MTracey podcast - "Today's News" livestream -- 3/25/2026

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

Enjoy. Or don’t. 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 going to do it live. All right. Oh, fuck. We're actually, we're on now. Welcome to today's news. I'm Matt Taeevi. Michael Tracy. And Michael, where are you?

I am still in Miami, Florida. In the middle of spring break week or I guess there are maybe like two weeks that are known to be associated with spring break. I've made sure to keep my distance from anybody who could even be plausibly under the age of like, 22 just in case just in case i don't even want to give anybody the basis for theorizing anything i think we got around that up to a higher number michael i know i mean maybe like maybe anybody under 45 is off yeah yeah for anybody even in my age group i have to steer clear of yeah yeah go hang around you know aim for people in in the uh in a bracket above how about just only elderly only the elderly. Well, in Florida, that's not so hard. In Miami, it might be a little tougher,

but I'll go over to Fort Myers. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Hold on. Is it going to, are the comments down? That is interesting. All right. I'm seeing comments right now. Okay. All right, good. All right. So, Michael, last night, you were on location here, and the reason we're doing this now at 1030 in the morning is because you have to fly back home because you've been somewhere you were doing a little journalisming uh journalismisming right exactly and uh report reportage reportage uh from an event uh where where was it exactly it was in uh high alea florida hi alea florida i made sure i got that pronunciation down because it's right totally straightforward it's a very It's a kind of fascinating place because it's got,

it's the municipality in the United States, as I understand it, with the highest percentage of Cuban Americans. South Florida in general has a large percentage of the overall Cuban American population in the United States. It's actually near where I live in New Jersey. Hudson County is probably the secondary part of the United States with the highest level of Cuban Americans.

So like that was Bob Menendez, the former senators, Democratic senators, kind of power base when he was the mayor of Union City in Hudson County. But South Florida, you know, far away is the biggest enclave. And Hialea is like the biggest enclave within the enclave for Cuban Americans. So I happened to be in Miami anyway, if doing other stuff. And I figured, hey, you know, since there seems to be this talk building recently about potentially another round of dream change in Cuba. While, you know, we have the situation in Iran, Trump was in the White House last week, musing that he feels that he will be the president who has the great honor of, quote,

taking Cuba, whatever that might mean exactly. Or are retaking it, as it were, but whatever. The way he put it in his very precise way was taking Cuba. And so I- There was a Raleigh Cuba Libre. Yeah, yeah. And what was most notable to me about this rally, or one thing that drew me in and maybe sort of intrigued enough to want to go, is that it's not just a private group or

a handful of ordinary citizens holding the rally. It's actually a rally that was sponsored and organized by the municipal government of Hialeah, Florida. And this is not a new. phenomenon. We saw this also in 2020 when you also went on the road, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'm progressively interested in this phenomenon because every now and then, given whatever political winds are blowing, you will find that local governments in the United States feel that it's within their purview to sponsor political rallies. And I saw that myself in 2020. Sometimes against themselves.

Sometimes against themselves. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I'm not. I was telling you, Matt, yesterday that in my hometown in New Jersey, West Caldwell, sleepy town USA pretty much, like a pristine suburb that I would have never anticipated any kind of major political activity taking place in, really, or at least any kind of street protest behavior of any size. In 2020, like at the peak of George Floyd fervor, the students at the high school, that I went to, basically organized a George Floyd or Black Lives Matter rally, but not out of defiance of the school administrators or in rebellion against their parents or the cops or anything, but in conjunction with the school administrators.

Their parents attended as like fellow protesters. And the cops even took part. I think one of the cops, I have to go back and check. I think one of the cops even like sang the national anthem or something. I fucking love this country. I'm sorry. It's amazing. I know like the cops were effectively also participants in this rally that was ostensibly

about abolishing the cops. Yeah. Or like that was one of the themes running through these protests, right? All cops are bastards. Yeah. Abolished the police, et cetera. I don't know, I don't know like how extra. I wish I had known about this protest.

in advance in my hometown, I definitely would have went, but I only heard about it in hindsight and or after the fact. And so I don't know how extreme the protest slogan earring was. I would assume there was a handful of kids that probably went all the way with their catchphrases and whatnot. So that just unto itself to me was like a very significant or interesting phenomenon to observe just about American civic culture. Because it was almost like the George Floyd protest there were this ad hoc equivalent to like a Fourth of July. parade or a Memorial Day parade or like a, I don't know, Easter egg hunt, not maybe not Easter egg hunt, but like a Thanksgiving commemoration, you know, it was like a civic holiday

that was just declared on the fly. Right. So, you know, this Cuba stuff isn't quite the same, but there is this thematic continuity and just in that in this particular sort of aberrational part of America just in terms of the demographic balance, it's just taken as a given or taken as totally unremarkable that the city government, like the mayor himself is the one who declared this rally and organized it. Right. And I don't know, if we have the photo available, you can pull it up. Like there was a, and we'll have a much more professionally produced video. No, we eventually. We sent a shooter, so we're, we're going to have like a big piece of video with interviews, and we're going to talk about some of those. Just to give some folks,

you know a little bit of the flavor of what this thing yeah so i mean i just on my own on my phone just took a handful of videos uh photos and videos so we'll give let's look at taste of it but but you know if when you walk in one let's put that up while michael talks okay yeah um well anyway i mean eventually we'll have our guy here pull up a photo that i took of the city of halea had a high alea had a tent set up or had a series of tents set up with the city logo you know beautiful high allaya florida okay so this i mean this is just this is just on the line waiting to get in i just you know snapped a photo of these i wanted to interview these two but they didn't speak english that was another funny part this whole thing like most of the people could at

least talk you know speak some english uh but there are some people who don't speak any english at all or at least not enough to do an interview with and i hadn't brushed up enough of my spanish duolingo right updated my high school spanish um proficiency to to do a full Spanish interview. Maybe we've, maybe we should have, like, filtered out for a camera guy who actually spoke Spanish. The guy last night didn't.

Yeah, so here we go. Here's, here's like a Trump banner, right, for in, in the city sponsored event. So this is like, this is at like basically the height, it looks like it's like the town football field or soccer field.

Exactly. It's like, and they've got, they're in the bleachers, you know, they got the big Trump banner. People were, you know, there's Trump, Trump, Trump,

Trump, chance the whole time. Everybody was pro Trump, uniformly at this thing. I remember Trump in 2024 won Miami-Dade County for the first time, and I forget how many years for a Republican, but he flipped Miami-Dade County, which was like one of the few remaining Republican Democratic bastions within Florida. Right. Although actually Miami did elect a Democratic mayor recently, so it's maybe flipping back a little bit. This is just a lady who's a, you know, T-shirt I had to, or Kamisa. I had to take a photo of just like Daddy's home.

Like, that's what I imagine they want Trump to declare once he strides into Havana as like this conquering hero. Yeah. And we had to make Cuba great again stuff going on. And then you interviewed some folks in the crowd. But if you could pull up the photo, there's a tent that I was mentioning. Yeah, there we go. Okay. So this is like the city of Hialea tent, right?

And what are they selling? Where are they giving away this tent? Well, this lady had a, had a mini little shop. set up under the auspices of the municipal government where they're selling the make a make cuba great again hats and obviously the style of the classic trump hat and they're all other kinds of like regime change stuff so it's just like it's just interesting to me when a when government entities feel that they're doing stuff like they didn't they wouldn't perceive this as political probably right they wouldn't see themselves as transgressing any like

political boundary but it's clearly is a political demand. I mean, they're calling for Trump to take effectively military action to overthrow a government. And yet it exists for them in this realm, at least in their kind of collective minds, that it transcends the political, which is part of why the George Floyd, you know, state-sponsored protests were seen as totally acceptable as well, because it wasn't about politics, right? it was this is like you know something that transcends politics human rights or racial equity or what have you that to them was not something that they would have conceded as even a politically oriented issue such that you can have the state government like essentially endorsing it and there's no problem so like when an issue and then one of the ironies i found is that when an issue reaches that transcendent state it's the most politically salient ironically enough right right

because it's not thought of in terms of just partisan bickering or something. It's something that is just like now this tenet of our collective faith. And again, that only accelerates the political potency of it. Yeah, yeah. Well, and look, and this is part of this thing that's been happening in America for the last 10 years now. Just everything bleeds into everything else. like NGOs don't have separate missions from the organizations they ostensibly watch over, you know, government contracts blend into private contract.

