Pod Save the World - Pod Save the World Live!

Episode Date: January 19, 2018

Tommy talks with Ben Rhodes, Ambassador Samantha Power and Greg Barker about the documentary The Final Year, which follows President Obama’s foreign policy team during the final year of his administration. They discuss Obama’s foreign policy legacy, ruptures over Syria, and how Trump’s election upended everything. The Final Year is in theaters and available on iTunes starting Friday, January 19th.  Watch Now on iTunes:https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-final-year/id1324474039?ls=1

Thank you very much for coming out to a conversation about foreign policy. That means a lot to me. It will never cease to amaze me. It's the very first ever live PODSA of the world. Special shout out to Magnolia Pictures, our partner for this event for making it happen. Tonight is a conversation about a documentary called The Final Year. It's by Greg Barker is here with us tonight and we'll be on stage. They filmed the final year of President Obama's administration.

They started shooting in September of 2015 and followed a number of members of the foreign policy team as they sprinted to the finish line. The film is available in theaters everywhere starting now. This will be released on Friday. It will be on iTunes as well.

Our guests today are the stars and the creators of the documentary first ambassador, Samantha Power, former Deputy and National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, and the director of the final year Greg Barker. Hey guys. How you doing?

Nice chandeliers, Tommy. Yeah, it's cool, right? So this movie was like, it was like free-basing nostalgia for me. The film, a lot of it's in Ben's office. I used to sit right outside that room where he was. And it reminded me that what I missed the most about working in the White House, and I think the reason people are going to love this movie

is because you see, like, decent, caring people doing their best and really trying, unlike the current. current crowd who just sort of bumble-fucks their way through whatever is going on. One thing I didn't miss about the White House was how hard it was to get anything approved and done. So I guess my first question for you is, how the fuck did you pull this off? How did you get a documentary crew in the bowels of the NSC for an entire year? Greg, maybe you should answer this as well. We just sold it on the glamour of documentary film. You know, by the end of the administration, I was kind of a dangerous character.

You know, I could get things done probably I couldn't have when you were there, Tommy. Because you weren't there anymore. But the fact of the matter is I think that Sam didn't ask us before she agreed to fully cooperate with the documentary film. Ask for forgiveness, not permission, government lesson number one. Yes. But what was interesting is when Greg came to me and sat in my office and said, you know, I want to do this and depict the work of diplomats, I kind of looked at them and thought, you know, that's crazy. I'm not going to do that. But what was interesting over the course of a few months in the first part of 2016, what I realized

is, you know, all those press briefings that you and I would prepare for, you know, for hours, you know, that seemed very important at the time. When you're getting ready to leave, you realize how ephemeral that is. You know, nobody's going to remember the press briefing we gave on June 12, 2016, right? The TPP briefing? It felt so important. You know, we really needed to make these points. But then I realized, actually, but people will consume this film one year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now. And if I really wanted people to understand what we were trying to do, that there would be much more value in actually opening up the doors and letting a documentary film crew follow us around, follow Sam around, you know, get some access to President Obama, and really show what this is like.

Because, you know, we get frustrated with the media sometimes. and that they cover the kind of horse race of politics and the kind of trivial back and forth of the day. But if you're frustrated with that, you have to find different content. And a documentary film that's actually going to pull back and show the lens over the course of a year is going to tell the story that I wanted people to see,

warts and all, by the way, I had to trust that they were going to get some stuff where we didn't look that good and stuff where we did. And, you know, I think Greg, I didn't know what his angle was, but I could tell that he was really trying to understand what we were doing in a very complicated environment. He didn't Michael Wolfie. The book's coming out later.

Part two is the Deep State. So I don't know if you guys have read the Michael Wolf book, but Ben features prominently both in the book and in Donald Trump's mind. He's his favorite character of the Deep State. He cites him often as... In the last scene in the film, I'm actually walking out of the White House

and you see me disappearing into the black, what it doesn't show is in a... a black car picks me up and took me to a mountain somewhere that I won't disclose where I've been orchestrating the deep state ever since and I was flown here tonight just for this statement. The scary thing, this is going to be quoted.

I'm absolutely convinced of it. There's a huge Twitter flurry about Ben Rhodes finally admitting. Coming to a free beacon blog post near you. Okay, let's go to our first clip, which I think sets up sort of what the film, the final year is about. I feel like we should have, you know, a clock up with the days counting down because what we have

set in motion, whether Cuba normalization, climate change, Syria, you know, incredibly important issues of our national security, you know, all of that is at stake. A lot of people are running to succeed President Obama. Republicans have the largest primary field ever. 17 candidates are now in the race, promised to undo much of his work on climate and foreign policy. One of the things I want to do with the time remaining, you know, is to just try to convey that this is a different way of doing foreign policy.

So Samantha's first words there, we should set up a clock, counting down the days. And that's what the movie is about. So you guys sprinting to get done as much as possible, which is kind of counterintuitive if you thought Hillary Clinton's going to win, she'll protect our legacy, she'll be continuation on foreign policy, at least of Obama's sort of third term. Where did that sense of urgency come from? Did he sit you guys down at an NSC meeting and say, here's my list, go get it done? How did that come to be?

