Pod Save the World - Don’t look back in Brexit

Episode Date: September 4, 2019

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s wild decision to suspend parliament and try to force a Brexit. The latest on the protests in Hong Kong. Can the US finalize a peace deal in Afghanistan and is John Bolton cut out of that process? Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu pulls out all the stop in advance of the Israeli elections. North Korea’s missile launches look dangerous. Will France sweep in to save the Iran deal? Trump’s former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis refuses to criticize a president not named Obama and Trump has a message for Poland.

Welcome back to Pottape the World on Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Roots. Ben, could be back, man. Good to see you, Tommy. I missed you, although I was do a little world-doing. You world-doed. Yeah. Went to France, went to Spain.

It's nice out there. It's nice out there. It's a big, big planet. But, you know, it's good to come back and make sure, you know, everything's still burning. Yeah, things didn't get better in your absence. No, no. It did not. So we're going to cover a lot of ground today.

We'll talk Brexit for a while. We're going to talk with the Hong Kong protests. Big news out of the, Afghanistan, some updates out of Israel, North Korea, Iran, and then a new book by General Mattis in a discussion of whether he will or will not criticize President Trump. And finally, the vice president is abroad, so we'll chat about that for a bit. Pack show. Yeah. So let's get into it. Let's talk Brexit first. So Prime Minister Boris Johnson is proving to be every bit as destructive as people feared. Last week, the Queen approved Johnson's request to

spend or pro-rogue. That's a word I learned over vacation in Parliament. So in normal times, this would be a pretty standard move. It makes sense for the new prime minister to end the current session of parliament for some relatively brief period of time. Get your ducks in a row, return, give a speech called the Queen's speech where you lay out his or her agenda and then the work starts again. Of course, these aren't normal times because on October 31st, the UK is getting booted out of the EU, regardless of whether they have managed the fallout, a so-called hard Brexit. But because Johnson wants to spend Parliament until October 14th, he's pitching like a five-week pro-rogue period, that means there's basically no time for Parliament to amend or pass a Brexit deal

or block the UK from leaving these. They can't actually meet and work during that period. So this is a pretty sneaky, gross move. Lawmakers across the spectrum are unhappy. Citizens are not happy. There have been big protests. Many people are calling it a coup. The latest news as of us recording on Tuesday is that a conservative lawmaker actually defected to the liberal side, meaning Johnson, has lost the majority he once had in Parliament as a very slim majority. Other lawmakers are talking about possibly resigning rather than going along with Johnson's nonsense. And a group of lawmakers has put forward a piece of legislation to block a no-deal Brexit. So if that happens, Boris Johnson said you call early elections to prevent them from blocking

his Brexit dreams. This would be the third general election in four years in the year. UK. So let's just pause there. Those are a lot of facts. Like, what a mess. Yes. This is a complete mess. And again, kind of predictable on all the conversation we've had about Brexit, we've come back to the fundamental contradiction, which is the British people voted for Brexit. That campaign for Brexit was rooted in a lot of lies.

So nobody likes what Brexit actually looks like. So nobody really wants to actually go through with it, except for the hard Brexit supporters like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. Let me step back here for a second and try to break apart these pieces of what happened. So part of what's interesting that's happening now is the UK doesn't have a constitution written down like we do. They have a set of democratic norms that have evolved over centuries that people kind of respect and abide by. And what you see now is Parliament and Johnson kind of testing the boundaries of that. for him to go and say he's got the queen's permission to not convene parliament for a period of weeks to shorten the time that they can try to block a no deal Brexit is this kind of testing of how far the prime minister can go in his powers and to people who are thinking like wow the queen got involved in this no the queen basically signs off in whatever the prime minister yeah no love of choice right the queen is not like intervened to block the wishes of her prime minister certainly that i can remember right so i don't i wouldn't put this on her majesty right

So he knows that Parliament would pass an extension. What Parliament wants to pass is another extension. Three more months from the October 31st deadline to say, let's keep negotiating with the EU and see if we can work this out and get a deal to shape how we leave the European Union instead of crashing out without a deal, keeping in mind that if they crash out without a deal, likely recession, possible shortages in food and medicine, social unrest, you know, all the unresolved questions. It's going to really hurt.

people. Like, just a quick aside, like I met this guy in Spain who's a British guy who runs a small business there, leasing, you know, charter for people who go out for the day. He basically is like, I'll have to close up shop and move to a non-EU country. He'll have to essentially leave the country that this goes through. Like, people are going to get hurt. And all, there are all these people who don't quite know, you know, if you're an EU citizen working in the UK, what does it mean for you? If you're a Brit working in Europe, what does it mean for you? If you're a company that relies at all in the European market, which most British companies do in some fashion, the large ones, at least, like, you don't know what it means to you. So Parliament wants to prevent a no-deal Brexit.

Johnson has said, come hell or high water, if we don't have a deal by the 31st, I will leave without a Brexit deal. And so the showdown is now Parliament has said, we want to have this capacity to pass this law. And because Boris Johnson only had a one-vote majority, and imagine if, you know, the Democrats only had a one-vote majority in the House. and this lawmaker today left the conservative party, Philip Lee, and went to the liberal Democratic Party. He no longer has a parliamentary majority, right? And so he's a very weak prime minister, obviously. And now parliament's going to test, can we try to pass this, you know, a law preventing him from crashing out of the EU without a deal? And so there's this kind of test between the prime minister and parliament. Okay. That is very unusual. I guess the question is what happens now? Okay. So Boris Johnson could decide,

that he wants to have a general election before October 31st under the gamble that if he runs a general election and wins, it revalidates the decision to Brexit, it solves his political problem, and it might even give him an increased majority if he wins. And his people suggest they think he may gain seats if they do that, which is unnerving. Yeah, and so that's one scenario. The problem with that is you need a two-thirds majority in Parliament to agree to hold an election. and the Labor Party might not want to have that election right now for a variety of reasons. One of them is they say they want to just prevent an no-deal Brexit.

Their focus is on getting this extension and making sure there's a responsible approach to Brexit. I think another problem that's been present throughout that we've alluded to a couple of times is Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Labor Party, is not naturally an anti-Brexit kind of guy. I mean, you know, he's part of the kind of old reconstructed British left that has some antipathy to the kind of corporate project of the EU, right? And so it's interesting that the lawmaker who defected today didn't go to labor. He went to the Liberal Democratic Party, right, which is a smaller party that has positioned itself as just the anti-Brexit party, right? So now people are going to Liberal Democrats as this home base for the anti-Brexit movement. And so Labor might just not give Boris Johnson the election he won. in which case, you know, you can't just have an election if you don't get a broad enough agreement.