I mean, it's just, and then in the media, the roles are interchangeable, like, you know, editorial and reported journalism. there's really no dividing line anymore. It's just all one big piece of mush. Yeah, it's all just the media. Right, yeah. So, you know, another thing that was interesting, you know, and I didn't interview with this woman, but there was the one, I thought there was probably to be more politicians there than there were. There were some, like the town council was there, the mayor was there, but they also had a Florida state senator who was a Republican, Ileana Garcia.

She actually served in the first Trump administration. as a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. And she got elected to the Florida State Senate, and she represents, I'm not sure if he represents Hailea itself. I think she does actually, but, you know, somewhere in that area. And it was just fascinating because she gave her, the speech that she gave was entirely in Spanish. Now, there are, there are some on the right, let's say, who in the abstract, you could imagine objecting to a political event taking place in the United States that's almost entirely in Spanish.

Well, not even in the abstract. Or a different language. Or any other language, right. I mean, if it's Arabic, forget it. Somali or, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Is Somalia language? I mean, maybe there's a Somali dialect. Yeah, there's a Somali dialect. I'm not sure what language I'm talking about. But anyway, they objected to instantiations of what they seem to be this ethnic factionalism that is, not fully assimilated, not assimilated into the broader American culture where like, you know, speak English, mother effort, remember that whole like, there were those t-shirts and, you know,

bumper stickers and whatever. And so, but so, but it was just interesting that we had that exact dynamic, but at a Republican event, that was like 100% unanimously, ardently virulently, pro-Trump and Republican. And so, so that, that was just an interesting phenomenon to me. So this state senator gives a speech and she, you know, at what point in the speech I could make out that she was talking about Marco Rubio. They call him Marquito. Because he's like the native son of Miami, right? Yeah. And they have big hopes for 2028 for him.

And she got the crowd chanting for Marco Rubio 2028. And, you know, so obviously were he to run, which, you know, I think there's every reason to think he will if there's any opening whatsoever, which I'm sure there will be. I would even, I couldn't even see Trump preferring Rubio at this point to advance. Because like Rubio is his right hand man at this point. Like he's still got this hybrid role of secretaries of state and national security advisor. Ever when they, when Trump shuffled out Mike Waltz last year as national security advisor and plopped him in the UN ambassador job?

And we were told at the time that like eventually we're going to get a new standalone national security advisor appointment. And it just never happened. Like he just liked Rubio like occupying. this all purpose? Yeah, because those two jobs aren't difficult at all. To manage. To manage.

He's also like the National Archivist or something. Oh, that's right. That's right. Okay. Well, that's a sensitive topic. But anyway, that gives you a topic. That gives you an insight into how fondly or how comfortable Trump is with Rubio now that they never even bothered to fill the national security advisor job.

So he's like the equivalent now of a Henry Kissinger, who also had that hybrid, under Nixon and Ford. But now, but Rubio strikes me as probably even more influential than than Kissinger was. Also, he can run for president where Kissinger. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Kissinger was born in Germany, right?

Yeah, so you interviewed some folks about it. But just like, so just as a little bit of like a 2028 early, maybe a little bit of a horse race, boring pundit preview, just take note that like this entire crowd of a major Republican constituency was like in a fervor. chanting for Rubio 2028. And if they do go ahead, and I think they, there's ever reason to think they will with this regime change off of some sort in Cuba, that could be Rubio's calling card.

And if that goes forward, then like he's locked in with like a, no, a very significant part of the Republican primary electorate potentially. And he probably was already locked in with these Cubans anyway. But like that's just going to make it go into overdrive. as a random story i was once seated uh in coach next to a senator from florida um on the way to manchester new hampshire in the middle of a campaign season and um we had a really interesting discussion that was uh it wasn't off the record but wasn't something i want to get into too much but you're not liberty to disclose who this well we didn't talk about anything it wasn't

Rick Scott, was it? No. But put it this way, one of the things that came up was, um, when parties decide, uh, who they want to run for president,

uh, the likelihood of winning Florida is a major factor. Oh, I think I know who it was. Yeah. So we, it was probably Bill Nelson, right? No.

It was. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. Okay. Um, so, uh, but in that sense,

uh, I will, I'll pry this out of you eventually, maybe you're probably. Eventually, eventually, eventually. So you interviewed some folks about Epstein and what happened there?

Okay. So I love just randomly interjecting questions about Epstein to people because it's just the funniest topic to get people to just opine on. And you wouldn't think necessarily this would be front of mind at a Cuba Libre rally. But one of the favorite things, my favorite things that I've done in the past year or so was I went to the Jersey Shore in July, like after the Epstein thing kind of blew up again. And I just thought, you know what? You know what's a good way to spend my Saturday in the summer beach season?

Go to the Jersey Shore, go to the boardwalk in Seaside Heights and just ask random people about Epstein. It was actually fascinating. What did they say? Well, I mean, people could pull it up on my YouTube if they want. But like amazingly enough, and I promise this was not planned whatsoever. The first guy that we ended up speaking to had just like a month or two prior gone with his wife to the U.S. Virgin Islands where they took a boat tour to where they could, they could, they could sail around the Epstein Island. Outstanding. Because like, the guy was just so into it. And he was

like, he had a whole Pizza Gate theory, had a whole Q&on theory. And, you know, he was pro, he was pro Trump. And he wasn't like quite sure how to reconcile that yet. So he was kind of like working through it. And, you know, some of them, you know, obviously some of the people hated Trump. So it was just something that was a mixed bag. It was like very representative of like, popular sentiment. So I love doing that in general. But so one of my favorite moments of last night was they had, they had a lot of musical acts, right? Too many for my liking because like, maybe I'm not open-minded enough, but like I, you know, one or two Cuban rap songs was

sufficient for me. But you know, I powered through it and I asked one of the Cuban rappers who's coming around like, you know, taking selfies with people and, you know, he's got all the, you know, the neck tattoos and the teeth, you know, thing images. and you know he's a real the grill the grill yes yeah um and so you know i interviewed him right and uh i i i never read him first about like what he thinks you know trump should do in cuba does he support the iran thing and i threw in so what do you think about epstein and it's like being partially translated by like one of his guys is with him and uh eventually the guy who just are translating like he can't tolerate the question like he can't tolerate the question like

He doesn't want to hear about Epstein, so he goes away. So I'm not, I'm like out of loss now is what this guy is saying. But he goes into this whole Spanish tirade about, I heard him say pedophiles. And, you know, maybe we'll get somebody to translate what this answer is. I don't even know. But it was just, it was just funny. Like, you'll, this is like the last person on earth you would ever expect to hear, like make a statement about Jeffrey Amnesty.

But everybody, but the whole world now has, has a position on this. I know, I know, I know. So everybody had heard about it, obviously. There wasn't anybody I had to explain it to. One thing I enjoy doing is so like when I first ask them about it, kind of their first instinct is almost a defensive reflex where they're trying to explain how Trump didn't do anything. And that's not even really what I was trying to ask them about. I'm almost more curious about like how do they understand what the Epstein issue even is?

Like how did they synthesize it? How did they distill it? And so that's the question that I asked a bunch of times to the people that I Well, how do people distill it? Well, can we back up? back up for a minute and talk about something that happened this in the last week since we've since we last. What did I do? Oh, not you. No, no. Oh, I thought you found out the scandalous thing that I did over the past week that I didn't actually do, but maybe it would make my life more interesting. With those definitely not at all 22-year-olds.

No, no. I mean, hey. So can we, mystery producer, can we, can we throw up that graph of the, how the how the discourse works today the circular thing um Michael retweeted it over the weekend it was uh it was pretty interesting uh but oh i think i think this was something that somebody tweeted at me yeah yeah somebody tweeted it at you and you retweeted it yeah yeah and so so why bring this up okay uh so it's it's basically a loop right uh schizzo's posts schizo theories on twitter would be nice if they spelled that correctly, but whatever. Podcasters read Twitter and repeat them on their podcast.

Twitter users share podcast clips as proof of their schizo theories, repeat, and then loop around. I think schizzo with the way they spell it. That's a Yiddish delicacy, actually. Yeah, I was going to say it's, it's like a Yiddish, it's like a confused bagel or something. Yeah, Schizo ball soup. Yeah, that's right, schizoball soup. So, okay, and one of the first things that we talked about was this really funny interaction where basically this, that professor Jang, who is now omnipresent.

