Pod Save America - Trump’s Made for TV Occupation of D.C.

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

Flanked by half his cabinet and citing crimes against a DOGE staffer, Donald Trump announces that he’s deploying 800 National Guard troops to Washington and federalizing the city’s police department. Jon and Lovett react to Trump's desperate show of force, then break down his new plan to negotiate a Russia-Ukraine peace deal and JD Vance’s latest attempt to spin the Epstein files crisis as “full transparency.” Then, Lovett talks to The New Yorker’s David Kirkpatrick about his big new investigation into how much the Trump family is profiting off of the presidency. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

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Yeah, that's right. Digging through court files in Miami. Down there with a magnifying glass and a black light. Oh, God. Sorry. That's not good. On today's show, we're going to talk about Trump's upcoming summit with Putin in Alaska. His latest comments on Gaza, J.D. Vance's attempt to pin Epstein on the Democrats and predict indictments over Russiagate.

And then Lovett talks to the New Yorker's David Kirkpatrick about his investigation into the full extent of Trump's corruption, which is so far. far made his family more than three billion dollars richer three billion and that's conservative and that's conservative holy shit but first here's how the white house kicked off the week the president of the united states has responded to an attempted dc carjacking that targeted uh the 19 year old doge staffer known as big balls by deploying 800 national guard troops across washington and federalizing the city's police force that is a thing that actually is happening in america right now Doesn't matter that violent crime in D.C. has dropped to a 30-year low. Doesn't matter that the 5,000 troops Trump deployed here to Los Angeles in June

had basically nothing to do but stand around and look bored. The purpose of ordering our own military to occupy our cities doesn't seem to be about fighting crime, but about getting headlines that Trump is fighting crime, and as always, owning the libs. This was clear from the president's Monday morning announcement in the White House briefing room where he was flanked by half his cabinet, who apparently had nothing better to do than focus on the fallout from a carjacking

in a city of 700,000 people. Here they are in all their glory. Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people. They love to spit in the face of the police as the police are standing up there in uniform.

They're standing and they're screaming at them an inch away from their face and then they start spitting in their face and I said you tell them you spit and we hit and we're getting rid of the slums too we have slums here we're getting rid of them I know it's not politically correct

you'll say oh so terrible no we're getting rid of the slums Let me be crystal clear crime in D.C. is ending and ending today they will be strong they will be tough and they will stand with their law enforcement partners this is nothing new for DOD in Los Angeles

we did the same thing I can't touch you if you're 14, 15, 16, 17 years old, and you have a gun. They go to family court, and they get to do yoga and arts and crafts. Sounds like Galane Maxwell's facility in Texas. Yoga and arts and crafts. Yeah, the beginning of that sentence, I can't touch a, it's like, wait, where, oh, the different story. We're covering a different story. Yeah, it's hard to, it's confusing that with you spit, we hit.

Right, yeah, for sure. There's a lot going on there. Also, I just, the attorney general. of the United States saying, I am going to end all crime. Crime is ending in D.C. Crime is ending. Thanks, Pam Bondi.

So what do you think about this? It seems as if Trump has the legal authority to do this because D.C. is technically a federal district and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser conceded as much in a press conference later on Wednesday. But is this a wise move? Is this the way to fight crime? So first of all,

so Bowser is like striking a kind of conciliatory posture, which seems like what she's been doing quietly because Trump refused to even criticize her. He actually spoke well of her and saying, though she was failing on this issue, she's a good person, which is more than he would say about most Democratic mayors, I think. So there's- Also seems like she doesn't have much of a choice. Right. Yes. I mean, look, we can, there's the fact that the president can call something an emergency, and that unlocks all these powers and who decides what an emergency is, is completely subjective. It's a huge problem. It's a huge problem across a whole range of issues. That's like, that's like the shape of a lot of

these things. That's the shape of him invoking the Insurrection Act and a whole bunch of other abuses of presidential authority. But yes, he's saying the law is clear. He can say it's an emergency and then he can take over the police. So there's two big pieces to this. There is the deploying of the National Guard. That doesn't look that different than what Trump did in Los Angeles, except D.C. is a federal place that has tons of federal law enforcement, military facilities, all kinds of. Presidents in charge of the National Guard in D.C. Yes. Well, and also that there's just tons of presidential police departments. The Veterans Affairs has a police department. Secret service is running around D.C. Yeah. So it's just like unlike other cities. But the other

part of it is declaring that Pam Bondi is now in charge of the Metropolitan Police Department. And I think this gets at the uncertainty about what happens next because how are we meant to know what Pam Bondi is going to do when she's running a local police department? She doesn't know what she's going to do when she's running a local police department. She has never done it before. And she didn't know she was going to do it until this week. Look, you got a lot more eyes on all those Epstein files now. She's got a lot more hands than the DC police force. They're going to be working around the clock because there's more pages for them to look at.

Yeah, no more shifts walking around. the block we should say yeah there's there's the there's the the home rule act was passed long time ago that gave dc you know certain sort of privileges and and and autonomy right and in that legislation there is a a provision that says okay in times of emergency the president could federalize the police force in dc for 48 hour periods yeah because it's like supposed to be for like there's like you know overwhelming violence or rioting whatever else and then apparently if you federalize it for longer than 48 hours, every time you re-federalize it for another 48 hours, you have to, like, send a message to the relevant committees in Congress,

which I'm sure they'll get to that, right? Yeah, and then there's also, I believe after 30 days, Congress might have to approve it, but we're a long way from that 30-day period. Okay, Pam Bondi, you're now basically the police chief of the District of Columbia. What are your thoughts? Like, you know, I know what Donald Trump's thoughts are. They're not tough enough. They're not violent enough.

They're not knocking heads together. They're letting everybody get away with stuff. We've got to be tough like we used to be tough. Okay, that's something you can say in a campaign speech. You're running the police department. Their police department in, in D.C. doesn't have enough officers. That's something that they've talked about publicly. Are there specific issues you'd like them to address?

You know, are they not like when you say you want them to be tougher, like presumably continuing to follow the Constitution will have to happen. But they don't know. They have no idea. I think it's, like, hard to predict exactly what this will actually look out, how different it will look than just the, the, the, then, then DC looked yesterday. But what I, what I go to is this is for headlines and not just for today, right? So what are the headlines they want in the next couple of days and weeks? And I think it's them, they want they want to show people being arrested. They want to show bodies on the street. They want to show, they want to see military, national guard members, you know, standing in front of building. And I think it's them. They want, they want to show, they want to show, they want to see military, national guard members, you know, standing in front of building. And, And then I think they want to show like homeless encampments being torn down and then they want to declare victory of some kind. And so that to me is what comes next.

Does it have any actual impact on crime in D.C.? Who fucking knows. But like they don't have a plan for anything other than a series of photo ops over the next couple of days. And even if they don't get those photo ops, I mean, we know from experience here in Los Angeles that it doesn't really matter to Trump whether he's got the photo ops are, that's cherry on the cake, right? But if he doesn't have the photo ops, then, you know, a month from now, he's, you know, a month from now he's just going to say oh and then we we took over dc and have you seen it lately it's

beautiful it's beautiful that's right we that city was dying we saved this city and everyone's like no one's going to ask them oh what about the crime statistics there's a lot of arguing about the crime statistics right but like let's just take them at their word that they want to fight crime in dc right sure so like if you want to fight crime in dc if the crime rate is not declining fast enough for you i don't know there's a whole menu of options that they could have picked from, right? Trump's acknowledged in the press conference that there's enough police

that should be able to handle the crime. So I don't know why you're adding a bunch of troops, military, that are not trained in law enforcement. They are trained in sort of combat overseas or defending the homeland or doing various other tasks that National Guard do in the United States.

Law enforcement isn't necessarily one of them. There's some courts that could be filled with more judges or prosecutors so they could get the cases done faster, right? Like, that's a challenge that Judge Janine could fix in her new role. Sure. She's also complaining about the, you know, the way that they treat juvenile offenders who commit violence or have guns.

Like that, again, that is a, if that's a problem for you, that's something that you could address with legislation. None of this is Pam Bondi becomes the police chief. Right. And we send out the National Guard. Well, the other, yes. Also, it was, what, two or three years ago that Congress rejected a reform law from D.C., because they wanted to not allow them to do certain kinds of legal reforms and criminal justice reforms in D.C. Like, this has been like a roiling topic. So now Pam Bondi is in charge of the Metropolitan Police Department. There's going to be a couple hundred members of the National Guard. They also are saying that they're going to involve all these other federal police agencies that exist. an incredible bit of coordination that has to happen now, an incredible logistical feat of

figuring out how to involve and track police in doing local law enforcement. Which this administration is known for. So Pam. Logistical planning. Yeah. And so Pam Bondi, who was a prosecutor and became a state attorney general and then a lobbyist for Qatar and a Kuwaiti company and some others. And now is the attorney general.

