Pod Save the World - Con Man Air: Trump’s Middle East Cash Grab

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

Tommy and Ben discuss how President Trump’s first official foreign trip is a blatant extraction of money from the Middle East, his announcement that the US will lift sanctions on Syria, the widening cracks between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump and Israel’s increasing isolation, and the different stories the US and Iran are telling about the latest nuclear talks. They also talk about why Trump caved to China on tariffs, India and Pakistan’s ceasefire and the Trump administration’s belated intervention in the conflict, and the latest talks between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey. Additionally, they talk about the first American Pope and why the Trump administration’s classification of white South Africans as refugees is white supremacy as policy. Finally, Tommy speaks with Senator Chris Murphy about the historic corruption on display during Trump’s Middle East trip and what Democrats can do to fight back. 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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Welcome to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Don't smile at me that way. I smile at him. This is one of the best days of my life in the last 25 years. You hurt Jason Tatum. We did not hurt Jason Tatum.

You tore his Achilles. It was dirty pool. No, it was fine. It's a terrible injury though. Yeah, I felt bad. It was like one of the greatest You didn't tell that bad. I mean, I felt bad mainly because you want to beat the team full strength.

Cawky. Yeah, that's where we were at by the fourth quarter. I also like Jason Tatum. I feel like he's gotten kind of a bad rap. He catches a lot of shit. People say he doesn't have aura. They think he sometimes doesn't seem like he wants the ball at the end of games. Maybe we jack up too many threes.

All of that, you know, there have been times when it's true, but also he won an NBA final. He did. Now, he's no Jalen Brunson who wants the ball in every clutch situation and tends to hit the shots. But, you know, we're still rooting for him. We wish him the best.

Can I just, I want you to know who you're hurting with this. This is an amazing clip I saw released on Twitter, Ben. This is a guy named Frank Murray, president of the Iron Workers Local 7. He's talking about Kilmar-Arbrigo Garcia. Listen to this man. Listen to your hurting.

Who you're hurting. It's time for us to stand up for our brother Kilmar and for all the people that have been unjustly deported. Bring out brother, kill my home. My name is Frank Murray. I'm the president of local seven iron workers here. That is the best Boston accent I've ever heard. I don't know Frank Murray, but I love him.

It's better than Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and Goodwell Hunting. He's wearing a socks hat in this video. Of course he is. I just sit at home watching clips of drunk Knicks fans on 7th Avenue. Screaming Bing Bang. Yeah. So that's basically what I do at night these days. Okay.

Well, you know, we got different things going on. Yeah, yeah. But we have a great show today. We do have a good show. We're going to talk a lot about President Trump's first foreign trip. He's going to, he's in Saudi Arabia. He's going to Qatar. He's going to the UAE.

There's a big announcement, some big news on Syria policy that we're going to dig into, Ben. We're going to talk about how the future of AI policy kind of looms large in the background of this trip. We'll, of course, talk about corruption. We're also going to cover what this trip tells us about Trump's relationship with Israeli Prime Minister, B.B. Netanyahu and the latest news on the Iran nuclear talks. Then we're going to talk about why Trump caved to China in the trade war. What scared the administration is getting involved in diplomacy with India and Pakistan to stop the fighting there. Hope for a possible meeting between Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky and President Putin this week.

That would be big. See, yeah. Yeah, we'll see. We'll talk about the new pope. What do you means for America and the world? How our immigration policy here in the U.S. somehow got more racist. And then you're going to hear my interview with Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy about the historic corruption happening in plain sight during Trump's trip, what it means for U.S. foreign policy

and what Congress can do about it. Chris Murphy always brings a takes with lethal efficiency. I also, there's a tight interview. I love that for that. It was like 19 minutes. I do appreciate, though, that he was saying, you know, before we started recording, that for a while it seemed hard to get people to pay attention to, like, the kind of crypto-corruption piece. But obviously, when you gift someone a $400 million airplane like guitar just did, suddenly that

Yeah, although, again, I'd like to say that this is a beat that we've been on for a while. Oh, yeah, big time. And the reality is, yeah, sure, the plane is attention-grabbing, but the $2 billion gifted to Jared Kushner, the hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto. I mean, I know you cover this with Chris Murphy, but it's useful that a plane can encapsulate things, but that is kind of the tip of the iceberg here. It's definitely the tip of the iceberg. You do sort of sometimes need an image or an object or a video clip. you know, like John Edwards getting his hair cut or, you know, whatever. The kind of political moment might be to focus.

Boy, that was a callback. Yeah. That will, that one. From someone who works for John Edwards. That one hurt. That cut deep. All right, Ben, let's take into this trip. So this is Trump's a first official foreign trip.

I say official because he did go to the Pope's funeral. But that doesn't count because it wasn't like what they planned to do first. As we record, Trump is in Saudi Arabia. Then he goes to Qatar and finally the UAE. Listeners may remember that Trump's first foreign trip back in 2017 also started in Saudi Arabia. But then he went on. to Israel, with Italy for another meeting with the Pope, I think the G7 was there, and then to Brussels for NATO meetings. This is just a tour of Gulf monarchies. Yeah, his favorite places on

earth. Not a democracy in sight, not a voter insight. Yeah. And it probably tells you everything you need to know about the way Trump is trying to kind of reorient our foreign policy or realign the United States globally. More on that in a second. So Senator Murphy will get into the Bonanza piece that was kicked off by the Qataris giving Trump a 7478 that he's going to pretend to use as Air Force One and then take with him after he leaves office. That's the best part. Well, let's just talk about that for a second. I want to get to the Syria piece.

But, like, the idea that you could take a plane from a foreign government and use it as Air Force one is so just ludicrous on its face. Like, the security considerations alone are just, it's unworkable. It's unfeasible. Yeah, I think that the point of this trip, though, is that the corruption is like a feature, not a bug of the entire Trump administration. And I will give credit where it's due to the Gulf Arabs. they get that. They get it. Right. So they're not pretending. They're not trying to hide the ball here. You know, the Saudis are writing checks. The Emirati's put, you know, a bunch of money into Trump coin. The cutaries are gifting a plane. They understand exactly who they're dealing with, you know. And so it's hard to hold it against them, you know, when Trump is just essentially making the United States and its foreign policy for sale. And so you have to think of this corruption, not as like a few bad actors or not as some side deal. Like this is.

core to the Trump presidency here. And that's what is on flagrant display. And yeah, Air Force One, it's hard for me to even get my mind around, you know, the security issues, obviously, but also just a sense of it's not that, I mean, I remember I wrote about this in my first book, Tommy, it's not like the plane of an individual. It's the plane of an office. I mean, I remember being on the Air Force One the first time. And it was like the president's 15 minutes out, the president's five minutes out, the president's on board. And then Obama comes on board. They don't say even President Obama. It's like it's the office of the presidency's plane. And then I remember I had to do some remarks. And I went to use this, remember those giant

computers that were like nailed down at the back, a desk in the back. And I booted up. And there was a set of remarks on the desktop that were George W. Bush's remarks delivered after Russia invaded Georgia. Oh, wow. And it was a very like. It's probably like the last speech someone edited on the computer, right? It was. Yeah, because he was at the Olympics, it was summer. It was a very humbling experience because it definitely reminded me that I was like a temporary employee on this plane, you know, that it wasn't mine, obviously. It wasn't even President Obama's, right? And, you know, that that's kind of missing, obviously, in the Trump conception of the presidency. Yeah, what is Trump going to like uproot the White House, put it on blocks, roll it away. Probably would if you could. Yeah, he could. Chill try. Yeah, it's absurd. It's outrageous. But let's start with the trip because there was a big announcement about Syria policy that Trump made in. his speech earlier today in Riyadh. Let's listen. I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions

against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness. So it's quick there. There's a lot of applause. You've got like 45 seconds of applause. Trump also told reporters that he's going to meet with Ahmed al-Shara, the new president of Syria, while he's in Saudi Arabia. I think Rubio is going to meet with the Syrian foreign minister later this week in Turkey. If Steve Wyckoff will let him. We don't know all the details for how these sanctions relief itself will work. Like if they're lifting sanctions, if there's just a pause on them, if they're going to ask Congress to do something. But either way, it's a very big deal. We've discussed in the show many times the fact that these sanctions were put in place to punish the Assad regime and the keeping sanctions on the people who

deposed Assad is madness. Yeah. And it was destined to destroy the country or prevent them from getting off their feet economically. So I think Trump deserves a lot of credit for this decision. It was politically difficult to take sanctions off someone who admits he was part of al-Qaeda and ISIS at one point. You know the Netanyahu probably hates this decision, but it's unequivocally the right thing to do. Ben, your thoughts on this policy change and just the itinerary for this trip generally. First of all, the applause is interesting because people clapped for about 25 seconds and then Muhammad bin Salman stood up and everybody else in the room stood up. I mean, this is a royal court, right? Everybody's watching and if that guy stands up, you have better get your ass up and applaud, you know?

