Pod Save the World - Keeping Up With the Korruption in Kazakhstan

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

Tommy and Ben talk through a week that includes US and Iranian airstrikes, a peace agreement, a Supreme Court double-header, and the French debate about air conditioning.First up, Israel and Lebanon have signed a 14-point peace agreement in Washington, but people on both sides question whether the deal will ever be implemented, and some in Lebanon fear that it could actually be a recipe for civil war. Meanwhile, the US ceasefire with Iran has produced a week of airstrikes and fighting over what was actually agreed to. Then a brazen new example of corruption combines a mining deal with Kazakhstan, the sons of both President Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and $1.6 billion in federal funding. Then the guys dig into how Supreme Court rulings on the preservation of birthright citizenship and the gutting of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians will impact American foreign policy. They also cover the devastating earthquakes in Venezuela and the impact on the interim government, the debate within France over air conditioning while Europe bakes under a historic heat wave, and the most devastating World Cup losses so far this tournament. Then Tommy speaks to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof about Elon Musk’s brazen lie that “nobody died” as the result of Musk and DOGE “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”For Friends of the Pod, the boys answer listener questions about how live audiences influence political speeches. They also recount some of their tougher culinary experiences while on diplomatic clock.Buy Ben’s book All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches  and subscribe to his Substack here. For a transcript of this episode of Pod Save the World, please email [e-mail]

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We're going to reveal where later in the show. This is how we make you stick around until the very end. But it's one of our, I think we have one more remote. How many we guys? This is it. This is it. Next time I'm on with you, I will be sitting across the table from you. I'll be very happy to be there.

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There we go, Woldoz. That's directly because of you guys, because you bought the book. You recommended the book. It is. It is really because of you guys. Good people. So keep showing up. We've got a great show for you guys.

We're going to talk about the agreement signed between the Lebanese government and Israel and what it means for the fight against Hezbollah and hopes for peace on the sort of Lebanon front of the U.S. Iran-Israel war. Then we're going to recap the latest fighting between the U.S. and Iran and then today's peace talks in Doha to the extent that we know it happened yet. We are going to fill you in on the latest shocking report about the Trump family's corruption this time via Kazakhstan. exactly where I'd expect, frankly, for this kind of corruption. Yes. We'll talk about some Supreme Court decisions that will greatly impact U.S. foreign policy, the devastating earthquake that hit Venezuela and the potential political fallout. Then we're going to cover this pitched, like cultural, existential, political battle in France about air conditioning.

That, by the way, also is about people dying because it's so hot over there. And then we're going to do some more World Cup fund, including the Easter egg. we talked about at the top about where Ben is and how that World Cup result is affecting his trip. So I think you might want to hunker down for a little bit, buddy. And then you're going to hear my conversation with Nicholas Christoph from the New York Times, where we talk about, Ben, I'm sure you've seen this too. Elon Musk's, like insane claims that USAID's destruction, the doging of USAID didn't lead to a single death. cutting off AIDS drugs from countless people, no death, not funding malaria nets for babies,

no deaths. Everything's just totally fine. Yeah, big balls knew exactly what he's doing. Yeah, Mr. Balls was all over it. So I talked to Nick about a couple things. First of all, he went to South Sudan recently. He's been to Uganda. He's been to a bunch of places that were directly impacted by USAID cuts.

He met caregivers that cared for children that died. He met caregivers who themselves were going. to die because their access to AIDS drugs, for example, we're about to be cut off. We also talk about kind of the big picture projections about the impact of the USAID cuts. And then we end the interview with a question about his reporting on allegations of like systematic rape of Palestinians in Israeli prisons and other places. So an important interview. And, you know, what I think we want to do out of this, Ben, is take that conversation with

Christoph, try to cut it down into like the tightest social media. video we can for Instagram and Twitter or wherever else and just use it to rebut these claims from Musk because this is like the most 1984 shit I have ever seen in my life and he just cannot get away with this. It's bad enough what he did, but to try to evade responsibility by essentially, you know, gaslighting people, just lying. It just cannot be allowed to stand. We have to kind of keep reminding people of the consequence of what he's doing. And just because he bought a social media platform doesn't mean he gets to control what's true and what's false. Yeah, it's, it's truly disgusting. And it clearly bothers him that people are stating what happened and that reporters like Nick

Christoph and Atul Gawande and many others are reporting on the impact of his decision to, quote, feed USAID into the woodchipper. That was what he tweeted. Could have gone to some great parties, decided to spend the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper. He bragged about this shit. So he will have to own it going forward. And we're going to help him with that. And by the way, if you want to support a news organization that will gladly call up, on Musk for killing people via one of his, you know, ketamine-fueled rage moments. What I don't even want to call it the destruction of USAID and with Doge. Please consider becoming a friend of the pod subscriber.

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All right, Ben. So it's been kind of confusing and unsettling week of news when it comes to this fragile piece between the U.S. and Iran. So over the weekend, the U.S. and the Iranian military is the exchange fire several times. And then there was this flurry of diplomatic activity last week regarding Lebanon. So let's start there. On Friday, Israeli and Lebanese officials signed this 14-point agreement at a ceremony in Washington. The goal of the agreement is basically to create a pathway for the Lebanese armed forces and the government of Lebanon to take control of their own country and for Israel to withdraw from it, although the timeframe is not stipulated.

And I think the word withdraw is not in this agreement. But the gist of the way this thing would work, it proposes a phased approach. Lebanese forces take control of these two pilot zones first. LeBazon pledges to reject any security role for Hezbole and Lebanon going. forward. They commit to preventing Hezbollah from getting funding or support. And then Israeli troops are supposed to withdraw from like two pilot zones to start the process of transferring security control with the ultimate goal of having the idea of fully withdraw. The agreement calls on the U.S. and Arab countries to help support the deal so forth. That means like $100 million in humanitarian aid

from the U.S. And like the State Department said, the Pentagon is ready to provide another $30 million to the Lebanese military and like direct military support. Now, this all kind of sounds fine in theory, Ben, but I think there's more than a few reasons to be skeptical that the plan will ever work. First of all, Hezbollah is not a party to a peace agreement that involves Hezbollah. That's a problem. They have responded about as well as you'd expect to the prospect of losing their power. There was also pushback in skepticism in Israel. That starts on the far right.

Israeli national security minister, It's Mara Ben-Govir called the deal, quote, A historic mistake, a terrible missed opportunity and a lament for generations. Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Net Yahoo and his own team, they also didn't sound all that bullish on the agreement working defense minister Israel Katz said, quote, people should not hold their breath wondering where the next place will be from which Israel will withdraw from Lebanon because it will not happen until Hezbo is disarmed. We have no territorial ambitions in Lebanon, but until Hezbollah is disarmed, we will not not withdraw a millimeter. Then there was a bunch of backlash in Lebanon where you had a bunch of senior officials, some of them with ties to Hezbollah, some of them not,

criticizing the deal. One called it a humiliation. There was the suggestion that it would force the Lebanese military to confront Hezbollah on the battlefield and lead to a civil war. It could legitimize Israel's occupation of Lebanon for many years to come. That's another concern. There's also concern that some of the terms of the deal could prevent efforts to prosecute war crimes in the future or like accountability. So this is a deal separate from the MOU that reopened the Strait of Hamos. It's the result of a bunch of weeks of talks between Israeli and Lebanese officials at U.S. pressure. So, Ben, the fighting has not stopped. On Sunday, Hezbollah killed an IDF soldier. The Israelis have been conducting a bunch of airstrikes.

What did you make of this agreement, the U.S. role in pushing for it, and some of the very strong responses you're seeing that it could actually lead to civil war, not peace? It doesn't feel like a deal that's actually going to solve the problem, if you define the problem as Hezboa needs to disarm and Israel needs to withdraw from Lebanon. It feels like a deal that's designed to be a fig leaf to facilitate the, you know, U.S. Iran MOU to go forward because at the end of the day, the only deal that could lead to some form of disarming Hizbollah is between Hizbollah and the Lebanese government. You fundamentally can't have a deal that, you know, whatever you think of Hizbala, this is not even in any way a favorable statement

about them. But like if they're not a party to the agreement, well, sure, the Lebanese government and the Lebanese armed forces is willing to sign a piece of paper saying that Hizbala needs to disarm but that's not going to get you there. And so I think where it's going to leave you is you may have this kind of veneer of diplomacy that gives people enough face-saving to move forward with, you know, moving the MOU between Iran and the U.S. forward, right? Because the U.S. can tell Israel, look, we're getting, you know, Hizbullah disarmed and the U.S. can say Iran see, like, you know, Israel's pulling back from these parts of Lebanon

and hopefully he's not bombing, you know, Beirut anymore. And so we can move forward with our deal. But this is like we've seen this time and again in the Trump diplomacy. They don't solve underlying problems. They kind of paper over them, have big ceremonies and lavish signing ceremonies, announce things, and you don't solve the problem. And the problem is this will fester. Like Israel will continue to occupy parts of southern Lebanon.