Like, okay, like, well, this is a very big logistical challenge for you. I guess you're going to be working around. on the clock on this. Well, good thing she's got the help of Pete Hegseth and the military and Janine Piro, a couple of Fox hosts to the rescue. Yeah. Doug Bergam was up there because I guess I guess Interior has some, uh, well, no, interior has law enforcement. They all, they all have law enforcement in D.C. It's just, Cash Patel's there. We got, we already have FBI agents on the streets in D.C. Over, over the weekend, they deployed some federal law enforcement. Cash Patel said something, I think, that was not, that, because that didn't seem like particularly helpful.

because he talked about how crime rates were dropping during the press conference. He's like, hey, you're not on book. But the, yeah, I can't, like, so yes, they were, they're turning this carjacking, which is terrible, and they're a carjackings in D.C., and that is terrible, into, like, an inciting incident to do this, but they must have been wanting, this must have been what they've been wanting to do. I don't, I can. You don't think the show of force was just for big balls?

I don't think it was, look, I think big ball, look, I think big balls maybe got things rolling, you know, but I don't. Like, was this something that they were playing to you in a couple weeks, moved it up? Was this always happening anyway? Was this like, who knows? Yeah, I know. Because, you know, the first thought for a lot of people were, it's a distraction, whatever. And then, you know, a White House official tells playbook.

No, no, he was driving around the city. And he, because he complains about the graffiti, too, as well as the violence. And he was just like, no, we got to clean this up. Which, honestly, I'm willing to believe because he's a, again, he's a visual learner. He's a visual learner. He's a, he's a TV guy. For sure. He likes, you know, he probably watched cops a lot.

Right? And he sees crime and he's like, oh, crime's bad. We got to do this. And then, well, why isn't crime falling fast enough? Why isn't crime eliminated? It's like, well, there's a lot of comp. No, I don't want to hear the explanation. We just need more force. More force, more people. I do think the implications of this and the potential consequences are far beyond just cleaning up crime in D.C., which is like, I don't know if you saw, like, Greg Sargent at the New Republic got a hold of some memo that was floating around the defense department that was like, you. yeah, DHS is going to need a lot more deployments like they had in Los Angeles of the military to really take care of this political priority for the president of immigration. So one implication, one consequence of this is now there's just going to be, you're going to get more ice raids, more raids of people like we have here in Los Angeles. And like we don't, and stuff we don't even know, right? You have a bunch of people walking around with fucking guns militarized in Washington DC who don't necessarily know what they're doing, who don't necessarily have an objective,

and I don't know, I think putting more guns around the street with people who don't really know what they're doing is probably not the best way to achieve public safety, but who knows. Yeah, so I think there's one part in this press conference where he talked about how, you know, it's just starting in D.C. They're going to go from D.C. and then go elsewhere. And it, like, look, it's a small thing, but, you know, Trump's saying, I'm ordering all the states to lower their flags for the Pope, too. Well, you're not in charge of them. And so for Trump, who does, who either chooses not to know or doesn't know about the distinction between a city like D.C. and what would it, what would mean to have federal officers in Chicago is saying, oh, we're going to do

this everywhere, right? And then you look at what they did in in Los Angeles, which, again, is because he wants the headlines and he wants the attention. And so he puts some National Guard troops there and some Marines at federal buildings in Los Angeles. But if what he wants is to be policing a whole city right like it's not it's not hard enough for him to do that if he really wants to do that right we are we have benefited from the fact that he has a short attention span and this is more of about a show of force than force right but if you really wanted to guard every federal building in chicago when when in portland there's some question about where there was federal jurisdiction right is it just on federal property was like well no you have to be able to guard federal property which

it extends beyond federal party. You have to be able to investigate beyond federal property. So it goes beyond federal property. It's not hard to imagine them deciding that every post office, every federal building, every courthouse, every customs office, every place where you get your passport renewed, those are all federal buildings all throughout every major city in this country. And then all of a sudden they're deploying National Guard there. Oh, and they're detailing people from Veterans Affairs and from the Interior Department

and all these places. And all of a sudden, there's all kinds of police throughout a city, right? That is not impossible. And so all of this, every, like, do I think that's what they're planning to do? I don't know. They don't really plan. These people are kind of improvisational. But, like, that is a step.

That is a step they could take. And so they start with this because they can get away with this. He sees what the press looks like. He sees what the attention looks like. And I do worry that they're going to enjoy the stories and attention and press they get from this. I do. And I realize that, you know, calling out hypocrisy is just like fucking spitting in the wind at this point. Sure.

You spit it. We hit it. It's you. You spit it hits you in the face. But like, do we think this is a tough on crime president? This is a president who doesn't like crime. He's very anti-crime, right? Criminal conviction himself, pardoned a bunch of people who in D.C.

attacked cops in D.C. I guess we went through this once before. There was a big crime scene in D.C. It was when a bunch of people attacked the Capitol and attacked cops. And one of the people who screamed at the time that the cops should die was caught on cameras. saying that. Kill him. He's in the Justice Department now.

He's in the Justice Department now. He's a top official in the Justice Department in the Trump Justice Department. So I don't know if it's that Trump doesn't like crime so much as he does. He's fine with crime if it's committed by people who are his pals or himself or his followers. But crime that's committed by the Libs or Democrat-run cities or people who look a little crimey. They look a little crimy. Does it? He's not going to tolerate that.

For my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law. And look, again, it's not Trump. Trump is enabled. Like, the fact that there has been so little outcry over the fact that they have put a person at the Justice Department that shouted, kill cops at the top of his lungs is, you know, I don't care for it. There is a lot of like, oh, this is what the White House wants us to be talking about, wants everyone to talk about, which I get. I don't know.

What do you think, how do you think Democrats should respond to this one? You know, I'll tell you, I'll tell you what's a crime. this big, beautiful bill. Yeah, man, it sucks. He's the assignment editor for the world, his most powerful person in the world, and he's doing terrible and dangerous things with his power, and we have to talk about it. The answer is not to try to pivot to a different topic. It is to be persuasive, interesting, believable, trustworthy to others who are persuadable on the topics as we start to build a larger story about why Donald Trump is such a threat and why we are a better alternative. I also think you can't just write this off as another distraction because most people

who don't pay close attention to politics are like, oh, there's crime somewhere. Crime is bad. We like when there's less crime. And it seems like Donald Trump, he wants to throw more resources at the crime. And I think you've got to tell people like, no, no, no, that's not what's happening. If like what the conversation you and I just had, like if he wants to fight crime and do more a crime, there's a whole bunch of things he could do. This is not that. This is putting a bunch of people who aren't trained in law enforcement throughout the city so he can exert more

control. Yeah, and it's also just like this is a distraction is not an argument. It's not anything. Right, because some people were like, well, and I know that people felt like that about L.A. at times, right? Because people who weren't living here when all of this went down and be like,

whoa, were the riots really bad? Was there a lot of violence? And we're like, no, there wasn't. But if there was, people would be like, well, maybe the troops are good to, like, calm down the violence. It's like, no, no, no, this is a whole fucking made up thing. Yeah, I just, this is a distraction. It feels like it's from another era of Trump politics. And it's also just a conversation among a bunch of people who are not distracted and are aware of the threat, right? Like, it's like, I'm not distracted. You're not distracted. The people seeing these articles about distraction are not particularly distracted.

I suppose if you kind of, I don't know, steer the ship of the great 100,000 talkers that were all surrounded by the 100,000 people that are part of these kinds of debate. You shift it and what? They talk about what Trump's doing a little less, talk about Epstein and tariffs a bit more. That's going to affect, what, local news coverage and TikToks that'll reach people who are going to find out that Trump federalized the police. I just, everything's a fucking distraction. We're a perpetually distracted society. I'd say what's going to land with people when in a couple weeks or a month, there's a bunch of stories about the National Guard not knowing what they're supposed to do,

and Pam Bondi's run the police force like an incompetent mess and crime's not going down, and then someone gets arrested who didn't do anything. Like, then everyone's like, oh, he's fucking incompetent, and he did this for some other reason. Like, then we're able to show what's wrong with it. Yeah, I'll also say this. The Attorney General of the United States just made a huge promise that she's going to end crime in the District of Columbia. They now own this.

