, actually probably most especially at that time, the mainstream media precincts. And also alternative media didn't do a right job. Much of that, I have to say, as well. Although alternative media has gotten exponentially worse since then.

I just felt like I needed to inquire for myself to the best I could. And it wasn't that complicated. Like it wasn't, quote, rocket science. It wasn't some amazing feat of investigative journalism. I literally just got in my car. and went across the country. Like, it's something that Joe Schmoe could have done if he was interested. But a lot of people still talk to me about that to this day because I guess it was somehow massively revolutionary.

But I also did it, I guess, like maybe in the context of the media of 2020, it was revolutionary because I set out on that quest or that journalistic journey with. without a mission to kind of vindicate or discredit the protest movement or the sort of related ideological fervor that was being germinated at such warp speed. So I think just by necessity, I did end up doing a lot more, quote, debunking or critical examination of some of the tenets of that mania because it had all congeny. yield so quickly into this moralistic fervor that almost inevitably, whatever direction the moralistic fervor that's so expeditiously comes together, it's inevitably going to have embedded within it lots of contradictions or weird anthropological features, maybe that are worth pointing out and strange sort of political extrapolations being made from it. So I did lots of that because I don't think people had a great sense of what the scope and nature of the protest movement really even was.

And I remember like there would be international media covering the early days of that protest movement. And it would be they would be called race riots or race protests or race. They were basically analogizing it to the ghetto uprisings, quote unquote, of the 1960s in places like Wilmington, Delaware or Newark, New Jersey. or Detroit. Was it the word of Detroit? I think so. And that just was not what was going on at all. It was multifaceted,

but the pattern that I came to detect, most prominently in Minneapolis, where it began, was that the initial social disorder was essentially instigated by very ideologically driven younger activist types who were largely white, not exclusively, but largely white, who probably had some beliefs

in the realm of anarchism or accelerationism, right? And then, so once they do, like, the initial wave of arson activities in Minneapolis, it creates a vacuum in the public resources or the municipal services such that police are focused on like a fire that's engulfing the vicinity of the target or like a liquor store or something. And then they're basically absent from other parts of the city where then the more local largely black population kind of opportunistically or incidentally says, hey, I guess we can, you know, loot now or something, right? and that was just on a dynamic that was really captured at all in any of the coverage that I had seen

and still hasn't been really. I did some stuff on it. So that was a fault of the mainstream media, quote-unquote, and also somebody said the alternative media, but I also remember observing that there's plenty of conservative media or right-wing media that's pretty well-endowed at this point. And they also, theoretically, could have done a journalistic inquest akin to the uncomplicated one, fundamentally, that I did. But I wasn't seeing much of that either, because what were they mostly looking for? It's kind of ordinary, partisan sort of Zinger-type coverage where, I don't know, maybe you goof on some 20-year-old girl who's screaming something a little bit silly at a protest, which I'm not totally above, I admit. But I wouldn't make that to some total of my coverage, right?

It was too partisan. So, like, for example, I remember a lot of people, I don't know if you recall this at the time in 2020, we're saying, oh, the backlash to these riots is so obviously going to redound to the electoral advantage of Trump because he's seen as the candidate of law and order or what have you. But that wasn't consistent with what I was seeing and hearing when I would speak to people in that Trump himself was viewed as an agent of chaos in his own right in a way.

And he does fan the flame. James famously. And then sure enough, when you look at the Minnesota state election results in 2020, precisely the areas that you would have expected to trend toward Trump, had that thesis been correct, went in the opposite direction and actually went to Biden, who did very well in the affluent suburbs nationwide. That's what basically powered his victory. So anyway, that was why I set out to do the 2020 protest thing.

and I guess it's, you know, Rushagate is maybe another example. I don't know if you were aware of me at that time. I guess you maybe didn't miss much. Or I advise people to not become aware of me at all. But I don't make a calculation, right, that I'm trying to placate anyone or antagonize anyone in particular. At least as best I can access my own mind.

Obviously, I do think that there's a way in which I'm sort of primed to look for unexamined inconsistencies or tensions in narratives that arise and if there's

something I can do to add a bit of corrective to that journalistly that's probably what I'm inclined to do

but you know I do think that there is a way in which my I'll start over I'll also acknowledge that I have probably a peculiar temperament in that you're kind of right

I don't allow myself to I don't know if I ever consciously sort of generated this in myself or my psyche but I find that I do not have huge emotional highs if certain people are praising what I'm doing or huge emotional lows if people are attacking what I'm doing. Now, I'm not a total psycho, and then I have like a handful of like close friends or associates whose personal opinion. I would, I would assign more personal value to. But in terms of like the general morass of online opinion, no, I don't think I, I don't think I allow that to have any meaningful impact on me.

And I think, you know, I wouldn't advise most people to try to replicate aspects of my personality by and large. But if you're in the media, right, if you're doing what you consider it to be journalism, I think it can be a useful sort of psychological guardrail to have for. Well, I was going to say the fact that you don't even recognize that it was like an unbelievably brave act to tell America. during the 2020 riots what was actually happening. Like people were losing their job. I almost lost my job for saying we're in a racial moral panic. Like people were losing their jobs right, left and center just for saying what was, by the way, only obvious because you were doing the legwork, right? Like I wasn't going out there to these cities. It was just like obvious to me what was happening in the zeitgeist. But like that actually like took insane amounts of courage because there was,

you would get called racist, which at the time, I mean, now there's a lot of skepticism around those accusations. I think, you know, that's a good thing. But, you know, at the time it was like, you were like, are the people that I love in my life going to believe these accusations about me? Like a lot of people felt that is a horrifying thing to consider, right? And there was so much more power, I think, to the mainstream liberal media. Now, I totally agree with you, by the way. Now it seems like we're caught between on the one hand, like terrible, woken. liberal mainstream media on the left, which is totally captured by like the worst impulses of the Democratic Party. But then this kind of like this, this slot machine of like the podcast

stereo on the right, which has just like no standards, race to the bottom, never questions anything that happens on the right, exists like purely, you know, I would have said before, you know, Iran and Epstein, like just to sort of boost Trump in a way that's not real journalism, but then kind of turned on Trump over those issues. And just like completely not rigorous journalism. So what is you like what, first of all, do you agree with my analysis that those are kind of the two main groups? And like where do we go from there as Americans to get like good journalism? Whenever anybody and whenever anybody asks me to give any kind of all-encompassing advice along those lines,

I have to just sort of laugh them off because you're asking the wrong guy. Like, I don't want to be in a position where I'm looked at as some sort of oracle of profound guidance because, firstly, everybody else who purports to be an oracle of profound guidance, I don't take that seriously. So why should anybody take me seriously in the converse? Do you agree with that there's, like, like, elite crap on the left and then, like, bottom feeder crap on the right and that, like, 90% of our journalism is in one of those two camps? Well, first of all, you mentioned that you were disconcerted in 2020, the people that you love might get the impression that you are a racist because of something that you said or tweeted or whatever it might have been. I think, you know, my take on that, at least from my own perspective,

is that anybody whose opinion along those lines, I would actually take seriously or credit in any meaningful way, they wouldn't be susceptible to some kind of extraneous characterization of me floating around the internet and have that fundamentally altered their view of me. So, you know, I think it's good in a public-facing role

where inevitably you're going to be getting down and dirty on some controversial topics, or maybe not inevitably, but that's what my trajectory seems to have been, to sort of narrow the scope of people who could develop a personal opinion of you that would actually cause you some kind of psychic discomfort.