That was the bone sauce coming. So that was interesting. And I think clearly MBS was one of the Arab leaders who was pushing for this decision, too. So it kind of further reinforces his doubt. That said, it's exactly the right decision. It's hard to overstate how impossible it was going to be for Syria to have any chance at viability as a state with the continued sanctions. We've talked about this. You just cannot attract any investment, any reconstruction funding, anything whatsoever if businesses are worried or

foreign governments are worried that, you know, that money could get entrapped in sanctions or could, you know, be seen as a sanctions violation. And so this opens the door for Syria to have a chance. And it's so clearly the right decision. People may start to think that we harp on Joe Biden, but I don't know why Joe Biden didn't do this. Like this just shows you, too. Like, I don't like Trump's motivations for lots of things he does. But he's, one thing you will say is he's not, like, tied to this, like, constant fear of some... Bad faith, right-wing attacks.

Yeah, bad faith, right-wing attacks. Or kind of stupid, you know, blob type, you know, well, we don't do this. So we must leverage those sanctions for blah, blah, blah, you know. No, sometimes you just have to try something different. And continuing to sanction a country because of the sanctions you've put in place for the dictator who's no longer there makes no sense. Now, we'll see how this goes. We don't know if Ahmed al-Shara is going to end up governing an inclusive way. We'll see. But I mean, as we've said about this topic in the past, you can always put those sanctions back in place if they do something

terrible, you know, but why not test and see if this new government can deliver on some of its promises? They have huge challenges, not the least a largely destroyed set of infrastructure. They've Israel like bombing and occupying parts of their country. So this gives them a chance. And hopefully what this can also do is unlock a ton of money from the Gulf, right? I mean, if the Gulf Arab States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, U.E, want to plow money in there, that's all to the better. That's a good way for them to spend their money. The one thing I'd say about the itinerary is, you're right, it's just the three Gulf countries. And first, that is the world that Trump likes. And yeah, we talked about the corruption piece, but even just in terms of, yeah, transactionalism. He

likes transactional foreign policy. There are no rules. There's no rules-based order. There's no norms. There's no values proposition. We're just dealing with wealthy countries that can invest in things and can move things quickly. And Trump likes that. I will say, and we'll allow ourselves to do the, what if Obama did this, you know, what if any Democrat did this? I remember Obama's first trip to the Middle East, we went to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. And I'm still hearing about not going to Israel. About how we didn't go to Israel. Look, they are cutting Israel out of the Iran talks.

They clearly made this decision which Israel wouldn't like on Syria because Israel's bombing this government. They aren't going to Israel on this trip. So I don't think that means that Trump gives a shit about the Palestinians. He doesn't. But it does mean that he isn't like going to check everything with BB Netanyahu first, which by the way, Joe Biden also did. Yeah.

So like, we can be unburdened by. that kind of foreign policy. Yeah, I want to dig more to this Israel piece because I agree with you. It's really interesting. I like, yeah, I like tweeted something praising Trump's decision and people are like,

well-actualing me being like, oh, Al-Shara offered to build a Trump tower in Damascus. Like, that took a shit. Yeah, it's not going to make him anymore. I mean, if you wanted to get the sanctions for your country, like I'd be offering

to build fucking whatever. I don't think this is why Trump made the decision. I agree with you. MBS and all these golf that's why I mean. Clearly push hard for this decision. and clearly pushed for it to be announced during, you know, the Riyadh portion of the trip. Al-Shaura did just meet with Emmanuel Macron in Paris.

So I think there will be a lot of global support for this decision. Ben, this is another clip from President Trump's speech today, though, that I think, you know, kind of made both of us perk up. And it's crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionalists or flying people. and beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs. No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders neocons or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop, Kabal, Baghdad. In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and

the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves. They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves. So to your point earlier, like, I do like that Trump not only doesn't give a shit what the neocons and the blob thing, he views it as politically advantageous to slap them around regularly. So applauding that, I do think, you know, we should probably be honest that the part about not giving lectures to foreign leaders that the Americans not giving lectures

is probably Trump just saying I don't give a shit about human rights you don't give a shit about human rights we're not going to talk about that today and the fact that human rights was totally off the table was hammered home by like the CEO guest list which included the

Elon Musk the head of Black Rock the head of Amazon the head of Nvidia Sam Altman from Open AI Reid Hoffman because you and I were old enough now to remember the 2018 Saudi Davos in the desert conference right after Mahab bin Salman, the Crown Prince, had ordered the execution of a journalist

named Jamal Khashoggi and this international effort to isolate MBS and the Saudis. And that's gone. Yeah. It's just off the table. Look, first of all, it's kind of funny when he says, Kabbal for Kabul, I guess. Struggling with some words there. Internationalists. But let's put that aside.

Sir, you meant Jew. Yeah. I mean, here's the thing about Trump. I obviously share a bunch of his views about the pointlessness of American military intervention in Iraq, about the kind of corruption and cluelessness of aspects of the military intervention in Afghanistan. I do work with liberal nonprofits and I'm not aware of the trillions of dollars at the liberal nonprofits. Yeah, they don't have that much money. It'd be nice if we did. But I'll say this.

While I share some of those critiques, he's missing the fact that there's an alternative. between essentially, you know, neocons or whatever we're going to call them, who want to kind of think that they can engineer Middle Eastern politics from the U.S. military and like a Muhammad bin Salman who, you know, let's face it, why is there marble in Saudi Arabia? It's just because there's a lot of oil in Saudi Arabia. It's not like he discovered some ideas. That a lot is printing money, right?

there's a third way which is like Arab peoples themselves making decisions, not Americans showing up there and not like just a small number of really rich people making those decisions. And by the way, that doesn't have to look like yours and my exact view of democracy. But what continues to be missing from this is the participation of people in these countries in some fashion, right? It may not be multi-party elections next year. But by any stretch, you know, it's not like the people. people in Saudi Arabia have a lot of say and what goes on in their lives. And so we shouldn't let the Emirates or the country. Exactly.

So we shouldn't let his accurate disregard for American interventionism lead you to believe that the only alternative is a bunch of, let's face it, a bunch of fucking white American CEOs and, you know, a bunch of royals sitting around and deciding everything themselves either. There needs to be a voice for people in these discussions in this part of the world. And that's missing. And the fact that you have Elon Musk there and Sam Altman and all these other people, you know, that that's not out of some earnest interest in the human well-being of the people of the Middle East. That's because they want some of this money. Purely financial.

Yeah. I mean, so President Biden put in place global restrictions on the export of AI artificial intelligence chips. So he allowed unlimited AI chip sales to about 18 countries like allies like the UK and Germany. And then he blocked sales to China, Iran. sort of enemies. And then all of their countries, including the Saudis, the UAE and Qatar had caps. I believe all those countries want to get rid of those caps. And that's probably the kind of thing you would imagine Donald Trump trading for, say, a nice new airplane. Yes. And look, this is a really interesting issue. And, you know, I've mentioned this before. Full disclosure, I've done some work over the years for Microsoft, which is obviously involved in this. I think there's somewhere in between what Trump is doing and what Biden was doing, right? Which is that Biden was. putting like really tight restrictions on the export of any American AI technology.

And I actually think that in the long run that was kind of futile because we saw, I mean, in China, right, with deep seek that we put all these restrictions on chips going into China, on technology going to China. And guess what the Chinese did? With a lot less money, right, like a few tens of millions of dollars instead of tens of billions of dollars, they were basically able to take some of the open source models that were released, right? So Facebook released its Lama AI model. So we kind of look at that, reverse engineer it. All you need is a little bit of computing power.

You don't need massive GPUs. And lo and behold, they put out a deep-seek model that is pretty comparable in quality to most of the American AI. So I think it is a futile task to suggest that we're somehow going to build some giant wall around AI because smart people can just figure it out. And when they kind of look at what is already released and what is available. Right. And I frankly think that if we build too high a wall around American AI, like, well, then the rest of the world is just going to buy Chinese AI. Like, I truly think that's where this would go. Now, the flip side is you can still try to put some guardrails about how it moves out in the world.

Like, the first stuff that moves out is the software and then the applications and then you allow kind of training runs on these models to take place in different places. There's something in between just allowing as many chips in. you know, to flow into anywhere in the world and in restricting it totally, you know. And I think I land in the middle of that space Trump probably because, you know, he's getting huge investments from these countries, seems like he's moving the other direction. Yeah, you're a third way guy. Yeah, I'm a third way guy on this one. So, Ben, you noticed, you mentioned that Trump is skipping Israel on this trip. That has increased this chatter about a rift potentially between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Nanjahou. And as you mentioned, like when you look at some of the recent

moves out of the Trump administration, it sort of seems to be the case, right? I mean, there's just the existence of the Iran nuclear talks led by Steve Wittkoff is going to piss Bibi Nanyahu off. Whitkoff, who is also, you know, he's just like the emissary doing everything around the world. He also reportedly told the families of Israeli hostages that Israel is not willing to end the war and is prolonging the fighting despite there being no security upside, which is, unequivocally true, but a tough thing to say. According to BBC, Wittkoff orchestrated the release of Adon Alexander, this final American hostage who was released a couple days ago, the final American be held in Gaza. And he did it via a back channel with someone talking directly to Hamas.

And I guess the Israelis didn't learn about it until Sunday night. The Axios just reported that the Israelis didn't learn about this from the White House, but from their intelligence services. Yeah, my guess is Qatar might have been that. My guess, too. I don't know, but I mean, I've been. Yeah, there's not a lot of addresses you go to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not that big of a secret. The Trump's ceasefire agreement with the Houthis only requires the Houthis to stop firing at U.S. ships, not at Israel. There's talk of cutting a civilian nuclear deal with the Saudis outside of an agreement to normalize relations with Israel. There's some Naga Republican types that are fighting these crazy efforts in Congress to criminalize boycotts of Israel in the United States.