So that might happen. That might not happen. One scenario is there's an election. One scenario is there's this kind of brinksmanship around whether or not parliament can pass a law to prevent a no-deal Brexit or whether Boris Johnson just kind of test whether he can go all the way and achieve a no-deal Brexit, right? Sitting there is this October 31st deadline. Boris Johnson says part of the reason why he doesn't want parliament to debate is, and pass another law mandating extension instead of no-deal Brexit is he wants a no-deal Brexit as leverage in the negotiations with Europe. So he's saying, if Europe thinks I'm crazy enough to drive this car off a cliff without a net,

they might give me a better deal. The problem is there's no indication that Europe is going to do that. And actually, Boris Johnson's own negotiator has kind of been fairly pessimistic about how the negotiations are going. Because the reality is for the Europeans, they would suffer a bit in no-deal Brexit, because there's some uncertainty for European companies, but it's much, much worse for the UK. So Boris Johnson is essentially saying,

I'm willing to shoot myself in the head and kill myself through this no-deal Brexit, but you won't let me do that because you might be hurt a little bit. He's in a weaker position, right? So where are we? I mean, I think we're heading into a period of unprecedented, and it already has been,

but even more acute dysfunction in British politics, where nobody has the answer here the no deal Brexit is not supported by a majority of people in the country. It's certainly not supported by the parliament, but it's supported by the prime minister, and he sees his greatest political risk coming from the right, not the left. Because he believes if he abandons the full tilt commitment to Brexit, he will get toppled by this pro-Brexit party that Nigel Farage is running that is kind of peeling off the right wing of the conservative party, right?

So it's like in the United States, he's got a conservative party that's more concerned about its right flank than the center. And so you have leadership that is looking over its right shoulder while everybody else is trying to figure out what to do. God, I mean, can you imagine, like Trump calls himself Mr. Brexit, right? He thinks he predicted this whole thing. But can you imagine if you're in the White House right now and you are watching the global economy falter a bit because of your trade war? Wouldn't you want to do everything in your power to prevent a no-deal Brexit and the potential like global economic shock that would come from that right before a reelection? It's Just madness to me.

Yes. You would want to do that. And I mean, what are the scenarios? The scenarios are Britain leaves the EU on October 31st with no deal. And you get that shock. There is somehow a deal that is reached between now and October 31st. That really doesn't seem that likely right now. I mean, the deals that have been reached under Theresa May couldn't fly with the British Parliament.

And Boris Johnson any better deal just doesn't seem likely. a general election that either validates Brexit through Boris Johnson or that kicks him out, and then we have certainly longer time to negotiate this or perhaps no Brexit at all, right? Or you have this completely bizarre scenario that, you know, Boris Johnson's acting like they're going to crash out, Parliament's acting like they're going to pass laws to prevent it, and there's legal challenges, and this whole thing becomes, you know, up to interpretation, right? I mean, all of this is unstable for everybody involved, including the United States. Right. I mean, you sort of alluded to this. I mean, these moves have started an interesting debate about kind of democracy itself.

Yeah. The Daily, the New York Times, The Daily did a good episode where they juxtaposed the political turmoil in the UK and Italy. I think that's worth listening to and it was interesting. But I did think sometimes we miss that there's a bigger picture here because, you know, you look at the UK, you have Johnson doing all these really radical undemocratic things and apparently considering things that are even worse, like just ignoring legislation he doesn't like or refusing. to resign if there's no confidence vote in him. And people are saying rightly, I think, like, hey, man, that's a coup. But then you have the Johnson defenders who say, well, he's implementing the will of the people on their vote for Brexit and the referendum. The undemocratic thing would be to ignore their will. But I think if you zoom out from these specifics, the debate in the UK in the US as well, frankly, it underscores the need for everyone to have a better understanding of the value of democratic institutions and processes and the fact that it's these norms and rules and democratic bodies

that are the key to keeping democracy working in the long term. And like we're putting all of that at risk right now on both sides of the alliance. Yeah, I mean, here's what I'd say, because it's an interesting debate. I disagree with the idea that the will of the people was for this Brexit, and so we have to Brexit no matter what, even if it's a no deal. And here's why. The Brexit referendum did not specify what Brexit would be. In other words, it didn't say no deal Brexit. We will leave the EU with no agreement about how we leave the EU. So I don't think a majority of the British people voted for that. They might have voted for Brexit, right? But if you polled them, at least a healthy portion of the people probably assumed that there would be some agreement with the EU in which,

because it was just a yes or no thing, leave or remain, like just because you voted leave doesn't mean you want to crash out with no agreement. So I think Boris Johnson is extending that beyond what the will the people was that was expressed. The second piece, though, is institutions matter. And if you can't get the democratic institutions, the elected representatives through parliament to support your course of action, that matters too. And you can't just say, I like democracy when it is my democracy, when the people voted my way. And I don't like democracy when the people the people's representatives, like, won't support my course of action. So therefore, I'm just going to pick which democratic outcome I like.

And Johnson, in talking about Brexit, actually, was trying to claim that he was defending parliament and their local institutions versus the tyranny of the EU. Versus the EU, exactly, right? And so they're cherry picking when they like democracy, right? And I think part of what we're learning everywhere is, no, there's a reason that democracies are built to have elections, but also to have parliaments and to have the rule of law. and you can't just ignore a portion of the democracy for what you like. It's like Trump's saying, well, because I won the Electoral College victory in 2016,

I can build my wall. Well, no, the elected House of Representatives will not give you the money for that. And so what's he doing? He's saying, I will ignore the will the elected House of Representatives and say there's a state of emergency on the border to get money. That is fundamentally undemocratic, right? And so I think the key takeaway I have about this whole thing is that democracy has to work in total here. And you can't, these populists, these nationalists are trying to kind of cherry-pick

democratic outcomes that they like and ignore the democratic constraints that they don't like. And, you know, I think that's a very dangerous situation because then democracy comes only about the validation of one side's view and not about, hey, how do people with diverse views get along in a nation and society? Yeah. Well, I mean, this thing is changing hour by hour, but I imagine we'll not be covering this every single week until October 31st because it is fascinating. All right, let's talk about Hong Kong for a bit. So we're now about three months into these protests in Hong Kong and there's just no sign of things slowing down. There's no sign that China will offer any political concessions to the protesters. And there's no real effort that I've seen from the international

community to mediate things even if that were to be possible. I'm not sure if it is or not. But meanwhile, things are getting more and more violent. I mean, there were some truly, horrifying videos going around a few days ago of Hong Kong police, just beating the shit out of and tear gassing protesters in the subway. There were random commuters who got swept up in it. They're spraying these protesters with blue dye to make it easier to arrest them later, to the most police state thing I've ever seen. There's no equivalence here, but it's also worth noting that there are groups of protesters who say they're now going out and looking for violence. They think violence is part of the answer. They're lighting fires. Stepping back, like I imagine

there's probably already been pretty severe and potentially lasting economic damage done to Hong Kong. But then I'm curious like what your thoughts were on what's happening generally. And, you know, I find myself to be continually amazed and inspired by the bravery, these people who are out there protesting, like a quarter of the population of Hong Kong is that they're protesting. But I also really worry about the endgame because the Chinese government is looming so large over all of this in a way that feels immovable and that feels novel to this protest movement in a way. that maybe wasn't in other Arab Spring countries, for example. Yeah, and this is really fascinating because, first of all,

the authoritarian governments like China learned a lot from like the Arab Spring and the color revolutions and like Ukraine. What they learned is to try to strangle these in the crib to use an awful metaphor, which is essentially we will crush any dissent, we won't let it gain traction, we will use the social media that citizens once use to empower themselves to repress them by kind of monitoring them or having disinformation.

