Pod Save America - Donald Trump, Empath in Chief

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Trump says the savage murder of Rob and Michele Reiner was the result of their own "Trump Derangement Symptom" and says Reiner was bad for the country. The one real surprise: the number of Republicans in Congress, and even Trump's own social media followers, who denounced the post. Jon, Tommy, and Lovett discuss the Republican pushback and the weekend's (many) other tragedies, including shootings at Brown and Bondi Beach, and the death of two U.S. service members in Syria. Then they look at MAGA voters' growing disappointment with their president, Erika Kirk trying to stop Candace Owens from spreading conspiracy theories about her husband's assassination, and growing speculation about Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom's political futures. Finally, CNN's Jake Tapper talks to Tommy about the fate of his network now that its parent company is for sale, the sham Pentagon press corps, and his new book, "Race Against Terror: Chasing an Al Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War." Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Today's presenting sponsor is Simply Safe Home Security. We can't calm the news cycle, but we can help you feel more calm and secure when you're at home with a Simply Safe home security system. Simply Safe is for people who want real proactive protection. These are the goals to stop crimes before they start. Traditional systems wait until an intruder is already inside your home. Simply Safe works with a double layer of defense outside of your home to keep intruders out. If someone's lurking, AI-powered cameras or alert live agents who can talk directly to intruders

to let them know they're on camera and that the police are on their way, because early action is better than after the fact to deter crime. There are no long-term contracts or hidden fees. You can cancel any time. Name Best Home Security System by US News and World Report for five years running. 60-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it and see the difference for yourself. As you guys know, John Levitts had a Simply Safe system up himself. It was super easy to do.

It gave him great peace of mind. The monitoring works excellent. There's no long-term contracts. You can turn it on and off from your app. There's great cameras. There's rapid response from the folks over at SimplySafe. If it's an excellent product, give it a shot. This month only, take 50% off any new system.

This is one of the best prices you will ever see for SimplySafe. Don't miss it. Hit SimplySafe.com slash crooked. Again, that's simplysafe.com slash crooked and lock in your discount. There's no safe like SimplySafe. Welcome to Potsave America. I'm John Fabro. I'm John Lovett.

On today's show, we got another chapter of MAGA in disarray, as Candice Owens spreads some truly insane conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk's murder. And separately, the MAGA base is getting more and more disappointed with Donald Trump. We'll also indulge in some harmless 2028 speculation coming out of the DNC winter meetings here in L.A. week. And bad news, if you were counting on the Washington Post's new AI-generated podcast to stay informed, you may want to double-check the quotes and facts you're hearing, if you can believe that. Then, CNN's Jake Tapper talks to Tommy about the fate of his network now that its parent company is for sale, the decimation of the Pentagon Press Corps, and his new book,

Race Against Terror, chasing an al-Qaeda killer in the dawn of the Forever War. But let's start with how our government is responding to the onslaught of horrifying tragedies over the weekend. both here and around the world. On Saturday, we found out that three Americans, two Iowa National Guard soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed in Syria during a counterterrorism mission against ISIS. Trump has promised retaliation.

Hours later, there was a mass shooting in a Brown University econ classroom that killed two students and injured nine. While paying respects to the victims, Trump responded to the shooting by saying, quote, things can happen. In fact, things like that happen so often that it became the 300,

189th mass shooting in America this year. Meanwhile, FBI director Cash Patel once again bragged about detaining a suspect who turned out to be the wrong person and has since been released. So as of this recording, the shooter is still at large and hasn't stopped Cash from tweeting. Now he's tweeting about the reward. Nothing can stop him. Any thoughts on the on the brown shooting and Cash Patel just, this is like the third or fourth time now, the second or third time he's done this? The idea that we should have the FBI director kind of live tweeting

through active investigations. No need. No need whatsoever. It doesn't do anything to help the investigation clearly because you're putting it out there that they've caught someone when they haven't caught the right person. And then he looks like a fucking fool every few hours.

He has to kind of adjust whatever he's put out into the world. It's just this intense need for like social validation online from the head of our most important national law enforcement agency, and it's just a reminder that he's an incompetent who doesn't belong in the job. Yeah, he could so easily avoid these mistakes by just following precedent and shutting up. I mean, I think the first time he tweeted about, when he tweeted about Charlie Clark's assassination, it was reportedly from a dinner table at an ultra-exclusive restaurant in New York City called

Rouse or Rios. Rios. So just don't do that. It's very easy, Mr. Patel. also the person who was the suspect briefly that person's name was out there all of their information and as one of the local authorities said like hard to put that toothpaste back in the tube yeah after you do that i will say also just reading about the brown university event like it's horrifying for all of these kids but also you keep noticing in stories about mass shootings that there are now students involved who are uh in previous mass shootings who survived previous mass shooting and it's just like we have failed these kids over and over and over again it is fine fucking horrifying. Yeah. Trump was asked about Patel and the shooting and the investigation later when he was at the White House and he said it was a school problem. It's not a FBI problem. It's a school problem. What? Yeah. The security guards are going to run this one down and not the FBI? Even though the original suspect was a suspect because of a tip that the FBI got. And of course, it's not the FBI's fault that they brought in someone who ended up being the wrong person. It is the fault of the FBI director for announcing that. People bring in people, you know, the FBI brings in people. of interest all the time, and then they just let them go. Like, that's not a—I was baffled by what he's saying there. Is that just his way of subtly sort of indicting Brown for being a liberal

institution? No, I think it's just deflecting blame from him and the FBI, from the FBI and him by extension of the FBI. I mean, also, it's a different issue, but I mean, this attack on these service members in Syria is awful and these people lost their lives. I'm very nervous about what this, like, retaliation that Trump keeps previewing will look like. But also, I do hope this starts a conversation of like why do we have troops in Syria what are they still doing here right can we bring him home can we end this mission like what why he didn't really have a good answer for that when someone asked him in the oval is that one stumped him uh so then on sunday we woke up to news of an anti-semitic massacre at a honica celebration in sydney australia that killed at least 15 people

including a rabbi and a holocaust survivor uh the shooters were a father and son uh the son was known to authorities as at least tangentially related to some kind of local isis cell and we one of the shooters was tackled and disarmed, thanks to the heroics of a fruit shop owner named Ahmed al-Ahmad, a Muslim Syrian immigrant, who's in a critical but stable condition after sustaining a gunshot wound himself. Just fucking awful. Yeah, I mean, news reports say the victims included a 10-year-old girl and a Holocaust survivor. So the victims were from 10 to 87, I think. It's just like an unimaginable evil. And so it was at Bondi Beach was the site of this Hanukkah celebration. And also, I think, like, maybe the most popular tourist destination of all of Australia and filled with just families playing

outside. And so, yeah, these guys are murderers. They're evil. I was reading another article about this couple who got separated from their three-year-old as the shooting started and they couldn't find their three-year-old kid. And then they found their little girl underneath a stranger who had shielded her with her own body and took a bullet in the process. So just like, amidst the stories of these two evil monsters, there's just unbelievable heroism. The Holocaust survivor. that died. It's an 87-year-old guy who shielded his wife with his body. I mean, it's just... Who was also a Holocaust survivor.

It's just a hero. But, you know, this is... For the people of Australia, they have not had to deal with a mass shooting like this since 1996 because the last one that happened, there's a massacre that killed 35 people and they passed really strict gun control laws and it has been far less of an issue. So it's horrifying for them. It's also

in particular awful for Australia's Jewish community because they have been crying out for help because of this growing number of anti-Semitic threats and incidents, including like attacks on synagogues, arson attempts, and things, and they just feel like they were ignored. And it's, and for Jews around the world, I mean, it's just like another, you're trying to celebrate Hanukkah with your family, and it's another reminder that there's people who want to kill you for your religion. The Executive Council of Australian Jury had a statistic that

37,000 anti-Semitic incidents in Australia have occurred since October 7th. That is five times the number in the decade than were in the decade before. Yeah, it was on the first night of So it is a night where a lot of Jewish people go and have, you know, they have luckas with their family and with their friends and you're celebrating and everybody was talking about it as just a reminder that it continues to be dangerous to be Jewish, that there is a feeling that anti-Semitism is rising here in the U.S. We see these surveys that show anti-Semitism and conspiratorial thinking and antisocial thinking is rising among the young. true, by the way, of young Republicans. It's true of young Democrats. There was one Manhattan Institute survey that found that actually it is more common amongst college educated young people, which tells you something about the ways in which this really is not, that this is some kind of a kind of ideological radicalization that's happening online, that something very sinister

is happening when people are exposed to these kinds of ideas. And this was just a reminder that that it is a scary time for a lot of Jews who are worried about this every day. Yeah, you're Rosenberg and The Atlantic wrote a piece about this, how it's generational more than it is partisan. And Alec McGillis and other journalists posted some of the portions of the piece, and J.D. Vance jumped in to basically say J.D. Vance's argument, for which he offered zero evidence or data whatsoever, was that actually you should have looked at the demographics of the younger people

because the reason that anti-Semitism is growing here is only because of immigration and the failure of immigrants to assimilate, I assume he means Muslim immigrants. Again, with no data whatsoever that the Manhattan Institute poll that you just talked about, Leavitt, was cited in the piece.

So I don't know if all those college-educated young Republicans just happened to be Muslim immigrants that came over here and joined the Young Republican Club. Right. Well, I saw that too, and it's sort of obviously he doesn't say it, But he means, he means some combination of Arabs or Muslims. Maybe he means a few other specific countries. But certainly he can't possibly mean the actual shift in demographics we've had in this country,

which is rising Hispanic immigrants, rising Asian immigrants. Like the numbers are such a big change. It's so stark, right? Like you can't account for it with just an increase in anti-Semitism among a small part of the immigrant population. So he can't really defend it. There's no facts that would defend it. And also, by the way, I just want to say it would be a surprise, I think, to American Jews to discover that anti-Semitism in America

is a recent fucking import. Right. Yes. It's a centuries-old problem. And also, J.D. Vance has still not said a word about Nick Fuentes, a vile anti-Semite of growing stature on the far right, who was platformed by his friend Tucker Carlson,

who attacked J.D. Vance, attacks him all the time by name, calls his wife and kids a racial slur to do with Indian people, and J.D. Vance is silent. And the peace in the Atlantic doesn't say, that it is just a problem on the right, either, among young people, acknowledges that it's a problem on the left as well. But, like, that's not enough for J.D. Vance who just, like, goes on and loves to shitpost. He just has to jump right to.

