Pod Save the World - Low IQ President visits Japan

Episode Date: May 29, 2019

First, Tommy and Ben discuss the European parliament election results, Trump’s trip to Japan and the major US/Japan split on North Korea, the ongoing political disaster in the UK, more arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Turkey’s slide to dictatorship, NSA hacking tools in the wild and Trump micromanaging aircraft carrier designs (seriously). Then Ron Klain joins to discuss his work coordinating the global response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak and why the outbreak happening currently is so frightening.

Welcome back to Pot Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben. It was very hard, again, trying to figure out what the hell to talk about today because there's just way too much out there. It's a lot going on. So the biggest stories for those listening are probably the European Union parliamentary elections, the total mess in the United Kingdom, Trump's trip to Japan and the huge split it revealed on North Korea policy and his arms sales to Saudi Arabia. But there's like three or four more stories that we might get to before we get to this week's guest, Ron Clayne, who talked about the Ebola response he managed in 2014, and the pretty scary outbreak that's happening right now in Congo. So, packed show today. And lastly,

before Ben and I get going, we hear Crooked Media announce a brand new podcast called This Land. It's hosted by Rebecca Nagel, an Oklahoma journalist and citizen of the Cherokee Nation. The show is going to provide an in-depth look at how a cut-and-dry murder case opened an investigation into who owns half the land in Oklahoma. This land premieres on June 3rd. It's an incredible show. So you can subscribe right now and listen to the trailer. It comes out next week on June 3rd. You're going to love it. It's a great show. It's a new narrative style show for us that we want to do more of. So please check it out. Okay. So the European Parliament election. So this is a legislative arm of the EU. They're the only EU representatives that are directly elected by member state citizens. So they

passed European Union laws. They provide some oversight over EU institutions. They deal with the budget. Each country has a number of EU reps proportionate to its population. Apparently, there's 751 reps total, which seems completely unmanageable to me, but what do I know? So the elections were over the weekend. The results were mixed, but interesting. The headline seems to be that turnout was way up. Some of these nationalist parties that everybody was worried about did better. moderates did very poorly, but the Green Party did well in some places. What was the big takeaway for you when you checked out these elections? First of all, I think the main takeaway is, like, Europe is right now the principal battleground between, and I don't like calling a populism, it's basically

right-wing nationalist politics, and everybody else. And this election has been seen for some time as kind of the litmus test, because the far right thought that they were. would do well in this election because they've been attacking the European Union for years, right? So the fact that it was in a European Union election, they thought would play in their favor because they thought they could gin up anti-Europe sentiment, anti-immigrant sentiment, and then get enough of their people elected to kind of grind the business of the European Parliament to a halt, which ironically then allows them to say, look how dysfunctional the European Union is. I actually think that they were generally positive results. This was not the right-wing

populist wave that some of the more ambitious national leaders had anticipated. Basically, I think in general, the center held. They did not get enough seats to really be able to kind of drive the agenda of the European parliament. They're still around like 25%. If you look underneath the hood of the results, there are a couple interesting things. One, where did they do well? So unsurprisingly, countries like Hungary and Poland that have become kind of more, you

right-wing nationalist, they did well. Italy was the standout. So this politician, Mateo Savini, who's the kind of leader of the far right in Italy, comes from the Northern Italy, you know, Northern League party, very anti-immigrant, very, you know, the kind of vicious rhetoric, Trump-like rhetoric against immigrants. They did very well in Italy. That shows you that a country that's like right on the, you know, the border of the Mediterranean has a lot of immigration problems, was more susceptible to that message. But if you look at other places, particularly like Germany, which is usually the bell weather for European politics, there was kind of a groundswell for the alternatives.

So the Greens, the libertarians, like the non-fascists did quite well in Germany and northern Europe, in Spain, as we saw in the recent election. So in other words, this wave of nationalism didn't spread across all of Europe. It just came out of individual countries where the far right has gotten a foothold. Then the other interesting thing is not about the far right. It's about the left. And the Greens did very well in this election, the Green parties. And if you look at, again, Germany, the Greens actually poll better than the traditional

center-left party in Germany, the Social Democrats, which tells you that Europe is also going through a bit of what we're going through here, where their left is trying to figure out, okay, are we going to be the kind of traditional business-friendly center-left parties? Or do people want something more, I don't know, radical is too strong a word for it, but certainly more aggressive in promoting social justice and standing up for immigration and, you know, climate change is obviously central to the Greens. And so what that tells you is that the left in Europe is going to have to sort out between the Greens and the traditional kind of social Democrat tax hardy. Yeah. I mean, I think, I normally think that there's maybe some risk to trying

to draw lessons from European elections to the U.S. one to one, because people do it in such a blunt way. They're like, oh, the left is losing. Therefore, you know, Trump will win again. But were there any global trends or macro trends or trajectories for these parties that you think might help us better understand changes in our own politics? I do because what you cannot ignore is how similar these trends are in the U.S. and Europe. It's basically a bunch of far right figures like Trump and Orvan who demagogue immigrants and attack institutions and attack elites and use that to get into power. And then a bunch of people on the left have been kind of knocked back on their heels and are trying to figure out how to get back up, right? And I think the thing you draw, one is the turnout was very

high, I think, as you mentioned. So, like, it's a signal that people are politically engaged. They get that the stakes are high, you know, and that's, I think, good, because I think a lot of people, the right had driven up turnout. I think what you saw in that election is people on the left turned out because they were worried about what's happening on the right, you know. So that, I think probably does forecast what happened in 2018 and what might happen 2020 here is just more people are engaged, that's good. I think people in Europe have been very aggressive in pointing out the dangers of right-wing nationalism, probably more so even than here. Here, you know, we have all these debates about, you know, how much to take on the Mueller report and impeachment. There,

I think, the people who've sounded the alarm bells and offered a message of values, like these people don't represent our values on the right. Here are the values that we believe in. Those kind of appeals to the kind of core values of the European voter. You know, we, you know, we believe in the European Union and we believe in, yes, controls on immigration, but diversity is a value. We believe in democracy is a value, the rule of law. Those appeals did well in Europe, just the kind of basic building blocks of democracy as part of a message. And then I think what you saw on the left is some people, again, trying to figure out how much can issues that people care about on the left, like climate change, galvanized voters, and the Greens are proving that it can, particularly young voters in Europe

turned out much higher than they did in the past. And I think some of that is these movements you've seen in Europe around climate change, like the school walkouts, I don't know people saw this here, but hundreds of thousands of kids walking out of school to protest the need for action on climate. I think the Greens are proving that having an unabashedly progressive message about climate change and economic fairness can turn people out. I think that's an interesting lesson too. And, you know, the main question is, you know, this question of populism that has been defined around immigration on the right. You know, finding a language on economics and inequality, I didn't feel like they necessarily were able to do that. You know, so like in France, Macron's party didn't do very well.