Hezbo will continue to be armed. They live in southern Lebanon. And I see this thing flaring up time and again. And if Israeli politics is also pushing from the right, then Bibi Neniao has an incentive to occasionally bomb Lebanon to show that he's not going to be bound by a piece of paper either. So I guess it's better than not having it, but it's not in any way solving the problem. Yeah, and like the problem has been really bad. I mean, 4,000 people have died in Lebanon since the March 2nd war started.

To the extent there was a ceasefire in Iran itself, there just was not one in any way in Lebanon. And so the people have really suffered there. Like I mentioned at the top of the bend, so the 60 days. a ceasefire deal between the U.S. and Israel. It's been light on ceasing, heavy on firing. So last week, there was a bunch of activity. Iran fired an attack drone at a tanker because it was using a route out of the Strait of Hormuz that was closer to the coast of Oman than to the coast of Iran. And Iran has said that they want only ships going in and out of the Strait of Hormuz via their pre-approved route. Only those ones will be insured safe passage. So they fire this drone at a ship.

Then on Friday, the U.S. retaliates by hitting Iranian missile and drone sites. On Saturday, Iran attacked another tanker. So the U.S. military retaliated again, hitting Iranian military infrastructure. And then, of course, Trump has to pop off on social media. He said that the U.S. and Iran may have to go back to war. And, quote, if that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist. So we're back to the kind of genocidal threats. Then on Sunday, the RGC fired at Bahrain and Kuwait, where the U.S. has troops.

those missiles were intercepted by missile defense systems, but one damaged residential building in Bahrain. And there's reports that a Qatari National was killed by falling shrapnel. On Monday, Trump tried to put a lid on the thing, at least temporarily. He tweeted that the U.S. and Iran would meet in Doha on Tuesday the day we're recording. It's always funny, Ben, to me, how all the fighting happens on the weekends when markets are closed. Yeah, convenient. Steve Wickoff, Jared Kushner, Trump's golf buddy, and his son-in-law, they were dispatched for the talk. Here's Trump talking earlier this week about what he expects from these Doha talks.

But the meeting in Doha is going to be perhaps important, perhaps not. We're going to find out. But we're winning militarily. It's almost won militarily, I would say. Seems bullish. So for what it's worth, the Iranians basically said that they're not going to meet with Kushner and they're not going to meet with Wickhoff while they're there. They're saying that the sole reason they're going to Doha is to talk about the $6 billion in Iranian assets they want unfrozen.

I believe this is money that was promised to Iran in 2023 as part of this Biden-era hostage-release deal that was then frozen after the October 7th attacks. So, Ben, we don't know how the talks went yet. I think my concern as an outside observer is that Iran is just trying to constantly normalize this new normal where they control the Strait of Hamuz. They tell ships where they can go. they fire out the ones who don't do what they're told and they'll demand fees in the future. And they just assume that Trump, as we saw in that clip, is ready to move on and just want to be done with it all. I think that's exactly right.

I think the thing that the Iranians have showed is their priority is that they control the strait of Hormuz, that they've not only demonstrated that they can shut it down as a deterrent against future U.S. military action against them, right? Who needs a nuclear weapon when you can control 20% of the world's energy? but they intend to profit off the straight. There's no question about that. They want to control the route the ships take. They can put some kind of fee on it.

They can call it an insurance fee. They can call whatever they want. But if they can establish that they can make money off the straight-of-hormoos, they have a whole new revenue source in an open-ended way for many years to come. And that clearly is worth more to them than even just some temporary sanctions relief, right, that they're getting from this deal. And the thing that's so interesting to be beyond just the market, nature of it all, right? The wars happen on the weekends and not during the week, is that Trump's

threats, I mean, look, I'm glad he's not acting on them. I don't want him to try to end a civilization or end a country. But the Iranians clearly don't believe them. No. Nobody does anymore. Whatever happened to red lines, you know, and I think what the Iranians understand is that those true social posts are no longer even intended for Iran. It's just kind of intended for Trump's dumbest base, you know, the same people that believe that we somehow have won militarily or that we've destroyed Iran's military capabilities, which, oh, by the way, we have to periodically keep bombing because they're still there. Trump is just issuing these posts just for his own dead enders, you know, to throw a sop to Ben Shapiro and, you know, Mark 11 or whomever, you know. And so I think

we're in this state where clearly they want a deal of some sort, but the Iranians are signaling, I mean, to watch what they do as well as what they say. They're signaling, controlling the straight is our top priority. It's even more important than this deal. And even if this deal goes forward, we want to enter into the deal, making it very clear that we're still going to control the straight. Even if we allow traffic to pass through there again, it's our decision to allow it. And Trump can try all he wants to make it look like, no, it's not.

We're forcing them to open the straight because we just bombed a few missile sites. but that's not what the rest of the world is seeing. The rest of the world is seeing the Iranians are the one to decide whether or not the tankers get through. Yeah, and just on this, you know, Trump claiming were defeated them militarily. I mean, Jennifer Griffin at Fox News asked a defense official why they had to bomb and restrike these sites because I guess we'd hit them before. And she was told that Iran had reconstituted its air defenses and its missile systems along the Strait of Hormuz since the ceasefire.

And now that's why we're having to hit them again. So clearly this, clearly they have lots of reserves and they're going to be able to to rebuild their missile defense infrastructure and have enough missiles and drones to be positioned in a way that they can close the strait. And then one other interesting thing, Ben, I mean, so the weekend's events, I think they demonstrate how fragile the ceasefire deal such as it is, is and continues to be. The good news on that front is that the tanker traffic through the strait is way up week over week.

But it's still only about 70% of what it was before the war started, according to the Kepler data. and we're always just kind of like one drone, you know, one Iranian one-way attack drone or missile away from the thing being closed again for God knows how long. But one interesting question I've had then is why didn't the oil, the price of oil go up further? Because, you know, you and I were reading the same energy experts who were predicting like $150 per barrel oil. And those people were very wrong. And I think Politico took an interesting crack of this question. And they ended up essentially pinning it on a couple factors. Like one was a weaker than expected Chinese economy.

And then China cut oil imports by about three million barrels a day. So that took a lot of demand offline and helped sort of even things out. And then they just noted like Trump's ability to bully the oil markets and mess with oil features. And, you know, convince those, you know, oil analysts to just never like fully price in the worst like kind of downside risk case. Because I guess they all assumed that Trump would taco as we were just talking about there. And then you had countries trapping their strategic reserves. at a greater level than expected. And I guess more tankers were just kind of willing to sneak through the straight,

even despite the risk of getting fired at than we'd expected. So, you know, now that the deal's in place, Iran's been able to flood the market with oil because the U.S. gave them that sanctions relief. But it was, I thought, an interesting attempt to kind of close the loop on why those worst-case scenarios in terms of price never quite came to be. I thought that was good. Actually, both of those articles you point to, the Jennifer Griffin report, and we should say, for a Fox News reporter, she's often been like a very good reporter and a pretty straight reporter.

It's really important because this war was clearly a catastrophic mistake. The best thing that anybody could try to spin about it, and I've seen some of the war's defenders spin this as well, you know, maybe we didn't achieve all these objectives and the regime's still in place and they still have a nuclear program, but we really set back their military capabilities. And I think what that report shows is we didn't. because even if we destroyed things, they rebuilt those things pretty quickly. You know, they're going to be back to their status quo ante of their ballistic missile capabilities or drone capabilities within like weeks, maybe months of this kind of pointless tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds of billions of dollars war, right? And so it kind of speaks to kind of the futility of military action to achieve your objectives

because, you know, your adversary can just rebuild. It is the case, though, that in addition to higher prices, I mean, we all know, know there are higher prices like Americans paid them, the shortages around the world have been very real. Yeah. And so part of the reason that the prices didn't go up more is because there was intense rationing of energy, right? You had people staying home.