He appeared, quote, unquote, Professor Jang. Quote, unquote, Professor Zhang. We don't really, apparently he, like teaches high school. Who knows what he is? He seems like he just, like, materialized out of the ether from some other realm. but what's so funny about that is that he he was on the air with jimmy door and he's talking about how uh you know he got information by listening to somebody on jimmy's show right um and then he was metzger who's like you know right out of his mind right right right right and he hates us both um

but essentially that just hate me it's like going around like declaring that that he knows for certain somehow that I am personally a pedophile. Oh, well, okay. So it's like, it's like not really even, even like arguably funny at this point. So I, yeah, okay, I better not confirm that in any way. No, I'm kidding. That's horrible. So.

Thank you. Thank you for your sympathy. Yeah, no. Look, I am absolutely sympathetic because that it's not like that hasn't happened to me before. Although my- let people go around declaring you a pedophile? Not a pedophile. Like that's kind of the worst thing anybody can be kind of capriciously going around declaring you to be. Yeah, no,

I get accused of other felonies, but whatever. So, okay, so that's, that was like a prime example of how shit works. In media now, like you have this random guest who is listening to other people in the podcast verse,

talk about things, gets invited on, by other podcasters, perhaps even the same podcaster, repeats the same stuff back. So they have a unique novel insight. Right. And really all it is, it's just like watching laundry go around. Like basically, it's the clothes are spinning. And then what happens is as more podcasts get involved in the process, you just get more and more of the stuff. So we had a big piece of news last week, a legitimate piece of news, which was that Joe can't

designed, right? And he was what, National Counterterrorism Director? Was that his title? I think it was director of the National Counterterrorism Center, which I don't think most people even know exists or what it does or like why that particular position is even needed. It's under the DNI, though, isn't it? I don't, I'm not sure about the exact bureaucratic makeup, but he says that he did report to Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence. since he was also her chief of staff in the first couple months of the second Trump administration before he got confirmed as director of the counterterrorism center. So who knows? I mean, like, you can kind of like shake up the bureaucratic pyramid chart like as you please in any given

administration. We'll have to clarify that because technically everybody kind of reports to the DNI. So it's in the intelligence world. So, but whatever, Joe, Joe Kent was, you know, they ultimately report to the president. That we do know constitutionally. Yeah, yeah. No, but in the intelligence world, though, every information. Anyway. But even the DNI position is sort of opaque bureaucratically. Like that was an invention of the George W. Bush years after 9-11. And like there was even talking to second Trump administration of potentially wanting to abolish that position. Like if you read that, remember that no famous, the notorious project 2025 document that all the liberals were freaked out about.

And they were freaked out about like all the for all the wrong reasons. But like if you actually went and read it, they were talking about like in order to enhance the, you know, lethality and the efficiency of the intelligence community and have them best able to carry out the will of the next Republican president, we should even think about abolishing the director of national intelligence because it's sort of superfluous. So it's a little bit, again, sort of obscure what the precise bureaucratic role is of that particular position, unlike say the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, who is demonstrably much more influential in this administration on a day-to-day basis or substantively than Trump.

Like, if you look at some of the footage of them planning this Iran operation or running it, Ratcliffe is typically in the room with Trump. What's that? You mean the Gabbard. Yeah, compared to Tulsi Gabbard, whereas Tulsi Gabbard's, I don't know, shunted aside to some, you know, cavern somewhere. Yeah, the DNI doesn't really have the huge staff that, say, the CIA does, right? But Avril Haynes, you know, Tulsi Gabbard's predecessor, she was always with Biden.

I mean, so it just depends on what the preferences of the president are. It depends. Okay. Anyway, Joe Kent leaves his job. And there's immediately a story about how he's willing to be a witness in the trial of the alleged. This is about a week later. I mean, this wasn't immediate. This was a new, this is a new spin to keep the story going by your old pal, Schellenberger. Was it just Mike? Was it just Schellenberger? I believe so. I mean, he put that out as this breaking news a few days ago. Okay. And you have to pay the paywall to read the breaking news. Right. So, but the quotes were, you know, it's not something I saw it after, like, but I'm willing to do it.

Sheltonberger clearly asked them, would you be willing to testify at a Charlie Kirk trial? Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah, exactly. So, so now everybody's on this thing that, you know, somebody who had a high ranking and intelligence position is willing to testify at the trial of the accused shooter of Charlie Kirk. Tyler Robinson.

Tyler Robinson, yeah. Because theoretically there was pressure by the FBI to non-investigate potential of exculpatory evidence and involving potentially other nations. right? I forget how this whole meme came about was that what really did happen immediately upon his resignation is that he scheduled an interview with Tucker Carlson. That was his big public debut. Yeah. And then the day after that, there was the appearance with Candace at the National Academy. Right. But on the Tucker Carlson interview, which is the very first interview that he did, first they go through sort of the timeline of him becoming disenchanted or having these concerns

about the Iran operation and what led it up to the rest of the nation. But then, you know, as the podcast wears on, which tends to be the case, you know, into the second or third hour, they start going a little bit far afield from the initial premise, which is, and it was Joe Kent and Tucker kind of sketching out a what Joe Kent called a dark theory for why it is that Trump allegedly betrayed his campaign promises or went back on his America First agenda and attacked Iran. Now, I would argue that's a total misreading of what Trump was actually campaigning on in 2024 and what his first term record was.

We don't have to get into that. It's just that, you know, Joe Kent, he was, you know, spinning out this theory that there could be a darker reason than anybody, that any of us can imagine as to why Trump did what he did in Iran. And it involves, it involves threats to Trump's personal safety. So they were speculating with this kind of like wink and a nod and insinuating language that it's possible that Israel is threatening Trump and sort of forcing him to go to war with Iran because Israel may have been involved in the Butler assassination attempt in July of 2024. And also wink and an nod may have been involved to some degree or another with the Charlie Kirk assassination. Now it seems like Joe Kent.

and he doesn't have any independent basis for suggesting as much. Didn't he give a quote along those lines? There was a quote along those lines, if I remember. In a subsequent interview, of course, with breaking points, they bring up Epstein. So to further bolster this thesis about how Trump is being compelled or cajoled or he has his back against the wall, and that's why he's doing what he's doing with Iran, They bring up Epstein with the idea being that, or Sager brings up Epstein to Joe Kent. And Joe Kent muses that it's possible that although he doesn't think Trump himself is implicated in anything,

it's very possible that the Epstein network, whatever that is, is intimidating Trump vis-a-vis Israel, meaning that they could be holding some sexual blackmail over Trump's head and thereby coercing him into taking. these foreign policy actions. And Joe Kent even says to Sagar, and this gets right to the sort of premise for why you brought this up, Joe Kent says that as to his potential Epstein component of this theory, it's not based on anything that he learned when he possessed a high-level security clearance in the U.S. government as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. It's quote, stuff he read on the internet. Right, right. But if he's just repeating back stuff he read on the internet and God only knows what stuff he read. But he's repeating that back,

but now it's got the seeming imprimatur of this high-level guy who was also, you know, personally courageous and going out on a limb to, you know, almost blow the whistle and inform the public about something that's gone desperately wrong, right? Yeah. But it's if it's one of the, one of the craziest examples probably of late of this feedback loop phenomenon. Yeah, the exact quote is, uh, You know, at the at the NCTC, we never touched any of the Epstein stuff. That was all under DOJ lock and key. So I don't really have any insider knowledge beyond what I've read personally.

Same stuff you've read on the internet. So he's like reading Whitney Webb probably. Right. I mean, this is beyond belief. So a guy resigns from a high ranking intelligence position. starts on the podcast circuit and immediately starts theorizing about shit he's read on the internet

that he's been reading on the internet and now this creates this acceleration momentum keeps barreling forward with it right, right exactly and you know, it's not out of the realm of possibility that completely out of the realm of possibility that there might be

some kind of exculpatory evidence or that there was something suppressed or whatever. But it's not based on anything. Well, what he says about the Charlie Kirk thing is that he, in his capacity, as director of the National Terrorism Center, felt that it was in his purview

to examine potential foreign links to the Charlie Kirk assassination. And if you recall, the thing that got immediately proclaimed the day of that killing, you know, by hairbrained internet users, was that Israel did it. Well, it wasn't even my hairbrain Internet users. It was by a very specific number.