And so the Chinese have this zero tolerance tactics. But what's interesting for me is the Hong Kong movement seems to have learned from the failure of past democratic movements. Yeah, they're very smart. So they've learned, let's not have leaders, right? Identified leaders, because then they can just arrest the leaders. So let's be this kind of leaderless mass mobilization

of people that has an element. of surprise working for us. They don't always just go to the same square every day. They might show up at the airport one day. They might show up in a different neighborhood. They're very nimble. And they've also learned, let's threaten the economic viability of Hong Kong, right? Like, by going to the airport, we're going to choke off the lifeline here. By showing such chaos, we're going to make this a more difficult business environment and get at the pocketbooks of the Hong Kong establishment in a way that they're thinking, like, how do we get out of this, right? So you've got these two sides that have each taken lessons from recent protest movements and deploying them concurrently, right?

And that manifests itself in a much more resilient protest movement, but yes, an increasingly brutal crackdown, right, an intimidating crackdown. If you're sprayed with blue paint, right, you know something's coming your way. You either are going to get arrested or you're going to go on some list, you know, and nobody knows the outcome. I think in a normal situation, you might try to have people come in and try to negotiate, okay, wait a second, what is, is there any way to try to figure out what one country, two systems means again, you know, Hong Kong in China but has its own system? And are there wise elders, you know, who've been involved in Hong Kong,

Chinese, you know, people who are a part of like Hong Kong's, you know, the movement over into China, who have some credibility, who can talk this out within credibility on both sides? The problem is you have the U.S. not engaged. You have essentially the Chinese have intimidated so many people around the world from addressing anything in their internal affairs that it's really just playing itself out as the Chinese governed versus the protesters. And they're becoming more and more maximalists. The Chinese are putting up with less and less dissent. And the protesters are talking about like independence

and their demands are getting more maximalist. And that really worries me because it's hard to see where this goes other than the kind of protracted back and forth. Yeah, I mean, the only scenario that I can sort of see that makes sense to me is that this just goes on and on and on. And like we've talked about how, you know, Chinese military forces are close by and we're doing drills. Like they probably maybe, I don't know, I shouldn't predict anything. Maybe you just stay shy of that and you let the cops deal with it all the time.

So I think that's what's going to happen. I think that they don't roll in the military, but they get really brutal. They go right up to that line and they try to squelch it. And look, they might work for a time. But I think even if they put this genie back in a bottle, it's going to pop back out. You know, the people of Hong Kong clearly don't like this arrangement. And so I think that like this idea that the Chinese can just make this go away, I don't know. It doesn't feel like that to me, you know.

And I should add like it's going to hurt them in other places. Like Taiwan, the party in power in Taiwan is a party that is not in favor of. essentially getting folded back into China right away. They're not necessarily pro-independence, although they have an element that has been, but the party that's less friendly to China, put it this way, they were really unpopular. Now, since this Hong Kong stuff has happened,

they've gotten more popular. In other words, people in Taiwan are like, oh, shit, that's our future. If we negotiate our reunification with China in the same way that the Hong Kongers did, like we're all going to be in the streets getting beat up in 20 years because we don't like that they're taking away of democracy.

So it's not without risk to the Chinese. Like this stuff does hurt them. And they are more vulnerable than they, I think, appear on the surface as this kind of monolithic, authoritarian entity. They're vulnerable in Hong Kong. They're vulnerable to their international reputation. They're vulnerable to the economic situation in a place like Hong Kong. And, you know, so I think the protesters have punctured something here. The question is, where do they want to take that?

Right. Yeah. I mean, the latest thing I saw was like, I think 10,000 students didn't show. show up to the first day of school. They're so smart and savvy. I mean, they're all communicating on these encrypted apps, which is a reason that all of us should oppose any efforts to let the U.S. government or any other government demand a backdoor into communication tools,

lesson learned. They're catching tear gas bottles, stuffing them into the things of liquid nitrogen and just, like, putting it into a solid form. I mean, they're like, what they're doing with the tools they have to resist a state as massive as China is remarkable. But I don't know, man. It makes me nervous. It makes me nervous, and you're right, because there could be a lot of bloodshed.

I mean, their basic leverage is that they're doing it in a really wealthy city that if the Chinese really went in and just killed thousands of people, that city would never, I think, be the same, you know, and probably wouldn't be, wouldn't exist as this kind of like freewheeling Asian capitalist center, right? And so the Chinese would have to decide to essentially kill something about Hong Kong to just make a point and they may do that, right? Maybe the lesson from Tiananmen Square is you do it and then you can erase history. And you wait it out 20 or 30 years and maybe Hong Kong's back in a different form, right?

I hope that's not what happens here. But I mean, I think, I don't know, like I think that the protesters there are showing, like we talked about Russia and Alexina Volni's anti-corruption movement. And we've talked about Sudan and Algeria. And frankly, in none of these places are the revolutions. succeeding. But there is a sense of people around the world understanding how existential some of the questions are right now between authoritarianism and democracy. And at a certain point, like, pots could start to boil over in multiple places and mass mobilization could spread, you know,

into to Russia or into places that we're not predicting or thinking of. I feel like we haven't heard the last of popular opposition to authoritarianism. It could be Turkey, right? I mean, because just like the authoritarian's gained momentum from watching what they do, I do think that there are people in different parts of the world watching what's happening in Hong Kong and thinking, well, if they can stand up to the Chinese government, we can stand up to whomever. You agreed. All right, let's turn to Afghanistan for a bit. So some big news out of Afghanistan this week. The U.S. negotiator with the Taliban told TOLOLO-TOLO-N news, which is a TV channel over in Kabul. that the U.S. has reached a deal in principle with the Taliban to pull 5,400 troops out of Afghanistan

over the course of about five months. This would all happen after a deal went into effect. That would also mean leaving basically five U.S. bases. And then the rest of the 14,000 U.S. troops who are currently there would come out over a longer period of time. I've seen reports of maybe 14 months floated. This would be the beginning of a longer peace process that would require talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government as well. This news has installed. the violence. There was a horrific suicide bombing right after this news was announced. It killed 16 civilians, wounded 119 others, and the Taliban took credit. It was not ISIS. I don't believe. Ben, this also came as the New York Times reported that White House advisors are pushing a plan

to expand the CIA's presence in Afghanistan. If troops are coming out, that doesn't mean more folks they are collecting intelligence to better understand the government or the people. it means like former Navy SEALs running, yeah, militia forces that can go after terror. So it's sort of just like changing the hats on the people doing the trigger pulling. The Times noted that many officials, including Gina Haspel, the CIA director, are wary of this idea. It feels like a very John Boltony idea. Yeah, Eric Princey. Yeah, no shit.