You had power grids operating at less than what they normally would. You had shortages in other areas of things that went through the straight as well. We're going to probably have a tale of agricultural impacts because of the shortages of things like fertilizer as well. So all of this effort was put into kind of mitigating what was a shitty situation and just preventing it from being an even shittier situation. I also think we were clearly approaching the danger zone. And part of the reason that Trump is tacoing so hard on this deal is that he knew that another couple months of this thing. And you would have that spiral. But last thing I just say, Tommy, is like, I'm not a investor. You know, there's a pyramid scheme feel to the

markets these days in general. Oh, God, yeah. I mean, just look at the AI bubble. It's just speculating. It's such speculation. It's just trading in futures and putting the most optimistic spin on things. And a lot of it's levered. A lot of it's levered, too. You have people taking out loans to invest in stuff. And a lot of, you know, a lot of times they're investing in these like, they're like called triple bull, like directional funds that are using levered accounts to bet even more. I'm trying to explain this without being too wonky, but basically a lot of people are borrowing money to bet on the stock market in ways that creates a lot of systemic risk. Yeah, and again, unfortunately, I think we're probably going to be talking about this at some

point in the coming months. This whole thing just feels like a bit of a house of cards. It feels like we're living in an economy that's kind of a pyramid scheme. And obviously, AI is at the center of that, but energy has some eerie characteristics that are similar. And you just summed it up well. It's a lot of borrowing, betting, you know, betting, betting, currencies like speculating and and and I'm not sure that this thing is going to sustain itself. It's like it yeah, it's good that prices came down quickly. It doesn't change the fact that we all, I think, spent collectively like 60, 70 billion extra on energy. Yeah. Yes. So people profited. Yeah. For no additional like value. You know, it's just it's terrible. Yeah. Oil and gas companies

profited. This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all in one website website, platform designed to elevate your online presence and drive your success. Squarespace gives you the tools to claim your domain, build a professional website, and expand your brand and facilitate payments all in one place. With Squarespace's collection of cutting edge design tools, anyone can build a bespoke online presence that perfectly fits their business. Start with Blueprint AI to get fully custom websites in just a few minutes using basic information about your industry, your goals, and personality to generate premium quality content and personalized design recommendations. Every dream needs a domain. Squarespace domain makes it easier to find the best

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Rights Foundation. If you've been watching this year's World Cup unfold and wonder how we ended up with a global sporting juggernaut full of corruption scandals, price gouging, and political theater look no further than Power Plays. Power Plays is a five-episode journey through the little-known authoritarian history of the FIFA World Cup from Mussolini's Italy in 1934, through the military junta in Argentina in 1978, Putin's Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022. The series also examines the present 2026 World Cup hosted by the U.S. and looks ahead of geopolitics influencing future host countries like Morocco in 2030 and Saudi Arabia in 2034. If you've been watching this year's World Cup and wondering how we ended up here, the corruption scandals, the price gouging, the political

theater, this show gives you the full picture into the history that allowed this to happen. It goes back a lot further than Trump or Gianni Infantino. The show is made for football lovers by football lovers. It's for anyone who thinks the intersection of history, geopolitical drama, dark money, and sports sounds like a good time. Five episodes, all streaming now, search power plays wherever you get your podcast. Ben, so keeping up with the Trump family's corruption scandals is basically a full-time job and one we are proud to do for our listeners. The latest story has to do with tungsten metal, Kazakhstan, and then the dumbass kids of both Donald Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik. So here's the gist of this story.

President Trump convinces the president of Kazakhstan to let a small American company that's now called CASRS Resources have access to the world's largest untapped reserve of tungsten. It's a metal. And then, in just an amazing stroke of luck, a firm called Domini Securities, which is partly owned by the Trump's sons, pulled together a group of investors to take a 20% stake in that project. And then Howard Lutnik's kids, who now run Cantra Fitzgerald, that's their dad's old company, so they're running it while dad's off playing government. They helped raise over $210 million as part of that deal, which will make them, we assume, millions of dollars in fees. And then if that wasn't enough, Ben, the Trump administration has preliminarily approved $1.6 billion in federal financing for the project. Now, that is a shocking

amount of grift and corruption, but the Times says that this deal is hardly an outlier. And the Trump and the Cantor kids, I'm sorry, the Lutnik kids, have, quote, financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals. This is just one of many mining projects where the Trump family is benefiting financially. So I highly recommend reading this whole article because it is long and it's complicated. And they did a really great job kind of reporting it all out and laying out all the details, including with infographics. But it's also just a great example, I think, for us, Ben, of Trump's family corruption directly impacting U.S.

national security because the military needs tungsten because it is the highest melting point of any metal. It's extremely dense. It's nearly as hard as a diamond. So it ends up getting used in lots of military things like large caliber armor piercing shells, armor for things like tanks, jet engines and components, stuff that you need to get really hot. They have to be able to withstand really high heat. And so this is very important. And so if the Trump kids screw this up and we aren't able to get this metal, like our troops

won't be able to use it. And just generally speaking, like if the Trump kids are involved in all these critical mineral deals or rare earth's deals, And they fail or, you know, they skim a bunch off the top and we're not prepared. It means we're going to get creamed in the next trade war with China again. So it's just like it's just one of those stories where before the Trump administration, this is like the only thing anyone talks about. And now, you know, we live in a reality where J.D. Vance is bragging about how Watergate

wouldn't be a big deal anymore. Yeah. I actually think this is an incredibly important story for our times because it says everything about how the world works right now. So bear with me for one second. These Central Asian countries like Kazakhstan were literally reborn out of corruption. So when the Soviet Union broke up, what you had is all these vast natural resources that were once controlled by the Soviet state kind of got sold off and given away to the oligarchs

who took over countries like Kazakhstan. And they set it up as kind of a family business. We are rich. We control the political power in this country. We control the resources. These are the billionaires that were starting shadow companies in London. These were the original oligarchs of the global economy that we're currently living in. So this is how they know how to do business, right?

You pay off somebody's son, somebody's son-in-law. You give them access to resources. Everybody makes a bunch of money except for the people who get screwed in the process. Let's fast forward, Tommy. I want to take you back in time. CrookedCon, right? Remember last year? Do you remember the hotel we were staying at?

Oh, yeah. was also hosting the delegates to the Central Asian summit that Trump was having at the, and I remember walking by the north end of Lafayette Park and I could see in the distance like a cocktail party at the North Portico, right? Trump literally threw a huge summit for these Central Asian countries. And I can tell you that the reason was not, you know, in normal foreign policy times, you might say, well, this is an interesting strategy to try to counter Russian influence in Central Asia or Chinese influence, that is clearly not their interest at all in Central Asia because

Trump likes Putin, Trump likes Xi Jinping. The whole purpose of that summit was to set up, I think, deals like this. And so you fast forward to now. And what's super dark about this is it's kind of perfect that just like you had the Trump family in business with the Whitkoff family on crypto, you've got the Trump family in business with the Lutnik family on these mining deals. Two people, by the way, Donald Trump and Howard Lutnik, who are pretty close to Jeff Epstein. So let's just say this is the Epstein class in miniature, that you've got the Trump family and the Lutnik family cutting mining deals with Central Asian countries like Kazakhstan. And the reality is these inputs are essential to the military technologies of the future.

Everything from drones to armored vehicles, all the kinds of things that we're going to need to compete and potentially, hopefully not have to fight wars, is dependent on these. But that's just another vehicle to make a buck for these people. So you basically have like the Epstein class running our country working hand and glove in concert with oligarchs and autocratic leaders in places like Kazakhstan to mine the materials that are necessary to then sell to the Pentagon for defense contracts so that we can maintain some advantage in the military harbor of the future. Super dark, but it is exactly what is going on in the world today. This is who's running the world right now. Yeah, and I can't remember if we talk about it in this show or if it's another show, but like there's

another company that's just like this. Donald Trump Jr.'s VC firm takes an undisclosed stake in a company called Vulcan Elements as part of their like Series A. I think at the time it was valued at $200 million. Fast forward a couple months. They get a massive injection of capital from the U.S. government. I think it was like a $600 million from the Pentagon, then another $50 million from like what was left to the Chips Act. And wouldn't you know it been pretty soon after the valuation of Vulcan Elements is now $2 billion. So Don Jr. just 10x. his investment in a couple months. And it's just clear that, like, I think Peter Navarro, like, called in a favor and said to the Pentagon, like, you have to do this loan for Vulcan elements.

So this corruption, it's just, it's so pervasive. And like the Howard Lutnik of it all, getting his kids, like, kissed into the grift. In Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's new book, regime change, there's an anecdote in there that apparently Lutnik's kids created some bad headlines from doing some sketchy shit, I think, you know, kind of like, corrupt stuff like this, basically. Yeah. Pissed off Trump. And so Lutnik made a $25 million donation to the Trump presidential library to mollify him.