Yeah, it went beyond that. But, you know, then went to, like, prominent media figures who were just echoing what they saw on their algorithmic slop feed. But, you know, there was a there was a wrinkle of this theory going around that, like, a suspicious proportion of cell phone users who were present at Utah State University at that day. That was the university, right, I think. They had, like, Israeli cell phones or something. Based on some quantitative analysis that they did. Who know? I mean, I wouldn't even credit that analysis that they did as legitimate,

but that's what they were claiming. Yeah, that wasn't the basis of it, though. It was one of the bases. Okay, well, one of the bases, but the original in Permanade of that, I'm sorry, the original basis of the whole thing was a call from some prominent media folks to other prominent media folks who immediately started speculating. Oh, really? There was a call? There was a, I didn't know there. There were, you know, on that for on that first day. Did you dial in or? No, I mean, I was a little bit removed from that. But, but, but, um, but anyway, yeah. So they, you know, this all got.

Because supposedly Charlie Kirk was becoming, uh, we were told or there was claimed that Charlie Kirk was becoming much more staunchly skeptical of Israel. Right. Um, and he. supposedly opposed the Iran war the Iran bombing in June of 2025, which he didn't. I mean, he declared that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for it and was such a masterful exertion of American military power. So that's just some another like, you know, bogus revision that, you know, always happens posthumously with somebody of that stature, I guess. But, you know, I was following what Charlie Kirk was saying contemporaneously because he was just like a mouthpiece for Trump pretty much. And, you know, once Trump made the decision that, you know, this war was going to, the bombing was going to happen. Charlie Kirk was all on board,

even though he would sound certain notes of potential skepticism. But the idea that it was becoming, it was becoming too much of a threat to Israel in terms of their grip on the kind of right-wing coalition that Charlie Kirk, like one of these lynch pins of the right-wing coalition, might have been going off the reservation. So they had to take him out. Like that was pretty much the thesis. Yeah. And then then of course, certain figures expanded that to include Turning Point had four knowledge. His wife had four knowledge. Ben Shapiro had four knowledge.

Like, you know, like, and look. But Joe Kent, just to clarify, Joe Kent appears to, I mean, we can maybe surmise. I don't know this for sure, but it seems like Joe Kent was following that online discussion. Right. And then thought there were leads that he could pursue in his government role.

And then he claims he was thwarted it from pursuing those leads by the FBI. Because the FBI turned it over to the state authorities in Utah, and Joe Kent no longer was given access to the relevant file or something like that. Right. So the FBI is now on the cover up and, et cetera, et cetera. But look, you can have as many theories as you want about, what was going on with Charlie Kirk. You can you can think that, you know, he was having second thoughts about support of Israel, all of these things.

But just purely as a media phenomenon, this is about as clear an example as you can get of how fucked up things have gotten. When basically podcasts are feeding information to a government official who is then, who then leaves the government, re-feeds the same information to the same podcasters who basically... Who then bring them back on. Who bring them back on and recycle it. And the world keeps spinning around.

Right, exactly. So now it's like a hurricane. It's like it just keeps gathering, you know, turning and turning in the widening gyre, right? This is how shit gets out of control. and nobody asks basic questions like what is this based on you know can can we refrain maybe from talking about things that we don't know et cetera et cetera so it's just that that is just one of a number of like crazy-ass things that has happened in the last week yeah and you know that that's extra

insidious from my perspective because the whole point of that the whole point of that tangent that was introduced first on Tucker's podcast by Joe Kent. And they're kind of going back and forth on it and like, you know, in real time almost, you know, sketching out their theory. It's fundamentally to claim that Trump is hostage to this nefarious foreign force. And that's why he's taking the action that he's taken in Iran. So they're doing it from this, this Trump exonerating impulse, meaning we have to find some roundabout reason how to explain. why Trump supposedly went back on his campaign promises.

And the only plausible reason is that Israel ratcheted up their blackmail slash physical threat coercion slash some other hardball tactic to require Trump to do their bidding. Like that, the Charlie Kirk Epstein, you know, Butler assassination, speculative angle to them, is more plausible, at least as how in terms of how they're presenting it, meaning the Tucker, Joe Kent, nexus, that to them is more plausible than Trump having any agency whatsoever, or having any, having a worldview, having predilections, having goals that involve him really wanting to go to war with Iran. Like that to them is not even something they could ever entertain because it could also necessitate them maybe directing some more personalized criticism at Trump,

which if Tucker does, then he's banished from having any access. And Joe Kent is also doing this thing where he's all, like on the one hand, still kissing Trump's ass, but also doing this pleading ritual where he's trying to, you know, urge Trump to see the light. So it's a political strategy in addition to just being dumb and, you know, mindlessly conspiracist fomenting. It's also this like political attack that they're taking that, that is it's unclear whether it's fully cynical or sincere or some combination, but either way, it should be understood for what it is, which is this political gambit. And for people who can't stand this comparison, even though it's absolutely, I would say

it's very solid. There's a reason why there was a sexual black male, secret sexual blackmail component, both in the first term and in this term. In 2016, there was just a world of people in Washington who were completely in denial about the fact that Trump won the presidency. And the only way they could explain it to themselves was, oh, goodness, the Russians must have cheated and they are, you know, they're operating Trump as a puppet. So it's really Russia that got elected, not Donald Trump or whatever it was.

Yeah, Manchurian candidate. It was a Manchurian candidate thing. And it was demented and a figment of their imagination. Well, actually, in some cases, it wasn't. There were, you know, there were people who actually helped turn that into a story. And they got supermajorities of Democrats believing, not just some of these looser theories around nebulous Russian interference, whatever that exactly meant. because it was kind of a weasel word. But the most hardcore theory that Russia actually tampered with the voting machines

and fraudulently installed Trump into office. So with people like Adam Schiff and even, you know, Bernie and Elizabeth Warren would occasionally toy with this rhetoric, meaning hack the election. Like that was understood by Democratic voters, understandably enough to mean that Russia literally did hack the voting machine. So you had Democrats operating from this all bizarre world sort of standpoint in terms of how they're perceiving events as they unfolded with Trump. And yeah, I think you're going to go and now make potential parallel or, you know,

assert a parallel here with the Epstein story, which is similarly causing these phantasmagoric or notions in terms of like what our current state of political affairs. Yeah, rather than confront head on, why is Trump making this decision, you know, was it, is this in line with what he set up? all along? Or, you know, is he doing it for reasons X, Y, and Z that, you know, are ill-advised or whatever it was? No, they have to explain it to themselves in terms of he's being blackmailed by,

sexually blackmailed by Israel. And now everybody, everybody is on board with this shit. John Mearsheimer, who was kicked out of intellectual America for saying a few things that I think were basically true about the invasion of Ukraine, which is that... Before that, about the Israel lobby, he and Stephen Walt wrote a formative book kind of first sort of positing that something existed called the Israel lobby in around 2006-7, and it caused a huge firestorm. But then, yeah, the Ukraine stuff came later and then he was exiled for that. Right. He was exiled for that. Maybe he wasn't exile because he had 10. He's always had tenure at the University of Chicago. So like you, how can you really be? Right. But the, well, there are a couple of things that are like,

I don't know how you put how you describe this. It's like a signal that the media has given up on you or has declared you a non-person. And one of them is a hit piece by, Who is that? Is it Isaac Chotner? The guy who does the email interviews And the New Yorker? Yeah, the ones that are like, Why the fuck did you say this? He's pretty good at it.

He is. He's good at it. But that's basically your gravestone in American cultural life. So he got that. But now he's back on board talking about how, you know, effectively elites were raping a little. What was the quote? It was effectively raping underage girls.

Yeah, he says, like, now we know, like, his point in that one podcast they did, and he's, like, on a million podcasts a day now. I mean, I don't know what other work he could possibly even be doing over at U.S. Chicago. But so even, like, somebody of, he's, like, 79 years old or something, even he is now podcast, adult. But, and, you know, I'm not discounting him entirely.

I think he's still got some good analysis, but, like, you know, there's some red flags in terms of, like where his mind is drifting off to. But he was on some, you know, one of these, you know, tediously long-form podcasts where, of course, they get into Epstein, right? And this is from, I think, last month. And he's talking about how, you know, the, the average person was already very wary of the elites that rule over us.