He's had trouble showing that he cares and is being responsive to inequality. Macron's party lost to Marine Le Pen's party, right? I mean, they got smoked by the far red. Yeah, after Italy, I thought France was the most concerning because, Poland and hungry you expect, maybe. But, you know, it's like a midterm election. People vote against the incumbent. But again, I think, you know, good lessons on mobilization of voters, on having a values-driven message against the far right, on activating your voters in issues like climate change, a little more work to be done on the kind of populist message around

inequality. So it's not dissimilar from what we're seeing in the Democratic primary. Those are good silver linings. One other story from these elections were that, I don't know how I'll say it. I mean, our friends in the UK are just a mess. So, Prime Minister Theresa May resigned. Some people are floating Boris Johnson as the likely next prime minister in New York Times in particular. Then Nigel Farage's four-month-old Brexit party took 31% in the EU parliamentary elections. Like, I don't really even have a question here. It's just everything keeps getting worse. Well, all right. Number one, if I was European, I'd be like, why the fuck are the Brits even allowed to elect people to the European Parliament? I would be so angry.

This is why I think the Europeans are going to lose patience with these Brexit delays. Because, like, basically you have this arsonist, Nigel Farage, this kind of racist, anti-immigrant arsonist, who has one play in his book, and it's Brexit. And, you know, he jins up his people to vote for him. And now he's got this 31% block in the European Parliament from the UK of a country that wants to fucking leave. Yeah. So why the fuck are you allowed to be in the parliament to begin with if you, if your whole message is just you want to leave? that, I think, is a warning sign that the Europeans can't put up with this weird situation where the Brits are still in but are trying to leave. Then May, I mean, what can you say? What a catastrophe? I continue to think that she did something's tactically wrong.

Like she thought that she would wait till the very end of the deadline and then pop up with her deal and like force everybody to vote for it. And when she did, everybody voted against it. But the core question is like when the British people have to actually look what Brexit is, look at what it is, they don't like it. Yeah. And that's why it always fails. And that's actually not Theresa May's fault. No, it's not.

And Nigel Farage won't articulate what Brexit means to him in any way, shape, or form. Yeah. And Boris Johnson has indicated, you know, who's like the Trump of, he's a slightly more erudite Trump, complete with the weird hair and everything. But, you know, he said, you know, a no-deal Brexit is the closest thing to the will of the voters in referendum. So you got a Boris Johnson in there, a no-deal Brexit. which, as we've talked about, could be potentially catastrophic,

becomes a much more real possibility, I think. Yeah, it's not good, nothing good. Arnold Schwarzenegger sat down with the F.T., and they asked him about Brexit, and they were expecting some long answer. And he goes, here's what I do. Every single article that comes up on my iPad, I immediately erase it because it's all the same shit.

Hello, it's like a documentary that's going on too long. That's a pretty good summary, Arnold. Yeah, pretty good from Schwarzenegger. I didn't do an impression because that wouldn't have worked. Did you see the guy drop kick, try to drop kick him? He just barely budged. Pretty amazing. He still got it.

He's like over 70. He's a big dude. Okay, let's talk about Trump's trip to Japan for a minute. So Trump goes to Japan. He meets the new emperor. He plays golf with Prime Minister Shenzhou Abe. He went to a sumo wrestling match, which I have to be honest, looks pretty cool. Yeah, it's cooler than anything we did in Japan.

Yeah, but he also revealed a huge split on North Korea policy. So Trump said that Kim Jong-un's ballistic missile tests don't bother him, and he refused to admit that they are a UN Security Council violation. Japanese Prime Minister Shenzuela Abe had to meekly suggest at a joint press conference that, yes, this is a UN Security Council violation, but he did so in a way that was sort of carefully calibrated to not anger Trump. I'm just imagining the many trips we took to Korea or Japan where the press was looking for the most minute daylight on policy. This is about as fundamental a policy split as I could imagine. I mean, it was pretty truly remarkable. Yeah, and first of all, the facts are the facts.

There was a ballistic missile launch. It is a violation of UN Security Consorres. Many of them, actually. These aren't debatable. Like, you know, it's like Trump, it's like, you know, well, I actually stand up here to say the two plus two is five. And John Bolton's like, yes, I drafted this authorization that it violated. Yeah. And so this isn't like up for debate.

And the fact that he's still like hugging Kim Jong-un, as Kim Jong-un is giving him finger in firing off missiles, he's so incredibly weak. I mean, I really, you know, and I saw you tweet this said, like, Beto had made this point that he continually sides of these dictators and that's a sign of weakness. I'd like to see the Democratic candidates calling this out. This is crazy. Like to have a president of the United States who's just been humiliated by a North Korean dictator firing off missiles, denying that a missile launch took place, denying that it's a violation of human security council resolution. Just the denial of facts alone is concerning. Now move on to the foreign policy piece. Japan lives right next to North Korea.

like they are in the crosshairs of these ballistic missiles. Like even if they're not intercontinental ballistic missiles that can hit us, they can hit Japan. They have nuclear weapons and missiles that can hit Japan. Our ally, we have a treaty obligation to them, right? We are literally their security guarantee. And for the President of the United States to stand there and say, actually, I don't think that this is a violation. And I like Kim Jong-un, say nicer things about Kim Jong-un that he'd ever say about the Prime Minister of Japan. I'm telling you that is a earthquake in Japan.