They own the challenges of running a police department in a city and stopping crime where even the best, smartest, most compassionate, forward-thinking department will struggle against the reality of a city and life in a city and the people that commit crimes in it and the people that live there and all the challenges that go along with it. But they claim they have some superpowers. Great. Because in a couple weeks, there will still be carjackings. There will still be challenges. which will be crimes and petty crimes and sexual assaults and robberies and all the rest

because they're authoritarians but they're not all powerful and we have to, I think that to me is like a lever for us which is just, all right, you're going to do this? Yeah. You're going to be the ones.

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the Acorn app to get started. Payed on-client endorsement compensation provides incentive to possibly promote Acorns, Tier 2 compensation provided. Investing Adol's Risk, Acorns, and SEC registered investment advisor. View important disclosures at acorns.com. So Trump took questions after his announcement, and lots of them were about his big meeting with Vladimir Putin that's set for this Friday in Alaska, the place from which proto-Trump politician Sarah Palin could see Russia from her doorstep,

thereby bringing the stupidest era of American politics full circle. We're right back there. Trump is theoretically looking for a deal to end the war in Ukraine, though he'll be doing so without, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy, who isn't invited to the Putin meetcute and will apparently get a read out later on the potential fate of his country. Zelensky is understandably ripped shit about this, though I'm not sure why, as Trump's negotiating prowess was on full display at Monday's press conference. You know, I'm going to see Putin. I'm going to Russia

on Friday, but it's very complex because you have lines that are very uneven. And there'll be some swapping. There'll be some changes in land. And the word that they will use is, you know, they make changes. But they've taken some very prime territory. They've taken largely ocean. You know, in real estate, we call it ocean front property. That's always the most valuable property. If you're in a lake, a river, or an ocean, it's always the best property. Well, we're going to have a meeting with Vladimir Putin. And at the end of that meeting, probably in the first two minutes, I'll know exactly whether or not a deal can be made. There's going to be a lot of swapping. There's going to be swapping. They're going to be changing. They like to call it

change. Change and they like to call it change. Yeah, there's another There's another quote where he said, it's very complicated. We're going to get, we're going to get some back. We're going to get some switch. There will be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both. He also said, I'm going to get everybody's ideas. I'm talking to European leaders. I'm talking to President Zelensky. I go into that thing fully loaded right up there. And we're going to see what happens. Yeah, Zelensky, the EU, Laura Lumer. Yeah.

No bad ideas in a brainstorm when it comes to the borders of Ukraine. Yeah. Asking a question in the briefing. Whoever, he's going to take all ideas from everyone. People at Mar-a-Lago that happened to be at the shrimp station at the same time. So with Tommy out this week, you finally have the chance to sling that take you've been working on about the fate of the Donbos. All right, yeah, no, that's right. But before I let you cook on that, the meeting with Putin, it's already being covered through

the prism of whether, you know, President Art of the deal can pull another rabbit out of his hat. It does feel like the most important question, though, is not whether he can get a deal, but what kind of deal he's willing to make? What do you think? Yeah, so, first of all, it's hard to know because he said virtually everything a person can say about the situation.

I think J.D. Vance sat down with Barter Romo, and we're going to talk about some of the other parts of it, but he talked about this, and I do think, like, he is the, like, you know, the first intellectual Zamboni among equals. And like what he says, I think is like kind of the most, the most intellectualized form of Trump's brain at times. And when you watch Vance talk about this, first of all, there's like that inherent like kind of moral, like it's just like morally vacant. Like, look, these are just two countries that have been fighting and they both want to get out of this thing, which is so despicable.

Like this is Russia invaded Ukraine. You know, both Trump and Vance tend to say a version of, you know, I believe Ukraine wants peace. I believe Russia wants peace, right? And Vance then does an aside because he's very smart and he carefully says, look, we all condemn the invasion, almost as an aside, right? Right. But then he makes the point about the U.S. not wanting to fund Ukraine, not wanting to support Ukraine, wanting to push it back onto Europe. And he makes this outrageous claim, which is that the fact that Putin is willing to meet with Trump is some kind of break. breakthrough, right, which is so embarrassing.

The President of the United States, you're calling it a breakthrough that you got a meeting. You scored a general with Putin, and now, like, all of a sudden, that's an impressive feat. The guy's a fucking fugitive from the ICC for war crimes related to kidnapping 20,000 Ukrainian children, not to mention the torture, rape, slaughter of thousands and thousands and thousands of Ukrainians that Putin ordered. and he's coming to the United States and look, it's like it is important to talk with even murderous tyrants

if we're trying to end a war but like Putin's pretty psyched he got the meeting. Right. So this is not like a, this is a big win for Putin. And so he describes Trump getting the meeting

as some kind of a win which is very embarrassing and wrong. And then part of the explanation for what made it happen is because of the pressure that they've applied to Ukraine. Right? All of which has made not like sort of made a, is a signal to Putin that his antagonism is effective. It weakens Ukraine's position. That's all saying we're going to that if you don't get to, if you don't strike a deal soon, we're going to pull all our support and let Putin's tanks roll across Europe. Finally, the pressure we needed to get both sides to the table. So the whole thing is just it is strategically incomprehensible.

It's like morally empty. And the end result is they would like to validate this whole idea of the U.S. has been getting ripped off and we're sending all this money overseas. And so they like to stop doing that. He wants to say how he wants a deal. He wants to be the dealmaker and the peacemaker. And beyond that, they don't seem to have very many equities in the actual, like the actual outcome of the conflict. What happens to Ukraine?

What happens if we live in a world where a country? country like Russia is rewarded for what they did. They're apparently floating some kind of a deal where like, ah, it's just a Donbos, which Zelensky has to, of course, reject because it is a victory for Russia in this conflict. And then all vans can come up with is some version of, look, nobody's going to like the deal. That's the thing about a compromise. I mean, just think of it from Putin's perspective, right? He, so he's lost about a million Russians in this war. He, his economies in the shitter. He's an international pariah. And now he gets to go into this meeting with Donald Trump, who he knows by now is easily manipulated through flattery, has the attention span of a

fucking fruit fly, probably can't locate Ukraine on a map, let alone freelance about its territorial sovereignty. Sure. So he's got this meeting and now he's going to be able to sort of set the terms of this, or at least influence Trump's thinking. And what's the worst that can, what's the worst he thinks can happen, right? Which is like, Trump walks away and he did either like, at worst, Trump's probably like, you're on your own. I tried something and I can't, I can't get a deal. I'm not dealing with this anymore.

I'm out. Which, by the way, it's just worth saying, he said before. Which is what he said before. And I'm sorry, he's also said, Daniel Dale, remember our friend Daniel Dale at CNN, that, that of the, of the fact checker. Of the cataloging of the lies. You know, Trump didn't just say one time offhand. I'm going to end this on day one.

He said it dozens of times. He said it at least 50 times. I'm going to end this war on day one. So Putin knows he's horny for a deal. And as already said repeatedly, I, you know, I talked to both sides. It's so complicated. You guys figure it out. Maybe the Pope can deal with it.

Remember that? Remember when the Pope was going to deal with it? And it's just like, what did Trump advance the rest of the thing? Do they really think that if you give Putin some territory, who knows how much of the dombaas he gets or how much of the territory he currently occupies he gets right he gives his territory after three years of losing this many soldiers and this like he's just going to say i'm out that's great i'm happy with a few provinces in eastern ukraine and now i'm just going to shrink back and just sort of you know try to rebuild at home like that's it they think that's

going to be it what i don't understand well and that look the whole this is like and like he like if he if he dares to invade Ukraine again to restart the war or to invade some other neighbor in Europe, like who's going to stop him? Is Trump? Trump going to stop him? You know, a friend of mine would say, and this is glib, but whatever, Tommy's not here, that you can think of a parking ticket as a punishment or you can think of it as a fee. And if you say, if you invade a sovereign country on a completely bullshit pretext, which, by the way, you know is bullshit because you're claiming it's for some kind of, you know, your national security and for your protection. Meanwhile, you've put your whole fucking army into this country. You're not defending the border

with Finland. You're not worried about your neighbors to the west. That if you do that, if you launch a war that leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, that you kidnap tens of thousands of children, you cause all this death and destruction. And your punishment is you keep a third of the territory you took. What does that say to the rest? What does it say to Ukraine in the future? What does it say to other countries in Europe? What does that say to China about Taiwan? What does that say to the world about what borders mean? We haven't even talked about security guarantees as part of the deal either, which no one seems to be floating, at least not in the not in a real way so far. And it's like, so, you know, is there a scenario where Ukraine gives up

some territory in exchange for like a security guarantee from the United States? and NATO or Europe or whatever, the EU. But like that's not even being discussed right now. It's just like you get, and like the quote that you said, we're going to swap territory that's mutually beneficial. What is Ukraine getting a few Russian cities? Yeah, what are we talking about? What are we talking about?