And now it's a thing like Trump likes to make fun of him about and brag him about. I mean, that's just like how pervasive all of this corruption is. Yeah. And what's so dumb about, well, everything's so dumb. But the two things off what you said. The first is they, again, are using the trillion dollar. that they want to make a trillion-half-dollar Pentagon budget as a giant piggy bank that they can loot because if they can kind of corner the access to some of these inputs or they can get drone

companies and then basically have what amount to no-bid contracts, they can make an unlimited spigot of money off of that. That's gross enough. And that leads to the second thing, which is the $25 million gift to the Trump Library, that's like a loose change in the couch compared to the money that the Lutnik family stands to make from doing these deals. deals. I'm not suggesting there's a virtuous $25 million a lot in a gift to the Trump Library, but it just shows you that our system is so broken, and we're talking on a day when the Supreme Court further gutted campaign finance laws, that Elon Musk's and the Howard Ludniks of the world for minimal investment, you know, tens of millions of dollars on a campaign here, tens of millions

of dollars in a library here, they can make hundreds of billions of dollars off stuff like this. Yeah, it's just a down payment. And by the way, I believe that the aggregate budget for Trump's future library is $2 billion, because he just needed to like double the Obama amount as if Obama's costing $1 billion is like a good thing that you'd want to top and not just like a sign that maybe these things have gotten a little too expensive. You mentioned the Supreme Court there, Ben. So there have been a bunch of major Supreme Court decisions this week that have national security implications, foreign policy implications. We're going to walk you through just a couple of them. The first is what counts as good news these days, which is that on Tuesday,

the Supreme Court upheld the principle of birthright citizenship, which means that anyone born on U.S. soil automatically becomes a U.S. citizen. Trump had tried to end it via executive order. That should have been thrown out, laughed out of court because the text of the 14th Amendment reads, quote, all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States. Seems pretty clear for the textualists on the Supreme Court. But still, the outcome was way too close. The margin was six to three. really is more like five to four the opinion given that Brett Kavanaugh said he agreed with the result, but he didn't join the majority opinion for reasons that we won't dig into.

If you want to learn more, listen to strict scrutiny, they are much better on this stuff. And then, Ben, last Thursday, the court cited six three with the Trump administration to give the Department of Homeland Security the authority to remove temporary protected status from 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. The TPS program was established in 1990. allows people experiencing humanitarian or natural disasters to legally live or work in the U.S. The Trump administration, they've been trying to end TPS status for 13 of 17 countries that currently have it. The suit to fight it brought by these Haitian and Syrian TPS holders argued that the

administration's policy was driven by racism. I think listeners probably remember that whole the Haitians are eating your pets thing from the campaign. Seems pretty self-evidently racist. But Justice Alito said that none of Trump's statements were, quote, overtly racial. Okay. Not discussed were the shocking levels of violence and insecurity in both countries. So Haiti has been gripped by war zone-like levels of violence ever since 2021 when Haitian President Jovan El-Mois was assassinated. Gangs control, major swaths of the country, millions of people have been displaced. The World Food Program says half the population is facing acute hunger in the State Department list Haiti is a do-not-travel destination.

And then similarly, Syria, barely starting to recover after 14 years of civil war under Assad that, as we remember, ended in December of 2024. The State Department's Syria page says, quote, do not travel to Syria for any reason. U.S. citizens are at risk due to terrorism, civil unrest, kidnapping, hostage taking, in armed conflict. But remember, under this new Alito approved, not at all racist immigration policy, Ben, white South Africans are basically the only refugees along the country. I'm sure you saw the New York Times report that the Trump administration was planning like special Afrikaner welcome bags that had it was like you're arriving at like an anti-woke wedding. It had like weird revisionists like white nationalist history books and shit in it. So Ben, I just like fucking par for the course when it comes to the country's shockingly cruel and racist immigration policies. There is something like I'm used to it from Stephen Miller.

There's something harder for me to stomach though when it gets kind of like blessed by the Supreme Court. Yeah, and it just goes to show you like what it out of control radical far right enterprise the Supreme Court has become. I mean, yeah, first of all, like quick swerve on the birthright citizenship here. Like we're celebrating essentially a five, four decision because Kavanaugh was kind of being like, here's a better way to get rid of a birthright citizenship. But we're celebrating that the same way we celebrated them like not overturning the 2020 election. Meanwhile, every other decision is racist. Every other decision is oligarchic. Every other decision is undermining democracy. On this one, if the State Department doesn't believe it's safe to go to these countries, then by definition, it meets the threshold for people who are here not being safe to return to those countries. Like it's not exactly a leap to figure that out. And we should just call this what it is, which is racist. Obviously, it's racist if you are opening the doors to do, I mean, let's just do a thought exercise, Tommy.

What is a more dangerous place to be? Haiti for any Haitian or South Africa for a rich, Afrikaner. Right. You know? Many of whom have come over here and then gone back, by the way. There's a great reporting in New York Times about a lot of them were like, you know, we actually didn't like it as much as we thought.

So we went home to South Africa. Like there are high levels of violence in South Africa. At times, that violence has been directed at white farmers. But there's just no evidence that it was systemic and based on race. It's more likely that they have resources and stuff to steal. So they gotten attacked and robbed in some instances killed, which is horrible and unacceptable. But it's like, again, it's like the notion that there's some like pogrom against white farmers. It's just, it's a fever dream on the right.

No, and yeah, it's not akin to the kind of systematic political violence you see in a place like Haiti, right? Or that we've seen in a place like Syria. And these are human lives. These are thousands upon thousands of people whose lives are upended by this ruling. You know, I mean, I hate how thin-skinned Alito and Thomas get about this stuff. If they're challenged on it, like, fuck you guys. Like, how do you like to be a Haitian who's going to be deported back to a country that is riven by gang violence where you're fundamentally not safe and you've been contributing to an American community and just because the Supreme Court decides that they're on board with like Stephen Miller's fever dream of a white nationalist

constitution in this country, which doesn't exist by the way. You have to get deported back. We even saw and we'll get to the earthquake in Venezuela, but I saw a horrible thing earlier today, Tommy, we were like, potentially well over 100 people died in the earthquake had just been deported back by the United States. We were just sending people, in some cases, not even to their home country, to third countries, right? And this is a, this will be like a lasting kind of stain on us, too. It's not like precisely because these are human lies, precisely because we're breaking

a promise. TPS is a promise. That's the promise that the United States government makes that we're going to give you protected status. And by the way, a lot of these diaspora populations, like not so much of Haitians, but like, you know, Venezuelans, for instance, like, some of the, you know, some of the support kind of right-wing politics in this country so that they've gone along with, you know, Republican policies because they wanted, you know, something like the Maduro

operation. But when you rescind TPS, it tells you what they really think about you. And so do not believe for a second that just because the Trump administration or some Republican administration kind of doesn't like the same leaders that you don't like, that they actually give a shit about you. This Supreme Court decision, this revocation of TPS, tells you everything about how they feel about you. It's fundamentally racist. And by the way, just it's worth mentioning for folks who don't know that the 14th Amendment was passed after the Civil War specifically to overturn the Dred Scott decision, which basically said that black Americans, including freed slaves, could never be citizens. It's the worst thing the Supreme Court has ever done in many scholars' view.

And the 14th Amendment was designed to fix that. And these guys came this close to throwing the whole thing out. I mean, it's just, it's shocking. Yeah, and just because like in, you know, my book is about this question, like who's an American, who gets to decide that question? Frederick Douglass had a great quote which I came across in writing the book, which is, how is it that these originalists? They were originalists back in the 19th century or like, we need to divine the intention of the founding fathers, but we totally ignore the intention of the 14th Amendment. Yeah. Like they had an original intent too, which is every person who's born in this country is a fucking citizen, you know?

And like you you mess with that. You mess with like the core idea of what being an American is. Including one of the best players on the U.S. men's national team. And we'll get there in a minute. Yeah. So another country impacted by these TPS decisions has been Venezuela, as you mentioned. The listeners have probably seen the reports of these. There was a pair of just catastrophic earthquakes in Venezuela last week.

As of this recording, there are at least 1,700 known casualties, but that number is going to go up dramatically. 700 buildings were at least partially collapsed. 50,000 people are reportedly missing. So we're now at the point where aid workers from around the world have descended on the country trying to help. The U.S. has pledged 300 million in aid, which is nowhere near enough. But they also sent more than 300 search and rescue personnel from the U.S. Those search and rescue teams, they're often called dart teams. They are incredible human beings.

I met much of them in Haiti in 2010. They work around the clock, just like searching. through rubble, trying to rescue anyone they can. And, you know, some of the stories have been surfaced and it's always incredible. But they're not going to be able to meet the need. They're not going to find everyone. And I think just by comparison, Ben, I mean, I was looking back at the 2010 response to what happened in Haiti. And within like two weeks, I think the U.S. had nearly 17,000 U.S. military personnel kind of in and around Haiti. There was an aircraft carrier. there was a hospital ship, all this infrastructure.