So, you know, at the end of the day, these guys are both right-wing autocrats, like, I'm sure they're patch things up by hating on some third group somehow. But it is fascinating to watch Trump, I saw Netanyahu a bit here. And it does, you know, again, I don't want to pile on, but it does annoy me that the Biden administration never told BB to fuck off. And Trump's doing it over and over and over and over. I mean, one Trump advisor described Trump's treatment of Netanyahu as, quote, one notch above the Zelensky meeting. Yeah. And the interesting thing is Nanyahu's nowhere to go, right? Because he's not like he's going to go and bring the Democrats. You know, that's, it just shows you the, like, he has one play to run in American politics.

And it's so, like, the right wing, the Republican Party. And all of a sudden, like, Trump is self-interested and doesn't really give a shit. And if you're at, like, the, you know, foundation for the defense of democracies or one of these kind of right-wing anti-Iran pro-Israel think tanks, like, you don't really know what to do with this. You know, like, who are you mad at, right? Because they can't pick a fight with Trump because, again, there's nowhere else for them to go. So it's an interesting time I'm going to watch. Again, like at the end of the day, I think what it could get you is, like, hopefully in Iran deal, which rationally avoids, like, a major war over the Iranian nuclear program. I don't think it's ever going to lead anywhere good for the Palestinians because I don't think Trump gives a shit about the Palestinians.

No. I mean, unless, you know, again, the Arabs decide to push him harder on that. Well, Wickhoff met with Ed Yew on Monday. Israel is now sending a delegation to Qatar for negotiations that. week. Trump reportedly wants to announce a deal on his trip. I mean, that's just, it's not going to happen. And also, Bibi has set a deadline for the end of this week where, you know, he's claiming that he'll have the IDF conduct a ground invasion unless there's a hostage release or some deal is cut. But I just saw a report that in Al Jazeera that Netanyahu told a bunch of wounded Israeli soldiers that there's, quote, no way Israel will stop the war in Gaza, even if a deal is reached to release the hostages. He said, quote, we'll take them and then we'll go in, but there will be. be no way we will stop the war, end quote. Yeah, but I, Israel's going to be like increasingly isolated. I mean, they've, they've already lost global public opinion.

I guess I'd say this to some of the kind of people who've been dead enders and supporting Israel's horrific and morally abhorrent and strategically disastrous Gaza policy and somehow think that, you know, that Trump maybe is good on this issue or something. I mean, this, part of what this shows is the whole focus on anti-Semitism on American campuses as a means of like, you know, quashing these universities and deporting people that you don't like is fucking bullshit, you know, like Trump doesn't believe that. He's just using that as a vehicle to break universities he doesn't like and to deport brown people, you know. And so this actually proves what a lie it is.

is that their policies are rooted in some, like, you know, across the board embrace of Netanyahu's agenda. No, they embrace it when it's convenient for them, like when they want to deport people in this country. And, you know, they could kind of care less when it comes to some other things Netanyahu is doing. So I just think this is, you know, if you don't see that this is leading towards the wholesale isolation of Israel going forward, you're just not paying attention. Yeah, also, like, for 18 months, anytime you, tweet or criticize the Israeli conduct in Gaza, the rejoinder is always, well, if Hamas released the hostages, the war would be over. And now Nenai was saying, actually, that's not the case. That's just not the case. It's never been the case. It's never been the case. And it's been

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the code world at American dash giant.com. So, Ben, Iran is, as always, looming large behind the scenes on this trip, not just because Trump is pissing them off by floating the idea of renaming the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Gulf. Do you support this idea? I don't. You were telling me you love this renaming stuff. The Pentagon used to always call it the Arabian Gulf. When we were in the situation meetings, and I'd have to do, but what? So like the Pentagon has already decided it's the Arabian Gulf. They didn't do Gulf of America, though. No, that's true. So over the weekend, there were some U.S. Iran talks in Oman. The results seems to go very differently, depending on who you listen to. Steve Whitkoff called them encouraging.

The Iranian foreign minister said the conversations were, quote, difficult but useful ahead of the talks. Here's what Wickoff had to say to Breitbart. The Iranians cannot have a bomb, and they have stated back that they don't want one. So we're going to, for the purposes of this discussion, accept them at their word that that's actually how they feel. If that's how they feel, then their enrichment facilities have to be dismantled. They cannot have centrifuges. They have to downblend all of their fuel that they have there, send it to a faraway place. But an enrichment program can never exist in the state.

state of Iran ever again. And they, that's our red line. We're never doing a JCPOA deal where sanctions come off and there's no sun setting of their obligations. So that doesn't, that doesn't make sense. That was a mismatched procedure in JCPOA. We believe that they cannot have enrichment, they cannot have centrifuges, they cannot have anything that allows them to build a weapon. So, The Iranian foreign minister had this to say on Iranian State TV, quote, enrichment is an issue that Iran will not give up and there's no room for compromise on it. However, its dimensions, levels, or amounts might change for a period to allow confidence building. He also said, quote, contradictory positions taken by the U.S. and the media is not acceptable to us as they do not help negotiations.

CNN quoted an Iranian source who also said the American side is basically not ready for meaningful technical and political talks, adding that the U.S. gives, quote, short. in general answers to questions, ignores main proposals, and constantly changes its position throughout the negotiation. So let's decode those statements quickly. Listeners might remember a few weeks back, Whitkoff did an interview where he said, Iran can enrich nuclear material to a level of 3.5%. Why does that matter? Natural uranium has a small amount of fissile material in it. That's the material that you can split with a nuclear reaction to create energy. Nuclear scientists enrich uranium to get higher concentrations of material for different purposes. So 90% enriched uranium is considered weapons grade. 20% enriched could be useful for research and medical purposes. 3.5% enrich uranium is used for nuclear energy.

So in that quote, Wikoff was saying Iran can enrich uranium for civilian nuclear power plant use. But after he said that, Wikov got smacked down. He had to walk back those comments and say, what I meant was Iran can have a civilian nuclear power infrastructure, but they have to purchase the uranium from a third country, they can't enrich it. So that's, I think, what the Iranians mean when they're calling out contradictory positions taken by the U.S. and the media. Then, do you believe the Iranians when they say that having the enrichment capacity is a red line for them? And if so, why do you think they feel that way? Because you hear, like the Marco Rubios of the world, argue that no country in the world has an enrichment program without a nuclear weapons program,

too. You can have a civilian nuclear program and just say purchase. enrich uranium from Russia, right, to fuel it? So, first of all, I believe the Iranians having lived through Iranian negotiations on the nuclear program. First of all, the Breitbart interview is very triggering me because Breitbart, I mean, must have written hundreds of articles. One trillion articles. One trillion articles just savaging the JCPOA before, during, and after it was concluded. and now they're like just credulously probably sitting there and like kind of regurgitating what Steve Wickhouse says.

I also hate that he puts this emphasis on like they've committed to never developing nuclear weapon. That text was in the JCPOA. I know. They never, and that was permanent, by the way. Like, it was a permanent commitment to never build a nuclear weapon.

And everybody's like, can you take a run at their word? And there's Wilcoff being like, and I believe them. He literally said, he said, he sounds almost sweet. He's like, they told me this. They told me.

It seems like, you know. What are you going to do? And so, I don't know, it drives me fucking nuts. That's first thing. Second thing is, Wickev has been all over the map because he doesn't know anything about this. Like Ernie Moniz was the Secretary of Energy for the Obama administration, was in the nuclear talks. He's a fucking nuclear physicist. So he could literally sit down and, like, understand exactly what he was talking about, these incredibly detailed things.

And we've talked about the Wickev rolls up at these talks with, like, one guy with him. And now he's got Michael Anton, this kind of, like, right-wing intellectual. Yeah, running the technical talk. I didn't run the fucking technical talks in the Iran nuclear deal. So there's just clearly nobody on the U.S. side who understands this technology. And the Iranians like have a bunch of smart guys who work on nuclear programs who are like showing up to like design. Because this is what I remember at the Iran nuclear negotiations. We were literally designing a nuclear program that we could live with, right?

Like what constraints? What could they do? What couldn't they do? These guys are just, you know, they want a deal. So they'd probably be happy with the JCPOA. Like, Rickoff and Trump would be happy if they, like, enriched only at a very low percent, shipped everything out of the fucking country, had this kind of symbolic enrichment capability that is only useful for, like, medical isotopes or something, like, it's totally anodyne. And they can just say they're dumb with this. And whether it's five years, 10 years, JCPOA's toughest restrictions were 10 years, maybe we'll get 11 years.

And they can say it was tougher than Obama. That should be good enough for them. But they're in this bind because all these, you know, people. Their own dumb politics. All their dumb politics, like, well, we got to say no enrichment. I just don't think the Iranians would accept that. They've invested too much in this program. There's pride involved in it.