It's almost like just confusing his meetings. He's confusing his meetings with Wiccoff about some future fucking deal. Because Wickev's got the poor, he's got the Middle East portfolio, and he's got the Russia portfolio. He's got one ICC fugitive. and another one who's just unfucking real.

Speaking of which, Trump did not get any questions on Israel at the press conference, but he did do a brief phone interview

with Barack Ravid at Axios, where he publicly responded for the first time to Netanyahu's new plan to occupy all of Gaza over the objections

of his own military leadership. Trump told Ravid that he had a quote, good call with NetNiah on Sunday and that he doesn't

think Hamas will release the hostages unless something changes then he added, quote, I have one thing to say, remember October 7, remember October 7. What do you think is going on here? Is Trump just trying to wait this one out too? And BB certainly seems like he's trying to wait out everyone. Do you feel like attention is waning? So it's what Trump says at the end there, remember October 7th, remember October 7th, that is Trump seeing the politics of this shifting, that the absurdity, the like,

the evil farce of saying you're going to what, that you're going to give notice to people in Gaza City and then you're going to occupy Gaza City. A city that we have now seen photos of is in ruins that you're going to take this territory where the military has told you there's no further military advantage here that you've leveled most of this country.

The city you're going to occupy is in ruins. Ruins. It's an evil joke. It's indefensible. And so when Trump says, remember October 7th, remember October 7th, he's seeing that, like, this does not seem justified. And people have, for, we are so far from where this conflict began.

It seems so disconnected from it. And that is true. The only hope has to be, if this is a hope, that this is some kind of threat as part of a negotiation or a potential negotiation about some kind of a deal. Whitkoff went to... What's the threat?

That if you don't return the hostages, I'm going to... Oh, I'm going to take over the entire Gaza Strip. I'm going to occupy Gaza City. I'm going to make everybody that's now in Gaza City, leave Gaza City, where are they going to go? Fuck knows. And that because there apparently was some kind of proposal

presented by Qatar and Egypt. Today, there's a discussion of like all or nothing. That's a quote, deal. Whitkoff went and to one of the aid distribution sites last week. So, like, there's, there are still apparently conversations happening. But the other side of this is, as many have pointed out, the Times reported this in their, their big reported investigative piece into this that Nanyahu's been reluctant to talk about after the war, that there, that, that in Israel right now, this is the reporting today that, that, that obviously Palestinians would be killed and harmed by any kind of

occupation, but Israelis do not understand and what the rationale would be for prolonging the conflict and occupying all of Gaza. It's all, it doesn't seem to be any way of getting any kind of hostages back. So the whole thing seems, it's just senseless. Well, and I think the IDF objected to this in part, or senior leaders in the Israeli defense forces objected to Netanyahu according to reporting in part because they think like, why wouldn't they kill the hostages? Like, the hostages would be in danger in such a military occupation or another military offensive like this. And then you just, like, with every development, you realize, okay, Netanyahu, he doesn't really, his first objective is not getting the hostages back. His first objective is not a ceasefire, certainly.

His objective is to completely eliminate Hamas, as if, like, that's a thing that you can do, and destroy Gaza, control Gaza, and it doesn't seem to care much at all about the starvation acts like it doesn't exist. And for Trump, Trump's just like, okay, well, you know, first I saw the images of the, of the starving kids in Gaza, and I didn't like those images. But then one U.S. official told Axios that Trump was moved by the video released by Hamas of an Israeli hostage digging his own grave. Quote, it influenced the president, and he is going to let the Israelis do what they need to do. Once again, just very easily manipulated person, Donald Trump. He sees images of starving children. He'll have a day where he says, oh, yeah, that's bad. We should fix that.

But then, you know, he forgets the next day, and the Israelis were like, yeah, what about this hostage? Okay, well, then now I care about this. This is how he did. By the way, they were like, oh, we're going to surge aid finally. Remember, last time we talked about this, they were going to do some pauses in the fighting so that people get more aid. Where's that? Has that worked out? It hasn't worked out.

No. In fact, a 14-year-old boy was killed by an airdrop, killed by the air drop. So they're still doing air drops. They're trying to surge more aid in there. really working. It's still a trickle. Huckabee, our fucking ambassador to Israel, said that the plan to take over, to fix the aid situation, the food situation, is to increase the number of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites, the GHF, from 4 to 16. So this organization that wasn't working at all, that was a

complete fucking disaster, we're just going to have some more of that instead of actually changing it and letting the UN in. I mean, it's a, it's a disaster. I saw, so there are some conservatives or people trying to defend Netanyahu and Trump in saying, oh, all these people are saying that eight trucks aren't being intercepted. But look at these stats. So many aid trucks are being intercepted. And Trump's former envoy to the region was asked about this. And if there is not enough food, if people in a place do not trust that there will be enough food, people, not Hamas, people, people try to get as much, they storm the trucks. They try to get the food. Now, when this U.S.

contractor backed by the IDF is doing this, they like exert order and control and it's led to people being killed. But what UN aid trucks have done is they just step back and they let people take the food. And I've seen some people saying, oh, that's the rationale for why they've cut off aid because some of that aid is being interdicted by ordinary people, people with guns, potentially Hamas. But that is not an argument for starving people to death. That's an argument for flooding an area with aid because if there is enough aid if there's only so much if there's not if there's only enough to feed a precious few people people with guns may get that aid but but even experts in this say there is an answer and the answer is to flood an area with aid because if people

can count on it count on it again and again all of a sudden there is not this sense that it must be stolen that it must be grabbed that it must be taken uh so it's all a fucking joke at this point the the excuses on this because more aid is trickling in now It's not really having an effect. More people are dying of starvation. The IDF just killed a bunch of journalists over the weekend, who they say are actually Hamas the whole time, even though they've been covering the war for two years.

No real documentation of that. And unfortunately, I think that the folks leading in the polls, after Net Yahoo, are not, you know, they're not dreaming of a two-state solution either. So not great. Pod Save America is brought to you by Article. We love Article. They have great stuff.

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for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. So one topic that Trump White House wants to talk about even less than Ukraine or Gaza is, of course, the Epstein scandal, which they are still working diligently to cover up with arguably some success. J.D. Vance seems to be in the middle of a hard-hitting media tour right now. Yeah. He's been sitting for a series of adversarial interviews with fearless journalists like former Trump staffer Katie Miller, the Gateway Pundit. He's a one with the Gateway Pundit. Didn't catch that one. Didn't catch it. And of course, Maria Bartaromo, who did ask Vance and Epstein question on Fox this Sunday. Here's what he said.

We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires. And now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this. And yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years. Give us some clarity on this meeting that is reportedly happening or happened last night at the White House about the Epstein final. and how you're communicating the Epstein story. So I've seen so many different fake reports about this. So let me set the record straight.

There was no meeting at my house last night. There just wasn't. Was there a meeting at the White House? We did meet at the White House yesterday, but not at the time that they said that we were going to meet and not about the subject that they said that we were going to meet about. Ooh, that was a technicality. What do you think?

Why are Democrats suddenly attacking Donald Trump over this who called for full transparency? It's this whole. I don't wish it on anyone to go to watch this entire Barter Romo interview. You don't have to and you shouldn't. But there is something about watching, like, watching him, like, he had, this is his move. It's his move when he's talking about gerrymandering. It's like, what are we meant to do?

We, these innocent Republicans simply put upon by these Democratic politicians and their gerrymandering schemes. Yeah, there's like the anti-antitrumps online. There's like this brand of sort of right wing pundit that for a while, their whole argument was like, well, I didn't want to support Donald Trump, but what were we supposed to do? The Democrats are so extreme and mean and nasty that they have just pushed us into his arms. Yeah. That's a J.D. Vance thing. That's a, yes, it's very, that is sort of like, like, that's like the intellectual defense for this kind of like Republican radicalism is that we have.

And by the way, like, you know, it's not just in politics. Like that is the argument that you see around like, well, they lost the culture war, right? There's gay marriage and there's there's trans people now. And, you know, American Airlines makes their logo the pride flag every June. Like we lost, why? We weren't fighting hard enough. And so that's what this is, right? And so when he gets to Epstein, right, what's the actual current real, truthful situation with whatever we're going to call the Epstein files, whatever that means?