But they just didn't have the hard data yet. They didn't have the hard data to prove that the elites were serving their own selfish interest and not looking out for the popular, good. But now, Meiersteamer says, we have the data. The Epstein files are out. We know that these men were going around raping underage girl, effectively raping underage girls. And we know that they were involved in pedophilia. And like that makes that that really gets people's, you know, gears turning. And like, I don't, because he said, and he said, you can discover this if you just spend an hour or two reading through the Epstein files. I would love to know which specific files he

apparently read through. I hope he didn't search for pizza in the DOJ search bar. I hope he had a slightly better research methodology than that, but it's unclear because he doesn't specify any particular evidence, right? He's just speaking in the abstract because he's probably just absorbing these kind of ill-founded takeaways. He's seeing across the media ecosystem. I'm beginning to think, Michael, that we really should do a reading of Michelle Speaks or whatever that book is because Michelle remembers. Michelle remembers because this is increasingly, you know, becoming a sequel to that,

but it's just a turbocharged nuclear-powered version of what happened in like 1983. So, man, I want to ask you a question because you mentioned that, you know, rather than grapple with what Trump is doing, everybody's kind of groping for these extraneous sort of hallucinatory explanations for things. And I read your piece from yesterday on Racketka.

which was entitled Go Outside, so it was a little bit edigmatic what the piece is going to be about, but that drew me right in. And it ended up being about, just like I guess your reaction to the Iran stuff, and I think he said Trump is crazy, something like this. And I saw a huge revolt exploding in the comment section,

and because I'm such an inveterate internet brain person myself, I couldn't resist hopping in and engaging with one of the commenters because the commenter was denouncing you for, once again making everything about Trump as though like Trump is an irrelevant factor here in the war that he just launched with Iran. So maybe just talk about that. And like, do you, could you answer the question that you posed at this point? Or do you have like a preliminary answer of any kind in terms of like why Trump did what he did?

That doesn't involve like invoking all these specious crazy theories. Well, what I would begin with, I don't think it's, he was. blackmailed by Israel sexually blackmailed by Israel. But beyond that, I think one of the areas where you and I differ is that I think Trump is a harder read than he seems to be. How do we differ on that? Well, I think Trump can change his mind from minute to minute. and it's often not clear of what exactly he's reacting to. Sometimes he changes his mind after meeting with a certain person

and you don't know who that person was. He will believe something fervently for a little while and then completely believe something else. I think he's a very difficult politician to figure out. when I first saw Trump on the campaign trail, I knew that what he was doing was going to work politically. But insane clown president. Wasn't that your first book on Trump?

Yeah. Your first Rolling Stone article? Yeah, but I mean, if you read the book, what it basically says is that Trump, you know, I thought he was, there were all kinds of negative things in the book about Trump from that campaign. But one thing I did say is that, look, I've been watching campaigns forever. And the one thing that was universal that I picked up from interviewing people on the campaign trail

from both sides is that people hate the campaign process. They hate the speeches. They hate the phoniness. They hate the commercials. They hate all that shit. And Trump was running against the process and it was going to work. Now, but the problem was, is that I couldn't figure out whether he was doing this as, you know, a PR stunt, you know, for the next season of The Apprentice or something. Yeah, like, it was, even people in his inner circle would tell you completely, they would tell you completely contradictory things. And, you know, as time went on, like, I found him more and more enigmatic, right? So, you know, I've always thought. Trump is a tough read.

I think journalists often misunderstand, they willfully misunderstand the nature of his support because his support is all over the place too. There are people who are hardcore, like anti-immigration, alt-right types. And then there are other, there are like old ladies who just like them on the apprentice, right? And so it's never clear. Or fun, fox and friends or something.

Yeah, exactly. With Iran, I was a little surprised. I mean, I was surprised by a bunch of things in this term, among other things because just because of the evidence of the first term, you know, Trump will, he'll say things like I'm great at war. You know, we'll hit them like they never, you know, like nothing they've ever seen. We'll bomb the shit out of them.

We'll bomb the shit out of them. And then in the next breath, he'll talk about, how, you know, you just got to do a deal with people, right? And if you read, if you read like, I actually read his books, right? Or I read the art of the deal. I read it. Yeah. And so.

It's our new, it's our new, it's our new Talmud. Yeah. And my, so I, I thought he was basically a sales creature who, who, whose gimmick was basically getting as many votes as possible in the same way you try to get as many customers as possible. Like, I thought that was the primary key to understanding Trump. I don't think that anymore because I don't think that what he's doing now can be explained as a vote garnering strategy, right? He's not going to garner.

He doesn't have to garner any more votes. I mean, unless you think he's going to abolish the 22nd Amendment. Politicians traditionally operate in terms of trying to maintain levels of support, right? He literally doesn't have to get, doesn't have to solicit any more votes. And he's got. It would be better to not lose the midterms if you were, if you were. I know, but that was almost a given anyway, just given the historical patterns, right? So, I mean, Trump doesn't care about whether the Trump does not really care that much, I don't think, about whether the Republican Party in the House and Senate does particularly well.

I mean, yeah, he'll help them. But that's not, you know, it's now almost a given in the era of Trump. So like in the past 11 or so years that when Trump was on the ballot, Republicans overperform. When Trump is not on the ballot, but just sort of in the ambiance, Republicans underperform because you can't draw out the voters who just want to vote for Trump and who don't really care to vote for Republicans per se. Yeah, but there's also, why is that? And this is something that another thing that politicians don't understand,

a lot of them don't understand all that well. Name recognition is the number one predictor of turnout. right so when you have celebrities on on the ballot it brings it tends to bring more people out um but just to get back to your original question the whole point of my piece yesterday is i am a mentally healthy person at least i think i am and trump is not is not at the center of my universe like i do not define my myself by being for or against trump i'm neither right i never have as you as you know given our russia gate mutual experience. Right, right. Yeah. I mean, like if you tell me that he's innocent of X and, you know, and that was how the rest of the get things started. And I was, I was even highly skeptical of all the prosecutions against him in the interregnum period. Yeah, yeah. I think there were one or two or a couple, where a couple of the charges might have been winnable, but they were shitty, mostly shitty charges, right? The espionage act, really? Yeah, the espionage act. I mean,

look, look, you're always guilty under the espionage act. That's like a catch all. I hate that law. So the point of that article was just to say like, you know, I don't, I don't get this. Like, I think this is crazy. But I think they're all crazy. And that's all I was really saying. And yet, people were denouncing you for now being a new sufferer of TDS.

which they found shocking and bewildering. So this is, but what's so hilarious about that is that this is completely the opposite phenomenon now flipped on its head. Right. Like, you know, when Russia gets started, any of us, there were only a few of us who stood up and said, yeah, I don't, I mean, this story doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It would be nice to see a little bit more evidence. Could you share that with us? immediately we were all denounced as as Trump supporters, right, or anti-anti-Trumpers or whatever it was. Or receiving roubles, you know, in an envelope to New Jersey. Right, right. So now the new thing is if you're against this war or like you would rather not have to worry about this shit, you know,

or about the destabilization of the world or of possible economic collapse or any of the number of things. Now you have TDS, right? So that's just what that piece is. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure that you and I differ so much in the way that you maybe imagine because I don't disagree that Trump is, quote, harder to read as a political figure than a conventional political figure who was training their whole life to become a politician, went to law school, served as like somebody is, you know, chief of staff. and then, you know, went through the ordinary route, right? They tend to formulate a political sort of program and policy preferences

as a much more explicable way than Trump who'd introduce something novel. So I'm not even denying that. And, yeah, of course I've read the art of the deal. And one of the central tenets that he expounds there is this idea of truthful hyperbole, right? It's a sales tactic, meaning you'll have maybe a kernel of truth of something and you'll just keep repeating it over and over and you're selling a product, and that's a great way to, like, get the New York City municipal government to allow you to refurbish the woman rank at a discount or at a higher rate or whatever it was.