See, Michael, that is such good advice for young journalists right there. It's tough, though, because especially, like, you have to make a mental effort to actually do that, to insulate yourself from the temptations to kind of give over your psyche to the cycles of either condemnation

or opprobrium with an a approbation Okay, you're on subst Approbrium versus approbium They're all fleeting Right, right

You're on substack You make your money You're getting instantaneous feedback From people in your social networks Which this used to be a little bit more pronounced On Twitter Like when it was then called Twitter

When it was like Indisputably the You know gathering point for elite media They still hang around to some extent But things are more fractured now but it was always so tedious to me how everything in these elite media spheres was always finally calibrated to

message primarily, it seemed to me, to peers in the media, rather than to the broader public. Totally. So, but how do you avoid audience capture because you're on substack, your audience pays you, right? Like, I think that's the problem

you're seeing now in a lot of the podcasters, especially the YouTubers, which is like they know what the audience wants. And they're the ones paying your bills. How do you not give them that? So how do you avoid that? Well, this sort of plays into the question that I gracefully delighted that you asked before about the sort of media landscape and maybe what do we do about it. I'm not sure if I fully agree with the diagnosis.

I agree in part. But I think a lot of people focus now in terms of the problem with the media on a handful of noteworthy podcasters and YouTube personalities and whatnot. And unfortunately, we do have to focus on them. But I think the problems with the right go beyond that and have antecedents in terms of Trump's personal role in overseeing the right-wing media ecosystem. Because if your audience is overwhelmingly, unflinchingly pro-Trump and you're going to get a direct commercial hit if you say something negative about him.

And then also, by the way, he used to have this thing where he would actually send out links. He still does on his own proprietary social media network where he's personally driving traffic to stuff. Then, yeah, obviously that's going to lead to warped incentives where you can't even do an honest journalistic assessment coming from the right or coming from whatever your ideological predisposition is toward Trump because he's just such an all-consuming political force in a way that the left or left-wing media

would never have been so hyper-sensitive and attuned to, say, whatever Joe Biden thought about some article, right? It would have been almost irrelevant. So I do think that there are some particular collective, like epistemic pitfalls that the right has succumbed to recently. that maybe have taken on additional urgency now, that stuff is also sort of fracturing on the right. But in 2034, right? Let me just look for a second on the Biden thing, just because what the right would answer is they would say

they literally allowed a person who was senile to keeping president and run for president again out of fear of offending him and losing access to the White House, right? for for but that wasn't really that was more a critique of like the Washington Post or the New York Times or axios or so like CNN less overtly ideological mainstream media or yeah or CNN or something look I mean I think the media could have done a better job on that story but it's not like there wasn't coverage I mean the the the lid was kind of blown open when the Wall Street Journal I remember did a big article on Biden's schedule being limited and his appearances being overly choreographed.

So I'm not saying that there weren't issues there, obviously. It's just I think it could be a little bit, it's not a one-to-one comparison with the phenomenon that I'm trying to describe here on the right. It's not to absolve more mainstream media of having a lot of faults in a lot of respects. But I don't think it was really about personal fidelity to Joe Biden. Like Joe Biden didn't have an outsized persona such that there would be like an expectation that you would have to show him fidelity. I think it was just like a, you know,

It was complicated, but it's just different than what's going on, that what has gone on with Trump. And also, like, you would have left-wing ideological media. Right. That would not have hesitated to point to what they saw as the major flaws with Biden in a million different respects, right? But you don't really have much of an equivalent of that on the right. So now, I guess we're seeing a little bit of a fracture

in terms of that right conformity or consensus around just kind of being an appendage of the Trump-Bormaga operation. But it's still sort of in its early phases, I think. But it culminated in 2024 when I was also being raked over the coals for supposedly defying consensus in this heterodox or contrarian, quote-unquote, way, which I hate the term contrarian, but people sadly apply it to me over my protestations. But that was actually coming more from the right because there was this algorithmic podcast consensus

that I fully acknowledged the Republicans brilliantly capitalized on as an electoral strategy in 2024 where to cater to certain demographics of the population that were more and more getting their information almost exclusively from non-mainstream media sources, especially the burgeoning podcast sphere,

typified by a Joe Rogan and accolites and whatnot. They came up with this messaging that was geared toward them that was different from the messaging that was geared toward like Fox News viewers or toward the sort of more conventional Republicans who would be the majority of the Republican coalition

for any Republican nominee. But at the margins, this younger sort of podcast consuming demographic was going to be electorally critical. And so they came with this whole sort of alternate alternate theory of Trump or image of Trump where he was going to be gathering together this anti-deep state Avengers squad

to triumphantly stride into the White House and, you know, abolish the military industrial complex, end all wars, restore free speech, et cetera, release the Epstein files. And then people are, then when that nonsensical vision of Trump that somebody hallucinated, that got kind of like collectively hallucinated doesn't come to fruition. They all whine and say that they were betrayed. Meanwhile,

the actual sort of just instinctual Republicans who, you know, were more or less vote for a Republican each election cycle, I'd probably voted for Mitt Romney and John McCain, et cetera. They love what's going on because it's been perfectly consistent with their expectations. They hadn't been forced to this total brain melting garbage that again I acknowledge was highly successful just from a raw standpoint of political tactics

but it just drove me crazy because I inhabit to some degree this same media environment where this stuff was so predominant and you know it was very algorithmically disincentivized

it was something that people in prominent in taste making positions on the right at the time didn't want to hear. They just wanted to cheerlead for, you know, this Marvel movie comic book thriller storyline where, you know, Trump and RFK Jr.

and Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk and Joe Rogan and, you know, I guess maybe Cash Patel is their little wizard sidekick like he wrote, like he put on his children's book. They were going to do these, they were going to perform some, like, profound anti-establishment feat. and unraveled the deep state.

It was so ridiculous, but a lot of people did believe that, apparently. And so that was an early instance of me training my focus a bit less on the mainstream media where it would have been, by and large, in the past, like during Russiagate, where every day you'd get a supposed bombshell that would first ricochet across Twitter at the time,

and it would be based on some incremental supposed scoop, that either the Washington Post or New York Times got that might not have been outright false in terms of the stuff that they were precisely reporting, but it was all in furtherance of a fundamentally fictitious narrative that was ginning up all this totally insatiable anticipation for some kind of climactic endpoint where we would all find out that Trump actually did collude with Russia

and subvert the American political system. But I think some of those tendencies, sees kind of got transmuted war onto the right. And I don't see much of a reckoning with it at all. And even to this, even, even now. Like I, after the 2016 election, I spent months and months and months, probably like years, actually, doing what I kind of, yes, slightly obnoxiously on purpose, term the Pundit Accountability Project, where I would go and find just ridiculously discrediting examples of stuff that these

most prominent and well-regarded people in the media had said about the 2016 election that was delusional. Jamel Bowie, then at Slate, whatever happened to Slate, by the way, is it still around? I guess so at some volatile form. He famously wrote in one of his columns in August of 2016 that Donald Trump had a...

He wrote that his headline was, there's a better chance that it, a meteor will collide with the earth and destroy humanity, then Donald Trump will win the 2016 election. And, you know, over and over, you saw stuff like that, like whether they would be very dismissive of the economic anxiety angle having any role whatsoever as like an explanatory variable for why it is that Trump overperformed in certain downscale economic areas.

I don't have to explain this to you. So there my ire was a lot more aimed at, and they actually, did because there was so much journalistic attention devoted to Trump and doing in the going on these like anthropological safaris where you you'd go to like West Virginia or you'd go to Hazleton, Pennsylvania or somewhere and describe to your bewildered audiences what a Trump supporter was or you'd have a million different like a narrative narrative pieces of reportage about somebody who went to a Trump rally. They did very little, very little, I think,

properly interrogative reporting of the Hillary Clinton phenomenon, such as it existed. And obviously, it was less novel than the Trump phenomenon. So you understand why the tension was skewed to some extent. So that was sort of a void that I filled in 2016. Then by 20, you know, sure enough, by 2020, I'm getting berated by the people who are, who had followed me for that stuff and for Russiagate

and for some of the other contrary perspectives I had taken on the histrionic anti-Trump narratives of the first term. And they're enraged that I'm not agreeing with Sidney Powell and Rudy, really Giuliani, that there was a Venezuela and fraud algorithm that somehow tilted the vote to Biden in Milwaukee or whatever. Because I actually did it,

I did a forensic examination of some of those 2020 claims, and they were just BS, but almost exclusively. And so by 2024, you know, I've been called every name in the book, fascist, Nazi, white nationalist from the George Floyd stuff, or, you know, and then now I have TDS, supposedly, because I'm trying to. But there was one insult that was just waiting in the wings for the Epstein story. Oh, right, yes. Which was pedophile.