There's a bit of a hedge involved in it because they've seen the U.S. pull out of these deals in the past. So they don't want to, like, dismantle their whole program. And that said, like, there are other countries that don't have nuclear weapons that have, like, they keep repeating a talking point that's not true. And now, granted, it's countries like, you know, the Netherlands and stuff. But it's just not true that no country with a domestic enrichment capability, it also does. doesn't have a nuclear weather. It's a big Rubio talking point. He says it all the time. Yeah, and J.D. Vance says it too. And it's just, it's, it's not true now. The reason Iran is an outlier is because they cheated on the nuclear proliferation treaty. They built these enrichment facilities in secret, which was

pretty suspicious, right? Not good. So I don't know. I think there's a deal on the table for the Trump administration if they're willing to live with some modest Iranian enrichment capability. There's probably a deal that they can say is like in some way tougher than JCPO even though it wouldn't really be any different. And frankly, it's just whether or not they're going to like face down their politics with Netanyahu and some right wingers in Congress. Yeah, it's, you can tell they want to deal. They just want to get something done. Well, and they just want to get it off the table, you know? Understandably.

Yeah. Rightly so. I get it. I appreciate it. All right. So listeners of this show know that we've been eagerly watching Trump's flailing tariff announcements and seeming effort to the global economy over the last few weeks. There was a big development over the weekend then during talks between the U.S. and China in Geneva, Switzerland, where both sides agreed to a

drastic reduction in tariffs for about 90 days. So the U.S. tariffs on Chinese stuff will go from 145 percent to 30 percent. Chinese tariffs on U.S. stuff will go from 125 percent to 10 percent. According to a bunch of news reports, pressure from industry groups, especially automakers in the defense industry, got Trump to cave. I think in particular that they put a freeze on the export of rare earth magnets, which are critical for both the technologies and cars and weapons and all sorts of things. According to the Financial Times, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also had a secret meeting with the Chinese counterpart about three weeks ago. So I would imagine that kind of plowed the fields that were announced this weekend. So, Ben, I guess like in 90 days Trump could decide to rev things back up and we could be back in a terror of war.

But it just seems like there's just no doubt that he fully capitulated here. Chinese conceded literally nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Retaliatory tariffs. Absolutely nothing. The Wall Street Journal editorial page wrote the following sentence. Rarely has an economic policy been repudiated as soundly and as quickly.

Anything jump out of you with this, this is a mess? Well, it's very Trump-like in the sense that he got absolutely nothing and they said it was like a deal. It's not a deal, first of all. I mean, there's no substantive change beyond the kind of fluctuation of these tariff rates. the Chinese, as we talked about, were just better position to win a trade war. Like, they had a monopoly on these rare earth materials. They can absorb more pain. They've kind of invested for the last, you know, decade in clean energy and technologies.

They have more geopolitical support in like lots of the world, particularly given what Trump is doing. So they had a better hand, even if they have like some economic weaknesses. If you look at Trump, though, first of all, the insanity of this is there's still 30% terrorists, right? So it's not like. like it's all the way wound back, you know. It's just like not as insane as it was post-liberation Day week when he was just like tariffing on everything, true social. So there's still going to be economic impacts that are negative. There's still going to be price increases. There's still going to be disruptions. And the trust of the rest of the world is already broken because they just don't

believe that Trump is a predictable actor. And I have to say, like, I don't believe, you know, I think Trump, Scott Besson is like useful to talk to markets. Like he's literally, there to speak to markets. Yeah, just to whisper at Jamie Diamond. Yeah, he's whispering in Jamie Diamond's ear. But I actually don't think he's the real decision maker here. It's Trump and like some of the Yahoo's around him. And so I think, you know, at a certain point, he'll probably dial these things back up again,

dial him back down. Like he likes to control the volatile. He's like a child with a toy. Like he likes to be the one who controls volatility in the markets. So he's decided after the post-Liberation Day Fiasco to dial things back, he'll dial it up at at some point. Whether, do I think he's going to, like, structurally arrange some deal that's going to remake U.S.-China trade relations?

Absolutely not. And that's what was proved to be completely bullshit. Yes. The idea that this is going to, like, compel China that can make all these. Remember fentanyl? Where's fentanyl on this thing, too? Like, there's none of the things he talked about are in this at all. No, and apparently the Biden people actually had cut a pretty impactful counter-fentanyl deal

with the Chinese right at the end of the administration. It's like, the Chinese are like, what, you know, why are you ignoring that? we actually did something on this. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I agree with you. I think Trump clearly views tariffs as like his first, second and third favorite tool in his toolkit. Yeah. For every situation.

So I assume he'll slap tariffs back on all kinds of countries. I do think that, like, everyone was wondering, like, do markets matter or the headlines matter? And the answer is yes. Like, he did not like the stock market crashing. He did not like every CEO calling him telling me, you're going to kill my business. Like, I think it really did matter. And so he blinked. And even like, I think Republican.

members of Congress, or I'm sure calling him being like, I'm not going to be able, I'm going to vote against this, right? I mean, it is worth putting a point on the fact that this was one of the most catastrophic announcements early in a presidency ever. Like he rolls at Liberation Day and all the, you know, big charts and everything. And just look at the climb down. And there are no deals. Even this UK trade deal, I couldn't describe to you what that trade deal is.

It's so minor. It's so meager. Yeah. It's the kind of thing that would normally be announced by, like, the deputy U.S. trade representative in an article that only appears in a three-paragraph notice in Bloomberg News. And they're trying to treat it like it's some huge trade deal. Yeah, they're trying to amp it up. They did, like, a stupid phone call with Kier Starmer. They did it on the day there was a new pope announced.

Yeah, yeah. Sorry, pal. I don't think this is going to lead the headlines. One thing that was a big deal was the ceasefire between India and Pakistan, Ben. Good transition. Thank you. So last week, the attention. between India and Pakistan, it was like just short of open warfare between these two nuclear armed

militaries. Folks probably remember that the conflict started when terrorists killed 26 people, mostly Hindu tourists from India in India controlled Kashmir. India vowed to retaliate against these terrorist groups that are based in Pakistan and against parts of the Pakistani security state that support these groups. The fighting escalated fast. It included air strikes deep into Pakistan. The Pakistani military said they shot down at least. one Indian jet. There were Air Force dog fights. The Pakistanis launched this volley of like several hundred drones across the border. So it got really scary. And for a while, the Trump administration was just completely checked out. They were making comments like these from President Trump and J.D. Vance.

It's a shame we just heard about it just as we were walking in the doors of the Oval. They've been fighting for a long time. You know, they've been fighting for many, many decades and sensual. is actually, if you really think about it, no, I just hope it ends very quickly. What we can do is try to encourage these folks to de-escalate a little bit, but we're not going to get involved in the middle of war that's fundamentally none of our business. So according to a bunch of media reports, this became our business, Mr. Jady Vance, after the administration learned that India bombed an area near the headquarters of Pakistan's Strategic Plans Division, which oversees their nuclear arsenal.

The New York Times estimates they have about 170 nuclear warheads sitting in Pakistan somewhere. That's a big deal because if Pakistan thought that airstrike was intended to take out their nuclear command and control capability, that could lead to them doing something really fucking scary. The Times pointed out that there were reports in Pakistani media that Prime Minister Sharif had called a meeting of the National Command Authority, which is the group in Pakistan that makes decisions about the use of nuclear weapons. Pretty terrifying. Either way, Trump's team, they got into gear, Vance called Prime Minister Modi in India. He warned about escalation, risk. Rubio called as Pakistani counterparts. Trump called nobody, but he did front run both parties

and announced the ceasefire deal on truth social, which the Indians then, like, initially denied. So it was a mess, but like good outcome, at least for now. Ben, like, what did you make of how all this went down? And do you think there's any hope that Mr. Big Boy, Smarty Pants, J.D. Vance, might learn that actually diplomatic intervention to prevent wars is a good thing? First of all, this was pretty scary because they, in the past, you know, they've, they've lobbed, you know, missiles at each other. Sometimes they've literally like just bombed dirt and said that that was, you know, that they hit something that they did. But they were hitting military targets. And this was starting to feel like it could become an actual war. A real war.

Not just like skirmishes on the line of control with episodic strikes. And so that, that's scary. And that, by the way, is still something that happened and they could flare up again if there's another incident. I have to say, and look, this is not us just kind of, you know, hating on the Trump administration. You heard us give credit in the same podcast on Syria. The way they handled this was fucking atrocious because they did not negotiate the ceasefire. I just like they lobbed in the calls that anybody would lob in, like any U.S. administration. The bare minimum. Any bare minimum.

Why would you not make those calls? What else are you doing? You're the Secretary of State, Marco. It's your job. It's your job. I mean, I know you've got to take a break from being the archivist and the, you know, whatever the hell I'll see is. Doing a lot of filing. National Security Advisor. But sure, he's lobbying and calls. And then J.D. Vance, like, who has this kind of intellectual isolationist worldview, which makes no sense in an actual world where if there's a nuclear exchange in Indian Pakistan, like, the fucking global economy collapses and there's tens of millions of refugees and maybe a nuclear winter over, like, big chunks of the world. So, like, yeah, it matters to us. And so then these guys, they lob in, like, the pretty root. calls. Trump doesn't even call, right? And then they get wind to the fact that the Indians and Pakistanis themselves are probably like, oh shit, we're getting pretty close to the edge here. Like, let's have a ceasefire. They announce this on truth social, like, clearly without clearing

it with it. Because if it was a U.S. broker at ceasefire, like, we all know what that looks like. Their joint statements all go out simultaneously from the U.S. and India and Pakistan. There's a plan. They're negotiated. Instead, he fucking truths it. And the Indians are like, what the fuck is this? The Indians insist, by the way, that their challenges with Pakistan are a bilateral issue and it's nobody else's business. Nobody else's business. So Trump announcing that he brokered a ceasefire, like really pissed them off. And so why does that matter? I think it matters because, like, if there's a next time, they're kind of not going to want to hear from us because they don't trust us, right?