No, no, no. The problem is purely immigration, like, every other problem. Well, it's, and it's like, it's just a, it's the same kind of response to any event to try to make it comport with your priors, right? And it's another example of someone looking at the complicated world that we live in, deciding that the only, that the answers are simple and it's what I already believe. Because if it is just a foreign import of ethnic grievances, I suppose we don't have to deal with the fact that people are being radicalized online.

We don't have to deal with the fact that getting your information algorithmically is leading people down all kinds of rabbit holes, that there isn't a problem among young people. That, by the way, isn't partisan, right? That does affect young people that are on the left, that are on the right. You don't have to worry about that. Because once we caught off the immigrants, then all of our problems will go away. We're back to being the kind of pure American culture in which anti-Semitism wasn't problem. I've bottomless contempt for politicians who take a crisis or an evil event like this

and say, actually, the solution is my personal political project or hobby horse. J.D. Vance just did it right here with immigration. B.B. Net Yahoo did it and said, actually, the real problem is Australia recognized a Palestinian state. I'm sorry, I do not believe for a second that that is connected to these individuals, one of whom was linked to ISIS in 2019. Yeah. What we know is that anti-Semitism is related to the attack and we can all talk about that right like that is the fact that we know so far beyond that it's all just speculation and garbage this episode is sponsored by better help therapy can give you the space to create new meaningful traditions give you some clarity amidst the holiday chaos let you write your own story the holidays are a time of classic traditions

Some people have many in their families. Some have none or are just beginning their own. Now is the time to reflect on what they mean to you or to rewrite those traditions and make them your own. Incorporating therapy into your new or existing traditions can help ensure you take time for yourself during what can be a very joyful but sometimes hectic and lonely time of the year. BetterHelp has quality therapists who work

according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the U.S. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 12-plus years of experience and industry-leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time

from their tailored wrecks. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is one of the world's largest online therapy platforms, having served over 5 million people globally. And it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of five stars for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. This December, start a new tradition by taking care of you. Our listeners get 10% off at BetterHelp.com

slash PSA. That's BetterHelphelp.com slash PSA. As if all this wasn't enough, the weekend ended with the tragic news that the beloved director and political activist Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, had been found stabbed to death in their home by their own son. Just awful. After condolences poured in from political leaders like Barack Obama, Gavin Newsom, figures from across the political spectrum, the current president weighed in with a statement Monday morning that reads as follows. Quote, A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood.

Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michelle, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as Trump derangement syndrome, sometimes referred to as TDS, May Rob and Michelle rest in peace.

A sick, deranged, sociopathic response that official White House accounts also reposted. But maybe the one real surprise has been the number of Republicans in Congress who've criticized Trump for it. People like Marjorie Taylor Green, Mike Lawler, Don Bacon, and Thomas Massey, who even issued a direct challenge to J.D. Vance and White House staff to denounce it. Spoiler. They have not taken him up on that challenge. They reposted it. J.D. has been tweeting all day. about all kinds of other stuff, but not about this. Trump's original post on Truth Social

has also been flooded with responses from MAGIFAN saying they don't agree with what Trump said and that he should take the post down. He has not. Not only has he not, he was asked about it in the Oval Office on Monday, and here is what he said. A number of Republicans have denounced your statement on Truth Social

after the murder of Rob Reiner. Do you stand by that post? Well, I wasn't a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned. Trump derangement syndrome, so I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all in any way, shape, or form. I thought he was very bad for our country. That's a thing that's worse. I thought he was bad for our country.

So does that mean you support killing him? Because it sure sounds like it. I just like, it was one of those statements, too, where when he first posted it, there were so many people on Twitter, journalists, everyone else being like, is this real? Are you sure this is a real post? Yeah, it's a gobsmacking. The, the, you know, like, hey, do you feel sympathy when terrible things happen to people that are not on your team is like the, the marshmallow test for empathy? It's like the most basic thing.

And I actually think most people pass it, right? That's, most people pass it. And then the loudest people online often struggle with it. That's what we see. And that's what we've seen with all, with Charlie Kirk's murder. It's what we saw with the United Health Care murders. What you see in, in this case. And it is, and then you see a bunch of people try to defyx.

Men Trump for a claim. Well, actually, you know, Rob Reiner would have said something horrible if something happened to Trump. But actually, Rob Reiner deplored political violence, talked openly about it, was deplored the murder of Charlie Kirk. The impulse to defend this or to not obviously just say clearly just like, you just don't have to. And the fact that there's a whole clique of people online, which includes the president, they can't seem to stop themselves from doing it. Yeah, that was, it was barely a butt. There was, there was murder is bad butt. It wasn't even, it was just like. It was a joke kind of. Well, yeah, he basically. blamed him. He died because other people were mad. First of all, it's like, it's, it's, it's deranged in the, and it's inaccuracy, right? Like, it's just an insane thing to say. It's, it's disgusting, but it's also like, what are you fucking talking about? And are you suggesting someone on your own side? Crazy fucking old man. Like, did somebody on your own side, dude? Are you saying he was killed for, like, are you saying killed by someone on your team? Like, what are you talking about? It's like the umpteenth example of his narcissism to suggest that two people who were murdered randomly did it because of you somehow, like their child. Like, I can't even wrap my head. I can't even wrap my head. I can't even wrap my head. I can't. I can't even wrap my. head around it. But yeah, I mean, it comes after all this outrage from Trump and J.D. Vance and the White House and the Maga Media world about genuinely like offensive, insensitive comments made by usually some rando person on TikTok whose comments got service. This is the president of United States. And like, of course, none of these people have a goddamn word to say about what Trump says. We had Fox News on all day. Did you guys see any segments? That's why we wanted to keep it on. I didn't see a single one. Not a single one. And remember, this administration was

getting people suspended from their jobs, fired from the military. Like Reuters had a big report about They found that 600 people were fired, suspended, or otherwise disciplined by their employers for the comments about Charlie Kirk. And then Donald Trump says this. It is, I was like somewhat, I don't know if I would say like pleasantly surprised, but the number of Republicans in Congress who just didn't do the usual. I didn't see it. Yeah. Now, the two most important ones, or the two leaders in Congress basically did that. Mike Johnson ran away.

said something like he felt bad. And then Thune said, well, I have nothing more to say about Trump, but I think it's awful and blah, blah, blah. So the two leaders of the party in Congress took a pass. Certainly the vice president, who's, you know, the putative frontrunner in 2028, he took a pass. The Secretary of State took a pass so far. So we'll see.

I think it also, by the way, like does matter, too, that there are the Thomas Massey's willing to just say, like the obvious truce about it, that Marjor Taylor Green had the right sentiment about it. Even Nancy Mace had the right sentiment about it. And the way Marjorie Taylor Green described it, I thought was, I thought kind of, she just was, it was well said. And, you know, Thomas Massey, like it was a week ago, two weeks ago that Trump posted that horrible thing about Thomas Massey getting remarried. And I do think, oh, I forgot about that.

Yeah. And that matters. I do think it really does. It matters that these are people that are just like, no, because these are right wing people. Marjorie Taylor Green is a right wing person. And they're like, this is gross. It's fucking gross. There's like cracks in the megabase.

And then every time it kind of rains and it fills up, it like erodes a little bit more. you can feel it happening. There's less fear of him. Courage begets courage. And people are just like, no, that's disgusting, man. This is also something that could break through beyond sort of just the politics stuff. I agree. Rob Reiner, nothing, except for the fact that Rob Reiner was a very committed activist, not just a donor, but like ran ballot initiatives and did like a lot of good work. Aside from that, it was nothing about the killing or anything else had to do with politics. And, you know, young people might not know who Rob Reiner was, but, most people do, one of the more famous directors.

So there's going to be a lot of news on this. And then you hear the President of the United States was like, oh, good. He hated me. Like, most of America's going to hear that and be like, what the fuck? And by the way, like, people are going to be reminded of how much they love. When Harry Met Sally, the American president, this is spinal tap, misery. Like, he's part, like, he's from the era of the monoculture. He made things that everybody loved, you know, the non-political era, nonpartisan era.

And then to have him be, like, vilified by the president turned into political cultural, it's disgusting. The Washington Post and Politico both had big stories over the weekend about the growing disappointment with Trump among elements of the MAGA base over a host of issues, quote, focusing too much on foreign affairs, failing to address the cost of living issues he pledged to fix, aligning himself too closely with billionaires and tech moguls, and resisting the release of the Epstein files. Trump himself, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Friday, said that he wouldn't have done anything differently over the last. last year and admitted he's not sure if his party will win the midterms. What did you guys think of those pieces? And how real and consequential do you think the maga disappointment with Trump is? I mean, I think it's real. I think it's consequential. I mean, I divide it into a couple of parts. I mean, the first is the economic piece of this. And it's very funny that they say he's too

focused on foreign affairs. And they did a big event on like the border and the military and it got a bunch of foreign affairs questions today. But I mean, that AP poll last week was brutal for Trump, 36% approval, 31% approval on the economy. And his response is to blame Biden or to call it a hoax. But odds are things are going to get worse, not better with the economy this coming year because of inflation, because terrorists really start to bite. And I think Trump just sits around in Mar-a-Lago or sits in the White House and he talks to people worth seven, eight, nine figures.

And then he picks out furniture for his new $300 million ballroom. And he's divorced from the reality on the ground in the world. And it shows. And then the elected officials hear him talk and they're like, well, 2025 was the disaster. 2026 is looking worse. Like now it's time to get some space from this guy. And then we'll get into the MAGA media class in a minute. But like, they're just, they're just chasing clicks.