Wait, I hadn't heard that one. Are you sure? Well, that's a crazy one because that was less, that was less. So crazy. That was less sortable by partisan affiliation. Right, exactly. Okay, so this ties in with the theme we've been discussing. So the Epstein thing used to be something that you heard about in the right wing podcast

derriot because they thought they could use. It was a new one. Like Judas Ascariat? No, like proletariat. Oh, okay, gotcha. I usually say commentariat or I actually have now calling them podcast creatures. It's pretty good. Because they inhabit this like subaltern. I know. They really do. Goopy, toxic swamp. So in this, this is the swamp that birthed like Pizza Gate, for example, and they saw Jeffrey Epstein, this is my analysis and curious if you agree with me, as kind of proof of the Pizza Gate theory, which is that the Democrats are all a bunch of pedophiles and devil

worshippers. And Epstein seemed to sort of corroborate that and they spun this narrative and this myth that there was this list and the blackmail and the this and the that. Okay. Then Trump wins the election. And suddenly the Democrats, who never gave two shits about Jeffrey Epstein, never did a thing to open those files or look into it because they kind of had a sense that most of the people files were Democrats. Suddenly they decided we can use this to attack Donald Trump. And suddenly like Rokana is the face of release the files and all. To me it was like very obvious that something that easily politicized was probably full of like nonsense. I never believed there was a list. But I did think that he probably had molested scores and scores of underage girls until I encountered your writing. And suddenly I was like, Wow, this goes even deeper.

I love debunking sexual assault and pedophile claims. That's what really gets me going. So I want to ask you two things. The first is like, when did you first became aware of this story and like realize like, oh my God, like none of this is true? The second thing I want to ask you, and I'm giving the two questions first because your answers are great and very interesting, but long. But I go on well. I go on very long. I'm aware of that.

What you do? You know, reel me in, reel me in like a little fish I am. Watching you have to take on the crazies from both the left and the right, specifically on this issue, they had become convinced that Epstein was Mossad. And so I was that- That's new. I mean, that's circa 2025. Right, because that only the left would have been like, because before that the right was not quite so anti-Israel.

That's also kind of new. So it was only when the left got their hands on Epstein that suddenly the Israel thing came in. That wasn't even really a major feature of the precursor of the narrative, like meaning pre-Duly 2025 when it burst back onto the scene. It only just so happened that July 2025 coincided with lots of other... Israel stuff. Yeah, around Israel. Yeah, exactly.

And it became just kind of like the kind of the, it was like a funnel, right? Like everything ended up being like, I, so I got to see you who are not particularly fond of Israel, not Jewish, but be subjected to the, exact same kind of like insane. Everybody assumes I'm Jewish. Everyone assumes you're Jewish. And so you were getting the same attacks that all of us Zionists get on the regular. And so A, I want to know when you got into the episode, when you realized the story was real. And B, like, did, experiencing like how insane and fucking stupid the anti-Israel left is change your views at all about Israel.

Not with not vis-a-vis Epstein because you know why? He's not most odd. Well, no, not even really that. I had always been pretty adamant that, look, this idea that somehow arbitrarily one's pre-existing views on Israel have gotten grafted onto Epstein as though they're inherently commingled subjects and therefore your views on Israel ought to dictate your views on Epstein. That just does not make any logical sense whatsoever. It's actually, you know, since Donald Trump and his followers say we're allowed to use the word retarded again,

that is retarded with the capital R. And so I just have to reject the premise that there was even anything that united those issues on some kind of fundamental level such that there should be this like a perfect correlation between being an Epstein quote maximalist and being anti-Israel or being an Epstein minimalist to the extent that they exist and being pro-Israel. So there actually is sort of an analog here in that lots of people who are pro-Israel, perhaps including yourself, also had an incentive to maybe be a bit more proactive and seeking out potentially Epstein minimalist explanations because they also saw the issue as having gotten arbitrarily bundled together.

Right? So those things I've run in tandem. Like, I probably would not have been a guest on Ben Shapiro. If it was, if the Epstein issue was only about Epstein onto itself, right? And I'm not saying that he's like reasoned on it in bad faith necessarily. I think he actually has, from what I've seen, a fairly sensible interpretation of the Epstein stuff, although I wouldn't agree 100% with it. But you're really not.

You're really sure what I'm coming from. Like I, like these people. like quote-unquote neocons, which is not a term I use earnestly anymore, and who are also pro-Israel, have tended to be a lot more auditory of me. Yeah, because these are the Epstein, because they also see it as a proxy for Israel, if only as a backlash or a reaction to the anti-Israel people saying Epstein's a proxy for Israel.

I'm saying we should get rid of the entire proxy war on this, because it's just stupid factually. Right. Like to me, I always saw the Epstein story as about Me Too overreach, which was like a crazy thing to, like, I was not able to see that until I started engaging with your work very intensively because like you just assumed all of the Me Too side of this was factual and real. And, you know, like obviously like, yes, he had molested like all of these children, right? Because he was called a pedophile or peal or so forth. But then you read your work and like especially like, it's. started to really hit home for me, like, when you were at that press conference. And you were pointing out, like, all of the women at the press conference had met Jeffrey Epstein as adults. And yet they were standing there. Not all of them. Not so, like, it's not as though. Okay. Yeah. So what are, what is, what are the facts here? Well, just, just to set the context a little bit, in terms of the chronology that you laid out,

where this was previously a preoccupation of the right or it had been, um, inclusive. And inculcated somehow by the right. It's a little bit more complicated from that, which actually gets to why the story is so enduring. It's unique in any story that I've ever covered in any detail in terms of the cross-ideological synthesis that undergirds it. Right? So I date the Epstein saga, right,

circa to 2018. So the first Trump administration, obviously, there had been some coverage of Epstein and his Florida prosecution and whatnot. in like 2008, 2009, like every now and then there'd be something new that comes out. In terms of becoming a major national sensation, that was 2018 after this Miami Herald series by Julie K. Brown came out, who was another piece of work. I mean, a journalistic malfeasance on this stuff. It's just, is alone enough to get me riled up, but then you have like a million other dimensions

of it that are also irresistible. But that, Julie K. Brown pursued the Epstein story because she was trying to find a news hook to go after Trump. Because the initial installment of that story, yeah, if you go back and look at the headline, the initial headline is, Trump's Labor Secretary gave sweetheart deal to sex offender, blah, blah, blah, blah, which was true in a way because it was the case that Trump's then labor secretary, Alex Costa, had previously been the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida when Epstein was originally prosecuted and got the so-called sweetheart deal, which actually was not a sweetheart deal.

that's another myth. But, and she searched out the story because she had been going through these, she had seen a totally bogus, made-up publicity stunt lawsuit that was filed against Trump and Epstein in 2016 by a made-up person in a literal PR stunt that was orchestrated by a former Jerry Springer show producer, where this person, quote, Katie Johnson was supposedly alleging that at age 13, she had been gang-rower. like brutally and violently gangrate by both Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. So that's how Julie Kay Brown became aware of Jeffrey Epstein and thought that maybe that was

an avenue of inquiry for her to pursue journalistically with Trump because she was trying to get hired by the Washington Post, right? Oh my God. And she doesn't get hired. I know all this because I read her dopey book. I mean, it's basically a memoir like about the personal travails of Julie K. Brown is that anybody cares about who her boyfriend was. Like she talks about this stuff.