Yeah. And across Asia, because what it says to every U.S. ally in Asia, and we have several, is that you can't count on us. Our word doesn't matter. The President of the United States doesn't give a shit. And he cares more about his relationship with his murderous dictator than he cares about the multi-decade commitments America's made to you. That we've gotten a lot out of those commitments, by the way, right? I mean, basically the security and stability of Asia, the growth of the global economy, all these things that we benefit from having stable democratic allies. And so what does that mean?

That means if you're Japan over time, you're going to find ways to hedge against us. You're going to fall potentially more into the orbit of the Chinese, right? The Japanese and Chinese have deep rivalries. But if you're Abe, you're sitting there thinking, like, well, I better call Xi Jinping because this guy is fucking crazy, you know. And I think we've undersold the extent to which this degree of recklessness on the global stage is both making us less secure because you've got this dictator of North Korea who thinks he can do whatever we want.

and is just completely collapsing our leadership position because if allies can't count on you, they will turn in another direction. Yeah. Look, I'm glad you brought up this, the question of how Democrats should take this on. We talked a little bit about this on Ponce of America. If you had 30 seconds to go at Trump at a debate, what angle would you take? Would it be weakness, ineptitude? I mean, when I think about their objectives, like their big regime change play in Venezuela's

failed. He said he'd get all our troops out of Afghanistan. He lied. He did not. He sent more. North Korea, the diplomacy there is crumbling. I mean, like, what do you think is the best way to make this case? Yeah, I think you take something that everybody already believes about Trump, which is he is reckless and impulsive and unfit to be commander chief. And that's having real world consequences. That is hurting you in your pocketbook because of his crazy China trade war, which is driving up prices and hurting American farmers and workers. It is making us less safe because he's being taken advantage of by nuclear-armed dictators like Kim Jong-un,

and it risks getting us into a war in a place like Iran or Venezuela when he said he'd keep us out of the wars. So his reckless and impulsive nature is making you less safe and is hurting you in the pocketbook. And then the second piece is this man is walking away from all the values that Americans have fought for, struggled for and led for for generations. He is more comfortable with authoritarian murderous dictators than with our allies. And America needs to be America again in the world and promote our

values and stand with our friends and stand against our enemies. And this president won't do that. And that's a combination of the fact that he looks out for his own interests and frankly is corruptible. And because he's just not fit to lead the strongest democracy in the world. I think that, you know, those two, the reckless and impulsive connected to real world consequences, and then the kind of undemocratic nature of his leadership, there's lots of offroads to those two core arguments. But I think those are the two core arguments, right? He's hurting you because of his recklessness and making you less safe. And he's not standing up for the values that Americans care about. Yeah, I agree.

And I do think Democrats really need to go at this because he's, his numbers on foreign policy. are better than his general numbers. And that's just because I think of a vacuum of an argument against him. So we did a poll. So the organization that Jake Sullivan and I have, National Security Action, we commissioned a poll on national security in the 2020 election. And what you find is, we message tested arguments. The arguments against his foreign policy, if you make them, really register, right? And it's in this space of he's reckless and impulsive, and that makes you less safe and less secure. He coesies up to dictators and turns his back on our allies. If you actually make the argument, you get up into like the 60s in terms of like susceptibility to it. You're right.

On the surface, his numbers are okay. They're not great, but, you know, people don't follow these issues closely. You have to make the argument. He's going to be making an argument. I crushed ISIS. You know, I made this breakthrough with Kim Jong-un that prevented war. You know, I made America respected again in the world. all three of those things are wrong. You know, like Obama basically started the effort that crushed ISIS. The North Korea thing's been a disaster. We're less respect in the world than we've ever been.

But he's going to make that argument, so you have to come back at him with something. But you can connect it to your domestic message. You know, if you're Elizabeth Warren, you've made a whole lot message about corruption at home, you can extend that abroad, too. Yeah, I agree. And Trump's, you know, to the extent that Trump has any genius is that he knows that people are going to remember that first Hanoi summit where all the cameras were there and, you know, pretty diplomatic backdrop and not follow up on the substance of whether a deal work.

But speaking of Trump's favorite authoritarian murderers last week, the Trump administration declared an emergency to bypass Congress and expedite arms sales to the Saudis and Emirates, among many others. Secretary Pompeo valued the arm sale at $8.1 billion. The emergency, of course, was Iran. This came as Trump announced to be sending another 1,500 U.S. troops to the Middle East to counter Iran. Ben, how unusual is it to use this?

emergency declaration to forsook an arm sale. And like, is there a reasonable argument that the Saudis don't have enough arms? And is there any way we can keep them from using these in Yemen? Well, one, it's very unusual, right? Particularly of this size and scale. This is a massive arm sale, right? Two, there is no fucking emergency with Iran. Like, this is, the only emergency with Iran is the one we are creating by deploying a bunch of shit to the Middle East and threatening them and being pulling out of the Iran deal.

And the Saudis and the Emirates, like, let's unpack this. What are they going to do? Are they going to attack Iran? I don't know. Like, if it is an emergency related to Iran, then why are we selling them $8 billion for the weapons? It doesn't even make any sense. No, they're going to use this in Yemen. So to get, of course they're going to use this in Yemen, right?

And they connect everything in Yemen to Iran when that is not the case, right? There's a civil war in Yemen. Yes, there happens to be one party that the Iranians have been aligned with, but it's not like Iran. is like fighting a war in Yemen. There's a civil war in Yemen and Iran like Saudi Arabia and the UA and many other countries have proxies in that in that fight. So this is a bunch of bullshit. It shows you how it's kind of a perfect window into the dark heart of the Trump farm policy, right? Because one, it shows you his complete subservience to the Saudis that he's shoveling all these weapons to them. Two, it shows you how much they don't give a shit about human beings

because these weapons will be used to kill people and accelerate a famine in Yemen. Three, it's part of their crazy Iran is the boogeyman behind everything in the world. But then also, there's this growing trend of, like, if he doesn't like that Congress won't give him what he wants, he just ignores Congress, right? So this is in a direct line to the emergency, you know, around the wall. It's like Congress says no to me. So I'll just say, well, I'll ignore Congress and declare an emergency. Like this is being used again and again, and it should throw up some red flags.