Hopefully the Trump administration will continue to increase its support. I know they've had some military on the ground, but I think they're mostly just like reopening runways and stuff like that to facilitate the aid transfers or fixing ports, but it just feels like they could use more. And the context is obviously different. I mean, this happened about six months after Trump launched this military operation that deposed Nicholas Maduro and installed his vice president, Delci Rodriguez, his interim leader before the earthquake, there was kind of like growing reporting about frustration and discontent in the

Venezuelan population because their lives were not getting better. There's just like a lack of improvement or change. I think this is obviously going to be a severe test of her leadership and kind of the status quo because, you know, you're already seeing these reports been of like Venezuelans who are furious that their own military was not helping with search and rescue efforts. They were like these guys just kind of sitting around while average citizens are digging through piles of rubble trying to find their loved ones. Crowds jeered Delsi Rodriguez when she went to one side. They were chanting,

get out, get out. The Wall Street Journal reported that Venezuelans were also mad at U.S. officials who were praising the response. And then Maria Machado is the opposition party. She said that they tried to like basically do a charity drive and it got shut down by the police in some places. So there's a lot of anger brewing.

And so again, then you and I were in government during that 2010 earthquake. The death toll is, way higher. I mean, the estimates were as high as like 310,000 people. It was horrifying that, like, the government basically collapsed from the presidential palace to like all the infrastructure and services. I was in Port-au-Prince for like a week to work on it. And like I just, again, I've talked about this on the show before, but I'll never forget how proud and inspired I felt by the kind of immediate term relief efforts, the ability of the U.S. government to rescue people,

like get infrastructure fixed, get relief efforts in, distribute aid. And then just how catathing isstrophically wrong, it went in the kind of medium and long term. Like the donor money never materialized. The projects took longer than expected to get done. There was not enough money going to Haitians and Haitian organizations too much went to like American NGOs. Housing never got built. And then in like the cruelest development of all like 10 months into it, a UN peacekeeping base created his cholera outbreak that killed 10,000 people. And then they denied it for years and years and years. So, you know, that's how badly things can go when you have an administration that cared when you had USAID intact and, like, functioning. Yeah. And now Venezuela went into this with, you know,

a healthcare infrastructure that had been decimated and, you know, a Trump administration that seemingly just wants to loot their resources. And it just makes me very nervous for the people there. Well, yeah, I was going to say, first of all, those dart teams in Haiti, as you'll remember, were run by USCID. So once again, you know, we are seeing that is the kind of organization that is necessary to run a complex assistance response that has an immediate surge of disaster response through DART teams, but then has to meet all these basic needs. They're going to be really acute in Venezuela.

And look, I think your point about the long term, that, that, earthquake ended up basically completely collapsing the Haitian government because they couldn't deal with the scale of the challenge and they lost the confidence of the people, whatever they had left. And I think one thing to watch for in Venezuela is just because Maduro was removed doesn't mean that really anything about the nature of that government changed. It continued to be corrupt. It continued to be repressive. It continued to not deliver for the needs of its citizens. All it did differently is offer a little bit of tribute to the Trump administration to the tune of some like oil tankers and kind of let all these Trump people down there like Maricio Claibor who's kind

of Trump's viceroy down there who are just doing deals like they're not changing the political system to be more responsive that they're doing energy deals or real estate deals right they'll probably want to get in on the reconstruction down there now too but I think something to watch is man, I don't know that there's anything that Delci Rodriguez's government can do, particularly the way it's constituted, to kind of win back the trust of the people that has been shattered over a long time, but has been really shattered in this earthquake response. And so this, you know, quote-unquote success stories of Trump, this like equally repressive regime that's just a little bit more responsive to him, you know, this place could become

a mess. It already is obviously a human tragedy. but also you could see kind of unrest and political instability because of this. My hope is, and if you want to, what should happen is, well, ideally, you know, I saw a lot of other countries in the region providing assistance, providing search and rescue. You would hope that there's some capacity to kind of internationalize a response to help kind of clean the rubble, obviously try to identify anybody you can save, and then also like people are going to want the remains of their loved ones, tragically.

but then there's some international response to help rebuild. The problem is, you know, not only is USAID decimated, so is the international community. There's not money for that anywhere. The UN system doesn't really work. And so I really do worry about the people of Venezuela. I've already been through a lot, their capacity to come out from under this. Yeah, I'm extremely worried too. Yeah, maybe send the board of peace down there.

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So in France alone, the health ministry said that more than 1,000 unexpected deaths have happened, including 74 people who have drowned or just like trying to escape the heat. This sort of heat dome challenge has kicked up a huge French media and political debate about air conditioning and how to cool people down. Check out this Instagram video from a French influencer named Olivier Hude. I'm probably saying that wrong, but it's a good video. Let's watch. watching on YouTube. First of all, please subscribe to POTSafe the World on YouTube. We're trying to

beat back on the right wing crap that's all over this fucking platform, you know, the pro-war propaganda from Fox News and Ben Shapiro and everybody else. But for those just, we didn't see it, this guy put a pan outside his window and heated it in the sun and then grilled a burger, popped popcorn, cooked bacon and fried an egg using just the sun. So that's how hot it is in France right now. So, you know, Ben, I've been to like Paris in the summer, France in the summer. I've sweated, you know, through my shirt and restaurants and bars and hotels. But until I dug into this latest debate over air conditioning, I just didn't realize how deep-seated and cultural this fight was.

So currently, for just a level set for folks, about 25% of French households have air conditioning. And I'm going to try to summarize the arguments you hear in French media or from French elected officials against AC first. So they say, you know, like it's bad for the environment. It's going to contribute to climate change. There's easier solutions out there that we should do first. like putting up shades and shutters on buildings,

changing roofing materials as another one. They say there are greener solutions, like planting more trees. And they argue that universal AC adoption would actually heat up the city itself because your unit when it pumps cool air into your house, it pumps out warm air that can heat up the city in aggregate.

There's also concern about thermal shock when you go from hot to cold or vice versa. I think that's really overstated, but it's the thing you hear in the media. And then there's this broader concern that's really about French identity and that if everyone gets an AC unit, they're just going to sit inside all day and that France will stop having this

outdoor culture. And so the pushback on those arguments are, yes, it would be great to have more greener spaces and less asphalt, but that's a long-term project and the need is now. Yes, changes should be made to buildings first to make them kind of naturally cooler, but Parisians are often just as averse to putting up shutters on the facades of buildings that kind of change the appearance or getting rid of their zinc rooftops that are standard in Paris and give it the look we all know and love, but absorb heat and can be as hot as 150 degrees. You know, they're as averse to that stuff as they are to installing AC.

And then in terms of the climate impact, in 2025, about 95% of the energy generated in mainland France was low carbon, so it's mostly nuclear and then some renewables. So the climate impact of more energy usage in France is not going to be nearly as bad as it might be in other places. Of course, increased demand will mean higher prices. It could mean to more fossil fuel use, especially at night. They'll put strain on the grid and power lines and on days when it's too hot nuclear plants can't necessarily run at full capacity.

But that's sort of like the policy debate. But then we get into this political fight, Ben. So Marine Le Pen and the far right national rally party are running on air conditioning for all. It's like Bernie Sanders, like Medicare for all. She's putting forward a national air conditioning plan. Whereas the leftist candidate, Jean-Luc Melanchon says France, says France installing AC will make the situation worse and he wants to create heat-resistant buildings first. Then I saw,

Macron's minister of ecological transmission said she was horrified, was the word she used by calls for AC in public buildings. And this is where I think the debate just gets insane, Ben, because we're not just talking about AC and homes. It's also schools, retirement homes and hospitals. I saw a report about a Parisian hospital where only three of 30 wards had air conditioning. And so the other 27 sections of the hospital, temperatures reach 95 degrees. And people were being told to bring fans from home, including in like maternity wards. And then I was talking to a buddy who's French, his grandfather lives in a home where only their common room has AC. Everywhere else is just like burning up. And it's genuinely unsafe. So Ben, I know you've experienced this yourself because you've been traveling in Europe recently. I'd love to hear your views, your experience, your lived experience, as they say. But then also just like a political matter. Like, I just can't believe the left is taking such an insane, like, kind of strident position on this issue when, like, there's a thousand additional deaths because of this most recent heat wave. Like, it seems insane. Yes. So I'll start with my lived

experience because I think actually does contribute to this conversation because a week ago, I was in London. And actually, the day that I did my podcast, it was 100 degrees Fahrenheit in London. so just about as hot as in Paris. I will say, I care so much about this podcast, Tommy, that in my un-air-conditioned Airbnb... It's crazy. I podcasted through the heat. But look, I noticed the same thing.