Blackwater guy. So, you know, you and I have talked a lot about how we think it's time to get out of Afghanistan. But these reports remind me, A, of the risk, but also there's a lot of ways we could say we were fully getting. out and still kind of be half in with some huge CIA presence? Yeah. I mean, first of all, there's a kind of incoherence here because Trump comes in saying he's going to end the wars. And then he's seemingly talked into doing this surge.

Like he sent about 5,000 extra troops into Afghanistan from, you know, Obama had around 10,000. He plused it up by 5,000 because the generals wanted it. And now here we are a couple years later. And keep in mind when he did that, all the pundits were like, now he became president. President, because he sent troops in Afghanistan. Well, what did that accomplish? Like, what did the, like, does it, can anybody verbalize what the two years of the Trump

surge got us in Afghanistan? And so now, the deal seems to involve basically withdrawing back down to the Obama level, because it takes out about, what, 5,500 troops, but they'd still be, like, between 9,000 and 10,000 troops. So we're negotiating a drawdown back to where Trump started that we're saying is going to end the war. that doesn't resolve the question of the rest of the troops. They say that there's some conditions attached to the withdrawal of those troops,

but they don't say what the conditions are. And they say they're going to be talks to the Taliban. But, I mean, it feels like Trump wants to indicate that he's leaving, but not really answer the questions around what that means. Meanwhile, you've had people around Trump for some time who've liked the idea of shifting, like you said, I like the way you said, it's just changing the hat. Because if what you have is a contractor army of like a few thousand people that is somehow tenuously

tying into the U.S. presence, whether that's intelligence or not, like you still have kind of the de facto presence, even though, you know, they're not wearing U.S. uniforms. Such a classic Washington distinction that will convince no one in Afghanistan. Yeah, no. In Afghanistan, it's like, is the U.S. still dropping bombs? Yeah. And are their Westerners still kind of rolling around in armored vehicles and training our security forces and calling the shots, you know? And so to me, it feels like Trump wants

the political benefit of saying he's drawing down before his election. And by the way, we know that's true because Mike Pompeo said that the troop withdrawalists have to come before the election, but they haven't yet answered these questions of what's the diplomatic deal going to be with the Taliban and between the Taliban and the Afghan government. I mean, to me it comes back like we should be focusing a lot more time on just how can we try to hammer something out between the Taliban and the Afghan government that is about their relationship and you know less tied to the nature of our presence I think our presence should draw down for its own sake and for the fact that our presence has not been a net positive at least I would argue in recent years

it has been probably in the grand scheme of things we can you know talk about the removal of Taliban and obviously the status of women and girls has improved in much of Afghanistan and you want to protect some of those gains. But the way to protect those gains is not by staying. It's by trying to negotiate something between the Taliban and the Afghan government about how this place is going to be managed by Afghans. It's going to be the much harder discussion, frankly. It's going to be the much harder discussion, but like I don't subscribe to the view that our troop presence is leveraged in those discussions. I'm also glad Trump has the political space to negotiate this deal. But

It's worth noting that Lindsey Graham, if a Barack Obama or any Democrat were president, would be calling this total capitulation. Oh, yeah. Oh, by the way, some of the people negotiating on behalf of the Taliban are individuals swapped as part of the Bo Bergdbergdahl. Yeah. Exchange. So remind me again how that was the worst thing Barack Obama's ever done. Worst betrayal in history of America. Yeah, I mean, I, and like, that normal diplomacy would be something that you would, and Zalemak, Kalilzad, who's the envoy, you know, is an established diplomatic figure trying to make, you know,

lemonade out of lemons, both because of the Afghan war and because of Trump. But I mean, what you'd want is kind of presidential level engagement, not just with the Afghans, but with like Pakistan and China and all these players, right? It's a complex array of foreign powers. Is there assistance and economic incentives and other things that can try to broker some peaceful stalemate, essentially, where the Taliban doesn't go away, but they don't take over the whole country and the Afghan government's still there, but they're essentially accepting the Taliban's presence in certain places and, you know, potentially there's some capacity to try to protect things like the gains made for, you know, girls going to school. And that's complex diplomacy.

But, you know, right now we're pushing that all into Khalil Zod. And I doubt you're going to get much out of Trump on this. So one other to that point, I mean, there's an amazing story in the Washington Post I wanted to flag about John Bolton. So Trump's National Security Advisor, John Bolton, apparently is being purposely cut out of meetings about these negotiations between the U.S. and the Taliban. The story also said that Khalil Zad, the U.S. negotiator with the Taliban, refused to give Bolton a copy of the draft agreement he was negotiating, which is just remarkable. I imagine Bolton took that really well. The concern, according to sources in this piece, are that Bolton opposes these peace talks and they think his team is leaking details to undercut the process. So, you know, look, I obviously think John Bolton sucks.

I hope he gets cut out of every policy debate ever. But I think any normal national security visor would resign because this is humiliating. And it shows the President of the United States doesn't trust you. Yeah. And I think, you know, I think Bolton has essentially made this deal with the devil. I'm not sure who the devil is in the same metaphor. Yeah. Where essentially he knows that he's going to lose some battles with Trump like North Korea, like, you know, cozing up to Kim Jong-un and probably drawing down from Afghanistan.

But he thinks, you know, as long as I can take a wrecking ball to international arms control treaties, as long as I can mess with Iran, as long as I can mess with Venezuela. Like, if I have total running room on these things I care about, I will stand to be humiliated in these other places. It is notable, you know, there's an interesting history here. The people pop up under Trump from Republican, and his past Republican administrations are interesting, right? Because a lot of mainstream people in the foreign policy side are like these never-Trumpers. Khalil Zad was in the Bush administration as ambassador in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Then Bolton goes to the U.N. Then Khalil Zad went to the U.N. after Bolton.