They go where the clicks take them. Please subscribe to POTSave America on YouTube also. Sure, for sure. But like, they're positioning themselves to be the leader, to like, to be the leaders of the MAGO movement in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death and the kind of void that will be created by Trump being a fully. lame duck. They're all kind of eyeing Nick Fuentes in his rise and seeing Fuentes say Maga's dead, Trump is over. And so like this feels like it's move in one direction. What the, what really made the Washington Post piece was the participation of Rasmussen pollster Mark Mitchell in the piece. So it's a really great story here. J.D. Vance follows him on Twitter and reached

out to him to Mark Mitchell and said, hey, like you're an outside pollster. It's not like you work with White House, could you maybe come in and talk to us and to Trump about what you're seeing in the numbers? And so Mark Mitchell then talks to the post about his whole conversation with Trump. And he's told the president, in Butler, you said, fight, fight, fight. And right now you're fight, fight, fight, fighting, Marjorie Taylor Green and not actually fight, fight, fighting for Americans. And then he said, he's talking to the reporters, he said, you know, to the extent to which we were talking about the economic populism message, he wasn't as interested as I would have hoped. And then he said that eventually Trump pivoted the conversation

to golf and talked about how much money he raised for Lindsey Graham during a recent golf outing that doubled as a fundraiser for Lindsey Graham. Just perfect. Yeah, just Mad King wandering around the road. But yeah, the Marjorie Taylor Green piece of it, I do think is really important because I think she is speaking, like she is as good a validators you could hope for her if she's on his side and as bad of one when she's not. Because what she's describing, I think is just accurate about what he's been doing. And I do think that like part of this is like democratic legitimacy is hard to measure, but it is real.

And so he had like I think there's that you can blur your eyes and say there was a mandate to go after the border. There was even an anti-woke mandate. He talked about that a lot on the campaign trail. There wasn't one to like fuck up the national parks and get rid of a bunch of like, you know, land management jobs. a bunch of other stuff that that is tear gas one year olds right not something that was a mandate or to like put on tariffs they're going to raise goods prices for goods and hurt businesses that do a lot

of exporting or any business that relies on any kind of goods that are coming in from abroad and because he doesn't have a mandate to do those things a like you're seeing this in all the polling but b it also leads to a bunch of other weather right like he's more there's more likely to be leaks from inside of these agencies there's more likely to be judges willing to stand in his way like there's just a bunch of more like you have members of Congress speak out against it. There's just like the the fact that he is more and more unpopular and what he is trying to do is so unpopular is grinding the gears down. So even on the places where he's trying to do things that like he might have had some kind of claim to a mandate for like his everything is getting harder because he has

pursued this agenda that nobody really wanted even in his own base. Did you guys see the story over the weekend about Trump's new passion project? What's this one? So the golf course, The Wall Street Journalist. The Wall Street Journal reported that they're trying to figure out what to do with all the dirt from the East Wing renovation. Someone suggested they make a big mound on the ellipse to better see the UFC fight that's coming up there. Oh, I didn't see that part. But then Doug Bergam said, no, sir. What if we bring it over to this golf course over some, you know, nearby and we can refurbish the golf course. So Trump's new passion is redeveloping DC golf courses. Yeah. You mentioned the AP poll. There's also like an NBC News poll over the weekend. Overall approval, 4258. The two groups that show the largest drop in strong support for the president since April, those who identify as Republicans, and in particular, those who identify as MAGA Republicans, still highest with those voters, but he was 78 percent approval with those voters in April, and now he's at 70 percent. That's an eight-point drop. It's the biggest drop of any group. They also ask people in all these polls, do you identify yourself as a MAGA Republican or a regular Republican?

And it used to be MAGA Republican by, you know, 10, 20, 30 points. And now it's 50-50 among Republicans, mega-Republican versus regular Republicans. Yeah, I would say my, my, I saw that and I thought, well, is that an actual difference or is that just a brand distinction, right? Because does Trump's, does MAGA leave, MAGA leaves its residue on the Republican Party. Because that's also what's happening is you see like the vances and the gnomes, all of them are also jockeying for what a post-Trump world will look like. And for some of them, it is not moving anywhere towards some kind of old-school republicanism. It's like, it's a gnome going out there and being like, I told the president, we're going get every darn immigrant out of this country. So they're all kind of jockeying for the what the future will be, but right now it looks a lot like MAGA just without Trump.

MTG says, I'm not MAGA. I'm America first. Yeah. And that's an interesting. And I do think that's going to be the split because MAGA is so identified with Trump and America first has overlap, but not the same. There's also plenty of MAGA infighting these days that doesn't involve Trump. Most recently, the feud that Candace Owens started by spreading some truly bat-shit conspiracies about Charlie Kirk's assassination. Owens has implied that Israel was involved in the murder, that French assassins hired by the Macron's were involved and are also now trying to kill her. That is what happens. And that Kirk was even, quote,

betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA, going so far as to criticize Erica Kirk, his widow, for not responding to Candace's crazy conspiracy theories. So right-wing influencers from Ben Shapiro to Nick Fuentes have gone hard at Candace over this. Erica Kirk herself has publicly and quite pointedly asked Candace Owens to stop. And on Sunday night, she announced that she would be meeting privately with Candace on Monday and that, quote, public discussions, live streams, and tweets are on hold until after this meeting.

Boo. Tommy, thoughts on how much this insanity matters? I think MK Ultra made an appearance too. Really? Actually, a few times if we're being honest. I actually think this does matter. I think it gets at a couple things. First, it's like how viable and effective is turning.

point USA going to be going forward because this is an organization that Charlie Kirk, whether you like him or you hate him, he built this thing based on his vision. He had a ton of big donors, but like he created an organization that was very impactful and his death created a vacuum. And it's not clear yet whether Erica Kirk can carry the mantle and keep it as politically powerful in part because of these attacks. Then there's also just like, I think this infighting is just consuming the MAGA media world. And they're not talking about whatever Trump wants to about like how bad Democrats are, you know, the things he's doing. And the majority of it is Candace Owens. And for those who don't know, she was at TPSA, then went to Prager You for a while,

then was at the Daily Wire where they fired her for being anti-Semitic and now she's on her own. And she does huge numbers. Like her, I looked at some of her recent live streams. They were getting like 1.5 million, two million people on YouTube. Yeah, she's regularly like a top 10 podcast. So like a ton of people watch the stuff and they believe it. And you're right. Like She was focused on Brigitte Macron being a man. Then she went to Charlie Kirk assassination world. Those two conspiracies converged at one point. And the French were behind both of them.

But there was always an Israeli in there because, you know, you got to work in some Jewish people somehow. But I do think, like, this has become like this all-consuming thing. And it's spiraling out of control. Like, now there's like Tucker versus Nick Fuentes and Heritage versus Tucker and Tim Poole's mad and his beanies all askew because he's mad at Candice. Do you guys know why the French and. Israelis or supposedly or supposedly were part of killing Charlie Kirk and might now want to

kill Candice? I think the French were trying to kill Candice to silence her about her regime Macron conspiracy theory and I think they took out Charlie to get to her was the suggestion. Yeah, not also but they're in cahoots with the people that work at Turning Point USA. I would just say whatever the cathedral of logic

Candace is building, I'm not super interested in entering but strong foundation but I will say it like it was just you know Jady Vance is going on and on about you know how it's actually immigrants that are causing anti-Semitism in this country and then you see somebody like Candace Owens getting like kind of a million people watching it coming from deep inside the house yeah and just like this is like the the most extreme voices like there's the most extreme voices gain a bigger audience but also being extreme either by self-selection or by algorithm then exposes you to more extreme things. And all of that pulls you further and further online and more

and more outside of the real world, whether you're a content producer like Candice Owens or the president of the United States or a content receiver. In the end result, it's a bunch of people that are just sort of completely divorced from everyday life. And that may get a lot of interesting eyeballs and get a lot of people that also maybe feel alienated, but also for everybody else, you see a Candace something like, who the fuck would believe that? Or you see J.D. Vance blame it all on sort of like an ethnic import. Like, well, that doesn't comport. with reality or Trump says this crazy thing about about about uh rob bryner it's like god what kind of a fucking maniac would say something like that well it's people whose brains are broken by in one way

or another the internet and and candace isn't just like for political obsessives you know it's not just like a show about politics like she was really into the um justin baldoni blake lively world so like people who come for that stuff are then getting like the crazy french conspiracy theories the TPSA's of the right-wing politics. So that's why she's got this really big reach and impact. Yeah, cultural entertainment, on-ramp to politics for Candace Owens. And it's funny to, like, there's one path that leads you to Candice Owens, but there is this sort of natural cycle with a bunch of different, like, if you start watching videos about

the pyramids, the pyramids, you will eventually, it won't take too long, get to videos about how the pyramids were built by aliens and actually it's tied to Atlantis. Like, there is a kind of natural honing that happens, and it leads you down these paths to eventually you get to some kind of, the Jews. Usually them. Usually us. Where it ends up. So, interested to see how that meeting goes with Erica Kirk and Candidone's. I'm sure we'll get a full readout and that the readout will be uncontested by both sides.

Can you imagine how weird and uncomfortable is? Like, like, Erica Kirk has been through hell. Her husband was assassinated on live TV. Now she has to go have a meeting with this person who is not subtly suggesting that she, might have been behind it. And is like, Candace, by the way, is not the only one. He's just really attacking Erica Kirk in some pretty gross ways, too.

So this has got to be, I don't know, just awful. It also speaks to just like this is a person that has gained a lot of influence in part because until they had the wrong enemies, they were embraced by a lot of figures on the right. Not a lot of people calling for big tete tete's when they were going after the Macron's. That's right, right.

That's right. Potta America is brought to you by Helix. It's getting cold out there. Nobody wants to get out of bed. You just want to lay there all day in your cozy, cozy, cozy blankets, and your cozy, cozy mattress and watch some TV. That's why you need a new Helix mattress. You spend more time on that thing than you do anywhere else.

Sleep is even more important during sick season, during cold and flu season, at times like this. And that's why Helix mattress is the best. It was the most awarded mattress brand. They got the EGOT over there at Helix. It was tested and reviewed by experts like Forbes and Wired. The Helix offers a variety of mattresses designed to fit your sleep needs. How will you know which Helix mattress works best for you in your body?