And now it's being, it's being dramatized into a new Netflix miniseries. Oh, no. Yeah, I think it's on Netflix, but whatever it is, it got optioned or something. But just so the news hook that she comes up with, right, is Trump's labor secretary

gave sweetheart deal to Jeffrey Epstein. And it then created a big clamor, a political clamor, It's circa fall of 2018. And then it was Democrats probably who were the most energized or exercised about it because, yeah, it seems to impugn Trump. But then there were Republicans who got, like Ben Sasse, who's now, I guess, dying cancer. There's a, there's a clip of him basically, you know, uprating. He sent letters to the Bill, Ben, Bill Barr.

of, was it Bill Barr? No, I guess then, it wasn't Bill Barr yet, but he sent the logic to the Trump Department of Justice, you know, demanding answers about this and so forth. So there was some cross-partisan sort of coalescence there even then. But it was probably more of a Democratic-coded issue because it also tied into Me Too. Like it was explicitly timed and sort of couched and framed to capitalize on the cultural energies of Me Too. Right, which started in 2017 and was really taking off in 2018. I mean, it took off instantly instantaneously in 2017 with, you know, Weinstein. And that's when it started. But, you know, in November of 2018, we're still pretty much at the peak of Me Too. And if you go and look at the initial installment in that Miami Herald series, they have like a Me Too banner on the article or something saying this is part of our Me Too coverage. But then, you know, so that partially triggers the federal reprospection of Epstein.

Fast forward to July of 2019. he gets indicted and re-arrested, then he dies in custody. So then you do see a lot of the conspiracist-inflected sort of intrigue around Epstein having somewhat of a left-wing cadence, or valence, no one I say cadence, valence, where they're tying it into Bill Barr with them being the Attorney General, and Bill Barr's father was the headmaster of the Dalton School, and they may not have hired Jeffrey Epstein at Manhattan Private School and the 70s,

and there's all kinds of dots you can connect to potentially insinuate that's something nefarious went on with Trump himself. Maybe he had him killed, maybe he had him killed in tandem with the Clinton Foundation

and Israel, or who knows. And by the way, because the most prominent Democrat who is perceived to be implicated by Epstein is Bill Clinton. Right. By 2018 or 2019, there's not a whole lot of left-wing

desire to rush to the defense of Bill Clinton. Right, right. He's not like Donald Trump in their sort of political orbit where the right would rush to defend Trump. Wait, but let me ask you, Michael, is it your position that? But then it morphs into a more of a right code of thing under the Biden administration. Elon Musk popularizes this idea that there's a client list. Right. He does this on Twitter.

And then the low info, low IQ, right-wing media ecosystem. system kind of picks up on that. And lo and behold, you then have Cash Patel going on Benny Johnson's extraordinarily dopey podcast saying, put on your big boy pants and tell us who the pedophiles are to the then FBI director, Christopher Ray. And gee whiz, in a twist of faith, Cash Patel becomes the FBI director himself. And Tuss is not, I guess, to put his big boy pants on and tell us who the pedophiles are. So, yeah, it was a self-infant, but it's a cross-ideological convergence in a way that is not quite like a rush a gate, not quite like quite like,

right, but sequentially. But is it your position that Epstein committed no sexual crimes? Like, lay it out. Like, what is your view of what he actually did? Okay, so you sort of vaguely attributed to me the view that Epstein committed no sexual

misconduct against any minors or something to that effect, right? I don't go that far, in part because Jeffrey Epstein himself pleaded guilty to two state level offenses in Florida in 2008 pursuant to his federal non-prosecution agreement, one of those charges was procuring person under 18 for prostitution. So Jeffrey Epstein himself conceded by way of his guilty plea that he engaged in unlawful sexual activity with a person who was below the legal

age of consent in Florida. Now, astonishingly, zero journalists before I had the right idea thought maybe it would be smart or prudent to, I don't know, go to the Florida court docket and look at the plea hearing transcript and see what he actually pleaded guilty to. Like that wasn't done until I did it within the past couple, you know, the past couple months. And that one minor to whom he pleaded guilty to procuring for prostitution, look, I mean, I'm not condoning even putting oneself in a position

as a 50-something-year-old man where you're going to be having any sort of sexual encounters with girls who are of that age. It's probably not something that's going to work out well for anyone. But the severity of the actual conduct has been exaggerated in that this girl who actually was unlike lots of the other purported victims, she actually, there's no events that she ever tried to make a whole lifestyle out of her purported Epstein victimhood. She kind of just got roped into this against her will by the prosecutors. who were demanding that she, you know,

who commanded her legally to come testify at a grand jury proceeding in 2006. She'd also been interviewed by the Palm Beach police, not in something that she initiated, but the police tracked her down. And she said that, look, it was consensual. She actually is one of the rare alleged victims who had full intercourse with him, she said. He often didn't do that.

And I know way too much about this guy's sexual proclables. But on one occasion, She says literally the day before her 18th birthday, she had sexual intercourse with him. There had been sexual activities leading up to that around 15 occasions when she, on her own accord, went to the house. She said she was ever coercion anything. I think it was ever violent. She didn't want to do something. It was always fine.

So, again, I'm not condoning that. I'm just saying that as a matter of putting things in proper... No, obviously, okay, let's just be clear. Obviously, neither of us is sitting here saying this is an exemplary human being. It's just that the story itself metastasized very quickly. for very clearly politicized reasons beyond like any accurate analysis of what went down. Yeah. I think my position, I would say.

But there was stuff that went on between 2002 and 2005 in a localized way in Palm Beach, right, that had to do with girls who were not above legal age of consent that people, I think, could understandably find, let's say, untoward, or if if you want to, to amp up the moral denunciation further, you could be just as animated as you want to in denouncing it. But it's, it's gotten so exaggerated such that people think it's, what he did in Palm Beach during that phase was proof positive of this like rampant pedophilic predation, which it really just wasn't. And it's also more, a little bit more morally ambiguous than a lot of people want to acknowledge because, um,

he was sort of systematically told, first of all, okay, the responsibility flows from him for even having this situation where girls were ferrying to his house, right? But there is a lot of evidence that he at least sought, maybe not totally scrupulously, but sought to ensure that they were 18 if they were going to be coming. And the girls would collude amongst themselves if they were bringing another girl who happened to not be above the age of 18

for that girl to tell him that she was in fact 18. Right. And again, that goes on. But if we want to object to that morally, that's fine. I'm just saying, it's gotten so unbelievably blown out of proportion that we're now talking

about something that went on in like 2004 where, okay, maybe objectionable, but like not the most heinous crime that was committed probably even in Palm Beach that week. And now it's this internationalized mega narrative. that's like what take down the British royal family.

It's just like nobody can keep things in a proportion because the popular understanding of what went on with Epstein has gotten so mythologized that it's almost now divorced from the underlying facts and evidence as such that people think, I mean, tell me if you think this is accurate. People think that once he got out of prison or once he got out of jail in Florida in 2008, 2009,

he continued to prey on children, right? That was part of why everybody who, associated with him after he got out of jail or was convicted, why they have to do groveling apologies and they have to atone for their sins of having just been in his presence or even sent him like a lighthearted email. It's just not true. I mean, there's no, or at least there's zero evidence that from 2005, when he first started being investigated locally in Palm Beach to 2019 when he dies, that he ever was even alleged

to have engaged in any. licit sexual activity with anyone below the age of 18. I don't think that's like, why shouldn't that be pointed out at some point? If Jeffrey Epson is going to be this like world historic figure, this like personification of all pedophilic evil where it's like Hitler and Satan combined, but worse because then you, because I don't, I think Hitler and Sigm were accused of pedophilia. So the reason why I, the reason why I distell the, the reason why I distell the, The reason why I dispel the historical exaggerations is not because, like, for its own sake,