Yeah. Let's take a quick break. We come back. We're going to update you guys on that crazy video sting operation in Austria, some news out of Turkey, some weird NSA hacking tools that are ruining people's day in Baltimore, of all places. And then the age-old debate Donald Trump has of steam versus magnets. All right, we're back. So last week we told you about this wild sting operation that captured two right-wing Austrian politics.

hanging out in Abiza with people they thought were connected to a Russian oligarch and offering government contracts in exchange for political support. So this is a good news story because the Austrian parliament has removed the chancellor and a no confidence vote. He'd force a coalition with these two goobers who were hanging out in Ibiza. This is our old friend. I forgot his name. I think he's accountability. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is great. You blow the whistle. You expose corruption and then the house cards collapses. People don't like it? Yeah. People get upset. And then shit falls apart and then there's an election and you choose a new government. It seems like it's a pretty good way to deal with the right wing nationals. Yeah, absolutely. Look, I have nothing

better to say, but, you know, if there's a lot of listeners out there who have the ability to set up a cool video sting operation in Abiza for a right wing nationalist. Cudos to the world those who, uh, in Abiza, I guess, uh, not that I know what they are, but I, the only other thing I'd say is like, it's a point that this is why Democrats shouldn't stop trying to expose corruption, right? I mean, look, because, you know, it's worth it to go in search of what you think is happening because you know you may come up with the one thing that does break the camels back i mean we don't have parliamentary systems so it won't collapse the government but it shows it like you know actually trying to ferret out the corruption and expose it to people rather than just

kind of talking about it uh is is worthwhile yeah it's good stuff took a creep to abiza it's like that mike posner song turkey less good story so the international community is criticizing turkey for a decision to rerun an election that we talked about previously on the show. Yeah. The Istanbul mayor election, prime minister Erdogan's party lost a bunch of municipal elections in a area that's usually his base of power. But he basically just refused to accept defeat and is now calling for a do-over. I guess my question is, at what point do we need to just acknowledge that Turkey is becoming a dictatorship

and that Erdogan is a fascist? Yeah, I think we need to do that. I think that the extent to which, you know, usually what happens in these drifts towards authoritarianism is everything goes but elections at first. You know, it's like the rule of law kind of falls apart and independence of the media falls apart. And it's basically a democracy in elections only. But now he's saying like we're not even going to, I mean, they didn't even really give a reason. It's like they lost the election. So they just said, well, there's irregularities and we have to hold them again.

And they stripped all the power from the mayor who got elected. that's just straight up fucking authoritarianism. And I think we have to be more outspoken about this. And by the way, be more unabashed. Like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, let's take those two examples. It's time for the U.S., I think, you know, to go farther than we were in the past, to stand by our values, in part because this question of democracy versus authoritarianism is so prevalent around the world that things we might have been hesitant to do before we should do.

So with Saudi Arabia, we should not be selling them any arms, period. And I, you know, if we feel like there's some risk in that, I'd rather take that risk. Turkey, I think it's time, you know, we always, it comes at us of like, aren't you nervous about Turkey potentially moving away from NATO? Well, you know what? It might be time for us to take that leverage out for a bit of a spin and say, NATO is an alliance of democracies. And in fact, if Turkey doesn't get its shit together, then we're going to think about

suspending some of the things that NATO does with you. Like, like, we should be more consistent. I obviously didn't like the tradeoffs that we had to make in government, right, because of these things and there are all kinds of security interests with Turkey. But you just get to a point where you can't ignore somebody's just invalidating elections after taking away basically all kinds of the independence of the media and the judiciary. We got to use our leverage. Other countries use our leverage. Russia does. China does.

To say, like, no, you're an alliance of democracies. And if you won't act democratically, like, we're going to take a look at this. Yeah, we can't just baby step around Erdogan because they're in NATO and we want them to be a part. I mean, at some point we have to stand for some values. At some point, we have to stand for, NATO is supposed to be an alliance of democratic countries. That's part of the whole thing about NATO. And I would rather have an alliance that has the credibility of everybody in that being a democracy than putting up with goons like Orban and Erdogan. Yeah, I'm with you.

All right, two sort of fun-ish stories to close the day out. This was a wild piece in The New York Times. apparently a leaked piece of malware designed by the NSA called Eternal Blue, whoever names these things, just kills me. It leaked out and it's being used to attack local city governments and hold them for ransom, including Baltimore, which is, I don't know, right down the road from the NSA, kind of problematic. I don't know how any of these NSA tools actually exist, but it does remind you that we are, you know, developing these weapons that can be emailed.

It's this unprecedented thing, right? The Pentagon can't email you like a missile, right? It feels almost more akin to like a biological weapon or something that could easily be transported. So I guess the question I have, and I'm really walking back, the idea this is a fun question. But it's like, is there enough oversight over these sort of tools and activities? So here's the context. When the Snowden disclosures came out, I remember reading all this information about NSA tools and things they were doing. Be like, whoa, I had no fucking clue.

Yeah. I mean, so I felt like... No, yeah. And it's not like Barack Obama knew either. Right. people like you and me are sitting in the White House and the highest levels of the national security staff have no idea what's happening in a more granular level in these intelligence agencies. Like, who does? Well, because it's so complicated that, you know, what you know in

the White House is like what the intelligence is it comes to you and what the tasking is you're giving them. You don't know what code they're writing or what tools are using to hack into networks. I think without disclosing anything in particular that happened under us, like this phenomenon happened under us where some tool that they had got out, right? And, you know, try to figure out a way to make this,

do you watch Mr. Robot? Oh, yeah, great show. Great show, right? It's actually a pretty good window into basically the idea that there's a subset of people in this world who are really smart about, I was going to say,

computers in the internet, but I sound like a fucking moron. But, I mean, who are about this world of how systems work and networks work. They understand the thing that we just don't that I don't understand. And basically, basically if the NSA hacks into something or has a tool inserted into something, a really good

hacker can see that, maybe reverse engineer it, maybe steal it. I mean, I'd probably just oversimplified it. But basically, if you think about the few thousand geeks in the world who really understand this shit, some of them work at the NSA, some of them work for the Chinese, some of them work for the Russians, and some of them are just like, you know, anonymous hackers, literally that group anonymous. And so the danger is, you know, the NSA is doing all this stuff to get into all these systems. And it's not like there aren't other people who can see that and who might be able to learn from that and do something themselves. And then what you have is this kind of subterranean war taking place between different foreign governments and hackers.