London has a lot of the same issues, right? It does not have AC anywhere. I mean, I rode the tube, Bill London Underground, and it was fucking hot, and the train stopped in the tunnel. And I was like, if this thing doesn't move, like, I just don't what the fuck I'm going to do, you know? And you go into public buildings,

you're going to restaurants are not air conditioning. You know, nothing is air conditioned. Like, and this is, I think, as an American, what really struck me is, yes, maybe you're aware that homes, apartments, you know, don't have air conditioning. But like public buildings, restaurants, stores, like nobody has air conditioning. And people have to go to work in that. People are riding on buses. They're not air conditioning.

People riding on trains. They're not air conditioning. It's dangerous because you get no respite anywhere. You know, it's not like, well, my, I don't have air conditioning to home, but I can, like, go ride the bus and get a little AC or go to my work space, my work has air conditioning. You just can't escape the heat all day. And I felt that. And that was kind of scary, to be honest, you know, which leads me.

And actually, just to get to the policy of this all, there was also like a perfect timing thing in London when I was there. A conference dedicated to extreme heat had to be canceled because of the extreme heat, you know? Perfect. And so look, look, the thing to the left, I'd say is this. absolutely make the argument that, you know, Europe is actually heating up faster than any other region. This is proving manmade climate change. This is happening because of climate change.

This proves that we can't turn our back on a clean energy transition. We need to be moving to cleaner sources of energy. By all means, use the heat to make your case. This is not the hill to die on, though. No, literally. And at a minimum, and by the way, because it all, yes, they should be greening these cities. They should be growing more trees. They should be doing all these things to try to make these European cities not like these heat capturing, you know, hellish places when it gets hot.

But at a minimum, right, like you need to air condition these public spaces. It's the leftist idea to say the worker that has to ride the bus, like, should be able to have AC or public buildings should have air conditioning. You know, like, does that mean that, does that mean that every single, you know, apartment in these European cities is going to have AC, no. But start somewhere like in the public good space. Because believe me, if you care about climate change and you choose the hill to die on as we don't want air conditioning, you're not going to be able to implement your climate agenda because you're going to lose.

And that's a long and short of it. That's the key point. I think sometimes on the left we like personalize and individualize the solution to problems that actually require government action. And we act like if all the progressives in the world like don't use Claude or whatever or like AI that somehow it's going to like, you know, save enough water or like, you know, impact the climate materially. And like that's, I'm not like trying to absolve people of making smart choices. We all should do our best and like think about climate mitigation in our own lives. But when you're talking about air conditioning a hospital like maternity

work, this is bonkers. What are you talking about? You actually are. punishing people that, like, historically, like, you know, social democratic movements are supposed to help. The elderly children, kids in school, like, it's insane. It is like, it is a death sentence as a party. Like, I think Marine Le Pen is going to ride this into the Elyze if they're not careful. Yeah, no, I mean, again, workers, right? I was talking to one guy who had a 40-minute commute and he was like, I was going to pass that by the time I got to work. And then I'm working somewhere that's not air conditioning. I want to say one thing about that video, Tommy. I do love the French. I love that the guy

salted the meat. Like, like, he wasn't just showing, you know, it's not enough, because I saw like a good video in Poland, someone was like frying an egg like that. But the French are still seasoning the food, you know? It would be so good to put a little garlic in there, I chopped up. Yeah, it was great. I love the

French. It still makes you, it does make me want to go to Paris. All right, bad. Last thing, so, for us at least, so last week we talked about kind of the thrill of victory in the world Cup. We talked about the kind of the beautiful melding of cultures and fan bases. And today we want to talk a bit about the agony of defeats because teams are starting to go home. So there have been some huge upsets. Germany lost to Paraguay on penalty kicks. Amazing game. The Netherlands lost to Morocco also in penalty kicks. I don't know if you caught this one. I don't know what time it is there,

but it was like I've just never seen them miss so many penalty kicks in a row or so many get saved. Uruguay lost. And the expectations were quite high. for the team. They completely flamed out. And apparently their soccer federation was so pissed off that they canceled their charter flight home from Mexico. And they told the players to book commercial flights. So I really like that pettiness. A couple more headlines for you, Ben. So the New York Times had this one, quote, World Cup loss dominates German news displacing even a mass shooting. That's how seriously they're taking this over there. This is supposed to be a lighter fun segment. So I'm going to spare you guys the details of the mass shooting, but it was awful. Here's another headline from the athletic that.

you should speak to, Ben. The Netherlands World Cup exit sparks identity crisis in nation of total football. Another very, you know, deeply felt one there, pretty intense. And then Ben, I think maybe the worst fallout might have been in South Korea because the expectations for this team going into this World Cup was really high. You have a lot of great players playing for like major international clubs. They won their first game. They lost their second game. They just needed to tie their third game against South Africa, who was ranked way lower than South. Korea, but then they lost. And I think the team looked so bad that the coach was asked at the press conference afterwards if they had food poisoning. They were jeered at the airport when they arrived

home. And then South Korea's president has since called for an investigation into the team's performance because it was so bad. I thought that was pretty fucking good. There's a lot of story. I went out of YouTube rabbit hole this story about like corruption within the KFA, their soccer association that I won't get into. But fascinating stuff. So you've again, you've been in Europe, up, you've been kind of living this from that side of the pond. What have you been seeing? So I'm in Amsterdam. I'm on vacation after my book tour.

And I will say, so I watched like the Germany game last night. Props to Paraguay, by the way. Did you see that the president Paraguay had a national, called the national holiday for the day after? Just so people could, you know, get hammered all night and like sleep it off the next day. By the way, like great fuck you to Uruguay, too, that Paraguay's advancing, you know, like an old rivalry there. But I will say, like, I went to sleep because the Dutch game started at 3 a.m.

Amsterdam time. I want to say that I was walking around, like, late last night because it's light here to like 11 o'clock at night. And people were setting up the coolest, you know, like they had boats with like big screen TVs and like fully stocked bars. Like people were getting ready to do it right out here. And at about five in the morning, maybe it's 5.30, I just started to be awoken by all these horns honking and people shouting.

And so I wake up like, what the fuck is going on, you know? And I look at my phone and they're reacting to each penalty shot. Like there was so much like pent up anxiety in the city that like good or bad, there's just like noise accompanying each penalty kick and horns and like, I mean, I can't. It was like the whole city was making noise like in the middle of the fucking night. And then when they lost, like it was dark, man. I just heard people shouting. I heard a lot of drunk people making very unpleasant noises.

Like I was like, I was like, I'm not going out of this hotel for a little while. I had to tell my kids, like, we had to be really nice to any Dutch people that we see today because they're going to be in a really shit mood. Don't tell me. I went out this morning. There was like trash everywhere. Like there was trash cans kicked out. Like, it was not a good scene here.

Like, these people really liked their football here. And it didn't end well. Flipside, like the Moroccans are, I mean, And the Moroccans made the semis last time. They're the new spoiler. They're like, this is like the biggest, you know, anti-colonial movement that we've seen in decades, you know, the Moroccan soccer team, you know? And the African teams in general, it's been a great subplot of this World Cup, like how well

the African teams have been doing. Yeah, it's been really fun. I loved every minute of it. A lot of big games coming up. I'm going to watch. I'm all like preemptively sad about it being over, to be totally honest with you. That's like, that's crazy. They were just going nuts at 5 in the morning.

My only experience that comes close to that is when I was in college. I got to Rome in Roma, the professional soccer team, it just won the Syria for the first time in like a couple decades. And they literally drove around and honked their horns for three days straight. I'm not exaggerating what I said. All day and all night, people were honking their horns. It was insane. But that's awkward.

I had this experience. I studied abroad in Paris. And I got there right after the French had won the first World Cup in 1998. And it was bonkers for days. I was like, is awesome. You know, people are like marching down the Chamzlyse and, like, their uniforms is fucking great. Burning it down. Okay, that is it for us for today.

But do not turn off the podcast because when you come back, you're going to hear my interview with Nick Christoph about Elon Musk being the worst liar in the world and trying to claim that no one died as a result of doging USAID. He walks through in great detail what he found on his reporting in places like South Sudan, what the, you know, sort of the projections and analysis say about the impact of USAID cuts and much more. So please stick around for that. It's a very important conversation. We cannot let Elon get away with these lies. Podsafe of the world is brought to by SimplySafe. When you imagine a traditional home security system, you're probably thinking of an alarm that players after someone breaks in. But if

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In moments like these, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and even easier to feel powerless. But we are neither. I'm Stacey Abrams, and on my podcast, Assembly Required, I take on each executive action, legislative battle, and breaking news moment by asking three questions. What's really happening? What can we do about it? And how do we keep going together?