You take the Helix sleep quiz. Easiest quiz you've ever taken. It matches you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences, making it easy to find a mattress that fits your sleep needs. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door with free shipping in the U.S. Rest easy with seamless returns in exchange. changes, the happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk-free, customer-first experience designed to ensure you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. They even offer a 120-night sleep

trial and limited lifetime warranty. Go to Helixleep.com slash crooked for 20% off-site wide. That's helixleep.com slash crooked for 20% off-site wide. Make sure you enter our show name into the post-purchase survey so they know we sent you Helixleep.com slash crooked. So you may have missed it, we sure did, but the Democratic National Committee's annual winter meetings were held in L.A. on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, I guess our invite got lost in the mail. I don't know. Party leaders were here. Oh, and you sat down with, J.B. Pritzker stopped by. Yeah. We saw him on his way. He let us know. He made a drop by. Anyway, the party leaders were here, and his Politico reported, quote, for the first time in a long time, the mood was warm. Optimism coursed through the hotel ballrooms. Is that what that was? Taking a hit of optimism.

I've got good weather out there. What actual business is transacted at these meetings, I've never been clear to me. I don't know. I think it's just go, you go, you mingle, you talk. Rules and bylaw votes, I don't know. A couple of non-acknowledgments. Yeah. Everybody got to everyone.

I was thinking about this. I don't think I've ever been to a DNC meeting. I don't know if that's a me problem. Just maybe my job would overlap. I went once with Obama in like 07. Yeah, I might have gone in D.C. Yeah, I feel like we've got in D. I don't know what else is going on.

When he was first thing about breaking his promise. Anyway, the whole thing led to a predictable series of speculative stories. One was an Axios piece about how Kamala Harris, who spoke on Friday night, is, quote, working to keep another White House campaign viable based on the fact that she's trying out some new applause lines and extended her book tour. Another, also from Axios, featured anonymous advisors to potential 2028 contenders, acknowledging that Gavin Newsom is the current frontrunner and discussing their plans to highlight his past scandals and paint him as too liberal. Wow, it really feels like 2028 is

kicking into high gear. What do you guys make at the Kamala story? I would say it was pretty thin. The evidence that she's, like the headlines said gearing up for a run, but the actual article said gearing up for keeping her options open to run. And then you got to think that if your goal was running for president, you would stop the book tour,

not extend it based on, I think, the reaction to the book tour so far, which I don't think has been very good for her. Yeah, the evidence in quotes was she added stops to her book tour she went to a DNC meeting

down the street from her house Ken Martin made a quip that Doug could be the first gentleman someday not just the second gentleman and that there's some

new lines in her some speech and so that's pretty thin I'm imagining the narrative if Kamala Harris the 2024 Democratic Party nominee refused to go

to a DNC meeting in her hometown was my first thought probably wouldn't pretty bad for her now I'm not like trying to hate on Alex Thompson here

because I do think there is a world where this kind of story gets written because a bunch of advisors are like off the record. She's keeping her, you know, options open here. And he strings together a story kind of based on available evidence. That's politically kind of a smart thing to do, right?

If people think you're running for president, you get invited to speak. People write down what you say in the newspaper. They talk about you on the Sunday shows. Now, if I were an advisor to Kamala Harris, I would be like, ignore that crap. But let's figure out, like, let's lay the foundation for what you want to run on and do as president. Because I still think that is lacking. Like, she was obviously put in a bad position by Joe Biden, both, you know, with their record, but also with 107 days to run a campaign. But I think if you were to ask most voters, like, what would Kamala do?

What's her big thing? Most of them would not know. And just to use an imperfect example, like I worked for John Edwards in 2004 and then we ran against him in a way. We know a lot about his big thing. We know what his big thing was. He decided to make 2008 about ending poverty, universal health care, attacking corporate power and attacking, like, shitty trade deals. He was like a populist before Bernie made it cool and he was anti-Washington. I think she needs to like fix this problem pretty quickly so that people know like, oh, this is her identity.

This is her lane if she runs. Yeah, the new rhetoric that she trotted out that they were treating is like kind of a big deal. It was the quotes they used were like, both parties have failed to hold the public's trust, Harris said. People are done with the status quo and they're ready to break things to force change. we cannot afford to be nostalgic for a flawed system that failed so many and that she added arguing that President Trump as a quote symptom of a bigger problem imagine you read a speech from October 24 what is supposed to not add new lines well those are just like but this is the this is why what you just said was really important tommy

is that like the Edward stuff was like very specific like poverty issue she you know saying that both parties have failed to hold the public's trust is like a all you need to do to say that is just reflect the current polling and punditon tree that's out there. It's like the next question is, okay, then what are the Democrats done to not hold the public stress, like specifically, you know? Right, right. That's like, so like I, in that story, one of the, one of the proof points that she might run for president, she's going on Jimmy Kimmel this week. And if Jim Kimmel were to say, where's the Democratic Party gone wrong? Like, maybe she has a good answer. But to be honest, what I expect right now is just a words out.

That's what I would expect because I just have not seen her layout any kind of a specific point of Yeah, I was hoping for a little more. I listened to, I haven't listened to too many of her book events, but I listened to the one with Tim in Nashville. And it was just, you know, she's funny, got some good applause, but it was just like, you just want, like, okay, what's here? How do you see the country? Where do you see the country going? What do you care about right now, you know? I do think back to the piece, like one piece of evidence in the piece that I do think is legitimate is expanding the book tour to go to South Carolina and to, and she's been doing a lot of southern states. Yeah. And she talked about this on some other podcast, too, that she, they were going to go to like the regular cities that you go to on a bookstore, but she really wanted to go to a whole bunch of different places in the South. And I do think that is that, that is her and her campaign being like, okay, she wants to be strong with the black vote. She's going to South Carolina thinking that it's still going to be in the early state lineup. So, you know, I guess that that warrants the piece to me, the South Carolina thing.

Okay. But not so much, not as much the rhetoric. That's smart. Or the meeting that's in her backyard. When she shows up at like a party dinner in New Hampshire, that's an obviously. like, okay. Yeah, that's the big one. You guys think Newsom's earned the frontrunner spot in the, in the ire of the contenders who think they're going to take him down with his liberal record? I'm on frontrunner. I would say he's done the most to, like, make himself the

anti-Trump figure in the Democratic Party. I don't think anybody's done as much as him to kind of take that spot, and he's tried things that I think have not made him necessarily the person everybody thinks should be the candidate, but he's definitely assuaged a lot of, I think there a lot of people that were that are or were skeptical of Gavin Newsome that are less skeptical today than they were a year ago. Yeah. I think he's done more to improve his image with the base of the Democratic Party than anyone else by a landslide. And some of it is like the tone and the tweets and kind of the silly stuff that people see on the internet. But mostly it's his willingness to use the power he currently has as governor of California to advance the Democratic Party's

interest in fight Trump. Like the biggest piece of that is Prop 50 in redistricting. We would be fucked right now, if not for getting those five seats. But also, he was the highest ranking American official to go to the UN cop meeting in Brazil a couple weeks back to talk about climate change. I think that was like a very savvy move. It was one that was planned about a year ago, I think, but it was great timing. Now, like, it hasn't all been smooth sailing, like the early days of the podcast rollout with Charlie Kirk, with Steve Bannon. That didn't go over well, but he's course corrected and adjusted. Yeah. They listed in the piece, the different areas that opponents are thinking about in terms of how to like make the case against him and you know they have like old

scandals they have french laundry and that kind of stuff i'm like you know i don't expect that to be as effective for someone like him who has first of all the way the media information environment is now but like everyone knows about those scandals he owns them he talks about them i think him doing the podcast and him just being out there so much much like it did with trump and many politicians since Trump actually helps him get through that kind of stuff. I think the biggest weakness for me, at least, is sort of the he's a liberal from California. And I don't think this is necessarily specific to just Gavin Newsom himself. I think any governor of California for the last eight years is going to have to answer for a lot of very, very liberal legislation, even if it's not their

responsibility as governor, but it's just been through the legislature and it's been passed and there's this city ordinance and that and he's going to have to own the housing stuff and affordability and all that kind of stuff and he's been good on a lot of it but like your record are still your record and you know hearing him defend it on Ezra's pod he just sat down with with Ezra Klein last week you he has a he has answers for everything but it you know over the course of a campaign I think that's going to be the test for him whether he can yeah you look at the like the contrast between like so we would say Newsom you have Pritzker you have Josh Shapiro right these are all sitting governor's potential presidential candidates. And they have just very different profiles. Josh

Shapiro has just a much smaller one right now. And that's perhaps maybe that's a political strategy. Maybe that's a consequence of governing a purple state in which you are working with a legislature that's much more divided. You have, I think, Pritzker, who comes from a liberal state, but it's kind of defined a kind of smaller set of issues with which he's kind of picked some big fights with Trump. But I agree. Like I think it's funny because there's the, there's the, there's the attacks from the left that, oh, he's been bad on, on homeless people or that he's thrown trans people under the bus. And I do think he'll have an easier time talking about that than he will be, say, like, health care for undocumented people. I also sort of, I can't tell yet if it's

going to be like you're voting with your heart or your head election, right? Like 2008 was like people were fired up after 06. We felt good. We thought we could win. They voted with their hearts for Barack Obama, even with considerable kind of concerns about electability. 2020 was a vote with your head, like, Joe Biden is the most electable. Let's get this guy in there. We've got to beat Trump. I don't know where the headspace we're all going to be in in 20, 27, and 8. Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I guess you could argue that Obama won part of the reason he won the primaries. He successfully prosecuted the electability argument against Hillary. Right, and Iowa. So, like, maybe it's both. But, yeah, it's a good question.

How was, how was J.B. Pritzker? I'm 10 minutes into that one. I haven't listened to the whole It was really interesting talking to Pritzker because I do just, he has a, like a, and I said this to his face, like, if you would have told me that this was like a, like a one of the richest human beings in America and the richest person in public office, like that would be surprising because it's not how he carries himself. He has a much more, I don't know, like just not what comes to mind. And it was an interesting conversation about how he does come from all this privilege, but that he was shaped by a lot of loss when he was a kid and the tension there. But there's a, he has something that I think a lot of Democrats don't have, which is a, similar to Obama, which is a feeling like they could just walk away. Yeah. Right? Like he doesn't have that. Like, I don't know. I've been planning this since I was seven years old kind of a thing.