So those two guys have a history where they probably just hate each other. And literally when Bolton couldn't go back to the U.N. because he was not confirmed by the Senate, Khalil Zab was the guy who was then sent and confirmed by the Senate. So there's all these like subterranean rivalries. that in a normal administration would be getting a lot of attention, but like, nobody cares. No, nobody cares. Let's do a couple of updates out of Israel.

The first is that Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, again said that Israel is planning to annex all Israeli settlements in the West Bank. So he's repeating a previous campaign pledge that is designed, I'm sure, to appeal to right-wing voters in advance of Israel's election on September 17th. Remember, he had to call a new set of elections when he failed the form of government. Just for context, Reuters noted that there's about 400,000 Israelis live. in the West Bank. There's 212,000 Israeli settlers in the East Jerusalem. The Palestinian population in the West Bank is about 2.9 million. So if they annex these settlements, it would end any hope of two-state solution, which frankly is probably the point. It is a huge slap in the face to Jared Kushner and any U.S. peace effort. It's also worthwhile context to note that Bernie Sanders

and Pete Buttigieg have said they would cut or at least or condition U.S. aid to Israel if this kind of annexation occurred. So that's interesting. Regardless, you know, this election's coming up. I think everyone's kind of waiting to see what Trump does to give Netanyahu a boost before people vote. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the settlements are both the population and they're positioned geographically in a way to make it impossible that the Palestinians could have a contiguous piece of land. They essentially slice up the West Bank, right? So if you annex them, you not only like dilute the population there, but you make it impossible for the Palestinian essentially control a piece of land that is whole.

You know, so that's very bad. Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, it's interesting. An Israeli friend of the pod reached out to me after hearing our discussion of the Ilhan Omar, Rashid al-Talib, controversy and said, look, if Beebe gave Trump this, you know, gift of not letting these women in, I'm sure he's going to get something in return. And her point was, you know, look for the promise that Trump makes before the election to boost BB, which she'd probably do anyway, but, you know, maybe even more quid pro quoish after that. And, yeah, maybe acquiescing to the annexation of the West Bank.

I mean, remember, Trump came out before the last BB election that didn't produce a strong enough result for BB, embrace the annexation of the Golan Heights, right? So there's a precedent of Trump embracing essentially Israeli territorial claims before elections to help. BB. So, you know, Trump, you know, embracing the annexation of West Bank or doing something to boost BB before this election is a near certainty, the election coming up on September 17th. And what we've seen is BB, you know, tends to move right further and further right before these elections to stir up the enthusiasm among his base, recognizing that there's a large part of the country that's just not going to vote from anyway, so it's a turnout strategy for him. And also probably trying to demoralize the opposition, thinking it's pointless, we can't stop

this. and the opposition doesn't have a very strong political leader. Yeah. Benny Gantz, he's just not a career politician, right? So I'd watch this space because I think, you know, there's two outcomes here. One is you see this kind of right-word platform for Netanyahu validated by Trump, and if Nanyahu wins it puts the other coalition, like the two-state solution is basically dead or on its, you know, deathbed. Or Bibi loses and, you know, he's frankly in criminal jeopardy and the whole thing is back up in the air. I think that Democrats are right to be considering, I mean, you've seen this campaign

Tommy like I've never seen Democrats take these positions publicly before, including Obama, right? I mean, on conditioning assistance. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's a big deal. And so I think we're in a new world where people are considering, okay, there's been this warning for some time that Israel could become a de facto apartheid state.

The annexation of the West Bank is kind of, you know, the confirmation of that direction. And so what do you do in that scenario? How hard do you go? Right. The other story that caught my eye out of that region is that Hezbollah and the Israeli military have been exchanging artillery fire over the weekend. So I guess Hezbollah fired anti-tank missiles into northern Israel on Sunday. This was in retaliation for an Israeli airstrike in Syria that I guess killed two Hezbollah commanders. In response, the Israelis fired into southern Lebanon.

So according to the Post, the Washington Post, this was the first cross-border exchange of fire since 2006. So that's a big deal. I mean, that's when there was a pretty serious war fought. there have been a bunch of one-off strikes by Israel on Hezbollah targets. The Israelis are seized with preventing more advanced weaponry from getting to Hezbollah from Iran. So they've been hitting targets in Iraq and Syria and other places. So there was a weird story. I don't know if you saw this, Ben, the Israelis, I guess, released fake footage of wounded soldiers

that confuse these Hezbollah guys, so they thought they were successful, but they weren't. Either way, like this kind of underscores the security stakes that we're talking about right now, because it has the potential to escalate very quickly and become dangerous. Yeah. Yeah, I think part of what's interesting is we've seen in recent months, you know, the Israelis have, you know, when we were in office, we got accustomed to them bombing certain targets in Syria where they were preventing weapons transfers to Hezbollah. And so they became comfortable. They would never like announce these things, but everyone kind of knew who did it, right? And it was established what they were, you know, in a weird way, everybody kind of accepted it. Yeah, it made sense. I mean, we certainly accepted it, but even like, in a weird way, even like the Russians, you know, people understood Israel had certain red lines about weapons transfers to Hezbo. If they saw a weapons transfer happening in southern Syria, they'd hit it.

And everyone would kind of like pretend like that didn't happen. And what we see now is that the pace of these Israeli strikes against Iranian interests in different places have picked up. And you've even seen, like, reported Israeli strikes in places like Iraq, you know, against. Iranian-backed militia inside of Iraq, stuff in Lebanon, stuff in Syria. It feels like there's this expansion of this Israeli approach where we're going to start hitting Iranian or Hezboa-related targets just kind of across the Middle East, right? And there were reports that Bolton had gone to Israel in June and potentially kind of green-lighted this approach, you know, that we'd have their back.

And Pompeo's made some statements along those lines. And, you know, the reality of this is Iran and Hezbole are very tit for tat, right? So if you escalate against them, they will escalate back. We've talked about this in context of Trump with the tankers and the shooting down the drone. And so they're going to do things in response. And, you know, lo and behold, it may be that, like, Bolton walked up to the precipice of this war and then Trump blinked at launching the strike. And now there's this whole other thing that could lead to the war, which is that if the Israelis and Hezbole

Iran are in some escalation, chances are the U.S. could get drawn into that, right? Good point. If there's another war between Israel and Hezbo and Lebanon or if there's, you know, skirmishes breaking out, you know. And so, again, I just watch this space. Like this is structural in the sense that, you know, it's one thing for Israel to say we're not going to permit Hezbo to gain certain weapons on Syria. If suddenly Israel's on a kind of campaign of seeking to degrade Iran across the whole region, why, while I might understand their motivations for doing that, the chance that could escalate is very real. Yeah, it will likely lead to a response.