So I'm not necessarily contesting or disagreeing with much of that. I just think that on Iran in particular, okay, Trump hasn't been that difficult to read because we've got four years worth of data from the first term. We have three presidential campaigns that he ran. We have a record of policy actions in the first term and a record of specific policy actions that he was pledging to take in a second term during the 2024 campaign. Not just the platitudes and the slogans and like the RFK Jr. Tulsi Gabbard, Elon, Joe Rogan, sort of, you know, wishcasting around, oh, Trump's going to barrel in and abolish the deep state and end all the wars. Like that was part of the marketing tactic. But in terms of what he was actually calling for specifically,

people kind of tuned it out or didn't want to hear about it or didn't want to accept it. But he was calling for ramping up what had already been. If you listen to Tulsi Gabbard, because remember, I covered her very closely. I knew her personally. I know Tulsi well too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, I mean, she contemporaneously, during the first term, and this is part of what drew me to her. She was very meticulously chronicling what Trump was doing in the first term that she said at the time was leading ineluctively to what she called a regime change war against Iran. And she was actually pretty prescient in that. Now she's got, she's subordinated herself into the Trump Borg, so she can't be truthful

about it any longer. But she was actually truthful about what were the ramifications of Trump's first term policy on Iran, whether it was the imposition of the maximum pressure sanctions to destabilize the government in hopes that it would cajole the, population to rise up and overthrow the government or the assassination of Solomani or him being, he said, minutes away from bombing Iran in June of 2019 over like a tickey-tac unmanned drone incident over the Persian Gulf. And there are a billion other examples from the first term. And so, and he continued that in the second term. He appointed a cast of people at the peak of his political

capital after he wins the 2024 election, right? He can pretty much pick whoever he wants and the Republicans are going to approve it. He picked. He picked. takes Rubio, apparently, as the person who is most compatible with him in terms of enacting his foreign policy agenda. Rubio is one of the most hardcore Russia, not Russia, also, yes, Russia, but Iran hawks are interventionists in the United States Senate. He appoints Mike Walts as his national security advisor who's one of the most ardent hawks in the house. That wasn't even a position that was subject to Senate confirmation. So he could appoint it like Bozo the Clown if he wanted. He appoints people like Elise Stefonic and whomever. And then, yeah, as a little political

patronage thing, he throws a bone to Tulsi Gabbard as the DNI, who's now frozen out, and who even knows what her sincere views are on any of this stuff anymore, any longer, because she's made so many tradeoffs to assimilate herself into Trump world. Yeah. But so, like, this is all explicable. I mean, I don't understand, like, there's not that much confusing about Trump's trajectory on Iran in particular. So I just don't, I just don't get that argument.

Okay. And look, I don't, I don't think we need to get into this too much, because, Okay. Like, no matter what the answer is here, I don't feel terribly strongly about it. But I just feel like if we're going to be ridiculing people who have their own sort of blinkered explanations, maybe we should give our own more intelligible one. Well, as best we can. As best that question is answerable.

That's part of my thing is that I have, I don't particularly know for sure what the deal is here, right? I would say there are a number of possibilities that would explain it. But, you know, again, going back to Trump's basic idea, and if you, you know, not just the art of the deal, but if you read all the sales literature that clearly informed that book, you know, his, as you talked about, the exaggeration is, you know, truthful hyperbole. it's one of those things like I think you walk into a room and you say I think we can both agree that you know that we're not going to pay a million dollars you you're probably not going to pay a million dollars for this product right and the the other person is like a million dollars like I wasn't

even going to put you know even anywhere near that price you end up selling it for 75,000 dollars which is what you were really trying to do all along that's how this guy thinks he's been in that world his entire time, are you getting, when he talks about certain things, are you getting that? Or are you getting, are you getting his real view of things? Like, I'm not always sure. Like, you mentioned that, that he brought in all those people. Well, yeah, but he also had that moment during the convention where there was a real fight within Trump's inner circle where that kind of pitted his family on the one hand against the

party on the other hand. And it's the reason why he had Vance instead of Rubio as his running mate. He did fire John Bolton. And, you know, who is the most unhappy person in the world right now? It's got to be John Bolton, right? But then who did he pick as John Bolton's successor? He picked something, you know, and going into the second term, Mike Walts was basically a protege of Dick Cheney. There's no ideological distinction there. No, I get that. There was a personality conflict with Bolton.

Yes, that's true. Yeah, but like in the first term, did he start any of these wars? Like, I don't know. Yeah, and look at what Tulsa. I'll just quote Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi Gabbard said when he drifted the Jones strike assassination of Soleimani, it instigated the first direct kinetic warfare between the United States. in Iran and triggered what she said was this ineluctible drive toward regime change war with Iran.

She was correct. Okay, yes, maybe, but that still doesn't explain why it happened at this particular moment, right? Like I... Because he stormed into office with this global conquest mission. We just started talking off, talking on this, in this podcast about them now saying they're going to do regime change in Cuba. They did some variation of it in Venezuela already. He was rambling about wanting to seize Greenland.

declared himself the ruler of both Venezuela and Gaza. He talks about wanting to take over the Panama Canal. He's not saying he's going to select the political leadership in Iran. So he's going to become, you know, art of the deal, Ayatollah or something. So this is like a very, it's like, this is a discernible through line. So I just feel like I, one, one thing I frustrated me in the past couple of years is that so many people seem to refuse to update their priors from 2016 as though, like, no new information had come in since the time. all we knew about Trump really in the political domain that he was a former beauty, passion proprietor and reality television show hosts. Like he had wielded power for four years.

There was like a lot more info for us to synthesize and discern things from, but people kind of almost like refused to do it. And that's why you have this phenomenon now, everybody is just so bewildered that something like this could have happened when like I wrote during the so-called 12-day war last June that this is like the most telegraph thing of all time. I was talking about it contemporaneously. Like, nobody, the algorithm didn't want to hear it in 2024. Because, like, you know, so people got consumed into this slop, you know, the precursors of this algorithmic slop system that we're talking about now.

Okay. Well, congratulations. I'm not looking for congratulations. I'm just, you know, I'm talking, I don't know. I just think that, you know, I don't know what I'm saying exactly. I guess I'm maybe I'm engaging a bit. I get it. I guess what I'm trying to say is that,

This was not foreseeable to me. I don't think even if you're thinking in terms of, you know, regime change, which he could easily have, like if he had wanted to enact regime change in Iran, he could have come in the first time he was president, you know, snuggled up to all the hawks, who are still in office and done it that way, the same way that Cheney and Bush did it.

But in the first term, he had guys like Mattis, remember, and Tillerson, who were, although, quote, establishment in a sense, they were a little bit more conventional in their thinking, such that they were trying to advocate for him to stay in the Iran nuclear deal. And so, like, he, but now, and Trump, you know, Trump didn't have the practice in the first term to actually, enact his true desires right now he does in the second term this is clearly one of his true desires you say it's not foreseeable i don't know like i mean i've i've been pulling up a speech that trump gave in

september of two thousand twenty four reading off of remarks not not not not not not off the cuff where he's threatening to blow the entirety of iran to smithereens like i don't know like is that so what about that is not foreseeable in terms of like what that might imply for his plans because because has Trump says all kinds of shit that never, that never comes true, right? Like that, look, that's just the fact that he's a different kind of politician to, to try to guess at. And this particular war, there's, there was no reason to do it at this particular moment. As you, as you have correctly pointed out, the only reasons are actually in his own head. And his own head, to me, is not particularly transparent.

So that's all I'm saying. Don't jump down my throat. Okay. I'm not jumping down. I know you have some feelings about like, you know, where I was in 2024, which was mainly. Yeah, it's okay. I'm not going to, I don't like, I'm not going to bear a grudge. You didn't do anything wrong to me, right? It's just like it was just a, it was like a political frustration about what I saw as this drift amongst a lot of people in that year in particular who had been in my little cohort as people who were against a lot of the histrionics that were anti-Trump in the first term doing what I perceived as now this unwarranted overcorrection where they were becoming a little bit too noticeably charitable toward everything

that Trump and his you know the Republicans could do well no but I had also been sunk into this years-long investigation into the speech thing uh which was on yeah I get it No, 100% true. Like, by the way, I'm not calling for your execution. Yesterday, by the way, the Supreme Court case based on our shit. Not in the Supreme Court, but in the actual lower court case. So I was terrified of that stuff. And I think there were legitimate reasons to be terrified of that stuff.

You know, I never came out and waved a flag for Donald Trump. No, I'm not saying you did. So, you know, and I just think that there was a, there was a, a very conspicuous dearth of what I would have regarded to be proper analysis of the campaign in 2024, in particular with relation to Trump, which was, you know, totally ironic because, I mean, so I didn't have to, you know, really argue with anybody about the flaws with Kamala Harris in 2024. Like, that was almost self-evident, at least in terms of the media ecosystem I was dealing in. But with Trump, it was like, you know, beating your head against a brick wall. Well, but Trump's only value at that

time, well, look, we're talking in circles, but the, the, if we're, if we're going to talk about sort of media distortions, right, and why people are in a, in a place that, where they are believing all kinds of crazy shit. You know, I certainly couldn't have foreseen this synthesis of, well, there were a number of things that were unforeseeable at the time. Like the way the algorithm shifted kind of dramatically after Trump got elected and things that it previously suppressed, it suddenly. encouraged.