Like if he loses, he'll just go to Vegas. Yeah. Just push it all forward. Yeah. Yeah. I popped in the conference room when he was waiting there to shot the shit for a minute about like the Bears and Chicago weather and he just seems like a completely normal guy. He also looks like, to your point about, um, he's just, he seems like a completely normal guy. Being a very, very rich guy, but not reading that way.

Like, even his suits look like a guy who has lost 20 pounds and not gone to a tailor, right? Which is not a very rich guy move. Like, normally you just get that stuff brought in, trim it up a bit. But yeah, it was a good conversation. I think people should check it out. I mean, one thing he said that I thought was interesting just about the future of the Democratic Party was because we didn't have a primary in 2024. We really didn't get the like vision shaping that would have happened if we were switching between kids. candidates and a midterm election usually just isn't that right like you might have a set of

proposals you're all rallying behind but for the most part it's a it's a anti-incumbent message and so all of this sort of like what do we stand for or we don't know what we stand for like that is a real feeling people have but in part it's just because we never had that big debate in which one person's vision becomes the thing we coalesced around yeah that's that's that's right all right last thing before we get to Tommy's conversation with Jake Tapper we all know the media business is in rough shape right now, especially the news business. Well, Jeff Bezos's Washington Post has decided to make a big bet on AI generated podcasts, uh-oh, which the Post has dubbed, quote, your personal podcast in which users of the paper's mobile app can, quote, shape their

own briefing, select their topics, set their lengths, pick their hosts, and soon even ask questions using our Ask the Post AI technology, end quote. The rollout's been a bit shaky, to put it mildly, with semaphores Max Taney reporting that the papers journalists are frustrated with the features error-riddled episodes and fictional quotes and that the post went live with it even after internal tests revealed that the AI-generated scripts fail to pass editorial standards two-thirds of the time. Gotta work out those kinks, huh? Yeah, it's a lot of errors. Yeah, this to me is a good example of a lot of times what we describe as the threat of AI is actually the threat of the people in charge of the AI, because if you had a journalist whose hit rate was 30%, you would say, oh, you got to go do

some more practice. You got to get some more reps, but we're going to put this on the website. But for whatever reason, because AI is this sort of magical future box, somehow you're allowed to just sort of roll it out and hope for the best and put the word beta over the top and treat people to something that has like an incredible inaccuracy rate. And like, AI can be a great tool. It can be a harmful tool. It can be a parasite.

But this is people choosing to put AI out there into the world before it is ready, before it makes sense, before it is, like, worthy of the institution. Open AI says, join the club where I'll do it. Yeah, I don't like what this idea means for me personally or for us at this table or crooked media. I love the idea behind the product. If I could be a subscriber to the New York Times or The Washington Post, tell it what I like. And then every warning have a bespoke, I guess, AI generated podcast that kind of summarizes for me. all the stories I would be most interested in. That is a really cool idea.

Is that a podcast? I don't know. It's more like an AI generated voice reading me an article, which I think the New Yorker is doing. And that and I, but like. And I love that, by the way. That's actually a useful additional feature, right? Because it's not something you would do, right? They don't have somebody read, but like it's like.

Well, that's such lower lift from a technological standpoint, right? Because you can't fuck that up because it's just a voice reading the text. Yeah, it's a fuzzy line. Now, some of the errors they reference were like mispronunciations, which, boy, if that's a problem, don't listen to my shows. But, you know, it's a fuzzy line between like, what's a podcast, what is AI, what is going to kind of eat into all of our brain share, right? I mean, we were talking about this with the Warner Brothers Discovery, like the way that, you know, some of these companies now, like if you're Netflix, you view TikTok as your primary competitor because it's just about aggregate, you know, leisure time people have. And I worry about this for other podcast creators, but not right now.

But see, I have a, like, I agree with you actually, right? Like, if you said that to me, like, oh, you know, I would love like for my. 20 minute drive in the morning. Oh, there's like a 20 minute product. It walks me through the biggest stories of the day. It like to all, it helps me like prep based on real journalism from real people that are being paid that are working in the paper. Like that all makes sense to me. And then I think, well, if the daily didn't exist, right? Like if the daily didn't exist, then your Times made this, we think, oh, wow, that's a great product. But human beings using the capacity for imagination, creativity, make a product that takes the daily's, the newspapers, like work and

make something interesting and new and special. And I do worry about the shortcut of AI to synthesize and aggregate when often what is most needed is something you couldn't describe because someone creative had to invent it. Yeah, I think about it as I would tell myself that this would be great and I'd want to listen to my 20 minutes of vegetables, which is like going to get the news of the day and just the news. But in practice, when I got in the car, I'd still want to hear people joking around about the news and just talking like humans about and having a conversation, then just hear the reading of the news. Hey, fingers crossed voice.

I was just thinking about it because I'm like, we have value, right? Like the random AI voice that's just spreading out knowing it's AI versus like Jane doing what a day, you know, on my commute. It's like that's not a competition. Right. And it's all, but also too, like all of these AI, this kind of an AI product is predicated on a world in which most things are made by people. and this is a synthesis of that human work, right?

Like it all, like, you still need the journalist at some point. Well, that's what I mean. It's like the like, which is good news, right? For now. But that's why it's about, it's about what the people are making and not what the computer is doing. It's not the, it's the tool user, not the tool a lot of the time. Get back to work, Jeff Bezos. Yeah, he's a tool.

All right. When we come back, Tommy's conversation with Jake Tapper. Potsay of America is brought to you by Quince. Cold mornings, holiday plans, this is when I need my wardrobe to just work. That's why I'm all about quince. They make it easy to look sharp, feel good, and find gifts at last. From Mongolian cashmere sweaters to Italian wool coats, quince pieces are crafted from premium materials and are built to hold up without the luxury markup.

Quince makes the essentials every guy needs. Mongolian cashmere sweaters for 50 bucks, Italian wool coats that look and feel like designers. And denim and chinos, it fit just right. Their outerwear lineup is no joke. They got down jackets, wool top coats, and leather styles that are built to last. Each piece is made from premium materials by trusted factories that meet rigorous standards for craftsmanship and ethical production. By cutting out middlemen and traditional markups, Quince delivers the same quality as luxury brands at a fraction of the price. It's everything you actually want to wear built to hold up season after season.

I got to tell you guys, I was doing some holiday shopping yesterday. Not only did I go to the Quince website myself and pick up like two or three things. I'm not going to say what they are because the people who are getting them might be listening. but also you know when you Google like best gift for mom or whatever yeah they even have a little tab it's like a holiday gifting option a whole layout of great options get your wardrobe sorted and your gift list handed with quince don't wait go to quince.com slash crooked for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too congrats Canada that's q-u-in-ccee dot com slash crooked free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash crooked

Joining me today is Ciedin's lead D.C. anchor and chief Washington correspondent and the author of the new book, which I'm holding up right here for our YouTube viewers, Race Against Terror, Chasing an Al-Qaeda killer at the dawn of the Forever War. Jake Tapper, welcome back to the pod, buddy. Good to see you. It's great to be here. Great to see you again. Please send my regards to all the others. Favs and Love It or Leave It, Fife, and all the others. Tell everybody. Hello. And congrats on the book, by the way, I was texting you yesterday, that it's fascinating. It's an amazing story. And it deeply triggered me because it brought me back to all these incredibly important and contentious counterterrorism debates from the early Obama days that I want to get into in just a minute. But first, I have to ask you about the corporate media elephant in the room. Paramount and Netflix are waging a battle to buy Warner Brothers Discovery. CNN's fate will be determined by that process in some form or fashion. President Trump weighed in on all of this the other day. Here's a clip. I just think that the people that have run CNN into the ground, by the way, nobody watches, very few people watch. I don't think they should be entrusted with running CNN any longer.

So I think any deal should, it should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately. But I don't think the people that are running that company right now and running C&N's, CNN, which is a very dishonest group of people, I don't think that should be allowed to continue. I think CNN should be sold along with everything else. Typically kind and generous media criticism from our president. So, Jake, I know you can't comment on merger talks, but I am just curious what it's like for you and your team and everybody in the newsroom who are used to covering the story to now be a part of the story.

Well, let me just bring it back to a moment that I'm sure you remember in October 2009. when the Obama White House was declaring Fox News, not a legitimate news organization. And I, in a gaggle, asked White House Communications Director, or was he press secretary, press secretary, Robert Gibbs, why is it appropriate for any White House to say any credentialed media organization is not legitimate? And I got, and still get to this day, a lot of crap from the left about that, as if I'm defending Fox, which I'm not. I'm defending the principle of should a White House be not criticizing a story or criticizing a particular anchor or whatever, but just labeling an entire media organization

not legitimate. And what that was, and I think it was just Anita Dunn and Robert Gibbs. I think Anita was the communications director at the time, is so small compared to what President Trump is currently doing in terms of not only labeling one channel fake news or illegitimate or whatever, but like everyone, except for the most flattering obsequious channels and coverage, and now weighing in on a potential merger that his Justice Department and the FCC and others are supposed to objectively assess, I don't think the FCC has a role if it's what Netflix wants to do because the FCC doesn't cover Netflix and Netflix is buying studios in a stream or not any TV. But be that as it may, it's just all unprecedented. And as with

everything in this era where President Trump says and does things that would cause huge outcry from Republicans and conservative media, if it were done by Obama or Biden or whatever, president, whoever, Newsome, AOC, whatever, these precedents are being set. And it's like, speak now, you know, as they say at weddings, speak now or forever hold your peace. Like, this is the time for conservatives to say, that's not appropriate. It's not appropriate for a president to put his thumb on the scale. And just in terms of our coverage, what is dishonest? What specifically is dishonest? That Daniel Dale guy. Like, honestly, as we know, President Trump thinks that coverage that isn't flattering is fake.