I'm super interested in exonerating Jeffrey Epstein or telling people why he wasn't such a bad guy. It's because of the political and cultural ramifications of all this through the mass hysteria and moral panic that has had all kinds of very, I think, damaging effects. And not just on the elites, quote unquote, who were found in the files and then how. had to make some reputation-saving, you know, you know, PR-approved statement, but because it's, massactery affects the entire polity. We had a,

we had a phenomenon amazingly enough. I don't know if you saw this or followed it at all, where in like February and March of this year, schools across the United States were canceling or, or indefinitely postponing their school picture day. Because it was believed based on memes on TikTok and elsewhere on social media that the school photography, company that's like one of the top companies for that sort of thing in the U.S. was in the Epstein

files quote unquote and parents were we're thinking that there's children's school photographs were going to be transmitted into a giant pedophile database. People lots of people thought that. I mean so so look I mean I think if we're in an information environment where that sort those sort of beliefs are just freely accepted like isn't there a problem they maybe they're there that maybe needs a little bit of correcting, apparently not. I'm the only one who thinks so. No, and I think that to me, what's interesting about this is not, again, I'm not interested in rescuing his reputation. I think he's probably a pretty gross person. But the way in which the narrative was so easily politicized. And when anybody got any pushback from you, they would just

kind of move on and like change the subject and act like they had been completely vindicated. And I think that that was like it's one of the great like journalistic misses along with 2020 and a bunch of others that like there but for Michael Tracy you know like you were literally the bulwark like somebody tweeted like you know it's basically Michael Tracy like like standing off against like this mob with pitchforks all right let's move on I want to talk to you about Iran because I know that we're not necessarily on the same page about that okay um can I ask you a question yeah of course okay so I couldn't help but recall a piece that you wrote, I believe it was your debut column for the free press. Yes.

Almost exactly a year ago. No, I was writing for them long before that. Well, this is April 2nd, 2025. I looked it up before we started. And I thought you were framing it as your debut item or something, like, whatever it was. No, I was writing for them, I think, since 2020. No, 20. Well, I guess it was a new gig of some kind.

whatever it was. And here's what you say. If you get your news from the liberal mainstream media, the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post, you may think, as I once did, that Trump is a far-right extremist. These outlets cast Trump as a racist, a hater, a George Wallace for the 21st century. I'm basically okay with that so far.

I think George Wallace would not be a particularly app parallel for Trump. I always thought Benito Mussolini was the only one that ever made much sense to me. No, sorry, not Benito Mussolini. Silvio Berlusconi, I correct myself. Oh, thank you. Not the actual, not the actual Italian fascist, media magnate, kind of like weirdly, outsized personality.

That was the parallel for the first term. I think things are different now, but that was the, that was like, because everybody was going, everybody was trying to say, is Trump Hitler, is Trump Stalin? Who is Trump? Who is, who can we make this, like, very tenuous parallel to?

Burlesconi was the only one that I thought was ever remotely app. Okay, but it's not George Wallace. But then you, but here's where. Here's where it goes south. Here's where I had a big, droopy frown, like sad dog. Trump, you say, is more like a 21st century FDR, socially moderate, anti-interventionist, and committed to America's blue-collar workers as the backbone of this country and the locus of our power and democracy. And you've gone to say, think of Trump's major convictions.

He's anti-war. He promised to veto a national abortion ban. He's respectful of religion, but also gay. And most importantly, he represents the working class. Gay? He's gay? He's pro-gay. Oh, pro-gay. That's also true, strangely enough.

And most importantly, he represents the working class's best shot at achieving the American dream that we've seen in 60 years. Okay, what really antagonize me, I guess, I'll put it, was the anti-inter, like the Blase ascription of anti-interventionism and anti-war to Trump, because even then, in April of 2025, that was to me a totally untenable description. Like, he had just at that time declared a six-week ultimatum for Iran to basically capitulate and allow the U.S. to come in in conjunction with Israel and blow up their national nuclear infrastructure. or else Trump said there will be bombing. And indeed, there was bombing.

Trump was correct. Trump was faithful to that vow. And he had launched just fairly recently an aborted bombing campaign in Yemen. He comes in and he does this kind of phony ceasefire with Netanyahu and Gaza that they use to expedite heavier-grade munitions to Israel so they can basically rearm and then resuscary. him the Gaza campaign. He, I think you might remember, said quite frequently that he would somehow solve the Ukraine war in 24 hours. How many hours are we up to? And also, rather than solving the Ukraine war in 24 hours, he actually removed restrictions on Ukraine's ability to fire long-range missiles into Russian territory that even Biden had been resistant to,

removing. So that was April of 2025. Now we're in April of 2006. And I got to think you would want to revise that characterization of Trump. Or am I wrong? Well, first of all, I just want to point out. By the way, the FDR comparison as the, didn't FDR kind of lay the groundwork for getting the United States in World War II? FDR was anti-war. But let's not get to diverting to that. For a long time, he refused to enter the war. Like he said no for, he was like he was an isolationist coming into office. And he held out for a long time until Pearl Harbor. So, you know, he didn't, though.

He did. I don't want to get derailed into a World War II thing. But I know. There's a whole time. He connive with the British, basically, to set up this Len Lease program that they were, he was claiming would be a means by which the United States could stay out of the war, even though his military brats were saying, this is how we're going to get into the war because we're going to have these convoys of arms shipments going across the Atlantic.

I mean. And he launched a secret naval expeditionary con. You just put a point that he at least wanted to appear anti-war because he had come in on an isolationist party on isolationist. Not quite by 1940. Earlier on, like 32, 36, yes, because that was still the, that was still the hangover period from World War I. But then he kind of, he gradually repealed these neutrality acts that had been passed after World War I. I mean, I'm not denying that he ultimately got in the whole war. Un declared naval warfare against Germany essentially in the North Atlantic.

He eventually got involved in World War II. But he wasn't anti-war. Anyway, so let's move on from the World War II because I don't want to get derailed into that. I don't want to get derailed into that. Trump, I mean, are you? I do want to say, first of all. Do you want to revise the characterization? I do want to say, first of all, like, this is what makes you such a treasure is like,

I just spent an hour talking about how. Okay, I'm not ass kissing. I just spend an hour talking about what an amazing journalist you are. And you were just sitting there waiting to tell me how wrong I was about this. and I love you for that because you just ask you if you're here to advise. You are so like unsusceptible to it's like incredible. Okay. I mean, you're very charming.

But you're not charming. You're not charming enough to get me off. No, I'm really glad you asked that because I want to, I do want to talk about it. I think, I think, first of all, it would have been probably more accurate to say he's against regime change because he's, he's, he's, like, if you look at what he did, for example, in Venezuela and I think what he's trying to do in Iran, it's to. it's to create a much more friendly government out of a hostile government without taking on the responsibility of actually doing the regime change in the way that we did or tried to do and fail to do in the Middle East so many times before. So he's not very interested.

I think he wants the protesters to win in Iran, but he's not going to put boots on the ground to do that. Like if he puts boots on the ground, which I do not think he's going to do, it would only be... She just did yesterday. Well, we had to save that guy, but... Okay, but what kind of footwear were the U.S. military person wearing? It would only be in order to get that uranium because in his mind this is about American interests.

Okay, and what kind of footwear will the U.S. military personnel be wearing when they go and try to extract the uranium? Michael, would you like me to answer your question? Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. So I think in my mind, like there's a very big difference between using the military, in order to create a much better strategic position for the United States going forward, which obviously we are in, if the Iranian regime does not have access to ballistic missiles and nukes, I don't know that that is necessarily interventionist. Like to me, when I hear interventionists, I think something like, you know,

the failed kind of forever wars where we are there saying we're going to nation build here. But like this is a semantic argument, right? Like it doesn't really matter like to me. So I wouldn't change my analysis. of like, you know, I don't think like, you know, what we did in Fordo, for example, counts even as war. Like, it was over before we even knew it happened. How about right now? You don't think that what Trump is doing in Iran constitutes a military intervention and or a war? No, I do now, yeah, but I think that it's, it's not nation building. So I'm saying like it. But you were anti-interventionist and anti-war. So you are realizing that. I just conceded that maybe against regime change would have been probably a better one.

way to phrase that. But I would ask you, Michael, I mean, like, do you think that, like, America would be in a stronger position or a less strong position if Iran had nuclear weapons? Like, is it really, like, it's all the same to you if they have a nuke? I mean, we can get to that, but I want to sort of drill down here a little bit more on the positions or the beliefs that were being ascribed to Trump. Because, okay, yeah, you want to say that he's not anti-war, anti-interventionist, he's anti-regime change. Yeah, he's America first. So the use of the military is always in order to...