Yeah. Let's talk about North Korea for a minute because that's another flashpoint. So we've talked about how the North Koreans have been firing off missiles pretty repeatedly. This freaks out Japan. It freaks out South Korea for obvious reasons. Trump just again and again and again acts like no big deal because he really only cares about selling these North Korea talks that he's had of some historic event and success. So he'll say things like, this is just standard. short-range rocket tests, it's no big deal. The Japanese think it's a big deal. They think it's a

UN Security Council violation. The New York Times reported that the intelligence community disagrees with Trump's assessment that this is no big deal. They think that Kim's recent tests of these missiles are part of a systematic effort to develop weapons that could help evade or overwhelm our missile defense systems in the region. The Times also reported that defense intelligence agency or DIA believes that North Korea has produced enough fuel for a dozen new nuclear weapons since the Singapore summit, that is a lot. Meanwhile, you know, the diplomacy itself is dead in the water. The North Koreans are back to attacking Pompeo and calling him toxic or whatever the recent

thing was. So, again, like, we all wanted to give diplomacy a chance. Yeah, yeah. But at what point does the world wake up to the fact that things are potentially a lot worse? I mean, this policy is an unmitigated disaster. We can't stress that enough. Like, it's just gotten much, much worse since the Singapore summit.

Like, more nuclear weapons advances in their technology. And remember the first time there was like a weapons test, every said, well, maybe Kim is just trying to show, no, no, it seems like they're up to something here. The pace of these tests suggests that they're seeking to refine their technologies. And yeah, maybe it's to overwhelm our missile defense systems. But clearly what they are doing is advancing both their nuclear weapons and missile programs. And the purpose of the diplomacy was supposed to stop that.

They may be seeking to advance it, advance it, and then make some hollow pledge to Trump knowing that he can, he'll take anything and sell it, right? I mean, so what I'd be wary of here is that the North Koreans are just going ahead, building nuclear weapons and missiles, and then later this year they'll promise to do something. Trump will say he should get the Nobel Peace Prize. Everything will be worse and still getting worse, right? I'd be very wary of that.

I also think that the calculation for Japan and South Korea is they're so afraid of the alternative of Trump being back in a some showdown with Kim. Fire and Fury mode. Yeah, they know this is bad, but it's better than that. better than like a potential war that kills hundreds of thousands of people in the Korean Peninsula. And so they're just like everybody else on a lot of these issues, they're just kind of weighed out the election. Yeah.

You know? And by the way, the election goes against Trump, whoever comes in will inherit a much, much worse North Korea program than even Trump did. And I'll be the first general. So Trump inherited a mess, right? But it's getting much worse, you know? And so I think we're in a dangerous status quo where the most likely outcome is still the North Koreans with their beautiful love letters keep Trump on some.

while the actual reality is they're just rapidly advancing their nuclear weapons program. Yeah. Speaking of nuclear diplomacy going sideways, things with Iran are getting kind of confusing. So on Monday, the Iranians warned that they were going to take a big step away from the JCPOA, the Iran deal, if they weren't offered a new way to sell crude oil. I think that basically means they would resume enrichment at a higher level of nuclear materials. Then on Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the French might be offered. offering the Iranians essentially a $15 billion bailout to help their economy, which has been hurt

by our sanctions regime in an effort to keep them in the deal. So this was very late breaking before we walked in here. We don't know all the details. But it does come after French president, Emmanuel Macron, had the Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif show up at the G7 meeting last week in what seemed like a surprise to Trump. So I don't know, Ben. I mean, this, if the entire U.S. policy is quote-unquote maximum pressure and the French, of all people, offer them a 15 billion dollar deal, that completely undercuts your policy. I would kind of personally support what the French are doing here, but the White House can't be pleased.

No, and here's what's happening is that the sanctions relief that the Iranians were owed under the Iran deal were in some of these sanctions imposed on their oil and banking sector, right? And so they're rightly, I'm not a fan of the Iranian regime, but their grievance has always been the U.S. violated this deal when we hadn't. We were complying with the deal. Then the U.S. reimpose these sanctions. So we need some way to make up this revenue that the U.S. is denying us, right?

What's interesting is the French have tried different formulations, all of which seem to be, let's try to find other ways to get the Iranians as revenue. But if it's not exactly the same as Iran deal, maybe Trump won't think it's Obama's a Rand deal. So they're basically trying to figure out what's a different, it's the same formula. The Iranians get some revenue in exchange for them accepting nuclear constraints. we can just tell Trump it's different than Obama's deal, right? And so first you saw reports out of the D7 of them wanting to kind of put like, you know, credit behind loans it could be made to the Iranians and now this kind of French bailout. I think what this shows is everybody knows either there's going to be something like the Iran deal where the Iranians have access to some of the revenue of their oil sales in exchange for constraints on their nuclear program or there's not.

And the Iranians are going to escalate their nuclear program and there's going to be this risk of conflict. and there's no other way here. There's no magic bullet of pressure that is going to make the Iranians capitulate here, right? It shows that the world doesn't think that the American strategy will work. They're just sanctioning them will get them to concede. And so, you know, I think this sounds like the French

trying to bridge our election again. Like everybody's just trying to like make it another 14 months here to see what happens. If Trump wins, then it's like, okay, we've got to deal with it. If you loses, then they can think, okay, now we can go back to something like the Iran Dill. And so it feels like the French inserting themselves, I think productively as the diplomatic player here is just going to try to keep things from going

off the rails for the next year. Yeah. So the other really weird Iran news that happened while I was gone was the Iranians tempted to launch what they call the satellite. Often countries do sort of space exploration operations and call it peaceful. It's all under the guise of developing and missile technology that can go further and further. So the Iranians tried to launch this, we'll call it a satellite. it blew up on the launch center. Trump tweets, the United States of America

was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safier SLV launch at Senman launch site 1 in Iran. I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at site one.

It is accompanied by what is clearly a classified U.S. intelligence community satellite image of this site, which is orders of magnitude more detailed than anything commercially available.

And you all also can see that they just blacked out the little classification header on the top left. And like, you can see some bozo's head who just took a fucking cell phone picture of something that was probably in the PDB. Yeah. Yes. That's all true. What? I mean, first of all, that's the best punctuation on a Trump tweet, too, that I've ever seen, right? So like, he didn't just write that. You know, like, did down, you think down Trump just like, so here's some theories. So let's start with what we know. We know that that was a classified image. It's obvious, right?

We know that this was some kind of sciop. And he admitted it, right? He can declassify whatever he wants. He's right, sure. And so it was clearly like, here's my theory, is this ties to Bolton, right? We know like Bolton likes these siops. Remember in Venezuela when he was like, we have the intel about all these people wanted to defect from Maduro?