This is a space for clarity, strategy, and hope, rooted in action, not denial. New episodes of Assembly Required, drop Tuesdays. Tune in wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube. My guest today is a columnist at The New York Times. He is written and reported extensively on the effects of Elon Musk and Donald Trump's destruction of USAID. Nicholas Christop, welcome to the show.

Great to be with you. Thank you so much for doing this. So as you know, Elon Musk has spent the last couple of weeks really just attacking in the most personal terms, anyone who criticizes what he and Trump and the Doge team did to USAID. Musk has denied that medical funding was stopped. He claimed that no one has died as the result of Doge cuts to USAID. He even threatened to sue Congressman Rokana for some of his comments. Specifically, Musk says no one can name a single person who died, quote, not a single name. And he also tried to claim that USAID is responsible for COVID and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

So he's been on one. Lots to unpack here. Let's start with the basics. Can you just remind us what exactly Musk and Doge and Trump. Trump did to USAID. Yeah, well, in Musk's own words, he fed it into the wood chipper. And he, you know, he did it over a weekend. And so there was a perfectly legitimate argument to have about reforming aid policies,

about programs that could be redeveloped, even about the levels of aid. But that's not what happened. He actually tossed it into the woodchipper. And while some programs were revived, there was a free. on funding, people who would actually disperse funds were suddenly no longer in office. And so there were all kinds of programs, even those that they said that they valued, that were abruptly cut. And so, you know, instead of nobody dying, lots of people died. And there's a, there's, you know, a lot of debate about the numbers. And we can talk about that. But, you know, as somebody who

reported the aftermath and walked through villages, I saw people dying and talked to bereaved families of kids who had died. And that's just, it's ludicrous to propose that nobody died as a consequence. Yeah, it is. I want to ask you about that reporting. Yeah, I think in all total, like 83% of USAID programs are canceled. Ninety-four percent of the staff were laid off. Some were rehired by the State Department, but that was after a long independent process. So the suggestion that, you know, it, They destroyed it. They fed into the woodchipper, exactly what Elon said. That's right.

And so I just want to start with some of the specific examples you just mentioned and then ask you about the broader long-term impact of the cuts. Let's first watch this clip of Musk talking about USAAD from May of 2025. And then I'll ask you a couple questions about it. But many times over with USAID and other organizations, when they said, oh, well, this is going to help children or it's going to help some disease eradication or something. like that. And then when we ask for any evidence whatsoever, I say, well, please connect us with this group of children so we can talk to them and understand more about their issue. We get

nothing. We don't, we don't, we don't even try to prevent show, we should come up with a, with a show often, meaning like, it's sort of like, well, can we at least see a few kids? Like, where are they? If they're in trouble, we'd like to talk to them and talk to their caregivers. And then we get nothing as a response. Because, Because what we find is an enormous amount of fraud and graft. A show orphan, that's a term he used. So Elon has repeatedly made claims more recently, like, quote, they cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the millions they falsely claim have died,

not a single name. You responded to him on Twitter with evidence you saw with your own eyes from your reporting trips to places like South Sudan, Uganda, the list goes on. Can you tell us about those trips and what you saw? Yeah. So I traveled to South Sudan, for example, and found kids who had died very early on because they were HIV positive. They had been kept alive by the PEPFAR program that President Bush had started in 2003. That has saved 26 million lives so far. And I think that Musk and Trump did intend to keep much of those HIV AIDS programs alive. But they feel. fired the health workers who had been the connector between the system and the kids who were receiving, these often AIDS orphans who were receiving the benefits. And so if you've got a, you know, eight-year-old kid, for example, who is on ARVs to prevent AIDS, and, you know, how is that

kid possibly going to navigate the system to manage to get those medicines? And so, you know, one boy called Peter Dunday died, another Evan Anzor. died. There were a number of, you know, these kids who had died that health workers told me about. Then in Liberia, for example, you know, dropped in one village and a child had just died of malaria because the malaria medications, they had been supplied in some case supported by the U.S., but maybe more important, the U.S. had supported the pipeline that transported them from the warehouses in the capital to the individual clinics. And without that pipeline, all of a sudden, you know, things collapsed.

And if this had happened over time, if the U.S. had said, look, a year from now, we're going to stop that pipeline. You know, Uganda might have been able to adjust, but it happened right in the middle of a fiscal year. And there was no time to make these adjustments. So that little child died. a woman that Yama Freeman, a mother of two, she in another village in Uganda, she was in labor, she was hemorrhaging, and the U.S. had provided ambulances precisely to reduce maternal mortality in an area that had very high levels of it. And those ambulances remained there, but Doge cut the fuel the diesel that had gone to power those ambulances. And so when Yama Freeman was emmeraging,

the villagers called the ambulance and said, you know, this woman is dying. And they said, well, you know, send some fuel over and we will come and rescue her. But of course, they can't do that. A bunch of the strong men in the village put her in a hammock, put her on their shoulders, and they raced down this path toward the hospital, and was shouting encouragement to her. but she bled to death on the way. And, you know, that would not have happened if, you know, for the cost of just maintaining diesel to ambulances we had already provided. And I could go, you know, on and on and on.

And when you go through these villages, a little girl called Jubea, you know, everything went wrong in her case. The U.S. had provided bed nets to prevent mosquito bites and malaria. A bed net cost $2. It's incredibly cost effective. So Javier's family, their bed net had holes. They couldn't get a new bed net. She got malaria.

Normally, there would be a community health worker who would connect her to the system, get her medication. The community health workers had been fired. The clinic no longer had anti-malaria medicine. She got very, very sick and needed to be rushed to the larger hospital. but the ambulances there too had lost their fuel. And by the time she got there, she was almost dead. And she died shortly after, you know, a fourth grade girl ranking number three in her very large class dead because of the reckless way in which Musk took apart aid.

Yeah. I mean, the reporting, folks should read all of your reporting on this. I mean, it's gut-wrenching. You know, you're talking to kids, caregivers. caregivers who have HIV who will die because they will no longer get access to the drugs they need. And, you know, when you see Musk, it's hard sometimes to determine whether this is malevolence or ignorance. I also interviewed a former USAID staffer turned whistleblower named Nicholas Enrich. He wrote a book called Into the Woodchipper about his experience at USAID.

And he talks about finally getting to brief the sort of Trump administration officials who were sent over to USAID as part of this leadership team about the work they've been doing. I think he got like five minutes. He focused on public health. And one of the Trump staffers said to him, wow, there really is so much that USAID does that we never knew. This is the story that needs to get out there. And then another said, I had no idea you did all this. As a Republican, when I think of what USAID does in global health, I assumed it was just, you know, abortion. So it's like profound ignorance and lack of interest.

And then the other part of must defense is like, well, if all these people died, if all these kids died, it would be a huge story. would be front page nudge, which, like, the suggestion that mass death in Africa is necessarily a huge story in the U.S. media just demonstrates such a profound ignorance of how the press works in the U.S. that it's kind of, it's hard to wrap your head around that. This is like one of the world's smartest men. You just, does he really think this? Yeah, you know, I've wondered about Musk's motivations. And, you know, he had been so successful in the business world by disrupting things. blowing it up. And, you know, SpaceX succeeded in a way that Boeing and Lockheed did not. And he made mistakes along the way, but then he was able to correct them. But when you're dealing with an aid agency, when you make mistakes, then the result is dead kids. And the result is Ebola, now in Congo,

raging out of control. And I think that that kind of recklessness was paired with a lack of of empathy, kind of an indifference to kids on a different continent. And that combination of recklessness and indifference has just been enormously lethal. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned Ebola. So the Democratic Republic of Congo has had this horrible Ebola outbreak. I think there's been 1,200 plus cases, well over 300 deaths. How do you think the USAID's absence and the actions of the Trump administration have made that crisis worse? So, With Ebola, the most important thing you can do is get an early warning, just tackle it immediately when there are just a few cases on the ground. So this began in Etruri in northeastern Congo.

It's an area that I've traveled through. It's a difficult area to work in because there is conflict there. But the U.S. did have had previously funded a lot of work in eastern Congo and had a network on the ground. But that was all defunded. And so all of a sudden doctors and nurses are not staffing local clinics to the same degree. They're off growing their cassava. And then even if they find something, they're no longer, you know, reporting to NGOs, which are reporting to the U.S. And so the Ebola outbreak happened and got.

grew before anybody was there to blow the whistle. And it was also, it was a different species of a virus. So it was harder to, it was harder to catch. No vaccine for this version. That's right. And so this, you know, this would have been a challenge. But everybody there in the ground tells me that unmistakably, it would have been caught earlier than it was.