Like these things, everything is so short term and transactional Trump and how can I get attention? So look, it's a, it's not a good outcome. It was a bad outcome for a few days there. It was scary. Like people, like actual people died in these exchanges of fire. It was a bigger conflict than they've had in recent years. And am I glad the U.S. got involved? Sure.

But like, so were a bunch of countries, by the way. The countries were involved as they normally are. The Turks were involved. Other countries, you know, the Brits were blobbing in calls. And I just think it's not a good look for them to treat everything, including potential war between India and Pakistan, as just some vehicle for Trump to truth something. know, because that, again, that people aren't going to want to let us into their business,

if that's how he's going to go about things. Did you catch any of the clips from, like, various Indian TV stations about the conflict that we're going around on social media? Yeah, yeah. Really wild stuff. Indian TV is pretty wild. Man, the amount of, like, the nationalism is getting stoked from just every single corner in both of these countries now.

And it comes from Modi directly, but it comes from every TV network. there was one clip that was going around or it was just like the like you know the sound when there's like an if a nuclear strike was coming like the kind of siren you would hear was just running in the background

of the entire clip it's like very incitement yeah and look I get that there's a lot of there's a lot of hate but thousands of years of hate millions of years but the dehumanization

in both directions is dangerous, because that's how you end up just killing lots of people. Like, if you consume Indian television and Pakistani television, you're kind of conditioned to see these people as like subhuman enemies. And that, you know, I'm not absolving ourselves from this. The right-wing media treats a lot of people

in this country as subhuman too. But I just think that that is a dangerous dynamic to just continue. Big time. No, I saw an Indian reporter bragging about how he had not interviewed any Pakistanis, the duration of the duration. of the conflict. It's a great way to understand what the fuck is going on.

What does that do for anyway? All right, we're going to take a quick break. But before we do, we want to let you know that Amanda Littman's new book, when we're in charge, the next generation's guide to leadership is out now. It's an amazing book, Ben. Amanda shares what it's like when a new generation steps into power, not just in politics, but new business, activism, and everyday life. It's a manual for leadership on your own terms. No fluff, no bullshit, no losing yourself in the process, just real tools, honest lessons, and the kind of clarity that today's leaders need. We want to help Amanda get on the New York Times bestsellers list.

Let's go. It's a big deal, right? Yeah, we love Amanda. Get your copy of when we're in charge at crooked.com slash books. You can get there now or wherever you get your books. Pod Save the World is brought to you by Simply Safe. Every day we make countless decisions. But one of the easiest and most important is securing your home with Simply Safe.

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the Russians and Ukrainians are maybe going to have their first direct talks since the start of the war this Thursday in Istanbul. What happened here is the Russians proposed having talks in response. the demands that they implement a 30-day ceasefire. This is their way of kind of evading that request. But you were hearing this from Kiev, from Trump, from Europe, lots of places. On Sunday, Trump decided to endorse this idea, truth, and quote, Ukraine should agree to this immediately. At least they will be able to determine whether or not a deal is possible. And if it is not, European leaders and the U.S. will know where everything stands and can proceed accordingly. Have the meeting now, all caps, three exclamation points. It's not clear if Zelensky is going to show up in Turkey regardless,

or if he's only going to go if Putin goes. But Zelensky also was like, I'll go. Also, Trump, you should go. Like, he's trying to make this a big thing. The Russians have been coy about what Putin is going to do. Dmitri Peskov, Putin's spokesman, said, quote, as soon as the president considers it necessary, he will announce it. But ever mindful of the moments where he could get big ratings,

Trump said, I'll join. I'll fly to Istanbul. I guess, like, you know, I'm already in Europe. Why not? Already over the Atlantic, rather. So, Ben, I guess I would argue, there are two theories I've seen. scene. Like, one is, by endorsing the talks, Trump undercut his own demand for a ceasefire. I get that. On the other hand, talking seems potentially positive. In a less positive category, though, NBC News reported

that Steve Witkoff, the envoy for everything, relied on a Kremlin translator in his three conversations with Putin. On previous episodes, we've talked about Wickkoff, Rodogsies meetings without experts. But not having your own translator is insane. He's like, he's like, What are the odds of this translator is, like, intelligence operative? 98, 99%. 150%. Yeah, first of all, just side note, like, big week for Turkey here. I know.

Because obviously, they are huge supporters of Alshara and Syria and have been advocating lifting sanctions. They're somehow hosting these meetings, like the PKK disbanding. Oh, yeah. So Erdogan, you know, beside from being a total autocratic creep who locked up his biggest opponent, you know, his foreign policy is having a pretty weak. Look, I, this does feel like Trump, I am on the kind of side of people that feel like this was a bit of a rugpole on Zelensky, because, you know, he had Kirstarmer, Mertz, the new German chancellor, Macron, and I think

Donald Tusk from Poland in Kiev for like show solidarity. And it felt like Trump didn't like, you know, the fact that the attention was no longer. him. So he's like, demanding this meeting happen. And I think Zelensky then kind of called the bluff and was like, okay, fine, I'll show up. But, you know, like, Zlonsky is so fucking sick of the goalpost moving on him. And so he's like, fine, I'll go to Turkey because like I, you didn't think Putin would go. And so we'll see what happens now. Did you see the literal Russian disinformation going all over social media, especially on Twitter, where people were trying to claim that Mertz had like cut up a line of cocaine and had it on the table and the train on the way to Kiev? And there's, there's, Like, there's clearly a napkin on the table and, like, a piece of string that's attached to a folder. So, like, Mertz covers up the string because he's just, like, reaching for his file folder.

And then McCron grabs a napkin that he, like, balled up and he hides in people like, oh, that was the bag. I was like, could you imagine two people less likely to be doing lines on a train than Kier Starmer and Friedrich Mertz? McCron, I bet he gets down. Let's just take a minute and imagine if that did happen how fucking awesome would be. If like, you know, Mertz, Friedrich Mertz's new chanceers, just like rip in lines. And then Macron comes in. He's like, hey, can I get a bump? You know?

Who starts that conversation? Curit's Armist. Like, yeah, anyone got a bag? What am it doing? Oh, God. There's so many people we're sharing it. Like, yeah. Anyway, continue.

Sorry. I'm glad that happened because, you know, that's why the internet is still a decent place sometimes. I just think that, like, Trump is, is, he, he, he, he, he. He's literally like a machine gun dropped on the floor with these negotiations, right? He'll be fixated on something. Remember the ceasefire? Remember the 30-day ceasefire? Yeah, what happened?

And each time Ukraine is the one that accepts it. Right. So Ukraine accepted the ceasefire, Putin wouldn't. Each time he throws these things out, and it's always the Ukrainians who he acts like are intransigent, who are the ones who are like, fine, we'll do it. And Russia, Putin never fucking does it. Ever, right? And meanwhile, they're still, like, grinding away Ukraine.

So I don't know what it's going to take for, I mean, I don't think Trump cares. But I do think that the good thing that you're seeing is that, like, you know, Zelensi's kind of got this click of Europeans who have his back, who are from, like, pretty big countries with some real militaries, although not nearly as real as the United States. I mean, that's the best card he has to play, is to hold those Europeans together behind him and just trying to stay, like, if not ahead of Trump, like, only a half step behind him

until it becomes more and more apparent that, like, Putin is just not the one who's serious about ending this war. Yeah, and, you know, if you get down, you guys get a little bump from your movies. I just have a good time, man. I was reading this incredible story in the Wall Street Journal about how there's such an excess of cocaine that the cartels are even better funded.

So you know how the cartels have those kind of like DIY submarines? Yeah. They take from, you know, kind of Columbia up around to somewhere else in Central America. Now they are literally driving these sort of like, they're not fully submerged. They're like mostly submerged in like a little,

you know, they're kind of at the water line. But now they're taking these submarines all the way to Europe. They're like driving them to like Spain. It's crazy. It takes like 30 days. It's a wild story. Great story in the journal. Anyway.

You know, good time to be into Coke, I guess. Two more big stories. Unless you live under Iraq, which case, credit to you. Thanks for listening. You probably heard that they selected a new pope. Last week, Ben, you and I talked through the favorites, to become the new pope, according to the betting odds. And boy, was that wasted.

Did not have our man on the cards. Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo the 14th. That's something like 0.3% odds, according to Polly Market. It's almost like the Mavericks getting the number one picking the graph lottery. How'd that happen? You think it's rigged? I think it's rigged. Because of the Luca trade?

Let me get it to that later. Pope Leo, as he's called now, is from Chicago. According to the New York Times, Pope Leo is Creole roots from New Orleans. I think his grandfather was from Haiti. Super interesting guy. He spent two decades working in Peru as a missionary, a parish priest, and eventually his bishop. Then Pope Francis named him to this powerful Vatican position overseeing the appointment of bishops around the world. But Ben, do you know who did predict this?