And we sometimes get overconfident, I think, that what we are doing to surveil others won't fall into the wrong. hands. And it has now happened repeatedly. So many times. And so I think the bottom line is, you got at it. There needs to be some way for there to be a little more oversight here about what is being done, what the risks are. Obviously, the risks of civil liberties, which you focused on not for us known, but the risks are security too. Because the NSA has the advantage of doing stuff that not many other people understand. And in a vacuum, that can lead to big mistakes, as we've seen. But also in a structure set up, where your access to information that is classified is based on your need to know, right?

So there's an ever-shrinking pool of people that know about the most sensitive NSA systems and practices and tools. And look, I'll just say it. Like a lot of those people are probably a little older, a little less familiar with computers in the digital age than, let's say, the people writing the code at the NSA. And it's like, I wonder if the oversight to capability level needs to be recalibrated in some way. Yeah. Yeah, because what used to kind of haunt me a little bit in government is, you know, we get the PVB, right, and get all this intelligence.

I never, I rarely did I know exactly how they got it. You know what I mean? Like, you know, they don't tell you, well, here's the origin of all this, right? And the amount of time it would have taken me as a White House official to be like, well, I'd like to know, I'd like to be briefed on, you know, what's the tool this is using or who's the human source and, you know, you don't have to. You be treated with such skepticism. And people would be like, why do you need to know that? Why do you know that? And I just think that part of this probably involves Congress and the intelligence committees,

but part of it may be internal, but there needs to be oversight on how we collect intelligence, not just like what we're trying to collect, because this kind of keeps happening. And I hate to put it on the NSA because, like, in defense of the NSA, right, here's what they would tell us. They'd be like, well, you all expect us to, you know, the policymakers expect all this intel. So we're just trying to get it. And so what you need is someone to tell them. yes, but, and this is what Obama did after Snowden. Yes, I want intelligence, but I don't want you to spy on the leaders of any of our allies.

And so we made this rule. Like, you can't do that, right? And then they stopped doing that. Like, there needs to be someone who will go underneath the hood and look at the, how are we doing this. Otherwise, this is going to keep happening. Yeah, right, because none of us can truly remember what it was like in the months and years, I guess, right after 9-11, when everyone was terrified of the next horrifying attack, but we stomped on the gas. and no one has pulled their foot up.

Yeah, and shoveled money at these people. For 15, 20 years. It's scary. Okay, actual fun story. So a lighter note, apparently during the Japan trip, Trump was walking around on aircraft carrier with a bunch of U.S. service members, and he was polling them on whether they preferred

traditional steam-powered catapults on aircraft carriers or electromagnetic systems. And then he went out and publicly said that he's worried that the electromagnetic systems don't work in the bad weather. So I guess, is this the normality? procurement process. You have some nearly 80-year-old president bumbling around on an aircraft carrier, and that's how you decide how to make the next generation of Navy hardware? I mean, there's so many things, so many things to say about this. I mean, the, the first thing is,

like, does Donald Trump even know what the fuck that is? Does he even know, like, what he just said aloud? Well, like the word salad that came out of his mouth about steam and electromagnetic and like, no, right? So let's just start from the premise that he has no idea what the fuck he's talking about. None. Right? Because that's an important baseline for us to establish, right? Number two, presidents don't normally get down into the weeds of the functioning of aircraft carriers and aircraft. Like, that is not, like, Jimmy Carter was like a, you know, actually an expert on these

and he didn't fucking do that, right? Why Donald Trump thinks this is a guy, the height of this guy's engineering capacity has been the size of the gold fucking letters that he puts on his buildings and the shade of gold that he paints his fucking toilet, right? And now this guy is going to take the most important tool in the U.S. military arsenal are aircraft carriers

and make some like flip decision that will probably affect like the entire, fleet of U.S. aircraft carriers and the entire procurement network will be changed and the way that like planes fucking land on these things will change. Decades long processes. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, I'm just going to make a pretty

safe bet that whoever decided how this should work is smarter than Donald Trump. Like whoever looked at this. My guest, too. Yeah, whoever it is, whatever nerd sat in the room and we're like, well, should we use steam or should we You know, like, that they actually had some data that informed the decision about the engineering of a billion dollars worth of aircraft carriers.

It is so crazy. Just walk around and do a straw pole of a bunch of sailors. Remember when we were accused of micromanaging the military? I wasn't even going to go there because, like, I'm just imagining, you know, Barack Obama coming out and announcing, you know, that he was changing that. Bob Gates would have wrote a whole book on this one. Oh, my gosh. Gosh, the pearl clutching among Bob would be out of control. All right, that's it for our portion.

But when we come back, my conversation with Ron Clayne about managing the international response to Ebola. I am so excited to have on the line, Ron Clayne. Ron is someone who is able to do literally everything in politics. He was chief of staff to two vice presidents. And he has run the debate prep for like every Democratic presidential candidate in history. and he is a guy when you get the call from the White House that says, hey, can you come, please coordinate the Ebola response to the worst outbreak we've ever seen, says yes.

So, Ron, thank you for doing the show. Thank you for answering this call as well. Thank you, Tommy. It's great to be here with you. It's great to talk to you. So, you know, the circumstances are less happy than the introduction. There is a serious Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I believe it's the 10th outbreak in the DRC.

what in your opinion makes this outbreak different and how concerned are you? So it's very different. I mean, let's put it in historical context. We've known about Ebola for roughly 40 years back to the 1970s. The typical outbreak has 100 cases. Before 2014, no outbreak had ever had more than 500 cases. So this outbreak, which is about 1900 cases already and still going, is the second largest one in history.

and by a factor of 4x over the third largest one in history and still growing. The only thing we've ever seen remotely like it was the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. And so this is a very, very serious situation. You know, lives obviously are being lost. Healthcare workers are losing their lives as well. It's spreading. And, you know, Ebola is kind of like a forest fire. Until you put it out, you don't really know how much worse still is.