Donald Trump and a bunch of right-wingers playing off a conspiracy. online, which has some truth to it, by the way, promised to bring full transparency of this story. They get into office, and they discover that in some ways what they were promising was overblown. But in one important way, it wasn't. There are powerful figures in the Epstein files. Their names are Donald Trump, among others. And so we know that Donald Trump's name is in the Epstein files, that that was told to Donald Trump. And so in the interim between Pam Bondi saying the files are on my desk, the list is on my desk, I'm going to release it, and her saying there is no list, and Cash Patel and Dan Bongino doing it. And so, in the interim, you know,

interview saying he killed himself and there's no they're there, somebody told Donald Trump that his name was in the Epstein files. And that's why it's stuck. Well, it's also like, why are Democrats attacking Donald Trump who's called for full transparency? Okay, the whole thing started when a bunch of MAGA influencers were attacking Donald Trump and were demanding full transparency. And Donald Trump can call for full transparency all he wants. But you know what? He is the president and he has the power to actually be fully transparent by releasing the fucking file. So it's like, what are you talking about? It's just, it's, it is the ease with which he lies now.

I guess he's all, I mean, he's always, but like, I feel like J.D. Vance has become, and we'll see it with the next clip too, he's become even more comfortable just like doing this sort of pathological dishonesty. It's bit and where he's like, it's not only that he lies, but like, how dare anyone else criticize that? Yeah, it's the, it's the, it's the, that laugh. when he laughs there about the question, it's the laugh of, I know why you're asking, because the world is an unjust place

and here we are just doing our best every goddamn day. Because part of it too is it's, yes, he will just lie flat out. But it's that he's creating like unverifiable kind of miasma

of like a narrative that is not rooted in reality. There's no, it's not an actual like, you can't put it to a fact, right? There's no fact that's true or false. It is a kind of manufactured worldview to which he's kind of fitting together different pieces of fact or half factor for lies some time to time that's like unverifiable.

But it's the it's the cockiness of it. And it is interesting because it is something that Rubio goes to as well. And I do think there's something about the like the, it's like the tension between their view of themselves and what they've become. Right. Like that's where, like in the delta between those two things, that's where that tone comes from. Yeah, and it's like the one real solid belief they have is, well, the left is awful. Right, right. And so, like, everything else is justified because I know that they are awful.

Right. It's like, it's like they've slid down the moral, like the side of the moral slope, and they've, they've bounced, and they're bouncing against the rocks. And the last tree they can grab onto before they fall down into the shoals is like that the left sucks. Well, it looks like we're not getting full transparency when it comes to the, at least the secret grand jury testimony in the Epstein case. a federal judge on Monday, as expected, declined to release the testimony and the trial that led to the indictment of Gillane Maxwell. What wasn't expected, though, is the judge's candor in explaining why he declined to release these files, writing in a scathing opinion that the Justice Department's argument that releasing grand jury materials might reveal new information was,

quote, demonstrably false, and that, quote, the government's motion for their unsealing was aimed not at transparency, but at diversion. I can't imagine why they'd want a diversion, but maybe it has something to do with stories like this. On Friday, Epstein's longtime butler, who worked for the sex trafficker for 18 years in his Paris home, told the telegraph that following the 2016 election, Epstein told him Trump offered the sex trafficker a job in his new administration. So, you know, that's just, that's just one butler. Who knows? That's just one long time butler. What job do you think Jeffrey Epstein would have done in the White House? I mean, you know, honestly, honestly, honestly like it's a name that could have been floated for secretary of treasury at the time

you could have seen him doing that yeah export import bank commerce something yeah uh i don't want have this no no there's a lot of jobs that would be very bad very bad just to be clear bad here's the bigger point no grand jury transcripts no transcripts yet of todd blanche's interview with glain maxwell that we were told that they were considering releasing to try to tamp some of this down. We're not getting those, even though we were also told, by the way, that Maxwell told Blanche,

everything was good with Trump. I never saw any misbehavior by Trump in my time. And, of course, she's very credible and, you know, would never lie. And no release so far of all the files that are out that we know are there with Trump's name redacted that he knows about because Pam Bondi told him about. So is the cover-up succeeding here? I don't, I mean, it is ongoing. I don't, I guess, you know, it can, it's,

succeeds until it fails, I suppose, you know, every secret, you know, until you reveal a secret, you're keeping it. Yeah, it's the Blanche, the Blanche interview is the one that's sort of confusing, right? Like what, if, if, if as we've heard from, I think it's via ABC News that Maxwell said she never saw Trump do anything wrong, like what is keeping them from releasing them? What is in the, first of all, what were those interviews about? What did they ask? about? What names are in there? What are they concerned about if they release it? What, what, like, what information do they not want in the public? Otherwise, I think we'd already have it. It's like, I have no fucking idea because who knows what the context of the conversation was about. What was the

ins and out? Like, are there parts of it they want to redact, either for reasons they will claim is for privacy or because there are parts of the conversation that would be embarrassing to the administration? Yeah. We just don't know. Now, one part of this, like, look, like, we're all conspiracy theorists now, fine. But a lot of the material that the Justice Department is sitting on is about terrible crimes against kits, right, that they can't release and shouldn't release. And so, like, that should never be released, right? You shouldn't, like, we do not need to publicize these, like, the aspects of these crimes that would be victimizing again to people that were hurt by Epstein, Maxwell, and others. Fine. Agreed. But it is shocking that,

given the fervor around releasing something, given the attention that has gotten, given the fact that they promised already that they haven't figured out how to get some new information out there. I mean, all Bondi was able to release was stuff that was basically already public. That was what was in Binder phase one. When she put out Binder phase one, in her mind, there must have been a, like, I don't know how far ahead it got, but you don't put out phase one without at least having conceived of what phase two was meant to be. One would think, but, you know, who knows?

So it is, it is strange, but they can't, they're not getting away with it because there's too many other parts of this to come. There's going to be congressional investigations. There's, by the way, like, you know, more and more like that butler who we hadn't earned from before, there's more reporting coming out of the times. There's just a lot of attention on this. And by the way, like, the, the influencers on the right or the like apolitical kind of more conspiratorial influencers that were talking about this forever, they're still talking about it. Yeah. Like there was a, Rogan the other day was saying, like, do they think we're babies? Like, do they think we're children? Because they're trying to make us look past this. So I, they can't just make it go away. One of the proposals that CNN reported on was maybe Todd Blanche should sit down with Joe Rogan, which I'm like, that doesn't seem like a good idea if you're the Trump White House. I mean, I'd like to hear that. No, for sure. For sure. I bet they've, I bet they shot that one down. I bet that's not a. I think they are just waiting out everyone's attention span, which you don't have to wait. wait long in this country. And yes, Congress is going to come back to this when they come back from break, but from recess, whatever you fucking call it. But I don't know, you know, at one point

Trump can make a call to James Comer or Jim Jordan or wherever the fuck it is and be like, hey, let's not keep pushing on this. You know, like, and they've got other things to think about and they don't like the political, you know, discomfort around this. So I don't, like, I am more pessimistic than I was about the staying power on this, just because, because, you know, it's dragged on over a month, and they control the federal government with an iron fist, and they're going to be able to bury what they want to bury. Yeah, we'll see. Well, look, Mike Johnson sent Congress home early in July rather than deal with the vote.

But that doesn't mean the vote isn't coming. I mean, Roe Kana doesn't care what Trump says about this. And Thomas Massey doesn't care what Donald Trump cares says about this. So that means the issue isn't dead. But, yeah, like, even listening to Vance in that interview saying, like, I see you have no problem with James Comer looking into Democrats. So then all of a sudden it becomes the, it becomes a hammer, you know, they're going to, let's get Bill and Hillary there. Let's get them all in there. Let's get Bill Gates up in here. Let's get all these people here and try to make

fools of them. And then all of a sudden, they want to make that, they want to make some Democrats feel squeamish about it. Well, J.D. Vance and Maria Bart Romo then, they went down the well-worn pivot from Epstein to Obama. Sure. And so J.D. Vance doubled down on Tulsi Gabbard's attempts to blame Obama officials for the investigation about Russia's interference in the 2016 election. Let's listen. Look, of course, you've got to have the law follow the facts here. You don't just indict people to indict people. You indict people because they broke the law. But if you look at what Tulsi and Cash Patel have revealed in the last couple of weeks, I don't know how anybody can look at that and say that there wasn't aggressive violations of the law. What they basically did

is they defrauded the American people in order to take Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign talking points and turn them into intelligence by defrauding the American people, defrauding the intelligence agencies, lying about what the intel said. They would take something that supported a Hillary Clinton campaign talking point and they would overemphasize it and exaggerate it. They took anything that actually contradicted that narrative and they buried it deep. and through that, they actually laundered Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign talking points through the American intelligence services.