My boy, Steve Bannon. Listen to this clip. They're going to say Stephen A. Smith. No, did he predict it too? No, no, he did. This is Bannon from about a week ago. I do think one of the dark horses, and I think, unfortunately, he's one of the most progressive is Cardinal Prevost. I don't think he's getting enough play.

He is certainly on the short list. That's my boy, Steve. It's funny that he sounds like he's betting on it, like on Fanduel. I know. He's not getting enough play. It's not getting enough. He's not enough action on Prevost. So, ban on aside, what do you think it means, you know, just for the U.S.?

We got an American Pope? Yeah. They've been a zillion takes, a zillion Chicago memes. But look, to take a serious note, I mean, what's interesting about the United States, and I always try to say this to, like, some of my friends overseas through, you know, it's easy to look at the United States and just see. Trump or just see our shitty stupid-ass foreign policy over the years or just see like some soulless capitalism. It's a reminder that this is like a big diverse country with many different

people. And I like the fact that Pope Leo is going to be the most prominent American in the world. I mean, I guess together with Trump, but he'll, you know, God willing be there after Trump. And that's a totally different kind of America. That's a guy from humble background. a guy who made his life about missionary work in Latin America, a guy who speaks four or five languages, a guy who cares about social justice. White Sox fan? Yeah, White Sox fan, like underdogs.

Knicks fan? Apparently he was tweeting about the Knicks or something. I mean, it's a Nova Knicks guy. I mean, for those that not in the know in the world though, community here, we've got Gellon Brunson, Mikhail Bridges, and Josh Hart, three Villanova alums, former national champions. and we know it's been confirmed that the Pope is aware of the Nova Next at least, right?

Because he's a private Villanova grad. It was weird that he went to an American college. I mean, I made this point to love it. It's probably inappropriate. But there's definitely some 7-year-old lady went to Villanova who's like, oh, my God, I bang the Pope. Right?

No. What do you mean? This is before he became a priest. He wasn't like celibate? I don't know. I don't know anything about it. I haven't asked them. Like, yeah, I'm not going to comment on.

Could be a 7-year-old dude talking about him. Chad, I don't know. Well, you know, that would, you know, that would make for a good, good story. That's a good sitcom. Yeah, it's a great sitcom, actually, like the Pope before, you know, celibacy. But anyway, put that aside. I like that this guy's going to be a different face to the world for the United States. It also seems like he's very much cut from the Francis cloth.

Yeah. He's a progressive. He cares about that part of Catholicism that is actually about what Jesus talked about, like helping the poor and social justice. The good part. It's kind of interesting to me. that at a time in which the world is swinging pretty far right in its politics in a lot of places, like the Catholic Church is becoming this more progressive institution.

Swinging left. I'll take it, you know. Yeah, we'll too. So I just, better than reason just the Chicago piece of this, you know, no, I'm happy from Mike O'Neill, our friend. But it's also just like it's a reminder that the United States is big and complicated. And it's the country that could produce Trump and it's a country that could produce this guy, you know. and I hope that people bear that in mind as he's spreading this message

of a more kind of progressive view of social justice. Yeah, I don't really think about the Pope often, but, you know, Pope Francis and now Leo the 14th, it's, you know, something to be excited about. Yeah, and I hope he's, you know, like, I know they're sometimes reticent, but I mean, there's a lot of shit going on

that, you know, the Pope wants to speak out, all the better. Stay active. Stay active on Gaza. I hope he continues with Pope Francis on Gaza. Steve Bannon later said, quote, the conclave that elected Pope Leo was more rigged against Donald Trump than the 2020 presidential election. Is that a real quote? Yeah.

Pope Leo's brother also says he served on the same Navy ship as Steve Bannon, like back in the 80s. Isn't that crazy? What a coincidence. Well, that, I mean, we could make a whole series. We'd start with the Villanova, you know, party scene and onto the Bannon ship. That's a, okay, we'll talk about for this. We'll talk about that. The brother did seem to really like his 15 minutes. Yeah, I know. He's out there. You're having a good time. I forgot to ask Chris Murphy about this, but apparently,

Pope Leo retweeted Chris Murphy in 2017. There's a tweet about the Las Vegas shooting. I mean, Murph is going to heaven now. Yeah, it's a big deal. If the Pope retweets you, I think that's a, your tickets punched. In the last Pope Leo, it was during the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s, and he was known as the Pope of the workers. I did like what the Pope said about.

He chose Leo because the last Pope was a time of like ramping capitalism inequality. And now, you know, like so he's, you know, he's thinking about the right things. It's taken on economic issues, social justice. We like him. A good, good working, you know, like he's going to stop giving tax breaks to the companies at ship jobs overseas, you know. Deep cut. Okay. Final story for us. So as listeners know, there's been a horrible sea change in immigration policy under Trump. We recently learned, today or yesterday, that the Department of Homeland Security is terminating temporary protected status for people here from Afghanistan. That means 9,000 Afghans could be deported back to the Taliban regime. These are presumably people that, helped the United States military during the two decades of war there. So this is truly disgraceful.

There was a report the administration was planning to send migrants to Libya. Hard to imagine a less safe place. Luckily, a judge blocked that plan. But the administration is having talks with officials in Rwanda about sending migrants from the U.S. there. Thank you Boris Johnson and the Tory party in the UK for that terrible idea. At the same time, the U.S. though, is welcoming, quote-unquote, refugees from South Africa as long as they're white. Here's Trump talking about what's happening in South Africa and why he's welcoming these folks here from earlier this week. But it's a genocide that's taking place that you people don't want to write about, but it's a terrible thing that's taking place. And farmers are being killed. They happen to be white, but whether they're white or black,

makes no difference to me, but white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa. To be clear, there is not a genocide against white farmers in South Africa. South Africa is a very, very violent country. Many farmers live in the middle of nowhere. They're at risk from violence because the cops can't get to them easily if you live in the rural farm. But there's no data or evidence to suggest that this is a systematic racial thing, let alone a genocide. Also, white South Africans are far better off financially than black South Africans. White people are about 7% of the population, but they own between two-thirds and three-quarters of the land in South Africa.

They are exponentially wealthier, on average, than black South Africans. We should also just be honest. We're talking about the descendants of colonial settlers that set up the apartheid system and government actions that are now trying to create a bit of equality for black people who are just brutally oppressed. I'm not suggesting that means these white farmers would be subjected to violence or any kind of harm, but the fact that they're getting special treatment by the U.S. as refugees, given the history is pretty disgraceful.

Ben, I remember you and I talked about this in, like, 2018, because Trump started tweeting about it. He saw a segment on Tucker Carlson about white genocide against South African farmers. He demanded Mike Pompeo do an investigation that resulted in nothing because there was nothing to do or investigate. But I don't know. It's just like, just been thinking about what an immigration policy that is this overtly racist, what that message that sends to the world.

Yeah, this is a really important story, and I'm glad it got a lot of attention, and I hope it continues to get attention because it kind of gives away the whole game. First of all, if on its face, their argument for letting in, or not like airlifting these white farmers from South Africa, their argument is an argument for why there should actually be a refugee program. In other words, if Trump is legitimately concerned about people facing threats of violence and political persecution. There are about nine million communities around the world

that you would put ahead of these white South Africans. By the way, at the top of that list would be Afghans, who if they get sent back to Afghanistan, could be disappeared by the fucking Taliban, right? So the first thing is, like, it's completely absurd on its face. And if you actually cared about what Trump said, you know, you're going down the list, people from Sudan, people from Afghanistan, people from, you know,

unfortunately a lot of Myanmar, like all manner of places. It also bears saying that the Afghans who came in under TPS, like some of the other people that had TPS revoked, did not come in illegally. Like they were following what they thought were the rules under their temporary protected status. All that said, I think what's important here is it gives away the game because it does reveal the fundamental white supremacy

that is embedded in the Trump project. And look, I know it's not post-George Floyd anymore, And, but this is, how else do you explain a situation in which they want to send pretty much largely, if not exclusively black and brown people to places like Libya and Rwanda while welcoming plain loads of white people from South Africa to the United States? Not subtle. Like, this is the Stephen Miller, Tucker Carlson, World View, where we're going to reverse, quote unquote, great replacement.

We're going to like push black and brown people out of this country. And we're going to become the safe haven for white people, this airlift of, Elon Musk's from Africa, like, is absolutely ridiculous. And it kind of cuts a grant in decades. And maybe you think, Tommy, like, our former boss, like Barack Obama, his father came to the United States and an airlift of students from Kenya that were coming here to be educated in the United States. Like, that's who we used to be, you know, 67 years ago. Like, we've gone backward. We've gone way backwards here, you know. And so I just think this is like a, this isn't just like a kind of, you know, weird side show. This is like pretty elemental to the project here. And it's a,

it's not even a dog whistle. It's like a pretty, I don't even know, it's just like a cry to his base. Like, look, we're letting in the white people and we're kicking out the brown people. And and I don't know, like, sometimes like you got to call out what it is. And this is a kind of white supremacist immigration policy. Yeah, it's weird. It's like dog whistle became the thing we would talk about all the time. But it's, it's, you're right. It's not a dog whistle. It's a policy. It's a policy. Welcoming white people. sending black people to countries they were never from. But also the language involved, like the term white genocide, it's far right propaganda. It was popularized by a white separatist,

literal neo-Nazi. It's been used. It was, you know, the unite the right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. There were signs about white genocide. The Tree of Life synagogue shooter talked about white genocide or the Great Replacement Theory. Like it is a, it's usually deeply antisemitic. It's usually the Jews who are conducting the white genocide in these twisted right-wing worldviews. And these theories, this propaganda, has been used to defend violence. Yeah. And the President of the United States saying it's like you can't kind of understate what a big deal that is. Yeah, and it does make you wonder, like, who is in his year about this.