it's going to get. But I will say this. Right now, the epidemiological curve for the current outbreak looks somewhat similar to where we were in the spring of 2014 with the West African outbreak in 2014. So it is, it's accelerating, but could really take off much worse in the coming weeks or months. And this could really go from being a catastrophe to really a real global nightmare. Yikes. I should note that we're recording this on Friday, May 24th. will release it next week. How much do you attribute the severity of the outbreak to attacks on medical workers as opposed to say, you know, just a generally weakened public health infrastructure and a virus that is deadly and spreads? There's no question that the circumstances on the ground

have contributed. Because what's really surprising about this is that between 2014 and today, the world's developed an effective vaccine to fight. Ebola. And the common conventional wisdom was after that vaccine became available in 2016 that we'd never see something like this ever again, that there'd be a small outbreak. The public health authorities would come in, identify the area where the outbreak was raging. They'd vaccinate all the people who had contact with the people who had Ebola, and the outbreak would be extinguished. That's what happened, actually, in another part of Congo earlier in 2018. We saw one of those incidents. And after really a couple hundred, after roughly 100 cases, the thing was extinguished

by using the vaccine. So what's going on here is a very special case. And it's really driven by the, both the politics and the violence on the ground. This is a part of Congo that is kind of opposed where the dominant political factions are opposed to the central government. And there's a lot of distrust of the central government. Plus, there's a lot of violence, armed groups. And that's led to attacks on the health care workers. It's led to a place where U.S. government responders, like from the CDC, are not operating in the area anymore, and suspicion, hostility, resentment of view that the responders aren't really helping but are hurting. And that kind of instability has definitely played a major role in how this has unfolded.

So how do you think the Trump administration is handling the response to this current outbreak? Well, so, you know, I think it's a little bit of a mixed bag. So you may recall back in 2014 when we were fighting Ebola, really the person who did as much as possible to make the situation worse and exacerbated, it was Donald Trump. Yeah. He tweeted attacks on President Obama for bringing health care workers who had Ebola, Western health care workers, back to the U.S. for treatment. He called for all kinds of outrageous and non-scientific-based measures and responses and really inflamed public fear. And so that was a reason to think that when President Trump faced one of these situations, it would really be horrible and awful. And one other thing, which was after I finished working on the Ebola response, President Obama created a permanent position of epidemic response coordinator in the NSC staff that had continued for the first year of the Trump administration. administration, Admiral Tim Zimmera, former Bush appointee, was put in the place by General McMaster

when he was head of the NSC. When Bolton came in, he abolished the unit, he abolished the position. So Trump's history plus the absence of any White House leadership led us to fear the worst. So what's happened? On the one hand, I think the Trump administration hasn't done anything outrageously bad or horrible like you might expect from Trump. And indeed, Trump did allow a healthcare worker, an American health care worker who was suspected of having contracted Ebola in the response, come back to the U.S. for treatment, notwithstanding his attack on that in 2014, the head of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Redfield has been to the region. He's looked around. The U.S. has written modest checks to support the response.

We've kind of done, you know, decent, average, fine, but this is becoming a situation. where we're going to need to do more than decent average fine to do our part as the global leader in global health security. Instead of pulling our people out of the region, we need to be getting our people into the region. Instead of kind of having a benign, just kind of modest response, we really need to be engaging in diplomacy to create the kind of security environment where the responders can work more safely. We need to write a bigger check to the response groups, both the NGOs working on the response front lines and helping the WHO fund it. We have historically been the global leader in global health security. And in response to something like this, now we're just another country.

And that's a shame that's going to cost lives here. And I don't think the world can do it without us playing a more active role. Yeah. Well, so let's flash back to 2014 and talk about your time when you were coordinating the U.S. government response to, you know, what was frankly a much larger Ebola outbreak. So the day after you get that job, a New York-based doctor test positive for Ebola, the guy rode the subway, he went bowling. I mean, it must have been terrifying. How did you get a handle on the crisis and begin to coordinate a global response? Well, so, you know, it starts with having a president who looks at this the right way. President Obama did two things that were really critical. First, he put the U.S. in the middle of the action in West Africa

to stop the disease where it was. He made a historic decision to deploy U.S. troops to fight an epidemic, Operation United Assistance, sending in the security and logistic support that the military could provide to help empower the response in West Africa. We sent 10,000 civilians to West Africa to help fight the response. Obviously, in the end, the West Africans themselves were the heroes who turned this thing around on the ground. But the U.S.'s leadership and generosity was the backbone of that response. President Obama committed to that.

Here at home, the president committed to a science-based approach. We wrote rules for how someone like Craig Spencer would be treated and took an approach to it that wasn't based on fear or prejudice, but based on what the president's chief scientific advisors were telling him and making science the preeminent decision-making principle, whether it was good politics or bad, played a key role in the success we had in managing Dr. Spencer's case and in safeguarding the U.S. from other cases and in getting the U.S. ready to deal with the possibility that more cases would come to our country or other infectious, dangerous, infectious diseases in the future would come to our country.

The President Obama made a big investment in that, and that's made all of us a lot safer. So, Ron, when you were, like, I assume holding meetings in the situation room to coordinate the response. I mean, what components of the U.S. government were in the room? And when you look back at the response and how effective it ultimately was, were there any specific things you guys did that you say that was highly effective? We should be doing that again today. Yeah, a couple things.

I mean, one, well, we had virtually, I think we had 13. or 14 agencies in the room was a when president called it a whole of government response. It really was. We had, as I said, the military on the ground in West Africa, lots of contractors and personnel from USAID, from CDC, the great scientists in NIH developing this vaccine that we got to test at the very end of the 2014 outbreak that's played a key role. Since then, you know, a lot of work by the Customs and Border Patrol to monitor how we were getting people into the country. and make sure we were identifying potential cases when they arrived here, and in partnership with state and local governments that were doing a lot of the contact tracing

here in the U.S. of potential cases here in the U.S., as well as a lot of work with the private sector on both kind of philanthropic responses to what was going on West Africa, as well as the health care providers in the U.S. to build 10 Ebola treatment centers in the U.S. that now are repurposed for potential dangerous infectious diseases to really expand our ability to test for potential diseases and to develop therapeutics and vaccines and all these things. And so it really was a massive, massive effort. Congress also very quickly appropriated $6 billion, half of which was spent domestically, half of which was spent in West Africa to really fund and power this response.