He has said before in the past that polls that show him trailing are fake. So, you know, it's never fun to be the story. That's not what we like to do. We like to cover stories, not be part of the story. But, I mean, I just think it's all. And one other thing I'll just say, Tommy, is that. The paramount deal, for people who don't understand, Netflix is just trying to buy the studios and the streamer. They're not trying to buy the cable news channels.

We would be spun off into our own thing called Discovery Global. But Paramount wants to buy everything. That's why President Trump wants that because he wants new management at CNN. Paramount that is doing the deal that President Trump presumably is in favor of, their money is not just. their money. It is also coming from the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and perhaps most alarmingly, the Saudi's public investment fund. And the Emirates and the Qataris, yep. Yeah. And I, you know, you could talk about foreign ownership, and that's one subject. But beyond that, I mean, it is interesting because conservatives have for years been decrying Al Jazeera as like

terrorist news because they're out of Qatar and et cetera, et cetera, Qatari money to buy CNN. Nobody has a word of objection on the right. But beyond that, we know what MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, thinks about independent journalism or critical journalism because he has had a journalist killed, according to the CIA. Not a big fan.

Killed. Yeah. Jamal Khashoggi. So all of this is the longer answer than you wanted. All of this is part of, of this situation. And again, to my friends on the right, speak now or forever hold your peace. Because like everything I've ever seen covering politics is a president gets a new toy of an expanded presidential power and the next president takes it and goes wild. Bush did drones.

Obama went crazy with drones. Now Trump is using the same justification to go after drug traffickers. It's all just it keeps going and going and going and going and going. Um, so I mean, I don't want to get into the, you know, the drones, obviously for, we'll get there. We'll get there and then. Anyway, I want to ask you about drones. Um, and I look, I agree with you. And by the way, Jared Kushner, I think he's got like five billion dollars under management at his, his firm affinity partners. I think 99% of it is from foreign entities, all the same ones you just mentioned.

So he's just a pass through for them. He, he, uh, he gets to invest their money in an investment, these sovereign wealth funds would already be in and then takes a fee. So why is he there? Clearly, there's someone thinks he's one way to grease this deal and get the political support they need from the administration to make it happen. And I should note that Paramount says that they would be non-governing partners. That presumes that the Saudis and the Emirates and the Qataris are giving $24 billion out of the goodness of their hearts. They don't want to impact whether or not I can say in a broadcast that is seeing internationally that MBS ordered the murder of Jamal Khash. according to the CIA. They have no opinion on that. They want to give $24 billion and they don't want to permit me from saying that, which is true. According to the CIA, MBS had Jamal Khashoggi and American resident killed and butchered. Like, okay, you can believe that if you want, you know, I find it very unlikely that any sovereign wealth fund is going to spend $24 billion

without, or sorry, or $12 million, whatever it is, without some sort of string attached. But you're Right. Look, it's unprecedented times with this merger, unprecedented times even before this for the media generally. I want to ask you about some of that. I mean, back in October, the Pentagon Press Corps essentially just staged a walkout of the building because Pete Heggseth and his team, the Secretary of Defense, demanded that they signed some document outlining this whole series of new rules, including one that basically prohibited the act of reporting. Could you just help listeners understand the impact of a policy like that on a journalist like yourself, kind of day-to-day. So I did a vertical video that lays out in detail what exactly this list was, this list of demands, but basically it was opening the door to the Pentagon being able to label a journalist who reports anything they don't like, a security risk, and it would criminalize not just the handing over by anybody in the Pentagon of classified information, but basically anything, any information not approved, not previously approved by the Pentagon. And, I mean, one of the things that's, there are two things that are very interesting about this.

One, they have replaced all those actual journalists with, which is a bunch of sycophantic partisans who are just there to make Pete Hague Seth and Donald Trump look good. which is not what journalism is. And second of all, this move, like, if you listen to what Heggseth says and his spokesperson, Sean Parnell, they're saying, oh, we need to do this to prevent classified information from being reported, which makes us weaker, et cetera, et cetera. Pete Heggseth, the Inspector General of the Pentagon, said that his disclosure of pending attack information literally put pilots at risk.

That's what the Inspector General report that he said, you know, completely exonerated him, which it did not. That's what it did. So like, if he can point to something that we in the media irresponsibly shared that put pilots at risk, I'd love to see it. But I can point to something that he did that put pilots at risk. So it's all just, again, I hope that the people on the right who are accepting this are excited for, you know, the next day. Democratic press secretary of the Pentagon to do the same thing and like only allow in the most sycophantic coverage. And yes, of course, that means that, you know, whatever Mike Lindell media, My Pillow Media leaves and like we get in some like left wing version of the same thing.

Sign me up, baby. I'll be there. I'm just kidding. Are they even good pillows is my question? I don't know if they're good pillows. No, what is kind of I find funny about this in the near term, Jake, is that all these, this like sycophantic group of influencers went to the Pentagon. They all took photos from the same cubicle and said it was like some Washington, Dan Lamont at the Washington Post cubicle. But they were doing this. They were doing this like preening right at the moment when the actual Pentagon press core was breaking blockbuster stories about these boat strikes off the coast of Venezuela.

So these guys look like complete fucking idiots. Now, in the long term, we don't really know exactly how bad these restrictions will be for Pentagon reporters. Does it mean they won't be allowed in the building? Will they not be allowed to travel with the Secretary of Defense? Will they not be allowed in military installations around the world? Will they not be allowed to cover international conferences, you know, the Munich Security Forum or like whatever? So I think over time, it really will sort of erode and ship away at their ability to do the job.

I think it's a big deal. So I will just say, just to toot my own horn and CNN's own horn last week, a reporter named Zach Cohen and I, CNN reporter Zach Cohen and I, we broke the story of what was in the inspector, report about Heggseth a day before it was released over a signal gate. Yeah, for Signalgate. And you know, and that was just a clean kill. We just, you know, whatever. And there's not one of those people in the Pentagon Press Corps or whatever they are, the Pentagon Fluffers. Yeah. There's not one of them even came close to, you know, and that, whether you like Hegg Seth or not, that is news. Let's say you love Pete Heggseth, you know. And you wanted to put the nicest spin on it. You could,

you know, like Heggseth did. But the point is they didn't even do that because they can't even do that because they're not breaking any stories. Right. They're not journalists. I mean, there also have been some kind of less draconian but impactful changes to media access at the White House. The short version is, you know, the media, the White House changed the process for deciding

who attends these smaller events. They're called pooled press events. And now more often than not, you have like events at the Oval Office includes a bunch of more sycophantic, kind of overly partisan questioners, dudes like Marjorie Taylor Green's boyfriend. What do you think the impact of those changes has been over the last several months? I have less of an issue of expanding the press pool to include new media, quote, unquote. I mean, you know, people want to ask, this doesn't outrage me. You know, I have seen good journalism in unlikely places. I have seen good journalism in partisan places. I mean,

the free beacon and the Daily Caller. And, I mean, there are a bunch of right-wing sites that I've read actual breaking news stories in. So that doesn't concern me. I know a lot of them were already part of the press pool and had been added during the Obama years. But beyond that, like, that doesn't, it's the exclusion of people that bothers me more than the inclusion. Yeah, like stripping out the wires, preventing the AP from entering the Oval Office for months and months, stuff like that. Look, Caroline Levitt, whatever people think about her, she does. And President Trump, whatever people think about him, they take questions from the legacy

media. They do. And so if they want to expand the circle, that doesn't really bother me. It's the exclusion that bothers me. Look, when you see Secretary Hagseth or Attorney General Bondi, they only do interviews, generally speaking. There are a couple exceptions here and there. but let's just stick with Hegsev. Secretary Hegsev, I've only seen him taking questions from Fox, period. He doesn't, like, do press conferences, generally speaking, and when he does an interview, it's only with Fox. To me, that doesn't demonstrate strength. To me, that doesn't demonstrate confidence. If I only agreed to do interviews with, you know, pro-Jake people on a book tour,

then that would be, that would, I think, be indicative of me being scared. Yeah, I mean, it's literally his former employer, too. It looks ridiculous. All right, Jake, so the book is called, I got it right here, Race Against Terror. You trace the story of the prosecution of this one al-Qaeda terrorist and what it tells us about the broader war on terror. I want to dig into this. But can you start, like, how'd you find this story? Why did you, how did you get onto this beat?

so I hadn't written a nonfiction book in a while I wrote the outpost about Afghanistan came out in 2012 I'm sure you remember I keep alluding to this but I was the white house correspondent for ABC News in Obama's first term and Tommy was the National Security Council spokesman so like I just for people who don't know so like I would deal with Tommy and favs and everybody else. And so I wrote the outpost in 2012, as you remember, and I hadn't written it. And that book was so meaningful to me, and it was such a powerful experience. There was just nothing that interested me as much. And that book was, I was inspired by the fact that my son Jack, who's now 16, he had been born October 2nd, 2009. And the outpost that I wrote about had the deadly attack

with 400 insurgents, you know, attacking 50 American soldiers the next day, October 3rd, 2009. and there was something profound in the moment of holding my son and watching TV and hearing about eight American sons taken from this earth that set me on this path to try to find out what happened. Fast forward to Jack's 13th birthday in 2022. We're out doing paintball. Nice. In the, you'll, you know, when you're a teenager?