That's a violation of the people's trust. That's a violation of what our intelligence services should be doing. And I absolutely think they broke the law. You're going to see a lot of people get indicted for that. That is, I don't know if you were as deeply triggered by that answer as I was. I started tweeting about it last night because I was like, I cannot, I know that there's been a lot of lies. J.D. Vance has said a lot of bad things. He's pissed me off.

Like, that to me, because, like, he, the guy fucking went to Yale law. He's got a law degree. There is no way that he believes what he just said there. There is no way he believes that unless he just has not looked at any of the details of anything, which I also don't really buy. So, yeah, so you see him struggling, first of all, in how to tell this story, right? Because just very, like, what is he talking about? It's impossible to know.

If you don't know this, the ins and answer to the story, it's impossible to even understand what he's talking about. But just as quickly as possible, the gist of it is, Tulsi Gabbard put out a dumb report that is not true. Basically, if it's in the report that says after Donald Trump wins the election, Barack Obama and the deep state colluded to sully that victory by telling the country and the world that Russia interfered in our election to help Donald Trump. win. But did not actually mess with any vote totals and that. And also do not allege any collusion in that intelligence assessment between Trump and Putin. None. And so after the election, Donald Trump has won. Barack Obama, not for his own benefit, not for shits and giggles, but to warn the world about what has happened that, hey, Russia is interfering in our elections in these ways. It may happen in your country too. It could happen here again. We all need to step up

how we respond to this because this is a legitimate threat. That is then ratified, not just by Democrats and intelligence officials, but by Republicans, including the committee led by Marco Rubio, the Intelligence Committee, saying that the conclusions are fair and fairly reached. That is what this is about. And now, J.D. Vance is somehow claiming that the release of this information, which was based on an assessment by the intelligence community that the Republican said

was fairly reached, is both an attempt by the intelligence to defraud the country, but also to put Hillary Clinton to, I don't even understand what he's trying to say, that it's then laundering into the intelligence committee. It's such

fucking nonsense that he obviously, like, to defraud the American people of what? What are we defrauding them up? They went to the, they went to the, uh, went to the polls, first of all, not knowing that there was an FBI investigation of Trump's campaign. Just the one of Hillary. Because guess what? The Obama administration made damn sure that that didn't leak out because they were worried that it could be taken politically.

So voters went to the polls not knowing there was an investigation into the, it turns out there were plenty of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. And they also went to the polls already knowing, by the way, that Russia had hacked the DNC, which, by the way, this Trump administration, Tulsi Gabri, all the rest of them, admit that Russia did interfere. What they're pissed about is that the intel said that they interfered with the, with the hope of helping Trump, which in 2018, Putin said, yeah, I wanted Trump to win. He just admitted it. So it's like, what are we talking about? But then, okay, all right, let's say, let's say, let's just say, you know what, in some ways that was exaggerated. It wasn't.

It just simply wasn't. That's not true. even Vance has to kind of walk his way back to he says they defrauded the country he says they exaggerated and then he has to add on at the end oh and absolutely I believe they broke the law never says how never says why and I believe indictments are coming

which is also by the way like you're the vice president of United States and you are predicting indictments or do you know them from your meeting or do you know them from your meetings that you're not supposed to be having unfucking believable it is wild I'm like how can you do like you know the law, you know, you, you, you are familiar with the Durham investigation. No doubt you are familiar with your buddy Marco's investigation, which contradicts everything you're saying right now.

Also, another, another, another, another, another, another, another, another telling this is barterromo after that says, and was there an impact? Basically, she has to, she's basically saying, but this was, even she is sort of like, but this was after he won and became president. So what do you, what is, what just, what are you talking about? And so then he has to kind of make some sort of claims that, oh, absolutely, like that the presidency was harmed because of the Russia hoax, because he had to fight two fronts at once. He had to run the country and be dealing with the ways in which the Department of Justice was distracted. It's all just, like, fundamentally, right, like, it's like just a kind of like trick that like they're acting as though this happened before the

election, but it didn't. But it didn't. And so they have to claim like, oh, telling us about this after was some terrible crime. He is just deeply dishonest and very comfortable with being deeply dishonest. And it's really, I also think part of it is just, you know, you watch these interviews. And I think people like J.D. Vans are like, oh, this must be cool for Trump. Like, he spent all these years just only doing these interviews with friendly outlets. And he never has to get challenged. And if J.D. Van sat down with like any other, any real journalist for five minutes, the whole thing would fucking come apart. Marco Rubio just did some,

another friendly interview about whatever. No one asked Marker Rubio in that interview, because it was some MAGA person. No one asked him about his committee's report on this because Marker Rubio couldn't answer that question either. These people, if they got in front of a journalist for five fucking minutes, the whole thing would fall apart. But they're just, they've become lazy, even in their lying

because they don't have to worry about it. Yeah, but like it's, with Vans too, they're such a, um, it is the like kind of, that like kind of self-righteous and smoked. tone in it because does he believe he's lying? Yeah, oh, for sure. He has to. He has to. And there's some

things I am willing to believe that someone's like, oh, I didn't even know I was lying because they're so like, you know, they've gone down the rabbit hole. But this one, you even, and again, it's a complicated story, but you don't have to go too far down the rabbit hole to know that what he said was bullshit. Right. I just, I like... And he was around

for all of this. He was a political junkie for all this. It's, there's something about like Vance specifically. Maybe it's just the fact that he's younger than us. That's part of it. Or that he is like a kind of like someone who had like written this book that had like gotten him all these credit and all the rest. Yeah.

It's that there's something about him where like I, look, I remember when I went to college and like I went to for some reason a rural sports college. I don't know why I made that choice. But I remember feeling like, oh, I got to learn the language of this place a little bit. Like I don't fit in here. I don't know how to do this. I got to like learn the language of how to fit in with a sort of. certain kind of person that went to private school.

Like there's a lot of different kinds of people, Williams. But like, you know, like the kind of like a kind of a fancier person than I grew up with. Like the kind of, there's a breeziness to it. Like a way people that grew up around wealth, with wealth, whatever. And like you learn that. And I see in Vance somebody that like is a student of people and like learn the language of success, right? Like comes from this rural place that comes from a totally different environment and then

kind of learns the language of a place like Yale and becomes really good at it. And then I see him do this with Trump again. And I see him take on this persona so fully as someone who's so good at figuring out how to fit in with a group of people. And I just can't tell how much of like, you know, you wear the mask, the mask wears you. Like how much of it has how much of it has, how much of it is he just performing and he's going to be the best boy in the world? I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, it's either way, it's pretty gross. Yeah. Okay. When we get back from the break, you'll hear Lovett's conversation with the New Yorker's David Kirkpatrick about his incredible

investigation into Trump's Gryft. But two quick things before we get to that. Big news, Cricket subscription content is now available on Subststack. We're coming to Substack. That's right. If you're already a friend of the pod, don't worry, this won't change anything for you, but if you love using Substack and prefer the experience there, you can now find us there too. When you subscribe on Substack, you'll unlock ad-free episodes of your favorite Cricket shows, plus exclusive content like Polar Coaster as you know, subscribing on whatever platform works best for you is the best way to support

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Here's a thing. Here in Los Angeles, it's for your consideration season. That's when all the actors are out there trying to get their Emmys. And all the performers are out there, kind of, and the directors and the writers are trying to kind of get attention for their incredible shows. And they're turning to their PR firms and they're like, why did you book me on this podcast? I'm telling you, I'm telling you, the yeses we get during this time of year.

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activate collagen production, promoting hair growth and enhancing skin radiance. You ever seen a bald cow i don't think so why because they're getting all that colostrum i think i told you that uh my brother-in-law was telling me he was getting sick all the time and then he started taking armor colostrum and he said he hasn't gotten sick since even with small kids in the house so it sounds like it really works whether you uh just want an edge sure fine when working on a special offer for our audience receive 30% off your first subscription order go to armor dot com slash crooked or enter crooked to get 30% off your for a subscription order. That's A-R-M-R-A dot com slash crooked. Crypto, real estate deals, watches, club memberships, corporate shakedowns. Trump's corruption

is brazen. It's staggering. But in a story out today, the New Yorkers David Kirkpatrick has done what no one has been able to do, count it up, to tell us just how much Trump has profited from the presidency. Here to walk us through the most brazen examples. is David Kirkpatrick. Thank you for being here. It's my pleasure. All right, welcome to the pot. Let's start with Mar-a-Lago. You estimate that Trump has made $125 million from how he has exploited the club. What changed since he, from before he was president and even in the years since his first term?