So there was a military intervention in January in Venezuela, right? So that was yet another intervention. So that also goes against him being anti-interventionist. I don't, I mean, that's not what I... That's not what intervention? What is interventionism then? I wouldn't call that arresting a person who is flooding our country, who is flooding our country with,

with gangs and drugs. Was it a military intervention or not? It was an arrest. No. The military didn't intervene in Venezuela? I think when I, again, I'm not very interested in semantic arguments, but to me, an intervention, an intervention suggests that you are trying to change fundamentally,

like the status of the nation, regardless or independent of the interests that we have in our relationship with them. I've never heard that definition of intervention. I always thought interventionism in this context meant a military intervention. Like adventurism. Would that have been a better word? Maybe. Maybe, but I would say it was pretty adventurous to send what Trump was bragging was the largest naval armada in the history of South America to the coast of Venezuela by whipping up a fake crisis around fentanyl, supposedly being traffic from Venezuela to the United States and bombing a bunch of random boatmen. And then in the dead of night.

You don't think it's, you don't think it's like better that that, that those drugs are not in the U.S.? You don't think it's better that Maduro is no longer the head of Venezuela for America? The whole pretext that it was about drug interdiction was obviously a farce. It was about what Trump is openly boasting that it was about, which was to appoint himself as the sovereign ruler of Venezuela, which he claims he is. He claims that he has ultimate decision-making authority in Venezuela, veto power, right? He's the one controlling their oil and they're taking the oil, just like he always likes. They're not taking the oil. It's being sold on the free market.

Like, they're forcing. And how's that? Because the United States is taking it and depositing the revenues into Treasury Department accounts. So they've taken the oil. It's Venezuela's money. We're not keeping the money. We're forcing China to buy oil at market rates on the free market. Like, that's a huge coup for us because they were getting that oil for free.

they had invested $100 billion into Venezuela, and so they were getting it repaid at $15 less on the barrel, and now they have to buy it at market rate. Like, that's great. But the United States is in control of the oil reserves of Venezuela and the import. We're not keeping the money. They're getting the money. Well, I mean, I guess you disagree with Donald Trump then,

because he's the one who very openly likes to trump it, how he took the oil. He says a lot of stuff I disagree with, and that I don't think is true. That's actually on the mark in terms of what the Venezuel. policy is. So you asked me about the merits of the Venezuela operation. I'm actually, you know, I've always been instinctively skeptical and kind of presumptively opposed to military interventionism, of which the Venezuela operation was an example. So no. It wouldn't occur to me that say, oh, yeah, you know what the United States should do? Like, you know what my taxpayers should subsidize? Going around abducting whatever head of state we'd like and bombing, because they don't, they're

bomb Venezuela. We haven't gotten many good on the ground reports of the casualties from that, but, you know, bombs dropped in civilian areas of Caracas, it appears. And, like, that's how I really want to, you know, tax days coming up. So that's how I'd really like for my, my income. What about Iran? Like, you don't, you don't agree that it's important that they not be able to have a nuclear weapon? Well, I think. Number one, the supposed existential threat that would even hypothetically be posed by Iran having a nuclear weapon has been radically exaggerated. It's almost identical to the threat inflation around Iraq pre-2003. I mean, they're actually just barring almost the same language.

Like, J.D. Vance was in a cabinet meeting 10 days ago, repeating almost verbatim, stuff that Dick Cheney went around saying before the March 19th, O3 invasion, to think, look, we can't allow a, we can't allow Iraq to develop its nuclear capacity, which they're definitely doing because they could pass off dirty bombs to terrorists, and we could have a nuclear explosion in an American city. J.D. Vance basically recycled that. So there's a lot of, there's obvious threat inflation. There was no, there was no clear point of demarcation where on February 28, 2006, somehow it became, existentially threatening to the United States that Iran was going to acquire a operational nuclear weapon. But would you have a problem if Iran did acquire a nuclear weapon?

I have the problem with nuclear weapons in general, but I have maybe even a bigger problem with systematic threat inflation that is manufactured to try to generate some kind of consensus around a obviously needless and catastrophic military conflagration, which, by the way, Trump is getting increasingly psychotic in waging it. I mean, it's not that, it's not funny anymore that he's saying he's going to bomb all of Iran and bomb the bridges and bomb the power plants. Do you not think that like, you and your children and your grandchildren will be safer if Iran was not able to acquire a nuclear weapon? That wouldn't be one of my most acute threats in terms of the safety of my potential children, no. And also, by the way, there were means by which to potentially curtail Iran's

nuclear capacity. But what the second Trump administration decided to saunter in and do was set up fake negotiations, quote unquote, even though Trump's supposed to be a master negotiator and we all have to read the art of the deal like it's the Talmud. And he appoints Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner to handle the Iran portfolio as they're also supposedly handling the Ukraine war portfolio. How's that worked out? And they set up these potential negotiations

because they obviously were gearing up toward military action because the negotiations were not structured in such way that an actual negotiated settlement was ever going to be arrived at. Iran was never going to agree via quote, negotiation to do a self-inflicted national humiliation blow up under U.S. and Israeli supervision,

its nuclear facilities, and I'll basically just wave the white flag to the United States as this imperial interloper from across the world. They did agree to a arms control regiment under Barack Hussein Obama that I'm not saying it was flawless in every respect or it would have been what I would have come up with

in terms of the sort of, organization of it, but it was like a laboriously negotiated multilateral agreement with China and Russia and Europe buying into it, where Iran was subject to the most stringent nuclear inspection protocols that any nation on Earth had ever been subject to, but Donald Trump decided he didn't like Obama, and he wanted to, quote, tear up Obama's big foreign policy legacy from his second term, so he comes in, even, and then he throws the JCPO, into the trash can, even though James Mattis and Rex Hillerson and others were trying to let him know that, look, Iran's actually complying with the terms of the JCPOA.

And why is that? Because Trump very clearly expressed that his position was, yes, in favor of... We're obviously enriching uranium because we found that out later. But also, I don't know. After they blew up the JCPOA. I don't know. It just seems like you're kind of like taking the Iranians word for things, which seems to me like, I mean, they want power over the West, right?

That's why they want a nuclear program because they want to have power over us. So it's good for us to be able to, I mean, even if you don't think that that threat is real, obviously our position is stronger when they don't have access to something that they could then use, right, in this kind of, the same way that the North Koreans use the ballistic programs to protect the nuclear program. And then they had the nuclear program so you couldn't touch the ballistic. program. Like, these are people who are our stated enemies. They hate us and they, they, they, how about maybe thinking about addressing some of the root causes of the hate? That might be cool. Like, I don't know. The United States does have military installations surrounding Iran in every

direction, as we're seeing now with these retaliatory strikes that they're doing into the Gulf Arab States. You're saying we caused them to like chant death to, like, they, they state. They're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're Ayatollahs, like, they stand in opposition to the West, like to, they don't, they hate, like. Well, they don't chant death to Sweden. They don't chant death to Slovakia. They chant death to America for a particular reason, right? Well, I don't know. You know, you can go back to- -R-Bosch who exists because the United States protects them. Like, the whole, like Europe exists because of NATO. Like, they're- I mean, the United States is the military hegemon that is a raid against Iran. That's why they- Right. I want to move on because. I want to talk about Ukraine. This is one thing I will admit 100%. I was...