You know, look, I think there are a couple lessons from that. one, there's no real replacement for presidential leadership. I mean, you know Tommy from having worked in this bureaucracy to turn around all the things we turned around in a relatively short period of time to go from three to ten of Ebola treatment centers, from testing in three to 44 states to go through a network of over 80 screening centers to, you know, all the things we did in 60 days. You know, I'm a good manager. I'm quite proud of my work on it. And more importantly, I had an amazing team at the NSC, but in the end, it really comes down to people doing it because they know the president wants it done. And what we see now is really in absence of that presidential leadership.

But I think you talk to people, so I talked to former colleagues who are still in the bureaucracy, you know, their basic approach is to hope that Trump doesn't really notice and hope that Trump doesn't engage. That's obviously a very different thing, a very different situation than we had with President Obama. And I think the other takeaway from it is, I hope everyone would take away from it, this is a really interconnected globe. This year is the 100th anniversary of the largest single casualty event in U.S. history, which was not World War I or World War II, but the Spanish influenza outbreak of 1918. 600,000 Americans died in a year from that pandemic. And it's an event we don't talk about, something we don't really remember, but we're at risk of a repeat of something left at any time, any day, unless we take the kinds of systems we started to build in the Obama administration and invest in global health security around the

world and increased resilience of our health care system here in the U.S., that risk remains. Yeah. So, Ron, you might have noticed that our political debates in this country can be trite and stupid. Yeah. And the challenge there, as you well know, is that stupid political attacks can lead to bad policy outcomes. So case in point, I was reading an article about your tenure as Ebola. are the government was having trouble early on reaching individuals who came to the U.S.

from West Africa because their cell phones didn't work once they got in the U.S. So the CDC says, hey, let's give these guys, men and women, temporary phones so we can reach them. Seems simple, seems obvious. But the proposal reminded people of a made-up racist controversy years earlier that claimed Obama had a program called Obama phones that gave special cell phones to welfare recipients. It was nonsense for a variety of reasons that don't really matter or aren't worth getting

into here. But it does matter to me that that kind of political consideration was even raised at a meaning. And I know it was raised by well-meaning people because I know all the people that were in those meanings. I mean, how often did politics like that interfere with smart policy choices? And how did you work through that? And how do you think we can, I don't know, change the system or the structure to eliminate that idiocy from entering the debate ever again? Yeah. So, I mean, things like that came up every day. And, um, And not to be overly simplistic about it, but we got through them because the president of the United States made a decision to put policy before politics. And on that one in particular, looked myself and Dr. Tom Frieden had the CDC in the eye and said, look, if it's going to save lives and make the American people safer to hand out these cell phones, then it's not even a close call for me.

If people want to give me political grief for it, I'll take the political grief. if you guys go do the right thing. And that really made all the difference in the world. It did save lives in West Africa and did help us bend the curve of the epidemic faster and did save a lot of lives probably around the world too. And there's just no substitute for that kind of leadership at the top. Now, it's not just these kind of petty political considerations. It's the broad political themes of our time that are working against health security.

So in 2016, after the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was defeated, we had a new infectious disease outbreak in this hemisphere, Zika, which was causing massive numbers of a babies born with a horrible condition, microcephaly, in South America, and really ravaged the island of Puerto Rico, U.S. Commonwealth. And President Obama and his team got ahead of that and went to Congress in February of 2016 before it really spread. in the northern part of our hemisphere and said, hey, we need money to fight this disease. We need to do these things to fight this disease. And I hate to say it, but a Republican Congress took that very, very slowly because they had an attitude. I used to hear this all the time when I'd speak out about Zika, that, oh, Zika's a problem for immigrants. Why don't we just keep the immigrants out? If we keep the immigrants out, we'll keep the disease out. Now, there is no evidence that immigrants, more than Americans, who are going to see the World Cup in Brazil or to tour in South and Central America, we're bringing it here. But the anti-immigrant sentiment really drove this.

And if you go about it, look, this is also at the time Trump was banging on the wall and the idea we needed a wall, and often you often hear on Trump's language about immigrants, this discussion about diseases, immigrants bringing diseases here. That anti-immigrant sentiment bends U.S. policy

in a bad direction that prevents us from doing the things we should do. As a result, we were late to respond to Zika. For the first time in our history, the Centers for Disease Control issued a travel warning against travel to part of the continental United States. They warned pregnant women not to travel to southeast Florida in 2016 because of the risk of contracting Zika in our own country. That was a completely preventable public health risk if we had made the kinds of investments President Obama asked for that were resisted largely because of this anti-immigrant sentiment. Wow, that is depressing. One thing Trump isn't dealing with right now, I think, is just the alarmist, irresponsible media coverage of the Ebola outbreak.

I mean, that could be, as you alluded to earlier, because in 2014, he was part of the problem in tweeting irresponsible nonsense that drove some of this coverage. But when you look back to the coverage of the Ebola outbreak in 2014, what did the media get wrong? And how do you think that news outlets should correct for some of those errors? this time around as they begin to focus on what's happening in Congo? Well, look, I think people are right to be scared of scary things, and there's nothing wrong with the media reporting on the fact that some scary things are happening, and there's some

risk here. I think the challenge in the circumstance is keeping that risk in context. And it wasn't wrong to say that people in America might have gotten Ebola. We were preparing for a handful of cases here. But that got blown out of proportion. And I think the problem here was that a very small percentage chance of a very bad thing got covered very badly. Dr. Tony Fauci, who was the head of the infectious disease centers at NIH and a great American hero, you know, used to tell us that a lot of the public coverage of Ebola in 2014 remind him of the early. days of the coverage of AIDS, where people said, like, oh, I'm not going to go out to dinner

in Greenwich Village because I have a gay waiter, you know, like he may touch my plate, and I may get AIDS from him touching my plate. And a combination of misinformation and fear was driving a lot of panic. And we saw the same thing in 2014 around Ebola. And look, it's complicated because we couldn't say, look, there is zero percent chance that someone's going to get Ebola here because there wasn't zero percent chance, or that there's zero percent chance that you might encounter someone. And although Ebola transmission is very, very, very hard, comes from bodily fluids. You know, there were risks here, which we were managing and controlling, but we couldn't promise we're zero.