Like what, the anti-Israel stuff? Yeah, the anti-Israel stuff. You know, there were certain kinds of conspiratorial theorizing, right? Yeah, like, Pizza gate was banned in 2016, but now it's rewarded. But even certain kinds of

like even certain kinds of ways of talking about issues, like, you know, with secret societies, even using terms like elites, got you, look, could get you deamplified, right? Or retweeting people who talked about themes like that. And what happened after Trump got elected is that, you know, those algorithms suddenly turned on their head.

These suddenly became politically advantageous to escalate. So now we have kind of this, we have kind of this, merger of pre-20204 sort of anti-Trump corporate media merging with sort of the pro-Trump or not pro-Trump adjacent podcast world right and and so the it's this it's two different brands of uh of extremism i guess not not extremism i mean that's not the right word fanaticism maybe right um you know i guess you know just to to to maybe calm down anybody who's too exercised right now and is listening one of my points and i'm almost positive that you and i discuss this at some uh over during the first term one of the points that i would always try to emphasize is that trump like any political figure

in my view needs a rational critique right so whether it's obama bide anybody, Superman. And the reason why I was highly focused on what I perceived to be these irrational critiques that were coming out at such high intensity from the Democrats and their security state apparatus and the whole confluence of actors that were, you know, flooding the zone with Russiagate or fascism, Nazi. you know, by 2020, it was, you know, white supremacy. Also Russia defeatism, right, with Ukraine and everything?

Yeah, whatever it might be. It was drowning out what I perceived to be the rational critique that was needed of Trump for exactly this sort of eventuality as we're now seeing transpire with Iran. So that's where I'm coming from on this stuff in terms of, so I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I've never been somebody who just reflexively wants to slam Trump. It's boring. Like I don't sit around vegetating in front of these liberal podcasts or like trying to adopt an MSNBC style.

I did the exact opposite. That's why I was like a semi-regular guest on Tucker Carlson showed talking about the stuff on Fox in the first term. But, you know, it was all with an eye toward, okay, so what could Trump actually do that might actually be worth objecting to, but people are not going to necessarily be primed for or able to interpret if they're so consumed with this hallucinatory man. And that seems to be coming to pass.

No, and I fully agree with you, but like, I guess I would just ask you to give me a little credit. Like, I was never manic about anything. I'm not, I've never been. I wasn't, that wasn't directed at you personally. And I've also never been a political fanatic. Like, my feeling about Trump, I agreed with you that he was, that he needed a rational. critical my thinking about that though in retrospect may not have been in the right place like what I thought was that the Democrats should have focused on the things

that were successful for Trump right like in other words why did he why did Trump win because there's a great great deal of frustration in the population there is there's a lot of anger about economic inequality there there is there's frustration about the wars. Like I remember going to Trump events. Now, Trump himself may not have been anti-war, but as the campaign went on in 2016, I remember noting this repeatedly

that there were growing numbers of people who would show up in fatigues at his events because he would toss in lines here and there about these Forever wars. Right. Wasted trillions in the Middle East. Yeah, he had almost like a contingent of the Ron Paul people subsumed into the mainline Republican sort of platform. Exactly.

So, but I was still thinking in terms of like conventional politics. Like, in other words, what's getting votes? What do you need to respond to this diagnosis of Trump as a white supremacist leader who is rising basically by running George Wallace's campaign? campaign. I didn't think that was correct. I think that was a George Wallace and Andrew Dice Clay. Right. Yeah. Exactly. So my thought was Trump is basically just a political opportunist. And you should listen to what voters are telling you. Like I never think of Trump about Trump in terms of Trump. I think about I think about who his voters are and what they want. Right. And if you listen to his voters, what the, you know, they'll tell you. the same nine things most of the time, right? Like, I mean, there are some people who do like them just as a celebrity, but for the most part, they're frustrated about everything from stuff

that's being taught in schools to, you know, the lack of jobs, to living in a place where you're 150 miles from the nearest birth center, like the decline of, you know, functional infrastructure in the country, right? Now, are they, is it reasonable to believe that Trump was going to fix those problems? No. And I never said that I thought, you know, he had offered good solutions to those problems or that he was necessarily believable in those areas. But clearly, he was winning with a lot of those voters because he was talking about these things. and his democratic opponents were not engaging on those issues.

Instead, they were trying to sandback and using all these quasi-illegal methods, right, which were crazy. So that's- I pretty much agree with all that. That would have been my rough heuristic as well from like in the 2016 time period. I'm just saying that now- I'm not so sure about 2024 time period, though. I'm not so sure about 2024. See, I think that's a bit.

I think that's sort of a misapprehension. I don't believe that really anymore about 2024. Look, I mean, we have three successive election cycles that involve Trump. Like, it's not, we don't have to all stay perpetually stuck in this 2016 time warp. By 2024, we had a guy who, like, who actually, you know, there comes a point where you do have to be a little bit more concerned about Trump qua Trump. Because, like, he's clearly got a pretty well-defined worldview right now that has been turbocharged in his second term that does flow from. his own instincts and ideology to the extent one can be discerned, personnel choices, et cetera, that I think is actually, you know, it's unfortunately necessary to hone in on a bit

and take thing, take our analytical lens a little bit beyond just this hazy 2016 thing when we're talking about the downtrodden people economically who might support Trump, which I agreed with at the time. Like Trump's support in 2016 did correlate with lower socioeconomic status in the Republican primaries and then to some degree in the general election. Hang on just a moment. Okay. In 2024, it was still a huge issue for Trump voters that there was a well-funded attempt to get him removed from the ballot using the end of the insurrection.

Oh, yeah, that's true. There was still incredible frustration about him being him and lots of other people being taken off the internet. Even Bernie Sanders said, Like if the president can be taken off the internet, who's in charge, right? The use of criminal prosecutions to try to get him. Oh, yeah. I agree. Yeah.

So all those things, I think they weighed in his favor, right? They were major factors in his reelection. And, you know, I don't think it's like being stuck in 2016. to say that he was being elevated by the dumb behavior of his opponents. The dumb behavior of his opponents was still, I think, the dominant factor in his election in 2020. Sure, sure. I meant stuck in the 2016 vortex as in constantly going back to Trump appealing to people who are disenchanted with the system in some way or have a lower socioeconomic status or fed up with the wars, stuff that people were kind of sussing out in 2016 to explain his

ascendance. I'm just saying by 2024, you're right, it was a very heavily sort of personalist appeal. Like, look up that term, like, meaning it was heavy about Trump himself. Trump was a tribune for the grievances of, you know, a lot of his supporters. And there was, then there was a lot of legitimate grievances given these insane tactics that were used against him. But I'm just saying with such a heavy personalist case being made, everybody just, strangely overlooked. Gee, I don't know, his Iran policy, and then here we are today.

No, you're right. You're absolutely right. I just didn't, I thought somebody who was, who had basically, he ran a very smart campaign, right? You know, smarter than the Democrats, by a lot, right? Twice. Not so much in 2020, but definitely 2016.

in 2024. Yeah. Well, I think he would have won even in 2020 if it weren't for COVID, frankly. You know, Biden was a very beatable candidate, even though he was a better candidate than the two that they ran. But, you know, he showed signs in 2024 of just purely on a, on a, you know, on a calculating level of being able to get himself elected to the presidency. I agree. I mean, inclusion of like the RFK and Tulsi and Elon and Rogan, like that was a brilliant marketing tactic. It appealed to the podcast consuming algorithmically driven demographic in a way that I agree was it was brilliant politics. Okay. Okay. And I don't think it's completely irrational to think that somebody who understands politics well enough to get elected will can might continue to. to try to pursue the same kind of political strategy going forward.

Like I know a lot of people in the Trump orbit. I didn't hear anything along the lines of, yeah, we're planning to get elected and then pull all this shit. Like that I didn't hear. Like I, you know, I wasn't like a thousand percent plugged in, but I was a little bit plugged in. And I didn't get wind of any of this shit. So, you know,

Look, I mean, people hear what they want what they want to hear, especially if they're looking for a job. Well, that's probably true. I mean, case in point, Tulsi Gabbard, right? I mean, she had the audacity to go in front of a crowd at Madison Square Garden on October 27, 2004, and say, a vote for Trump is a vote to end wars, not start them. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had the audacity to come on next and say, a vote for Trump is a vote to end the warfare state, as though Trump wasn't pledging to continue what he did in his first term, which is introduce record-breaking military budgets. And then we got another 200 billion request for the Iran War supplemental.