And that there are many more cases as a result, which means it's harder to do contact tracing. It's harder to contain it. Yeah. So let's zoom out a bit. So there have been efforts to track the total impact of the USAID cuts in terms of mortality. There's some researchers at Boston University who created a tracker. I think they estimated that over 780,000 people have died as a result of those cuts. The Medical Journal, the Lancet published a study, estimating that 9.4 million additional deaths could occur by 2030. could you help us give us your sense of how you make sense of these studies, including their limitations, because it is challenging, right, to project the impact of USAID cuts into the future.

But I'm curious what you make of the methodology, how accurate these claims are the likelihood that they could change if, you know, a Democrat gets into office and, you know, revamp some of these programs? I mean, I think the methodology is actually, reasonably sound, but that we have to be very skeptical of these numbers because we don't have good mortality data. And the, you know, one of the things that eight cuts did is it also decimated the data collection

process. So that makes it harder to actually figure out the impact. Early on in my reporting in Africa, I was, I thought that some of these numbers were exaggerated. because local health systems had actually managed to reallocate money in ways that somewhat softened the blow. But then, and also, you know, people have reserves. They don't die immediately. You stop getting ARVs and it's not that you, you know, drop dead right away.

But over time, it seemed to me that mortality was increasing precisely for that reason. It was catching up with people. And if they're malnourished and also get malaria, then they're, you know, then they're more likely to die. And so I think that, you know, mortality, for example, is going to be higher as a consequence of the USAID demolition in 2026 than it was in 2025 because it is to some degree, you know, cumulative. And so I think we should be very wary of the numbers, but the kind of general order of magnitude of hundreds of thousands of deaths a year, I think, is fundamentally right. But the exact toll is going to be, I think, unknowable until we resume data collection. Yeah. You mentioned this example in Congo a minute ago of, you know, these sort of like front.

line workers who went from, you know, warning USAID about Ebola outbreaks to farming, essentially, right? So we kind of lost this global health infrastructure in a lot of places. I'm curious how hard you think it will be to build that back because we got a bunch of Democrats who are going to run for president in 2028. Hopefully one of them wins. Hopefully that individual will want to build back USAID. But I think you've seen the good parts of USAID. You've also seen the programs that don't work as well. I'm curious what you think of how to build it back and what reforms could or should be implemented.

So, I mean, one of the astonishing things about this is that humanitarian aid is actually pretty popular among Republicans and Democrats alike. And the Rockefeller Foundation just did some polling about this. And Americans think that about 20% of the federal budget it goes to this kind of foreign assistance. In fact, it's, you know, it traditionally was about 1%. It's, you know, it's a tiny, it's 22 cents of every hundred dollars of national income

in the U.S. that is going to this kind of aid. And so I, you know, I certainly hope that Democrats will try to revive it. I don't think that it was a fatal decision to move it to the State Department. You know, there are, I mean, there are arguments either way. moving things is always a little chaotic, but I think one could reasonably keep it in the State Department, but it has to have support within the State Department and it has to have funding. I do think that periodically Democrats and Republicans alike have invested in, you know, projects that are a little on the ideological side. And Democrats tended to invest in women's empowerment program.

that sometimes were well-grounded, but sometimes were kind of touchy-feely and it wasn't obvious that they had good evidence behind them. Meanwhile, Republicans invested in abstinence-only programs that did not seem to help fight HIV-AIDS, for example. So, you know, I think a starting point is to really look at evidence-based programs that have randomized control trials behind them, given the limitations on resources, make sure that you're investing in the places that need it most and in the programs that need it most. You know, Sudan and Sudan is the world's worst humanitarian crisis right now. It desperately needs assistance, and it's not getting it. Somalia is a catastrophe right now, and likewise isn't getting it.

I mean, it's one of the problems with the Trump assistance that it's being, it's now dished out, in a sense, in exchange for other benefits. So, okay, if you give rare earth mineral contracts to American companies, then we'll help you fight malaria. Right. So, boy, I mean, I hope it'll be revived, and then we can turn the trajectory. Some of these doctors and nurses can, you know, move from cassava farming back. to saving lives and will all be better off if they do that. Yeah, I hope there's a widespread commitment among all the Democrats running in 2028. In Republicans too, by the way, to restore a lot of this funding, especially the life-saving humanitarian aid to starving people in places like Sudan.

That also has to be coupled with a commitment, by the way, to go after bad actors like the United Arab Emirates who are helping feeding the conflict in Sudan. The list could go on and on. But, you know, it's just so obvious to me that we can help avoid future conflicts if we take care of people in some of these places. And instead, President Trump took all the savings. He might have gotten from Doge and put it into a catastrophic war with Iran. So don't we all feel safer because of that? Yeah. I mean, you know, we'll spend far, far more on the Iran war than we were ever spending on these life-saving programs.

And, you know, one of the things I hear a lot on X is that, look, you know, it's not our job to save all these people that we can't do everything. We can't do everything. But if any of us were next to a woman in an ambulance that had run out of gas and she was hemorrhaging and dying in that ambulance for one of ten bucks worth of gas, of course we would reach into our pockets and help. And, you know, this is a chance for the country to do that in ways that advance American interests as well as American values. And we have failed on that because of Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Yeah, and relatedly, I think, of course, if, you know,

if I were to see someone like Elon Musk or anyone else take medicine, life-saving medicine away from a child and then that child died, then of course they deserve to be blamed for the outcome of that move and that decision. Finally, I just wanted to ask you about a separate piece you wrote back in May about what you called a, quote, pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women, and even children by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the shin vet, internal security agencies. and above all prison guards. This is a really, you know, a deeply reported piece that was met with fierce pushback from Israeli Prime Minister Bebe Netanyahu. The Israeli foreign ministry called it,

quote, one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press. I think they have threatened legal action. I was just wondering if you could describe sort of how you reported out that piece and what your reaction was to the reaction and the pushback from Israel. Yeah, given the threat of legal action, which Prime Minister Netanyahu has promised, I shouldn't say much, but let me say that this, actually, the roots of this came two years ago when I was speaking to a peace activist in a Palestinian in the West Bank who had been arrested and told me that he had been sexually assaulted by his jailers. and he told me this was, he thought, you know, quite widespread that, but because of shame, people didn't talk about it. And so that's what sort of seeded the idea, and I began to ask around. And then this year I took that on seriously.

And I wasn't sure it would be possible to report that people would be willing to talk about, rape and assault. But it turns out that if you ask the question and spread the networks, then people, I found 14 people, 14 different people who independently unaware of each other told me about having been sexually assaulted. And, you know, that pattern in prisons by settlers, by Shinbet, I think it's what happens when you get a combination of dehumanization of Palestinians and anger at them. and complete impunity in the in the prison process and you know I wish the I knew that there would be a very harsh reaction of course I expected that we it's one reason why we fact checked it out the gazoo but it was certainly more hostile than I had expected and I just wish that the

response were more along lines of well let's investigate and prove Christoph wrong yeah Let's let the Red Cross in and talk to these prisoners. Let's let lawyers back in to the prison system. And, you know, so far there hasn't been much inclination to do that. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, Netanyahu is one speed, right, which is attack, demagogue, you know, deflect from whatever responsibility. I'm with you that I wish the focus had been on the impact of, on the victim's support for them. preventing this from happening again. There is, you know, we've all seen video evidence of Israeli prison guards, you know,

allegedly raping a Palestinian prisoner, right? So this is, this should not have surprised anyone, even though the reporting, what you reported was shocking, should shock the conscience. So, well, listen, thank you so much, Nick, for doing the show today. It's not easy to get to South Sudan. It's not easy to get to the places you're reporting from. It takes a lot of time and money and you do it at personal risk to yourself and to the people who travel with you.

So we're very grateful to you for the work you're doing. and thanks for joining the show. Thanks for shining your light on this topic. Thanks again to Nick Christoff for joining the show and talk to you guys next week. Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Alona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Bonnergy.

Our team includes Matt DeGrope, Ben Hethkoat, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffat, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. In moments like these, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and even easier to feel powerless. But we are neither.

I'm Stacey Abrams, and on my podcast, Assembly Required, I take on each executive action, legislative battle, and breaking news moment by asking three questions. What's really happening? What can we do about it? And how do we keep going together? This is a space for clarity, strategy, and hope rooted in action, not denial. New episodes of Assembly Required drop Tuesdays. Tune in wherever you get your podcast and on you. YouTube.