No, I had in previous years participated, but then one time I shot one of his kids, one of his friends. And the kid got really upset. So I stopped, I stopped participating. That's good advice for me. Yeah, just don't. Let let let let let let let your little boy just play. Do not get involved. Got it. Because, yeah, that was very controversial. So he, the kid's fine. Just anybody out there worried about it. It just stings. It was paintball. It was not actual shooting. Fine. He did, you know, he did one of this kid, you know, he did, he thought I was too close. Anyway, got it. Um, so I'm having this. paintball party. It's October 2020. And because it's so far away, I had like refreshments and

pizza for the grownups as well as the kids. So the grownups could just come, drop their kid off, hang out for a couple hours, then leave instead of having to drive all the way back and forth, back and forth. And one of the dads comes up to me and he starts talking to me. And he says, hey, I know so and so from the outpost. And I said, oh, great. And I said, like, you know, that book was really tough to write because the Pentagon keeps such shitty records. And they're so reluctant to share anything. And he said, tell me about it. And then he starts telling me this incredible story. He's an assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn. He gets a phone call. It's 2011. It's during the Arab Spring. And on one of these refugee boats full of Tunisians and Libyans

is this guy who walks up to an Italian who is in charge of the boat and asks for water. The guy notices he has a bullet scar and says, how did you get that? He said, I got it fighting Americans in Afghanistan. I'm with Al-Qaeda. And they detain him. And then they call the Americans and say, have you ever heard of this guy? He claims he's killed Americans in Afghanistan. And they call the FBI and the FBI calls this dad that I'm talking to at this party, Dave Bittkauer. And Dave Bidkauer tells me this incredible story about they fly there, they hear his confession in Italy. And then because it's the Obama era and Gitmo is not taking in any news. people and the Italians wouldn't have turned him over anyway. At that point, Europe was just so fed up

with how the Americans were doing the war on terror. They wouldn't turn over anybody if they were going to get him or going to be subject to a military tribunal. So the only option was take him and prosecute him in the U.S. in a criminal court, which is what Obama wanted to do. He wanted to try terrorists in criminal courts. And this was a big sticking point. And anyway, they had to prove this case. That's the thing. And so the story that Bitkauer told me was all about the sleuthing, all about like, how do we prove this? How do we prove that this guy who claims he killed Americans in Afghanistan in like in the early days of the war on terror, 2002, 2003? How do we prove that he did this?

And he just told me this unbelievable story about the clues and the evidence. And then that's how this book came about. I just thought it was just fascinating story. and ended up also being about the war on terror from Bush to Obama to Trump and what are the best tools do is it good to is it you know criminal courts the best place or whatever and it also allowed me to revisit this era of you know that I had covered but when you're in the middle of it you don't see it as clearly as you know 10 years later which is why you got so mad when you were reading the book about like the the response from the public not just republic the public to you want you want to bring terrorists to the country to prosecute that the response was as if they were like superhuman and we're going to bust out of prison and kill everybody with lasers coming out of their fingers and I had completely forgotten all we lost our fucking minds yeah this is such an important topic I think first of all let's talk about this

this question of whether the courts the article three courts the u.s judicial system can be used as a tool to prosecute terrorists because for a long time it was and then Republicans just demagogue the shit out of it. And now it's kind of like off the table because just again, just to wind back the tape, you kind of alluded to this. Initially, Obama comes in and makes this big decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9-11 hijackers in a court in New York. And there's a huge political blowback. There's the kind of, there's legitimate security risks. There's legitimate fear. But there's a lot of just like kind of insanity like you were saying that Jake, like these guys are like, you're literally going to bust out of a prison and kill people in Manhattan. And ultimately, Obama was forced to shift the trial from the U.S. court systems to a military commission at Gitmo in 2011 because the writing was just on the political wall. And so you and I are talking today, a December 11th, 2025, KSM hasn't even gone to trial yet. No. These cases are still struck in, they're in pretrial proceedings still. There's no end of those pretrial proceedings in sight. And yet, Jake, there's no like discussion about this or political fallout over a decision that delays. justice for these individuals and for everyone impacted by 9-11. And it's just kind of like not discussed. Yeah, no, I agree. One of the reasons that this happened and this book, I mean, again, one of the things that was interesting about writing this book is just like, you really get a

sense of just the unrelenting nature of terrorism, just like, because it's like, oh, and then this guy happened. And then Zazi was going to blow up the subways. And then, you know, and it's just like, man, to be in charge of protecting Americans, whether Bush or Obama or Trump, like, what a weight on you to like have to like constantly, like all they have to, they only have to succeed once, right? So one of the cases that I had completely forgotten had to do with a guy named Galani. This is in the book. Galani was the first, and I believe to this day, only terrorist from. Gitmo tried in a criminal court. He was the only one taken from Gitmo tried in a criminal court. He was picked up after 9-11. He was tried for his role in the 1998 embassy bombings. And what happened during that trial was that the judge excluded the key witness because the prosecutors had only learned about his name from Galani being tortured by the CIA. Right, right. Or enhanced interrogation, whatever people want to call it.

I'm just using torture colloquially. It was torture. So that eliminated a witness. And so that jury in Manhattan under then U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara under Obama acquitted Galani of 284 out of 285 charges. They convicted him on one. And so he did go to prison. But the idea that he almost walked, scared. the shit out of everybody in the Obama administration and the Justice Department and,

you know, whatever. And like in the national security apparatus, they thought, oh, my God, this has real consequences. And that was one of the most instrumental actions or happenings in terms of why the gimmo is still open and those guys still haven't gone to trial. Yeah. And just bigger picture. I mean, the book reminded me of those early years, the Obama administration and how terrifying it was. Like, look, there's a lot of commentary now about drone strikes. There's criticism of them, especially the volume of drone strikes. And a lot of that I frankly agree with. But I also think that people do forget, like you said, how many very serious terrorist incidents near misses there were during that time. For example, there was 2009.

There was the Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk, Abdul Matalab, who only because of user error, basically, failed to bring down a plane over Detroit. There were the tempted subway bombings that you mentioned there was Najeebo Lazzazi and his buddies were going to blow up the subway. There was the Times Square bomber. They just chicken down. Yeah, they just like, I think we were following them, right? The FBI was following them. But then somebody screwed up on the George Washington Bridge and let him in. And then he disappeared in Manhattan. And like if he, he could have done what he was going to do and blow up these subways, him and his two accomplices. At the end of the day, they just got spooked and went back to Den. Yep. It was the near-miss disaster. There was a Times Square

guy, Faisal Shazade, which is similar. like see something say something right like that some like you know someone being very vendor vendor was like hey this looks weird called the cops um and so i bring that up jake because like again when i look back at the totality of the war on terror it is a catastrophic failure abject failure right the Taliban are running afghanistan al-Qaeda's not defeated not even close it's in more places that just change its name and metastasize right but there also hasn't been another 9-11 style attack you can say it's a total thing i i this is the nuance i want to get it's like there hasn't been a another 9-11, right? There aren't as many near misses. And you have to at least partly credit

counterterrorism efforts, including drones and other military efforts for that. So I like, what, what did you, where did you land on, you know, kind of the war on terror's efficacy after writing this? Well, the good news is, as a journalist, I don't actually have to land anywhere. I could just like report what's true. But I will say this. First of all, it's funny that you talk about like wanting to remind people of how terrifying it was. Because I, I was thinking about this interview last night in bed, and I was thinking about I should confess how terrified I was after 9-11. Me too.

Because a lot of your listeners are either too young. Well, yeah, a lot of your listeners are too young to remember 9-11 or even have been alive during 9-11. And let me just say, like, I remember having a, I remember having lunch with my girlfriend at the time, Sarah Feinberg, who you know, and Mike Feldman, who you know. And I remember, like, I was just a complete nihilist. Like, a month or two after 9-11, I was just like, what's the point? We're all going to die anyway. Like, it was a traumatic event for the American people. My dad worked at a company called Marsh McLennan.

They were on, like, the 100th floor of the second tower. I think they lost 358 employees. Thank God, my father wasn't there. He wasn't one. I don't think he even worked in that building. But, like, you know, I was still one of those. those kids walking around campus, like, trying to figure out what the fuck was going on, not able to reach anybody, right? It was absolutely. Oh, were you a Kenyan at that time?

Yeah, I was a Kenyan. I was sitting in the middle of Ohio. Like, boy, I've never been happier to be in the middle of nowhere and like rural Ohio, right? But, but yeah, I was here. I was here in D.C. and we were being attacked. Yeah. I mean, it was crazy. So, like, I just, the only reason I say this is because people need to, it's such an important part of this story, how scared everybody was. And when I say, Everybody. I mean, everybody. I mean, like, people in the middle of, like, Kansas were convinced that al-Qaeda was going to come and poison their water supply. Like, it was so traumatic. I mean, I imagine it must have been what, like, Pearl Harbor was like. Just like, oh, my God, like, we're not safe. Or Israel after October 7th, right? Like, try to put yourself in their shoes, yeah. Exactly. So that's an important part of it. So to, I don't want to belittle how scared people were by. the idea of bringing terrorists to the United States.

It's just that we have, it's just different now. Like Trump, to his credit, although I don't even know if he knows the debate about this, but like they are going, they are trying to try the second foreign terrorist in a criminal court for killing U.S. service members abroad. Jafar is this Pakistani who's part of ISIS Khorasan, who was part of the Abbey Gatebombing in 2020. Oh, right. Yep. And he, and Trump announced during the address to the joint session of Congress that Jafar is coming to the United States.

He's here. He's in Virginia. He's a few miles away from me. And he's going to be tried in a criminal court. No, I don't know whether Trump and Sebastian Gorka and all the others know that this was a very controversial thing to do if they had tried to do it in 2011. Oh, God. Lindsay Graham would have lit himself on fire in front of the White House. Yes. Exactly. I mean, like people, not just Lindsay Graham, Chuck Schumer. Michael Bloomberg. Like, people were scared. So that is, you know, that's an important part of this story. Yeah, I totally agree. So what did I land? I landed that, well, I don't actually have to have a position is the truth. Like, is it better to do the military tribunals? Is it better to do criminal court? I mean, I guess, you know, if the case can be tried in criminal court, those cases have proved effective. More than 300 terrorists have been convicted and put in prison. And

hypothetically, if Spingool, this particular terrorist that I write about, if he had been picked up in 2007 instead of 2011, and he had been sent to Gitmo, what do I think would have happened? I mean, it's, you know, it's entirely speculative, but I think it's entirely possible that he would have been freed. Because after a while in the effort to clear Gitmo, somebody would have said, well, we don't have any evidence. he just confessed to this that we don't we have nothing and since there wouldn't have been the investigation that the u.s. attorney's office uh in the eastern district of new york did and all the sleuthing that i write about in the book maybe they would have let him free and then maybe he would have gone and killed as many americans as possible which is his life's goal right so i don't know but there's also the problem that uh war is not law enforcement and the and the mel and the merging or

the morphing or the blending or whatever, that's where, I mean, it's not crazy that the Bush people came up with, you know, enemy combatants and everything they did. Like, it's not, it's not out of nowhere. You know, this is all of a sudden, like, it's not, they're waging war on us in a way that is not, they don't abide by the laws of warfare. So, how are we supposed to address it? Is it a criminal? Do we come up with new case law? I mean, I understand why it all happened. I just think at the end of the day, like, it was effective to lock up Spingool and try him in a criminal court. Yeah, look, I've empathy for the fear. I've empathy for how hard the choices are. I just, like, I find the politics of it so frustrating

because, like, there's just decades and decades of, like, established case law and processes for trying and putting in jail terrorists. And demagoguery is that. the thing also. It's like when you, anything that we do in the media or any questions anybody has on Capitol Hill about whether, you know, this extrajudicial killing of drug dealers, drug traffickers or, you know, which Trump is calling narco-terrorists is legal or right or effective. Immediately the argument like, oh, you're on the side of the terrorists. It's like, yeah, it's juvenile. Charles Cook, um, uh, who writes for the National Review. you wrote an entire column about this. Like, it was very clever and very well done. But yes,