And he already included the $156 billion from the big, beautiful bill. I mean, yeah, people hear what they want to hear. They will then project out to an audience that they feel needs to be politically sold to. And, yeah, it's sort of human nature, I guess. And Trump was such an omnipresent force that, like, people could project anything they wanted onto him at that point. I'm just saying, like, I would have hoped that the journalistic imperative would have to try to have been a little bit more exacting. So people wouldn't be so bewildered and befuddled when an eventuality like this comes about. But, you know, I was, I couldn't get anybody to sign on with that in 2024.

So. Yeah, no. In hindsight, clearly, you know, this, it had to be at least a little bit in the works. But, you know, at the same time, what was happening in 2024, it was hard not to pay attention to the fact that the outgoing vegetative presidency of Joe Biden was firing Atakums missiles into the territory of Russia as a lame duck. Like, that was, you know. Which Trump has continued and, in fact, loosened the restrictions on Ukraine for firing long-range missiles into Russian territory. if you had asked all these like podcast listeners in October of 2024, would you anticipate Trump 2.0 doing that? It would have been 95% no because they were getting the wrong information

filter to them. Yes, yes. But like has the war been solved in 24 hours? Like I haven't Googled today, but probably not. No, but but but certainly there were competing camps within Trump's Trump's circle. They believe different things. And even now, there are still competing camps even within, for instance, the people

who are in his intelligence agencies. Certain things get out. Certain things don't get out. The Epstein, the whole reason we have Epstein files out is emblematic of kind of what's going on within the Trump presidency writ large,

which is that there's sort of massive confusion. There are people who, there are some people who came in believing that they were going to be able to release a ton of stuff. There were some people who thought that was going to be the entire organizing principle of this term. Was this going to be released? The release of the EPSC file was going to be the organizing. No, no, no, no, releasing.

Oh, mass disclosure of UFO, JFK, whatever. Well, no, not even that, not even that, like actual stuff. Like, I know for a fact. Russia gate stuff. Russia gate stuff, there's, there are still things from the church files, believe it or not, that, that they have and have not let let out, right? And there was. The church committee. The church committee.

Like, 1978, was it? 76, 75, 76. Yeah. And they found some of that shit. You know, we did some reporting about the prohibited access stuff. And, you know, that only came out after, you know, a tremendous amount of effort by like a small number of people who are like, you know, in a minority position now within the government. And but all of this ultimately is subsumed to, you know, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a position. presidency, the buck does stop with the president. And if you don't know what's going on inside the

president's mind in any given moment, you know, I've been at, I've been at an event with people in the administration, right? And they're basically just waiting to read the tea leaves for the next truth social posts, like from the next truth social post, like everybody else. Like, they have no real unique insight into the topics that are coming up. up as to like what the plan is. And this is where I think Joe, um, Joe Kent was probably on the mark is, you know, not the weird theorizing around Charlie Kirk or assassinations in Israel, but when he says that his perception was that the process, the policy making process had gotten much more cloistered

around Trump, meaning restricted to a handful of inner circle people. So, you know, with with respect to Iran. So it's like Rubio, Hegsef, Kane, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Ratcliffe, and maybe Susie Wiles. And that's maybe pretty much it. They might let like J.D. Vance like call in every now and then, but that's pretty much the inner circle. And so Joe Kent felt like he could really not play any constructive role anymore. And therefore it would be who of him to do what he can from the outside. Like that I think jies with everything that I've been hearing for a long time. So I'm getting text as the show is happening from people who are kind of not in the administration, but adjacent to it, right? Who are basically telling me about the divisions within the various departments.

And I have to admit, I did not spend any time really at all. on the Pentagon stuff, except to do some stories on the legality of the, or the lack of legality about the Venezuela stuff. So this is not an area where I was plugged in at all. I can tell you that on the intelligence side, there are just schisms everywhere and there are intramural battles

where the kind, there are certain people and they're not hard to identify, certain people lost, last summer and were kind of booted out of that inner circle you just mentioned. And others were brought in into the trust tree. And within that little powwow, shit is happening. And it's not easy for me to figure out. I commend you for having seen it coming.

I'm really not even looking for praise. I know people are going to take it that way. It really, it's really more just. I don't want to repeat myself, but it was really just more about a genuine frustration that I had, not for my own self-aggrandizement, but because of like, I do think, like, on its own terms is necessary on some level to, like, give people the most accurate possible picture we can of, like, what's going on with American politics. And I feel like there was an epic failure in 2024 that was the worst in my adult lifetime. Well, I think you and I are going to continue to disagree on that because, Oh, no. Disagreement. I have to shrivel now onto the floor. No, no, no, no. No, no.

Because, you know, there were lots of people who were, who, look, we're in a terrible situation right now, right? There's an agreement. This is an awful thing we're in. But we could equally be in a different terrible situation. and I don't think that even though we're pulling back from things like trying to take over Greenland or Cuba or whatever it is, although I still some- Neither of which are over. I mean, some boyhood part of me still wants Greenland, but whatever. But they have direct flights that just opened up from Newark if you want to take a trip to Nuke,

Newk Greenland. Did they really? Yeah, just last year. We got to go. I'd love to go. go let's do it we got to go all right we'll we'll do that um oh they're probably sick of journalists coming now at this point to ask so so uh look uh what's happening right now is is is shortening people's memories about how fucked up things were um in the years leading up to this um and we're gonna

we're gonna remember that pretty quickly uh once uh a certain number of a actions happen, right? Assuming they do happen. And then we'll remember, we might remember why it is that we were paying attention, maybe as the Russians would say, not there at the time, right? So by the way, before you forget, Joe Kent, if you're out there, come on this show. Yeah. No, I, he's on every show under the sun.

Yeah, he's an invitation that's been extended. you know, I will be polite. I'm not going to be gratuitous, but, you know, I have some queries that maybe he hasn't been asked as of yet. And I think it would be informative. Okay, a couple of quick notes. We do have a little bit of,

we're going to have some breaking news coming out on Rackett later today. It's not a huge story, but it's a little bit of a story in the sense that... It's a ripple. It's a ripple. And don't take it as,

any kind of position on this war at all. It's just that we got wind of something that a meeting between Iran and Russian military contractors. And we're going to tell you about that. I don't think the even the Trump administration knows about it. So we're going to publish that. My position on the war is that it's a crazy misadventure. So if anybody feels more comfortable telling me stuff in light of that position being openly declared, then feel free. right you know feel free to talk to michael as well um and uh yeah we're there's also going we're going to complete uh the uh the march madness tournament also so stay tuned we're going to have a lot a show on on friday that's going to be a tape thing and we're going to have some more

from that event that michael went to last night so uh thanks yeah i mean the thing from last night it'll be like a standalone video montage whatever right So that should be good. There will be funny. There will be darkly amusing stuff. There will be funny to quote Daniel Day Lewis. By the way, is that your favorite over-overacted Daniel DeLewis role? Although I thought he was pretty good in that one, actually.

There will be blood? Yeah. You know, it's been so long since I've seen it. I don't retain movie knowledge. Well, I don't know what it is about my brain, but somebody will ask me about a movie that I saw in, like, 2009, and I almost have like... Oh, 2009 is way too long ago.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I saw like around when it came out. I don't know. I liked... I saw Phantom Thread. Is that... Is that the right name? It was a more recent one.

I think it was Phantom Thread. Let me look it up now, so I don't feel like I'm going... Maybe. I don't know. Yeah, Phantom Thread, 2017, Daniel Day Lewis. Okay, I'm not crazy. You haven't seen that one? No, I haven't seen that one.

What's that one? about uh it was another paul and thomas anderson again i can't even i can hardly even tell you what it was about oh he's like a tailor i think or yeah right right right right yeah anyway but i'm not going to be able to give intelligent movie takes really unless i saw it within the past week yeah yeah anyway there will like eddington eddington was my movie of the year last year i don't know if you saw that i didn't see eddington i did a review i did i did something unusual i actually reviewed that one really yeah nice nice moon for it all right excellent you you have to watch eddington It's like, it's a perfect encapsulation of like, it's internet conspiracy brain, but on the big screen.

You wouldn't even imagine that a movie like it could actually be successfully executed, but it is. It's like they filmed it from inside my own internet, addled brain. All right, I'll definitely take a look now because most movies now in the first five minutes, I'm like, oh, God, more of this fucking mess. You'll like this one. You'll like this one. Good. All right. Thanks everybody for hanging out.

and we will see you again later this week and have more video and all that stuff. Michael, thanks for going to the event. Have a good flight. Don't get captured. And we'll see you all soon. Adios. Everyone.