Well, first, I should say, I'm not using the word corruption here. When he took office in 2017, President Trump, through his lawyer, at a press conference, promised that he would not do anything that could even be perceived as exploiting the presidency. In fact, that was his justification for this arrangement where instead of selling or getting rid of his business empire, he gave it to his sons temporarily while he was in office. And what they said at the time was, if someone else owned our brand name, that person might crassly exploit. the name and demean the presidency. You can trust us not to do that. So I'm not saying that any one of these things is a quid pro quo, but he's exploiting the presidency for money.

Now, in terms of Mar-a-Lago, what we're talking about there, that's the one place where in 2016, in testimony that Trump was involved in, he said that the campaign had made that the best year ever for Mar-a-Lago, according to the manager there. And if you look at it, you can look at his financial disclosure forms and see. the revenue go up through the roof while the costs say mostly the same during his years, you know, in the White House, preparing to come back and then back in the White House. Because that's a place where he's got a club selling access to himself in his circle. And I hear you on the distinction about profiting off the White House and whether there's any corrupt outcome of that.

We can leave that to other. You are you are cataloging the profiteering. I'm cataloging the profiteering. Another example is in hospitality, $105 million from deals in Saudi Arabia. Another $40 million you're estimating from a deal in Vietnam. What are those deals? And why are they so interested in doing them with Trump and his family? Well, there you've got two different baskets. You know, Vietnam, which is a more isolated situation, obviously, that's a country which is a is future hinges on U.S. trade policy like nobody else, right? High tariffs on China mean more business for Vietnam, high tariffs on Vietnam, where a third of their economy depends on exports to the U.S. would be a disaster.

So, as Trump's on his way back in office, the head of the Vietnamese Communist Party, flies to New York, and while here oversees a new deal for a giant golf resort. We're talking about a facility three times the size of Central Park. my estimate for their profits there is probably pretty low. In the first three months after the deal was announced, he said in his financial disclosure forms that he'd received $5 million from that venture. So I'm just guessing that the next 10 years are going to be at least as much per year as that was over a matter of months.

That's probably quite conservative. On the other side, the Saudi deals around the Gulf, beginning in late 2022, when Trump had declared his candidacy and was the presumptive. Republican nominee, this Saudi company began doing a series of five mega hotel or condo deals, golfers or deals around the Gulf with the Trump organization, which really, there's no way to explain that without his political career. It's just it's not something that would have happened to the Trump organization. And I extrapolated from some of their previous hotels and golf courses and other ventures to try to estimate

what those would be worth. And I put them together because they are kind of at the border between how Trump used to make money and how he's now making money, which is something that you explore in the piece. That a lot of the way in which Trump had made money up to and through the apprentice was by licensing his name, right? Putting his name on stuff that other people ran and it was kind of pure profit. But in the last couple of years, as he's figured out ways of making money, off of being president, he's ventured into new and uncharted territory for his businesses.

And of course, there's no better example of that than crypto. You estimate that they've made $2.37 billion dollars through these various cryptocurrency schemes. There are so many different ones and they actually intersect with some of these other businesses as well. but can you just talk about how Trump went from how someone who was, as you describe in the piece, quite skeptical of crypto described it semi-jokingly as a scam or that it looks like a scam to something of a true believer, at least in terms of his policies? You know, so the family has offered two different stories about that. Eric Trump, who's the face of the business now, talks about it a lot.

and he always tells the story like this. After, well, he doesn't tell it quite like this. The way, what he says is we were blackballed by the big banks. What he leaves out is they were blackballed by the big banks after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. So he says, we were blackballed by the big banks, and it was political bias against our political philosophy. And that led us to love crypto as an alternative to the big banks.

and even as a kind of means of revenge against the big banks. Trump doesn't tell the story that way. He's a little vaguer about it. It's clear from his statements that it wasn't until 2024 during the campaign when big crypto were donating to him in crypto that he started to get on board. And around that time, first of all, they started accepting donations in crypto. an old friend named Bill Zanker, who people might know from the Learning Annex, his previous business, got him into selling these NFTs, which are kind of digital cartoons of Donald Trump. And when he did that, he started getting paid in crypto.

So from that point on, he's got an incentive to try to talk it up. And that's around the time when Donald Trump's interest in crypto begins to take off. So you are documented. the money. But throughout you are noting that there are obvious questions of conflicts of interest, of whether or not this has meant there has been undue influence from people that have invested with Trump or helped Trump put together these kinds of crypto businesses. Can you talk about Justin's son, how he went from being somebody under investigation to somebody who was a guest of honor at Maralaga?

Justin Son is a really interesting case, right? If you're hunting for a quid pro quo, Justin's son is as close as you can get, right? So the sequence of events is the Trump family sets up a company called World Liberty Financial, which is going to be a crypto company. They start raising money for that, you know, in mid-20204 before the election. Not much interest. Then Trump wins. After Trump wins, Justin.

Sun makes two investments that come to a total of, I think, $75 million. And that $75 million for other people interested in crypto is kind of a green light, and they all pile in. And around inauguration day, a ton comes in, and shortly after inauguration, they've raised $550 million. And what happens when Trump becomes president? the SEC drops its charges against Justin Sond for a variety of infractions evading money laundering laws, paying celebrities to hype his crypto, you know, selling crypto to Americans when

he should have been barred from doing so because they're not registered securities. All of this is going away. They don't drop it. They pause those charges to negotiate a resolution. Now, that said, the truth is, you know, the Trump administration, dropped everybody's charges, right? The SEC just stopped pressing charges against crypto. So you can't say it's, you know, a handshake deal. And because of the 75 million, he got off. But the sequence of events there is certainly provocative. And I should correct myself, you know, my bias. It wasn't

Mar-a-Lago. That dinner was at the Virginia in Sterling, Virginia at a different Trump club. I got the club wrong. Now, there's a connection here to Trump media. I didn't know this and I was confused by it. So there's a complicated transaction that leads to Trump media and true social and the ownership structure. But I was hoping you could explain this part of it. Last year, Trump media lost $400 million. In each of the past four quarters, it brought in about a million dollars or less in revenue, per your reporting, there is no plan for True Social to be profitable or how it would be turned into a sustainable business. And yet, True Social is sitting on a vast, vast sum of liquid assets. I believe the number was $3.1 billion in liquid assets, which is both

cash and cryptocurrency. How does a money-losing venture that only has about a million dollars in revenue per quarter end up sitting on billions and billions of dollars. Yeah, I almost had to pinch myself when I figure that out. I mean, it's a crazy amount of money. In short, here's the deal. So truth social is not really a business. It's not, you know, we don't know, there's no convincing plan for it to make money. Trump Media Technology Group, right, the parent company that owns Truth Social is basically a meme stock, right? It goes up and down. without any regard to fundamentals based only on what people think about Donald Trump. So Devin Noon, as the former congressman who runs that company now, had the bright idea

to basically sell shares at their high meme stock inflated price and to take that money and pile up some cash and then buy Bitcoin. So they've done a few transactions recently in July, they did a big one where they sold shares to 50 big investors, shares mostly some, you know, convertible debt that could be converted into shares, at this high meme stock price, those investors can then sell that out to retail investors. And they take the money and they buy Bitcoin. So they've taken this crazy, irrationally priced stock that mostly reflects, you know, Trump supporters' opinions of Trump. And they've swapped that for an actual liquid asset. cash in Bitcoin. Now, you might say, well, Kirkpatrick, how can you call this $3.1 billion? That's just the price of Bitcoin today. It could fall tomorrow. Be that as it may, there is an actual market for Bitcoin. If you wanted to turn around and sell it tomorrow, you could sell it. You know, when they were out of the market in July buying Bitcoin, they picked up, you know,