I think either the U.S. did a cyber, and I don't know anything, I'm not revealing anything because I don't know anything, right? But either we had a cyber attack that disabled this launch. and this is Trump showing them like, hey, look, or we didn't, but we want them to think maybe we did, right? And so this, we're going to be so clever and rub this in their faces. But what's the outcome of it? Like, number one, everybody's just like, this is so fucking crazy. This guy just tweeted a classified image.

Number two, again, taunting the Iranians doesn't work, right? I mean, like, it's guaranteed that they'll now do something in response. You know, like, we've seen that again and again that's tit for tat with the Iranians, like, you know, invites them to do something. And here we are in this juvenile brinksmanship that, unfortunately, a lot of lies are at stake because of the people are in charge of the U.S. and Iran right now. I don't know what the benefit it is because, like, okay, let's say hypothetically we did disable this missile. Like, why would you want them to know that? You want to be able to do it again. You want to be able to do it again.

That's a bell deal. I don't, I just, there's no part of me that can see what, what's smart about this, right? Does he, is he embarrassed that they shot down our drone and he didn't bomb them? So now he's like, winking at his hard, you know, supporters saying like, oh, see, I really did get back at the Iranians. I like, stopped this launch, you know. To me, like, it doesn't serve any point. And it's actually kind of astonishing that, I know he says a lot, but that that was like a two-day story. I know.

Like the President of the United States tweeted like a highly classified image from the PDB about potentially. potentially having a cyber attack against the Iranians. And it's like, whoa, isn't that crazy Trump tweeted something? And then, like, that was that. Yeah. And, you know, for all the times, again, Republicans attacked the Obama administration for allegedly releasing classified information when we didn't. Oh, my.

Well, what about the Hillary Clinton's email server? Yeah, exactly. The stuff in Hillary Clinton's email server that was supposedly classified, I think, was like she referenced that she talked to a foreign leader or like a public report about a drone strike. This is like literally the most sensitive image you could have in the U.S. government that morning. Demonstrating the capabilities of some classified satellite.

Yeah. But her emails. You know, like I don't, that's, where's Lindsay Graham on this one? I don't know. Like, you know, friend of the pod, Lindsay Graham, like, devoted to the protection of classified information, willing to spend years investigating Benghazi and Hillary's server over this. And this bozo is tweeting out. Yeah.

Like, I mean, I don't even know what I can say here, but like, like, hypothetically, like, I know what it's like to get stuff like that. And I wasn't allowed to take that. that like out of the building. No. Like like like you weren't even supposed to have a phone in the room. I mean this is for the listeners like we used to call these skiffs secure compartmented information facilities.

That's a fancy way of saying a room where you look at secret shit and you're not allowed to bring your phone in because someone might hack into your phone and take a picture of the image or record the conversation. So not only did they violate it, they took the phone and took a picture of it. Is that phone classified? because now, like, I've got pictures of my kids on my phone. Is Trump scroll through his phone and he's got a bunch of, like, pictures of classified stuff that he might want to tweet one day? Yeah.

Look, and there's a lot of, like, debate online, like, oh, he just destroyed our ability to collect with a satellite. No, he didn't. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying it's, like, the Iranians know we have satellites. Everyone knows who satellites. They probably have a pretty decent sense of how good the resolution is. It is still wild. It shows them, though, like, you know, they learn from everything, right?

So they do want to know, like, exactly what we can see. how the boxes and the descriptors that were on that, like, what are we interested in? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like, what are we tracking? So, yes, I don't think he busted some method. And this is why actually I always, like, didn't like the, I think sources and methods gets overused because people know our sources. Right.

They know we try to listen to conversations. They know we try to, like, have satellites to look at things. But it does, you know, tell them something. But it also just shows what bullshit their whole, like, protect classified information argument was against Hillary and Obama for so many. Also, the image added nothing. Like, he could have tweeted the same thing without an image and it would have been fine. It was just, or you could have zoomed out on the image itself and made it, whatever.

And the sci-up didn't accomplish anything. Better for them to not know that we have some cyber capability if we do. Children. Let's talk about General Mattis for a second, Trump's former Secretary of Defense. So he started doing interviews to promote a new book he wrote. So Jeffrey Goldberg, who's a friend of the show, a friend of both of ours, the editor-chief over the Atlantic. He got the first interview or several interviews about this book. So it's about leadership, the book itself, in Mattis' time at the Pentagon.

But Jeff's story for The Atlantic really, can I just go ahead. I mean, like, this fucking manual where it's like, I'm going to write a book about lessons and leadership. If you don't think that's to set up a corporate speaking tour, you know what I mean? Like, how many of these books do they need to be? There's a lot of books about leadership that have been written, including many by other predecessors. But so the story in the Atlantic in Jeffrey Goldberg's interview with Mattis really focused on

his frustration that Mattis wouldn't directly answer. the question, do you think Trump is unfit for command? And when he pressed him, he got answered from that as like, do you know the French concept of de voir de Reservé, he asked, like the duty of silence. If you leave the administration, you owe some silence. So look, without us making this personal, it does appear that the book takes all kinds of shots at Obama over Afghanistan, Iran, Syria. And it is kind of remarkable that, you know, when you have the chance to still, I don't know, impact policy or tell the world about a course correction that needs to happen from within the White House and the national security decision-making process, Mattis hides behind this French

phrase. I mean, we know that this White House is dysfunctional. We know the national security team is dysfunctional. All the things that the Pentagon needs to complain about, about, you know, tightly done decision-making at the NSA or them getting cut out are happening over and over again in the Trump administration. But like, just declining to speak honestly about that, I don't think that's particularly noble. Let's dispense with the hagiography of Jim Mattis here for a moment. Like, this man, just like Kelly, just like McMaster, validated, legitimized and participated in the Trump administration in senior positions. That's defining of them. Jim Mattis did not resign when he was ordered to send troops to the southern border before the midterm elections in a clear

political stunt. Jim Mattis actually even said, I don't do political stunts, lending his own credibility to Donald Trump's effort to divide this country, put kids in cages, and have a boost in right-wing turnout before the mid-term elections. Jim Manus

had no problem with Donald Trump saying there are good people on both sides of Charlottesville when there were Nazis on one of those sides. Jim Manus had no problem with Donald Trump pulling out of the Iran deal over the advice of Jim Mattis. Jim Manus Jim Mattis had no problem with Donald Trump cozing up to Kim Youngun.

Frankly, the only thing, or Putin, or, let's not even, banning Muslims from the country. Or banning Muslims to the country, right? So Jim Mattis, this pillar of the American establishment, was okay with the kids in cages, with the coddling dictators, with the Russian intervention in our election, okay with all that. The thing that he said broke the camel's back that he could not tolerate was the possibility that we might withdraw troops from Syria. That's what really got Jim Mattis to cross that threshold and resign and write an opaque letter that doesn't take any direct shots at Trump but kind of sub-tweets him on allies. And he can be feted all over Washington for being such an honest man when he won't even say what he actually thinks about Donald Trump.