Got to be Elon. Well, there's a lot of South Africans. David Sachs, Elon, Peter Thiel. There's a whole that PayPal Mafia is all. I'm telling you, man, like the white South African, you know, international is nothing to sneer at. I mean, like, and they have their, you know, I mean, sins of the fathers don't always pass on, but sometimes they do.

And these are people that came out of apartheid. Came out of their nostalgic for that, you know. I mean, they used to complain about what happened. I mean, yes, are there flaws in, like, land redistribution in, like, Zimbabwe and South Africa? Sure, but to your point, I mean, Mandela, like, held back the, you know, like, these people were allowed to keep their farms, you know, like, there's crime, sure, but there's all kinds of crime in South Africa. It's a lot more dangerous. This is just, this is, ugh, it's gross. I think, right. When it comes to the murder rate, like, the murder rate in South Africa is just shockingly high. And that's a universal problem. Yeah, but it's high for black people, too. Exactly. Exactly. It's universal problem. I think in terms of land redistribution, I think one of the things that, I think, led to. to Trump really freaking out about this was a law that was passed that said the government could expropriate land from people without compensation.

But I've talked about this in the States of America on Monday. Like a lot of experts say it was just kind of clarifying rules that were already in place. And when you read deeper into this, most experts say actually the sin is that South Africa has done very little to reduce racial inequality since the end of apartheid. Yeah, exactly. Like in fact, you know, and people basically hate the government because it's, been corrupt and sclerotic and incapable of delivering on the promises. Yeah, and I'm sorry. Like, these people built their estates on like a complete white supremacist system of apartheid.

And like, they've, I don't know, the fact that these are the people that you look out at the world and you see these people as a vulnerable people in the world, given all the places where there are people who are actually vulnerable, and we're setting people back to those places, it's a real stain. It's real fucked up. It, it, you know, I imagine this happening in like 2016, Trump articulating some of these things. Like the reaction would have been pretty much bigger. Yeah, that's the thing. The frog has been boiling for a while here.

Yeah, and we're just toast. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, you're going to hear my interview with Senator Chris Murphy. We are going to talk about all the avenues for corruption that are happening as we speak as Trump visits these Gulf autocrats. So stick around for that. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. We all know that our mental health is just as important as our physical. health, but we don't attend to it nearly as much. And that is a bad thing for a lot of reasons,

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We're all better with help. Visit betterhelp.com slash crooked world to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com slash crooked world. Senator Chris Murphy, welcome back to the show. Hey, man. Thanks for having me. It's great to see you. So we're talking on Tuesday afternoon as we speak.

President Trump is in Saudi Arabia. He'll go on to Qatar, then the United Arab Emirates. A lot about this trip is unusual, but I really want to talk with you about why it presents a truly unprecedented opportunity for political corruption. Just a few examples for listeners to kind of set the table. Qatar is apparently giving Trump a 747. There is an Emirati run investment firm that recently announced they will be buying $2 billion worth of a Trump family cryptocurrency for no discernible business reason. Trump's real estate business is working on a luxury golf course in Qatar, residential towers in Saudi Arabia, a new Trump hotel in Dubai. Jared Kushner has gotten a

bunch of money from all of these governments. Senator, it's genuinely hard to just keep track of all of this corruption, let alone make sense of it. But what is your sense of like, what is the other end of the deal? What are these countries getting from Trump in return for these giant favors? Yeah, you're being generous. It's not an opportunity for corruption. It's like corruption right in front of us, right? When pro quo is being announced as Trump is touring the Middle East. I mean, first of all, it's just so unbelievably brazen Trump is going to these three countries, not because they are the three most important countries in the world, not because there are three most important allies, but because they are the three countries that are willing to pay him.

These are the countries that are willing to just hand him cash. So he's going to the region to collect. Another example of the brazenness. Part of the deal that you just, part of the corruption you just talked about is this UAE investment in a Trump family crypto business. It's a $2 billion investment. And the Trump entity is essentially acting as a bank. So it takes the money.

It gets to invest that money. And it's so much money, $2 billion, that they can make hundreds of millions of dollars a year just on the investments. But the entity is not just the Trump family. It's the Trump family and the Whitkoff family. So it's Trump. It's Trump's kids and the son of the Middle East envoy. Just to like make it perfectly clear that.

when you're dealing with world liberty financial or whatever the hell it's called, you are definitely dealing directly with the people who make the decisions on U.S. Middle East policy. Okay, so what's on the other end of this? Every single one of these countries need something, and they need something immediate from the United States. The UAE wants the United States to relax our restrictions on semiconductors sales to the UAE, and Trump basically announced as soon as the crypto deal was set that he was ready to do that. The Saudis want a nuclear deal with the United States that is better than every other country's nuclear deal. In particular, they want to be able to enrich uranium in Saudi Arabia, which would allow them a pathway to a bomb. Cutter just sort of wants to make sure that they don't

get cut out of the deal. What happened during Trump's first term was that the Saudis and the Emirates ganged up on the Cutteries and the United States backed the Saudi play. So the cutteries are willing to give Trump whatever he asked for because they just want to make sure that they still get invited to these clubs. But everybody's got an ask. And it seems like Trump is ready to fulfill all of their asks because they are doing what is the price of admission in the Trump administration, which is send Trump and his family boatloads of cash. Yeah, there's greasing them. The corruption in Trump 1.0, as best we could tell, was like governments renting extra room blocks at his hotels for weeks on end or corrupt real estate stuff. Trump 2.0 features this kind of

novel crypto currency element or avenue to buy him off. How do you think that changes things? Trump's theory is very different in his second term. He's essentially testing, not just the Republican party, but the public writ large. He's saying if I engage in sort of daily acts of corruption in the dozens, then is it really corruption? Or if I'm telling you that I'm stealing, Will you just consider that it's part of the price of Donald Trump being president? I think for a little while it was working. I think for a little while the American people were like, well, I guess we kind of knew he was corrupt and we elected him and maybe we should look the other way.

But as the corruption has gotten bigger, right, as it's not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it's now billions of dollars and it's as gaudy as the gift of a gold-plated plane, I think the American people are just saying, okay, enough. and a few Republicans are saying enough. So it's the size of the corruption. It's the fact that it's all playing out in public. And it's the very transparent way in which he's, you know, operationalizing the entirety of the federal government, including tours of the White House to prompt people to give him more money. I just don't think this is ultimately going to numb the American people. It was close, but I don't think that's how this is going to play out. Yeah, that is what has been surprising about this.

I mean, I sort of went into this assuming God only knows what's happening in secret. God only knows what crypto wallets from Singapore are just firing off money to Trump for whatever deal. The reality is it's all happening in public. Like he's hosting a dinner for the 200 people who buy the most cryptocurrency. I think the top 25 are getting a VIP tour of the White House. Bloomberg News did an analysis looking at the people who own the most of Trump's meme coin, the Trump coin, and the vast majority. are from overseas. So you're right. It's just kind of, it's, it's so brazen. It's almost hard to know what to do with it. Yeah. And some of it is playing out in public, but some of it isn't. I know it's hard to follow for some people. And I think some of the bet that Trump made was that the crypto scams would be sort of the most opaque. And a lot of Americans, because they just choose to not want to understand crypto, would look the other way. But it's really not that hard to follow. I mean, there's the meme coin and then there's a stable coin. The meme coin is this valueless coin that's worth is just dependent on how many people want to buy Trump

meme coin on a particular day. And what we know, as you said, is that it's mostly foreign buyers. What we know is that Trump makes a bit of money on every single transaction. So every time a foreign buyer, an oligarch or a Saudi prince buys meme coin, they're sending money straight into Trump's pocket. And yet we don't know the names of any of these buyers. So the fact that he's doing it plays out in public, but he is conveniently masking the identity of everybody that buys.

And of course, we just know what's going on. There are people buying the coin and then going to the White House and saying, hey, I just bought $20 million of Trump coin. Here's what I need from you. That's happening with foreign entities. That's definitely happening with American companies. If a mayor did that or a governor did that, they'd be run out. a town or a state on a rail. And I think we're going to get to the point where people are

that fed up with Trump doing it. Yeah, I hope so too. There was some bipartisan movement in the Senate to regulate cryptocurrency. It fell apart. I was told by some folks who were working on it that that happened because, in part, because of some of these reports about foreign actors buying huge amounts of Trump's stable coin, as you mentioned earlier. A person involved in those talks also told me that the crypto industry dumping tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, into elections, in particular Sherrod Brown's defeat in the Ohio Senate race last cycle loomed very large in the background. How overt is the threat from the crypto industry to lawmakers that they will primary you or defeat you in a general election if you don't do their bidding?