I'm on the side of the drug dealers. Yeah, you know, it's just along those lines. I mean, come on. Can we have, can we be adults here for a second? It's absurd. And so like, you know, to these bigger points, I mean, look, I think a lot of Trump's appeal in both elections, was he ran against the Iraq war. He ran against nation building abroad. He ran against regime change wars abroad and like the mistakes from the war on terror. But now, as you said, the administration is murdering people in boats off the coast of Venezuela. Well, I didn't say they were murdering. I said they were murdering people.

There's this slow-moving regime change campaign to push out Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro that included, we're talking on, again, Wednesday, December 11th, on Tuesday, the day before, U.S. Special Forces, like, captured a tanker off the coast of Venezuela. And, like, I just keep watching this news. I'm like, what is happening here? Like, who is driving this? What are the Republicans you talk to say about this sudden, like, this sudden, like, like thirst for, I don't know, this Newman-Roe doctrine in Latin America where I guess we're just

the emperor of all these countries. So I don't know that the seizure of the oil tanker belongs in the same bucket because Beth Sanner, who used to, as you know, a pretty straight shooter who used to work in the director of National Intelligence Office. I think she was deputy. She was on my show yesterday and she said that she really just sees that seizure in the same light that she sees other seizures of other oil tankers in countries that are sanctioned by the United States, whether it's the Iranians or others. And apparently this operation, they had a warrant that, you know, there was actually. They papered it, right? And they look, they did some things, right? Like, I texted some friends who worked on Venezuela policy. And I was like, how is this not an act of war? And they were like,

well, you know, actually, it wasn't coming into the port. It was leaving. So they're not blockading the country. No one knows where the vessel is flagged. So there's all these technical ways. It didn't have the Venezuelan flag, which is a law of sea. You have to have the, you have to be flagged. And but in practice, it's a ghost chip. Like, I mean, right. I mean, but I mean, the U.S. just stole a Venezuelan tanker, right? Like full, at least full of Venezuelan oil. Okay, not to justify it, but I think that this has been done in previous administrations, including Democratic administrations, not of Venezuelan, but of Iranian tankers. And I think that. again, I'm not justifying it, but I do think that there is, as you say, they papered it.

There is a legal argument. It wasn't just like out of nowhere. So, but that said, so let me just differentiate that. Let's just remove that for one second. And again, I'm not defending it. I'm just saying like, I think it's different. The idea of what the United States is doing when it comes to attacking, killing individuals on these boats. First of all, we should make it clear.

Neither of us are in favor of drug traffickers, and neither of us think that, like, members of drug cartels are good people. But that said, like, these people on the boats, this is not El Chapo. These are not, like, the brain trust. These are not the, this is not the commander. It's not the general. It's not the colonel. It's not the major.

These are the people at the bottom of the totem pole that you put in a boat and you send them to, like, go to Suriname and drop off all this. Cocaine. Fishermen doing another job often. And the cocaine is important also because what's killing Americans is by and large, opioids, which we make ourselves, and fentanyl, which is basically the ingredients are coming from China and they're not going to Venezuela. So, you know, when you ask Republicans about this, they're likely to say it's all fungible, it's all drug lords, it's all the same thing. But this idea that the only reason why it's significant beyond the consent, conceptual idea of like, well, they're all drug lords and all drugs are bad is because the argument, the legal argument is for all the strikes, forget the second strike, you know, the double tap or whatever. For all the strikes, the legal argument is they are killing Americans with drugs, therefore they're terrorists and therefore we can kill them. Right. They're attacking. And obviously, yeah, and, and, you know, you can have tremendous sympathy and think that we should be doing more about the war on drugs, et cetera, et cetera.

and also say, it's not really the same thing as 9-11, is it? No, it's insane. The whole policy is insane and illegal. And by the way, it's not the cocaine. Right. It's not the cocaine that is killing people in the thousands. It's the fentanyl. I just, I think that someone is going to get prosecuted for this.

It probably won't be Heggseth or people at the top because Trump will pardon them. But the Hegseth in that team is putting U.S. service members in the position of committing like daily war crimes and it's awful and it's just hard to watch. Final question for you, Jake. Your last book, Original Sin, which you wrote with Alex Thompson from Axios, made a lot of waves. It was about President Biden, his age and decline in the ways that people around him prevented the disclosure of that decline. I've noticed that the Biden people did. Some of your fellow podcasters were in the book. Favro was a character who weighed in seeing some of that debilitated performance. Oh, I was at that event. Yeah. I was at that event too. It was rough. So I have noticed the Biden people didn't love your book. Biden's offenders didn't love your book. I've noticed that every time like Donald Trump stumbles or slips up or falls asleep, you often get attacked and kind of tagged in these tweets. Sometimes they tag me because they associate us as friends or us, you know, because Positive America said the debate went badly for Biden. We're bad now. How do you think the media is handling kind of these growing instances of Trump falling asleep in meetings or maybe seeming like he's losing a step? Like when is it a critical mass that it becomes bookworthy, right? For example. So it's a great question. I mean, we cover it all the time on my show, all the time. And I think that is to a large degree because we saw what happened with Biden. And while we covered it, we didn't cover it. Maybe we didn't

ask as many questions as we should have at the time. And I think it is a legitimate question for any president of any age, but particular anybody who is like in the range of being an optogenarian, right? We cover it all the time. Now, I didn't write a book about Joe Biden's missteps. Alex and I wrote a book about an unprecedented event happening, which was Joe Biden having such a horrible performance at a presidential debate where his only job was to convince people he was up to the task of being president for another four years. His performance being so bad that people thought, oh my God, should he drop out of the race, his not being able to do anything to disprove him, which is like a really important part of this, because, you know, we're all

sympathetic to the idea that, like, anybody in public life can have a bad day, a bad performance, especially if you're tired. The question wasn't even about the performance of the debate, although it was unprecedentedly horrible. It was that he wasn't able to go out any time in the following weeks and make any Democrats feel or sufficient numbers of Democrats feel better that he could do this job. And frankly, I understand that there are a lot of people out there who think I would take President Biden in a coma over Donald Trump. And I understand that. First of all, it's not up to individual people who already love Biden. It was up to a bunch of swing voters in like seven key states, and they didn't feel that way. But beyond that, I don't know anybody who thinks

that he could be president right now and all the way through 2009 in his current state. If you see him speak, if you see him walking, like, I feel bad for him. Oh, he's fighting cancer too. Yeah. He's got some real badical challenges. Beyond the cancer. And obviously, we wish him well, and I hope he lives to be 100. But like, I don't know anybody who thinks today that he is able to be president until 2029, which was the argument. So we were covering, and then basically he was chased out of the race by Democrats, not by me, but by Democrats who thought, oh, my God. And they saw the polling that suggested that not only was Joe Biden going to lose hugely, but, you know, they were going to lose states that Democrats hadn't lost in a long time,

like Minnesota and New Mexico and Colorado and Virginia, New Hampshire. So that's what we covered. It wasn't like, oh, look at all these examples of Joe Biden being old. What we covered was like, should he have run for re-election and why did they hide what they hid? And it was just about the story of Biden being chased out of the race because of that. In terms of what we cover about Trump, I mean, I literally cover it all the time. Like literally yesterday, I covered that crazy truth. social rant when he was mad at the New York Times for covering his aging and he called it sedition

or treasonous. And he attacked the appearance of the woman, the journalist. That was a few weeks before, yeah. Sorry. I lost track of my crazy truth social screens. Yeah, no, it's tough to keep them straight. But, but, I mean, we covered, I covered it on social media and I also covered it on my show. And like, I do. I cover it. No, I know. I agree. I assume you see the tweets too. And it's sort of I don't. I don't is the truth because I have quality filters up because I've just for years, it's just to be completely candid, like a lot of it was started during the Trump years, the first Trump years, when if you were Jewish, you know, the Nazis would come at you. And so those filters were up. And then after October 7th, a lot of the Hamas sympathizers would come

for you. So I don't see most of it is the truth, but I'm aware that it's out there. And I'll just say, like, I cover it all the time. And if people, so I don't really, I don't take the criticism very seriously because I do cover it. Yeah, no, I see you covering it. Jake, thank you for doing the show. The book is called Race Against Terror. Everyone should pick up a copy, give it to read. It's really an incredible story of this one individual case, but what it tells us about a couple decades of a war on terror policy that I guess the story is yet to be written. But great to see you, buddy. Thank you for doing the show. Thank you so much, Tommy. Say hi to everybody else. I will. That's our show for today. Thanks to Jake for coming on. Dan and I will be back with a new show

on Friday. Talk to everybody then. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to cricket.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast. Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. Also, please consider leaving us a review that helps boost this episode and everything we do here at Cricket. Pod Save America is a Cricket Media production. Our producers are David Toledo, Emma Ilic Frank, and Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farah Safari. Austin Fisher is our senior producer.

Reid Churlin is our executive editor. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seiglin and Charlotte Landis. Matt DeGroote is. is our head of production. Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team,

Elijah Cone, Haley Jones, Ben Hefcoat, Mia Kelman, Carol Pellevieve, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.