I'll just point on Iran, though, real quick. You said what you would concede that you might want to revise your characterization of Trump to is not that he's anti-war or anti-interventionist, but he's anti-regime change. I'm sorry. Trump just today. Trump just today said that... No, I didn't say that. I said that I think that the word intervention, he's anti-interventionist.

to me, that word suggests things like what we were doing in the Middle East for 20 years that Trump is utterly opposed to, which is getting bogged down somewhere. Everybody's opposed to that. Everybody's supposed to getting bogged down. Who goes out on the campaign trail and says, hey, voters, you know what would be a great idea? Let's get bogged down in the Middle East. Nobody says that. I mean, Joe Biden would lament the-

There's like a very significant difference between Trump's foreign policy and Reagan's foreign policy and Bush's foreign policy and that the word intervention is a, there's still a huge difference between what we've done in Iran because it's going to be over soon and what we did in Venezuela and what they did. And that's who Trump is distinguishing himself from. So I don't think that my characterization of him was wrong. I, I'm sorry. I don't. I say he's against regime change is not correct because his whole policy since he's been a national political figure has been oriented toward fomenting or instigating or trying to bring about in one of some fashion regime change. in Iran. That's why the Republicans don't like the JCPOA because it keeps in the

I think if that was true, he would have installed Maria Machado and Venezuela. I think he very- On Iran, on Iran. But okay, but I'm saying there's another example that you said that this was, you know, the same as like Bush era, but. Well, he's saying he's going to take Cuba and I think that would require some change to the quote regime, right? Meaning, and like Rubio goes out and saying, look, there's no solution here without a change in the government. James changing is not actually a bad thing. It's only a bad thing. So we're pro-regime. So we're pro-regime change. No, no, no. I'm saying he's against the thing that happened under Bush, where we paid trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of precious lives to change a regime into a democracy that never wanted to be that. If a regime on its own changes to become more favorable to America, that's actually a good thing. Like everybody- So if the U.S. imposes regime change. No, no, I'm saying imposing is bad. I'm saying if they want to be a good. change their regime, it's good. Okay, got to move on. Ukraine. Did you want to make one more, one final point? Yeah, I mean, I just think, I do think it's worth stressing to people for historical

posterity, if nothing else, that Donald Trump, in contravention to what guys like Joe Rogan and co have been saying in the past five weeks that they've been betrayed because it does appear that he's because he launched a regime change war in Iran, his entire, the entire body of work that he's had on Iran has been all pointed toward the ultimate goal of the imposition of regime change in one way or another on Iran. Don't take my word for it. Take Tulsi Gabbard's word for it during the first Trump administration, when, as you might recall, I covered her very closely. I knew her pretty well. And she was the one who was denouncing Trump, the Trump administration policy toward Iran in the first term for correctly, as she has ascertained it, attempting to foment regime change in Iran by manufacturing

military conflict through the Soleimani assassination, through the imposition of maximum pressure sanctions that are meant to destabilize the government and try to whip up some sort of regime change operation and so on and so forth. And that's just carried forth now. So it is a regime change war. So you think the United States in a couple of days going to say, you know what, we're fine to leave in the even more hardline son of the martyred Ayatollah. And that's that's okay with us? Or do you think this could be now? Because this is going to be like Iraq from everything that I can gather in that there might be an interregnum period where there's like no more, they're no longer the level of active military conflict that we've seen for the past five weeks.

But the United States policy toward Iraq between the Gulf War and the 2003 war was always that regime change one way or another has to get imposed. You would see these kind of recurring intermittent air strikes, even under Bill Clinton. and sanctions and no fly zones, et cetera. So we're going to see if it does get protracted, something like that. Look, I mean, do you think would it be credible for Trump to declare victory at this point if, again, the guy whose father, mother, wife, and son were just obliterated in U.S. Israeli airstrikes, if he's the one who still left with supreme governing power? I think that this is going to end pretty soon. I think that the person who's going to be left in charge is going to be more of a reformer, and the Ayatollah is going to be this gay amputee who's possibly made out of cardboard,

who has very little power, which is the best kind of Ayatollah you can want, and we're going to get out soon. And Trump will have achieved his three objectives, which as he keeps saying, are the obliteration of their Navy, the obliteration of their ballistic capabilities, and the obliteration of their ability to pursue a nuclear weapon. He launched the war, of course, in the middle of the night, so nobody could debate it ahead of time, or nobody could weigh the costs, or nobody could do any kind of inquiry to whether this was a good idea, which did happen with the Iraq war, for better or worse. You know, that was a very extended lead up, but Trump did it in the middle of the night with like just Rubio, Higsef, Bratcliffe, and Susie Wiles or something. In that speech, he says, to the Iranians, take over your government.

take over your institutions. He was posting this on true social in January saying take over the government. Do regime change. That's what he wants. Everyone wants them to do that. Everyone wants them to facilitate that and enable that and even militarily impose that. So Trump is pro regime change when it comes to Iran. I think he's very much. I mean, if you think the regime change in Iran is good and the happen, but he is not going to put boots on the ground in order to make it happen. If you think regime change in Iran is good and you think it would also be good for the U.S. to impose it. You think it would be good for the U.S. to impose it.

I don't think it would be good for the U.S. to enforce it. I don't think it would be good for the U.S. to impose it. That's what it's doing. That's what it's currently doing. Do you not think that the world would be a better place if the, if the protesters were able to like do a regime change in Iran? You don't think that irregardless of like us not being involved in that,

that that would be objectively good for like everybody. I mean, I could imagine myself if I was like a more cosmopolitan resident of Tehran, probably preferring that there not be an Islamic theocracy, right? But that's a much different question than the United States doing this omnidirectional, hegemonic belligerence routine, And Trump declaring, and Trump being on this global conquest crusade where he's going to seize, wants to seize Greenland, he wants to seize Panama, he wants to take over Cuba, he's declaring himself the ruler of Venezuela.

He's taking the oil from Venezuela. He wants to take the oil with Iran, he says. He's declaring himself with the ruler of Gaza. This is like just almost a parody of overstretched American Imperium that, no, I'm not going to just come out and say I support or indoors because maybe it would conceivably be better if there was some alternate. government in Iran. There's lots of governments around the world. I would maybe want an alternate government in if I could ideally pick one. You are acting like for Trump to be like. And also aggressive war was outlawed, I guess probably for a reason after World War II. You are acting like for Trump to be different at all from the Bush era, counterproductive endless wars of regime change. That would mean that he could have no foreign policy interests at all. Like,

that he could have no foreign policy goals whatsoever. And I just disagree with that. Like, we exist on a globe. And he wants America to be once again at the top of that, you know, he wants us to be the only superpower. And honestly, I think a lot of what he's doing, both in Venezuela and in Iran, is more about China and forcing them to buy oil at market rate prices, as I said,

and prevent them from taking Taiwan. But, okay, I do have to ask you why Ukraine. Trump is different than Bush. Bush wouldn't, and even Cheney, would not have had the Cajonis to declare that to declare themselves the new ruler of various countries in that they would not have said, I, Donald J. Trump, am now the ultimate governing authority in various far-flung territories. And they wouldn't have had the cajones to say, oh, we're going to take the oil. We're going to do this brutish resource extraction thing.

Okay. I know what I'm talking about Ukraine. I only have eight minutes left. Okay. All right. I think you and I were both kind of skeptical of like the U.S. involvement there. I think probably my memory is that you were kind of agreed with me that there was a lot we could have done to prevent Russia from invading in the first place. I personally didn't really understand why this.

I mean, I've never seen Russia as an enemy of the United States. Like, I just don't see the world that way. No. Is it a position on Iran? Huh? I mean, you're really into the Iran war. So what is Russia's position, as you understand, vis-a-vis Iran? Why don't you consider Russian an enemy?