And now here we are, right, a year later, and he's cashing it in with his leadership book that he's going to take on the road to corporate America to get six-figure speaking fees. lo and behold, he can offer all kinds of opinions about the former commander-in-chief if the former commander-in-chief is named Barack Obama and not Donald Trump. So we have all the old greatest hits, right? We shouldn't have ended the war in Iraq. We should have had more of a commitment, more troops in Afghanistan. The theory of everything is that if Barack Obama had only bombed Syria and none of these bad things would have happened anywhere after it, right?

Like he has no problem making those arguments. Is some of this because I take it personally? Sure. But I think any objective observer can look at this idea of that. this man saying, like, I don't speak ill of the commander chief and say that's utter bullshit. You don't say ill of your Republican commander chief. And if you're going to tell me that's because he's sitting, sitting president, Trump is a sitting president. He criticized Obama when Obama was a sitting president, right? So don't give me this. Before 2017, he was more than

willing to speak out. Everybody knew how he felt about Obama the last few years of the Obama years. So like, to me, this is a cautionary tale about the media, the hagiography of these generals, of anybody who appears, like, remotely, slightly uncomfortable with Trump, like, saying that, call me when Jim Ennis is willing to actually call out the racism and nihilism and destructiveness of the administration instead of just making, like, oblique comments in quoting them in French to Jeff Goldberg. So, yeah, so this got written up as like a parting shot at Obama, one of the quotes in the book. Acting strategically requires that political leaders make clear what they will stand for and what they will not stand for.

We must mean what we say to both allies and foes, no more false stuff. threats are failing to live up to our word. I mean, if that's like your big maxim, you could apply that to Trump saying he was going to retaliate to the Iranian shooting down our drone. I mean, there's a million different ways. It's completely exasperating. I mean, there's even a point in this book, you know, that really gets me where he says, it is frustrating to listen to any leader blame his predecessor, especially a political leader regarding a situation that he knew existed when he ran for office. Mattis says, referring to Obama's disdain for Bush. So it's not okay to criticize the Iraq war.

Well, so wait, so, but you're, you are saying that Barack Obama's example of a president who criticize his predecessor, you went to work for Donald Trump, whose entire foreign policy has been an effort to criticize Barack Obama. Like, you, you, I don't even know what to do with this. It's such a heaping pile of bullshit, right? That will be welcomed in like, you know, in cable news bookings and, and this gets a broad point of the American establishment, the American establishment, right, that is allegedly so hostile to Donald Trump, the Republican Party, the American business community, this general class of

the American military, like, I haven't really seen the, if any one of these people really broke from Trump, that would be a problem. And they're not doing it, right? The Republicans haven't done it, American business leaders haven't done it. And this general class, people like McMaster and Kelly and Mattis, who could really blow the whistle on Trump and have the goods. I'm sure Jim Mattis has seen Donald Trump do some crazy stuff. He could go. go out and say, here's what I saw. And that would actually be really impactful. It would be impactful in the election, too. But, you know, he's not willing to go there, but he's willing to go there for Barack Obama. Yep. It is hypocrites. You leave it to yourself to make the judgment why that is.

Yeah. Let's conclude with some talk about the VP. So the vice president's in Europe right now. He's staying three hours away from where his meetings actually are so that he can help Trump make money by staying at a Trump property. So that's disgusting. And he can like score some brownie points by calling Trump saying, oh, what a wonderful golf course. Sir, whoa, amazing chicken fingers. So Trump skipped this trip to Europe. He was supposed to go and commemorate World War II the 80th anniversary, but he said he needed to monitor the hurricane.

Instead, he just played golf. But a reporter asked him while he was here in the U.S. If he had a message for Poland to commemorate the 80th anniversary of World War II, let's take a lesson to what he had to say. But I just want to congratulate Poland. It's a great country with great people. We also have many Polish people in our country. It could be 8 million.

We love our Polish friends. And I will be there soon. So Trump's message to Poland is, congrats on being invaded and slaughtered by the Nazis. Yeah, the millions of Poles who were killed. Unbelievable. It is the anniversary of the most catastrophic event in history of Poland. And very frankly, the start of World War II in bringing in the UK and France,

the Holocaust, you know, many of the death camps, who were in Poland. Congratulations, guys. Happy anniversary. Way to be. And can I just say something about these trips, too? It's interesting, like,

I think he just doesn't like to go on trips. No, yeah. So like, Denmark, right, he wanted out of that trip, so he has like a fight over Greenland. Poland, it's like, oh, I'll take the hurricane out.

Unless it's like a summit in which he like has to go, he just doesn't travel. Especially in the trips aren't about him. I mean, remember he skipped that, I think it was World War II or just maybe a commemoration of all fallen U.

U.S. World War I in France, right? He just refused to drive. He said it was raining. He was raining. He wouldn't, you know. So, I mean, I think, like, what is it about these trips that are so difficult for Trump? And this is another thing to think about, like, is this just that he's such a narcissist that he, like, doesn't want to be bothered to go to a country for two, three days?

That's, you know, could be it. Or, like, is this guy, like, just not as physically up to it, you know, or mentally up to it, to go through the motions of a foreign trip? Because, like, a foreign trip, you have a sketch. schedule, you know? Like you, you wake up at 9, you do a ceremony, you go somewhere, you do a meeting, you do a breast event, it's grueling. And Trump never does that at home, right? And so like... He watches Fox and Friends until 11 a.m. and tweets from the toilet. Could Donald, I mean, this is actually an interesting question. It has been all this focused on Biden's

age. Like, can Donald Trump work like a 10-hour day? No way. Yeah, which is kind of interesting. Unless you think working is media monitoring and tweeting. Yeah, well, no, because I don't count that, right? So, like, can anybody find an example of him, I mean, I mean, I guess the summits are the only time. Like, he goes, you know, to the G7 and has to kind of sit in rooms all day. And he clearly hates that, right? And so part of me wonders just, like, what is his capacity to execute a schedule on a farm trip? Diminishing.

Yeah. That's it for our show today. I was obviously gone last week. And so we went without a guest this week, but we will remedy that next week. Yeah, a lot of people talk to out there. A lot going on. Thank you all for listening, Ben. No, and thanks, world those for your questions from last week.

Yeah, it was a fun mailback. It was good. So anyway, talk to you guys soon. See ya. POTSate the World is a product of crooked media. The show is produced by Michael Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Seiglin is our sound engineer.

Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Mokone, and Milo Kim, who film and share these interviews on video each week.