$2.4, $2.3 billion of Bitcoin. And it didn't really move the price. So that's a liquid market. Yeah. And this is a group of people uniquely position. to affect the price of both their own stock and their company and the cryptocurrency market more broadly. We've seen that. We've seen they have the ability to move these markets. I mean, you talk about an example that was with a bit more detail, but that was known at the time, which is that there were these transactions around the Melania meme coin right

before it launched, right? Like there is just so many opportunities here that wouldn't be cataloged exactly. in your accounting where there's opportunity for profit just in the ability to kind of play with the moving prices. Yeah, meme coins are, you know, they're not a security. They don't even pretend to be a security. There's no police. There's no reasonable expectation of fairness or transparency. You know, there's no such thing as insider trading in a meme coin because there's no pretense of fairness. I mean, you can almost, you know, you get what you pay for. It's true in one of his, in one of the crypto conferences that I watched, Donald Trump Jr. actually said that

for crypto enthusiasts, the good news now is that the people who are making the rules are themselves invested in crypto. You know, in the American system, it's acknowledged that they're going to be elected officials who have businesses on the side. You know, the founders were farmers. And so we require disclosure. So in fairness to Donald Trump, he's, he's not locked. about it. I mean, it's true. His family's in crypto now. So there are a bunch of other parts that you're looking at here. You have, you go into Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law's business interests with the Saudis and the raising of billions of dollars in private equity. But you also talk about Don Jr.'s company that he's a part of called 1789

capital. There's something that's confusing about all of this, which is they are seemingly frantic in trying to find ways to make money off of the presidency. It's not just true social and Trump media and the way it's trying to make money and amass a crypto fortune. It's not just the crypto investments separately. It's not just the Jared deal with the Saudis. It's not just the other kind of real estate deals that are bringing in north of $150 million. There's also this sort of tiki tax stuff going out and trying to get 500 grand for a social club, selling hats to compete with his own campaign. How do you explain the fact that there are schemes that are nine figure schemes, eight figure schemes, seven figure schemes, and even six figures.

your schemes? Like, how do you explain the willingness to fight for a hat sale from their users, their supporters, while at the same time shooting for the moon, you know, with these billion-dollar crypto moves? I'm as puzzled as you are, right? I mean, Donald Trump is the first to tell you that he and his family are very, very rich. And I would think that if my father was president for four years, I would take that as a good time to refrain from making money in ways that would embarrass him. And, you know, licensing their name for a phone company that's going to sell, you know, Trump cell phone subscriptions, I do find it puzzling. And I, you know, I went into this thinking, you know what, the people who really don't like Trump are going to be disappointed

in me because they imagine that he's stealing, actually stealing vast sums, which is definitely not happening. But by the end, I had to say to myself, like, $3.4 billion and so fast, you know, it's one thing after another. It's, they're really not slowing down. And I don't know why it is that they seem so almost desperate for money. You know, if we, if we go back to what you were saying before, in the arc of things, Trump was a medium successful, but very high profile builder. he was a great reality TV star, right? And when he was a great reality TV star, that's when he got into the licensing business.

And for a while, he was able to sell just the right to use his name, to use his name to sell a steak or a piece of pizza or a sheets or something, or the right to use his name on a hotel, you know, a broad or a golf course. As the apprentice ratings started to come down, that whole apparatus did too. And in a way, he needed a new show, right? He needed something else to keep his name in the public eye to keep that machine running. And that's where the presidency came in.

Why now? Why in the second term there's such a greater desperation to cash in on that than in the first? You know, it's very speculative. You do wonder about the enormous legal verdicts that he faces. You know, 88 million that he owes E. Jean Carroll, if that's not overturned on appeal, 500 million EOs, New York State, because of the fraud case there, if that's not overturned, not appeal. As much as they talk about their money, that's a pretty big hole for the Trumps.

So it might be, well, anyway, here I'm speculating, but you get the idea. Yeah, you talk about how he had to sell some of his holdings at a certain point, and that he may not have been, that he may have been in a pretty tough position coming into this second term, but that still doesn't, that, that, look, the, the rapaciousness is what it is, but it is strange, the watches, the sneakers, the, the, the kind of hats that siphon from the campaign, the, like, the smaller moves to, like, take advantage of his biggest supporters, while at the same time these sort of huge real estate transactions, that could be worth 10, 100 times, anything that they could get from moving a bunch of hats around.

It's maybe just the thrill of the game. Well, you know, a more charitable way to put that is, you know, if he and his family see themselves as business people, they're going to stay in business. And that means, you know, doing the deal to license the Trump Bible, the Trump guitar, and so forth, the Trump NFTs. At the end of this reporting, like, what was your sort of takeaway from how quickly became a nerd to this staggering amount of profiteering? You know, the joke a few years ago, they made Jimmy Carter sell his peanut farm.

You make reference to the $400,000-some-odd dollar donation to the Clinton Library over that became a controversy around the Mark Rich pardon. And yet now we have just brazen and open profiteering conflicts of interest left and right. And it's only speeding up. and it's become a kind of part of our daily understanding of how Trump works, even as we think about the fact that he's about to go meet with Putin and Zelensky and his intersecting personal interest there. What did you take away from all of this once you got to that number of $3.4 billion? You know, one of my old bosses used to say, you know, a billion here, a billion there, sooner or later you're talking over real money. And I think to a certain,

extent that just the number of digits that we're talking about kind of goes over people's heads. And the other thing about Trump is, and this is maybe his genius, as I say, he's not hiding any of this, right? He holds his head high. He pursues all these money-making ventures like it's something that he's proud of, which I think leads people to believe, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. How people are going to feel about that in the long term, though, I think remains to be seen. And one reason I thought it was worthwhile to do all of this math is to try to make it a little bit more concrete and tangible. You know, maybe you're right. Maybe it turns out we were all wrong for decades to think that Americans did not like profiteering off the presidency.

Maybe Americans, in fact, don't care about that. But it might also be that people just didn't didn't understand it concretely enough. And over time, and over time they will. So I'd say the jury is still out on that. Last question, what was the hardest number to figure out? Like, what was the, what was a part of this where figuring out exactly how much they were making was actually pretty difficult? Well, in a lot of these things, I'm extrapolating, right? A lot of the, where I'm trying to value how much they're going to get from their, their five new deals in the Persian Gulf or their new deal in Vietnam, I've got to go and look at an existing property, I've got to figure out what they've declared in terms of revenue, what the profit margin is on that, and then

multiply it across the new venture. So that's complicated. And I'm not saying that's science. You know, if they want to come forward and tell me, no, no, David, here actually is what we're genuinely going to make. I would welcome that, but they're not going to do that. The one that was the toughest, honestly, is Vietnam. This vast complex, 54 holes of golf, a hotel, residences, all in one big area three times the size of Central Park. In an economy where the golf industry is growing really fast, the whole economy is growing really fast, very hard to extrapolate. I came up with an estimate of $50 million over 10 years. That's almost certainly low, but I just, that one's a jump ball. That's the hardest one to come up with.

Plus, we'd like, you know, there's the mini-bar money. That's hard to figure out in advance. You know, with their stock at it with. Exactly. And the other one, the Trump Media and Technology Group money that we talked about before, I just couldn't believe it. You know, when I realized that they'd sold this overvalued meme coin stock and then bought Bitcoin and hoarded cash, I just, it's an incredible kind of alchemy

to have $3.1 billion in liquid assets on their books when their business is Right. And a business that could only exist because he is president and using it to put out statements and trying to get his people to use it. Coins that could only, you know, profit, coins that could only exist because his name is attached to them, a market that because he is the president has great influence over. It really is like the intersection of all these different ways in which in the second term, Trump has realized he was unfettered and able to kind of once he threw off the shackles of expectation and shame and previous rules and norms, and he was free to do all of these different things.

In the first term, people were pretty upset about people staying at Trump properties and the profiteering off of Trump properties. And I was surprised to learn that by your reporting, it turns out they might have been losing as much money from people who didn't want to stay at a Trump hotel as they were gaining from people who were trying to curry favor and that we were just so we were focused on that. We had absolutely no idea what was to come. Yeah, I think that's right. In retrospect, that looks quite overblown. Now, you know, some of my critics from the left will say, well, Kirkpatrick, don't be crazy. You know, all those people, Rudy Giuliani buying his $30 martinis or whatever, that was helping Trump. I mean, even if it was just

reducing his losses, that still counts. But, you know, if we're going to be fair, he did, anybody in the hotel business in Washington, anybody who's familiar with the performance of that hotel will tell you it's done better as a Wall of Historia under Biden than it did as a Trump hotel under Trump. And it's just not only indisputable, but it's also sort of intuitive. You know, if you're a foreign leader from, say, a European country who doesn't want to get caught up in an influence scandal, you're not going to stay there, even though location is superb. You know, as a Waldorf, it's a great place for a British Prime Minister to stay.

But would a British Prime Minister have stayed there when it was the Trump Hotel and Trump was downstairs at the bar with Rudy Giuliani? No, no way. Yeah, you got to, you know, it was attracting an unsavory element. David Kirkpatrick, thank you so much. The story is out today, carefully cataloging and estimating just the vast sums of money Donald Trump has made off the presidency. Thanks for being here. pleasure. That's our show for today.

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