Because I think they're probably speaking to the administration behind the scenes and doing everything they can to make it clear or to try to act like they are not getting involved. They've basically sent, like, thoughts and prayers in a few points. The state media puts out these AI videos threatening to blow up the statute. We also put out AI videos. Okay. I was very wrong. I thought it would be very easy for Trump to sort of bring that. to a close because I really, I thought Putin was a rational actor. Like, I thought he was looking for an

off ramp and the second he would be able to deal with an American president who was like, yeah, Ukraine's not going to be part of NATO. Don't worry about that. It would come to an end very quickly. I was very, very wrong about that, just like Trump. I guess my question is, as someone who kind of, I was agreed with me about like a lot of the origins of this. So how do you see this ending? Like, why is Putin like It seems to me irrational what he's doing. Like, I don't see why, like, how this ends or why it's still going on. Like, what is your analysis right now of what's happening there? Well, the whole thing is just a confluence of catastrophic irrationality, including, yes, Putin's invasion itself, which the actually pro-Russia people despise me for saying.

But that was my first instinct when Putin actually launched the war, February 24th, 2022. Some of these dates I'll remember probably in perpetuity, just like Trump's middle of the night aggressive war in Iran. But, you know, also the U.S. policy toward Ukraine from 2014 onward. You can even go back earlier, but definitely from 2014 onward under Obama and Trump 1.0 was all about trying to integrate Ukraine into the NATO security architecture, even if not giving it. at formal NATO status. I think I wrote something about this actually for Newsweek when you were still doing that. And so obviously that

was a powder keg waiting for the fuse to be lit. And then you have Putin getting more megalomaniacal as he stays in power for an absurd length of time. This is now his 26th or seventh year. And you've as the head of Russia, basically, undisputedly.

He's kind of marinating in these grandiose historical theories about how Russia has this rightful claim to Novo Rosia in Ukraine. And then that comes up against Biden coming into office in 2021, where the Democrats have been radicalized against Russia for the preceding four years because the president. received association with Trump. And so that becomes this total non-starter to even engage in reasonably substantive negotiations with Putin, if only to thwart a war, which has been a cataclysmic outcome

for Russia, for Ukraine, for Europe, for everybody. Because I don't know. We're all told this a great thing for Europe to be rapidly remilitarizing, but that's not the greatest historical omen, especially Germany. Like, we're, like, supposed to be great that, like, Germany's gearing up to fight a war with Russia. It's just, okay. I mean, I don't want to make these World War II parallels that are so heartwarming for every other military development, but not that one. And so, but I don't understand how it is that you were so confident that this, that Trump was right that he could solve the war in 24 hours.

I said I was very wrong. No, because, because, no, but this is important because there was, there was no. policy change attendant to it. It was Trump saying through the sheer force of my personality, because I'm such a filmmaker, I can end the war. But what policy would bring the end? The policy status quo from the Biden administration has still is continuing to do. What policy would would bring an end? I don't know if there is one. You know, that, see, I'm not, I'm not like a utopian. And I think I can somehow introduce a policy that it will solve the Israeli-Palestadian conflict,

solve the Ukraine-Russia conflict. There may well not be one. I don't know what it is because, yeah, probably if the United States just, did withdraw full support from Ukraine right now, Putin would storm into Kiev because his war aims have gotten more aggressive as the war has progressed, just like happens, often happens as wars go on for years and years and years. They go beyond what the initial confines of them were perceived to have been. That happened very quickly with this Iran thing, where Trump says, oh, we never could have expected that they would attack the UAE and Bahrain and guitar and stuff, and they did.

So that's always one of the risks of war, which is why in the early phase of the U.S. intervention or weapons provision program in 2022, I was saying interventions like this take on a life of their own or they have this bureaucratic inertia, where first it was only we're going to be sending them these very limited defensive weapons so they could just ward off the initial Russian attempted incursion to Kiev.

Then, you know, within a couple of months, basically the United States is trying to overnight furnish Ukraine with an entirely new military tanks and fighter jets and heavy artillery and Patriot batteries and on and on. And now I don't know what the policy intervention would be. Maybe Marco could brief me and I could maybe get some updated information and you try to come up with some hypothesis. But I don't know if there really is one because it's just a nightmare, which is why when you open a Pandora's box like Putin did on February 24th, 2002, or what, like, now Trump has done on February

28, 2006. It's not like you can just foresee what the ramifications are going to be. And I don't know, like, how many, I don't, I wouldn't know how to stop thousands of Ukrainians and Russians from dying in the death field of the Dombats

at this point in a way that's actually practicable, because although Trump repeated over and over that he could just somehow solve the war in 24 hours because he's such a great negotiator, he underlying policy framework hasn't shifted because Putin laid it out very clearly in June of 2004, meaning he was never going to accept a freeze of the conflict or a temporary ceasefire. He, just like Iran is now doing, was demanding a total political resolution to the Russian

grievances vis-à-vis Ukraine, which would necessarily have to include concessions by the United States and major ones, ones that go beyond what the Trump administration has even entertained doing. And then when Trump comes back into office, he sends White Waltz and Marco Rubio to do, yes, the first high-level diplomatic contacts with Russia that have been taken place since 2022, which is okay, you know, as a start. But what do they emerge with? They emerge with this unified U.S.-Ukrainian position that they're demanding a ceasefire and freezing of the conflict without addressing the underlying political grievances. And what? So Putin's just going to accept that because maybe he gets along a little bit better with Trump?

No, I don't think so. And he never really got along particularly well with Trump. That was one of the whole fallacies of Russiagate. Trump was more bellicose on Russia than Obama. And Democrats thought he was always submitting to Trump and like wanting to make, to be submitting to Putin and like had like sexual fantasies or even was being sexually blackmailed by Russia. So again, no, I just don't like because, look, Trump doesn't have an ideological aversion to engagement with Putin in the same way that the Democrats would have. But that doesn't really strain, change the structural factors. right? In fact, Trump has almost enabled this to go on an even greater perpetuity because he somehow concocted this mechanism by which the U.S. could now, quote, sell weaponry to Ukraine with Europe as a conduit, which I still don't really understand how that's even supposedly working. Who's paying for this? I mean, yeah, I guess there are some European payments that might be transmitted, but I don't know. The whole thing is a little murky to me. They're not responding to my FOIA request, but that means that Trump doesn't have to do the politically perilous.

giant appropriations bills that went on under the Biden administration. Right. Right. So there's no like, he's kind of just somehow circumventing the political downside to continuing to arm and fund Ukraine. And I don't know, don't you recall, like the MAGA online people were very animated about supposedly not wanting to continue to arm and fund Ukraine. And now they kind of just lost interest in it. Like, what's up with that? Like, what's up with that? We're always, I don't know, every self-gots memory holds at such warp speed, operation warp speed. Remember that? That's what's going on with Ukraine. And also, with this Iran thing going on what you think Whitkoff

and Jared are going to somehow come up with some brilliant, innovative idea to solve the thing more about the Iran One of the first questions I asked you is as a journalist, do you want to convince people or do you just want to put things out there? I think you really want to convince people about Iran.

Thank you. I want to convince people that my angle on things is correct. I don't want to convince people to have take on a certain worldview around Iran. I mean, I'm not I wouldn't want to be ruled by an Ayatollah. I acknowledge that to you. Incessions.

Michael Tracy, thank you so much for doing this. God bless you and protect you. Thank you for breaking your Sabbath. This is the most holy Easter I've ever had, thanks to you. I hope you read your New Testament this morning, rather than just the older one, which I think you're more custom to. The whole resurrection thing, that takes place in the new, the second one, right? Indeed, indeed.

That's what I thought. Come back for a Shabbat meal soon, and let's do this again soon. This was really fun for me. Your Shabbat meals are actually, I'm on, like, that made me, they opened up a whole new domain of respect for you, for me, because that stuff was really good. Oh, thank you so much. But you have just revealed that I've gotten free Jewish largesse. Free Jew food.

So all the people who are screaming about Epstein now have extra ammunition. But hey, I mean, it's worth the price for the brisket. Glad to hear it. Take care, Michael. Thanks so much. Bye, bye.