I think that's a hard situation for folks to deal with. It's important, though, for the media to do better on this because someday we are going to face a situation where accurate information is going to be the difference between life or death. It's not just going to be politics or public fear. It's going to be getting people to make the right choices and understand the right ways to be safe. And I think the public health community needs to get better about communicating about that. And the media needs to get better informed and more responsible how they deal with those circumstances. Yeah, I mean, honestly, that's why when they named you to this Ebola's our position, I thought that's actually a wonderful fit.

Because in my experience, you know, there are some incredible, life-saving, brilliant doctors out in the world, they often tend to be people that don't communicate the things they're working on well to people with smaller brains like me. So we need translators. Yeah, look, I think that the president made a choice to bring in someone who is not a doctor, who is not a scientist, because he had the best doctors and the best scientists in the world working on this problem. We had two big challenges in the fall of 2014. Our agencies weren't acting together quickly enough. The interagency process wasn't really working. We were confronting all these. questions of first impression, and there wasn't really a good policy process to resolve that.

And so he needed someone who knew the government, didn't have to know the science, but knew how to make the government work to kind of make these things go faster. How can we get more responders on the ground in West Africa more quickly? How can we get the Army to do more? How could we get HHS to do more? And I think, you know, he thought I had that. And then we needed a better way of talking to people about it in the country to camp down the fear a bit and to engage state and local governments and private sector responders to step up and to make the contributions we needed them to make. And, you know, that's the key thing, I think, of one of these responses.

The scientists will always do the science, but for the U.S. government to be effective, the government needs to kind of do its part well, and we need to communicate well. And last thing I'll say is, we also have to remember, we respond with our health care system, which is different than most of the other health care systems in the world. our system's much more pluralistic. The U.K. has a national health care system. If they want to send 1,000 medical professionals to West Africa to fight Ebola, someone picks up the phone and calls National Health Services and sends a thousand people.

Our health care workers work for private companies. They work for public companies. They work for nonprofits. They work for all kinds of different kinds of entities. They aren't, they aren't like collectively managed. And even here in our country, uh... our systems regulated by state officials by federal officials one we haven't uh... you know it didn't uh... you know it's got a lot of publicity which was president obama made a

science-based decision about how people could travel into the country and and how we would track what they came into the country and uh... you know the governor new jersey the governor new york made a very different decision and started quarantining people and in our federal system that's their i mean that is their decision to make they have the legal authority to make that decision but it makes having a unified national response obviously a lot more

more difficult. Yeah. So we talked a lot about the U.S. government and the government response you coordinated. How effective our international organizations like the World Health Organization or the U.N.? What's their role in a crisis like this? So it's interesting. Back in 2014, the WHO was a disaster, and they really, they were late to call the world to action. A lot of their early statements were incorrect. A lot of their ideas about what should be done were wrong. they were disorganized. They really, really weren't it helpful. The UN stepped up to fill that with an emergency response mission. That too was not really that effective, well-intentioned, but not well-organized, not well-managed. I'd say both those institutions are doing better now. The WHO has new leadership.

They've been extremely transparent this time. They've really, you know, kind of organized or set out the right battle plan this time. The UN has now stepped up to agree to do more. And so that's all improved. I give a lot of credit to the WHO for its improvement. But I think that there's a big misconception about this whole thing, which is the WHO is not a response organization. It's a regulatory organization. It says, hey, there's an outbreak over here.

We've decided that that's what it is, and we're issuing out a call, essentially, for people to respond. The WHO doesn't have large numbers of people. It doesn't employ the kinds of massive numbers of doctors and nurses. you'd send on the ground in Western Congo right now. It's basically groups like Doctors Without Borders and the International Rescue Committee and other NGOs that are actually doing the treatment

and training the local healthcare workers and how to do the treatment and so on and so forth. And so it's a really strange situation, Tommy. It would be as if we were facing some threat, global threat from terrorism. And we said basically, we're going to have this regulatory group. They're going to tell us when they're worried of terrorism,

and then we're going to hope a bunch of volunteers show up to do something about it. And that's kind of where we are in global pandemic response. You know, people used to ask me all the time during the Ebola thing, hey, one of the black helicopters is going to be here to, you know, take us all over. And I used to say the problem isn't that the black helicopters are coming. The problem is there are no black helicopters. I mean, there really isn't this kind of big secret global force to deal with this. we're reliant on the hortatory powers of WHO and a lot of NGOs.

You know, that feeling is so true for so many major foreign policy challenges. And meetings I was in in the White House situation room where you kind of look around and you realize, oh, shit, like these are the people charged with fixing whatever thing we're talking about today. Okay, better get serious. So last question for you. If people are listening, they've seen the news, they're concerned, they want to donate to a charity or an NGO that's helping with a response. Are there any ones you'd specifically recommend?

Well, I certainly think Doctors Without Borders and the International Rescue Committee are two groups doing fantastic work on the ground. The Centers for Disease Control, kind of unique in the federal government, has a private foundation that is attached to it, and gifts to there are always very useful to help empower our response in these circumstances. And I think those are the principal things I point people to. but, you know, also basically the development groups doing work in Eastern Congo, all challenged, all need help. It's a hard situation. And I do think, look, personal generosity is great, and the kinds of checks and contributions individuals can make, but right now we really need our government to step up more and to come up with some diplomacy to allow the response to be safer.

It's a hard part of the world for us to work in. I don't deny that. It's not a place where we have a lot of allies and friends. We need to try to find a way to help our people operate and to help fund some of the things directly that the WHO is trying to get funded. That's very good advice. Well, Ron, thank you for doing the show today.

Thank you for all the work you did in 2014 and previously because, man, that was scary for a while. Absolutely. I mean, I had friends like, you know, people like you, Ben Rhodes, texting me, like, here's a reality. less scary than what's on the news, but, you know, it's freaky and it's good that, you know, well-meaning people are doing their best to try to solve these problems. So thank you again. Have a great weekend. You too. Thanks, Tommy.

That's it for potta of the world. Thank you guys for tuning in. Ben. Yeah. Great to see you. Good to be here. And I'll talk to you guys next week. Live in the flesh, yeah.