And do you have any hope that the Senate can get that crypto bill in a better place? Listen, I don't know how overt it is. I mean, I've never had one of these crypto bosses or bros come into my office and tell me that if I don't support what they want, they're going to come after me. But, of course, I'm in Connecticut, not Ohio. But you're definitely right that there is sort of in the zeitgeist a fear of the crypto industry. And I mean, that's unacceptable. It is unacceptable for any member of Congress to be making decisions based upon what you fear is going to happen to you electorally. I think it's a little bit of an emperor without the sort of level of clothing that we believe they have. There's lots of other really powerful interests out there that we piss off on a regular basis,

whether it be the oil industry, the pharmaceutical lobby, they have just as much money as the crypto lobby does. And we should just tell a story about how the crypto industry is gouging Americans, and we should tell a story about how they are enabling Trump's corruption. The crypto industry is less powerful if you unmask them for their corruption and their unethical behavior. On why the crypto deal fell apart, I think there are a lot of complicated reasons. But amongst them, I hope, was the fact that the president was exempted. So the bill said that members of Congress can't issue crypto coin, at least stable coin, which is what the bill was regulating, but the president could. At the very moment that Trump was doing this stable coin deal in UAE, in which Trump was getting

a big payoff, my hope is that we will not vote on that bill, that Democrats will not support any regulation of stable coin unless it applies the ethics prohibitions to the president. That seems like a pretty reasonable thing to ask as the president is over there and in this gross, gross corruption campaign. Yeah, that seems like the bare minimum. So back to Trump. I mean, it does seem like his kids are the tip of the spear on a lot of the corruption. There's, you know, the hypocrisy from Republicans when you compare the comments they made

about Hunter Biden to their silence. Now it's galling, but it ultimately misses the real point, which is like corruption is bad no matter what, right? Like Hunter Biden's activities were, you know, cynical and kind of gross. But, you know, we're currently watching Don and Eric visit all of these Gulf countries. They're kind of either going right before dad or they're going right after to collect their real estate deal or whatever prize. I think Jared Kushner is sitting on $3.5 billion worth of Gulf money in his quote-unquote investment firm. Surprise, surprise.

Garrett just came out of the woodwork to say he was helping plan this foreign trip, I believe. What do you think the impact is of like the Trump kids in Kushner on the world stage? What part do they play? I just don't think we should view the kids as separate or distinct at all from the father. He says that the kids are running the business. And maybe operationally they are making the hour-to-hour decisions, but Trump is still running the business. So there's just no doubt that he is pulling the strings here. And of course, we see that on a daily basis because he's using his own social media feed to advertise and to market the business ventures that,

Apparently, his kids, not him, are in charge of. And, you know, I think you saw exactly how it works with that UAE crypto investments. You know, the Trump kids, along with the Whitkoff kid, went over there. Literally a day later, the Trump administration announced that they were ready to give UAE what they wanted. And I imagine when he gets to the Emirates, that will be the sort of summation of the corrupt deal. So the kids and the father are just sort of.

of playing individual parts, but it's all the same play. It's all the same game. Did you see the World Liberty Financial, that's the crypto firm that the Trump kids run? They released a video on social media of their trip to Pakistan where they were like met by diplomats. They had lights and sirens in the streets. They were meeting with, you know, if not the president, then very senior lawmakers. It's like, again, they're just kind of laying it all out there for us. Yeah, and it's not. And obviously it doesn't, you know, end with the kids. Again, Whitkoff is in on this. His kid and he are making boatloads of money off of these deals.

Musk is along for the ride on this trip, and you have all this reporting that Starlink is one of the investments you need to make as a foreign entity to even get a foot in the door with the Trump administration. There looks as if Saudi Arabia is part of this package of gifts that it's giving the Trump cabal is a deal with Starlink. So you have to pay off Eric. You have to pay off Donald. You have to pay off the Whitkoff family. You got to pay off Elon. You got to pay off Donald. And if you do all of those things, then you can ask for something from the American taxpayer. But what we know is that nowhere in that deal is the American taxpayer. Nowhere in this deal is anything good for U.S. security. The thing they're doing for UAE is a disaster. They are letting UAE have access to the highest technology microse semiconductors. We've never wanted to do that because we know that the UAE and the China. Chinese are super tight and that any technology we give to UAE likely go straight to China.

So China now will get access to these semiconductors and they will be able to potentially be in a position to lap us when it comes to the future of the global advanced AI industry. That is something that's really bad for the United States, but it's going to happen apparently only because the UAE met Donald Trump's price, which looks to be about a $2 billion cash payment into Trump enterprises. Man, it's amazing. And by the way, the UAE, I know they have a lot of friends at Washington. They have an ambassador who is kind of like out and about often at Cafe Milano, et cetera.

But they've also been funding one side of a absolutely brutal civil war in Sudan. They're funding the mercenary group called the RSF. So there's a lot of tough conversations we should be having with the UAE that are not about Donald Trump's pocketbook. And there's just no indication that those are happening. Yeah. And frankly, that we should have been happening during Biden's term as well. I mean, we were doing deals with the UAE, not corrupt deals, but we were financing the UAE's defense. infrastructure while they were fueling this brutal civil war. So we are going to force a vote.

There is a pending sale of arms to the UAE, and there's no doubt that that will not be fast-tracked. We will force a vote and a debate on the Senate floor where we will talk both about the way that the UAE is funding the Civil War and the work that both actors are terrible in UAE, but they're funding the worst of the two, and the way in which the Trump administration is dealing with the UAE are corrupt. So we're not going to stand by. We're going to at least force our Republican colleagues to go on the record on all of this. That's good. I think that's important. So I saw you gave a big floor speech about Trump and corruption this week. I think that's great. And you're sounding the alarm. What else can Congress do, though, if Republicans seem like they just kind of don't care. They're

willing to turn a blind eye. Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the things we can do on the foreign policy corruption is make it clear to these countries that, you know, there are repercussions if you pay off an American president and those repercussions last beyond Trump's term. I mean, maybe UAE and Cutter believe that Trump will be president forever, but that's probably not how it's going to work out. There will probably be a Democratic president and Democratic Congress, and they're not going to get the same treatment from a Democratic president if this is the way that they deal with the United States. So we need, Democrats need to communicate to these foreign allies that they should get out of this deal with Trump. They should unilaterally stand down the corruption if they want any long

term healthy relationship with the United States of America. And then we can just do what I've been trying to do, which is mobilize the public. It is curious and a little heartbreaking that it's taken a long time for the public to kind of reach a level of outrage. But that's kind of because we, as Democrats, didn't talk about it enough. Like the minute the meme coin was issued on inauguration day, we should have been talking about it and very little else. So I think if we work to mobilize the public around this set of issues with a kind of nasty midterm coming up for Republican members of Congress. It may cause, you know, them to raise some objections. You see Republicans starting to tiptoe into objections, at least to the cuttery plane. That might be,

you know, more likely to happen if we talk about this more in the public and out in the stump. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, the plane is a nice, quite literally bright, shiny object that we can all focus on and talk about. But the Steve Bannon flood the zone with. shit strategy from Trump is pretty effective and makes it hard, I think, to fire the right bullet at the same target. Final question for you. President Trump gave a speech earlier today in Saudi Arabia where he said he's going to get rid of sanctions on Syria and meet with the Syrian President al-Shara. I had to say I was incredibly excited about that announcement for President Trump. I think it's a politically challenging thing to do to take sanctions off a leader who was

admittedly a former terrorist, but it's absolutely the right thing to do if we want this new Syrian government to have a shot of existing. And by the way, these are sanctions that were all put on the Assad regime, which has now been deposed by these guys. But what was your reaction to that announcement? Did you guys have any heads up on it either? Yeah, there's certainly some commotion that this was being considered by the administration. I agree with you. This is a really important move. Now, there are a lot of announcements that Trump makes that don't end up actually coming to fruition. So I think we should pour a little bit of salt on this announcement. But yes, as unsavory as these characters are, this is not the Assad regime.

And we should give this Syrian government a chance to show that they are going to build a multi-religious, multisectarian society, that they are committed to a relationship with the United States. And we should just understand that if we're not talking to the Syrian regime, then our enemies are. the Russians and the Iranians, many others, the Chinese are willing to cut a deal. So this is important. We should drop the sanctions, but it probably will necessitate Congress stepping in because some of these sanctions through the Caesar Act are mandatory sanctions. So if Trump wants to get this done and establish a real relationship, or at least a pathway to a relationship with Syria, that's a good thing. We should applaud him when he does something decent, but he probably needs Congress to step in. But we'll see if all of his, well, I guess they'll do, they always do whatever he tells them to do.

So I guess I shouldn't doubt their Republicans who had been pressing against Biden, releasing the sanctions vigorously, will pivot on a dime. And all of a sudden announced that Trump has struck a genius move in doing the thing that they thought if Biden did it was going to be a cataclysm for the Middle East. Yeah, we got art of the deal tier. Senator Murphy, thank you so much for raising everybody's awareness about these issues and for coming on the show. Great to see you. Thanks, man. Thanks again to Senator Murphy for joining the show, and we'll talk to you guys next week. Pod Save World is a crooked media production.

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