Well, the best example, I think, of the surprising fact that we did scramble, kind of basically playing like we were broke all year, was Paris and the climate agreement. So as it turns out now, if Trump goes forward with his threat to withdraw, which we can expect he will see. seek to do, the Paris Agreement will still stay into it in effect. Why? Because thanks to the President, Brian Dees, President's climate advisor, Dennis McDonough, who's the chief of staff at the time, and the rest of us just as foot soldiers in this effort, we waged a full court press for the entire year of 2016 to bring the treaty into force, which required getting 55% of the emissions kind of covered by the countries and meant getting, you know, countries that otherwise would have taken years to sort of grind through their parliaments or do executive actions or whatever.

We got done before the election even happened in November. So people remember that it was in 2015, December 2015, that the Paris Agreement was negotiated. Kyoto took nine years to come into force. This took only those 10 or 11 months, and it was because of that urgency. And yet that urgency coexisted with, I don't want to say, complacency, but growing confidence, certainly as soon as Trump became the nominee. So where did that come from? I think it came in part from the fact that we all also knew that we would be leaving. So apart from just getting that direction from the president and feeling accountable to him,

we knew that these were our last chances to do these amazing jobs and to have this privilege of serving. And my list or Ben's list may look different than our successors list. And so we were, you know, very eager to lock down what we had already done. That's the kind of, is often described as kind of a legacy work, which I feel does it a disservice. It kind of sounds like it's about, you know, what's going to be on your tombstone rather than helping people. But some of it was just, you know,

when am I going to get to be UN ambassador again? Like, this is awesome. I'm running out of time. So along the way, I sort of felt like the film was becoming like a band movie. So it's like a band that's been together for a decade around the lead singer, and you know they're doing their last album. Where nobody has hooked up. Just rest assured.

No. Anywhere. No drugs. There is a quote, there's a quote from Ben in the film where he says, in Washington, there's a default that we've been trying to break that the way we show we're serious

about a problem is military force or that we're willing to use military force. This was sort of a fundamental Obama message from the very beginning, from like 2007 in the primary with Hillary Clinton. I think it flowed from his belief, that the Iraq war was a disaster and that Washington was too easily sort of lulled into thinking, into authorizing that war without thinking through the consequences. How do you think Obama did

in his effort to sort of break that default orientation? And how do you think that sort of mantra from him squares with the goal, with the reality of sending tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan increasing the tempo of drone strikes in some places and all the sort of, you know, successful uses, in some cases unsuccessful uses of additional military force. American foreign policy is an ocean liner. You can't kind of turn it on a dime.

And I think we're even seeing that with Trump. You know, he can't quite figure out how to get out of the Iran deal. Paris, I would even say for this crowd, you know, the rest of the world is in Paris. And if we elect a different president, Donald Trump can't get us out of Paris until

the year of the election, we could be in Paris and basically we'll lose some time on our commitment, but we can be right back in it. So that's to say it's hard to make dramatic change. I think he scaled down our military engagement. Personally, frankly, I think we're probably in Afghanistan past when we should be. I'm probably in a minority in that view, but I see diminishing returns of what we're accomplishing there.

There always is going to be a reason to stay someplace, and it's hard to leave. leave because you own all the consequences after you leave. But the fact of the matter is, we've been in war in Afghanistan for over 15 years, and we're not, you know, we're kind of on a treadmill in terms of trying to make the place a better place. Do you think that that means we should have, in 2009, instead of surging additional troops, he should have maybe searched fewer or not at all? No, I mean, you know, the logic of that was we needed to buy some space in that part of the world to have the platform to go after Al-Qaeda.

Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that did yield benefits. The question I have is, and this is what foreshadowing discussions we're probably going to have, there is a use of military force that I saw is very effective, which is that we can take out people, we can take out a terrorist cell, we can even take out a dictator like Omar Gaddafi. We're not as good at essentially engineering the politics inside of other countries, and sometimes we, I think, bite off more than we can chew in thinking that, you know, if we just stay here for a few more years, Afghanistan is going to become, you know, something that is resembling a functioning government and a functioning economy, when, in fact, our mere presence actually

in some ways feeds a corrupt economy that is dependent on a war. And so I think Obama was able to dramatically reduce our commitments, our kind of post-9-11 wars. What we were not able to do, in part because of the rise of ISIL, is kind of fully bring an end to a period of post-9-11 conflict. And, you know, that, too, is a cost of our successor because Trump has escalated every single conflict that he inherited from Obama, whereas I think, you know, Clinton would have been more likely to at least continue the glide path that we were on. But I think that Americans need to remember that, you know, we're asking a lot of our

military to fight year after year in these places. We're spending a lot of money that we're not spending on other things, and we have to look hard at our capacity to essentially dictate events inside of other countries that are very different from here, that have their own politics, that have their own sectarian conflicts. And that's my concern that is shown in the film. And over the course of the year, I kind of was looking at the choices that they were making about where to travel and what to do when they got to places like that. Laos and Vietnam and the choice to go to Hiroshima and I, you know,

with the background of the Syrian sort of tragedy looming, I sort of realized that you guys were grappling with these questions of war and peace which had really, you know, kind of helped define Barack Obama from the very beginning. It was emergence as a public, as a national

figure. And I sort of decided to kind of make that at the, at the very hard of the film. So yeah, you mean, you guys were grappling with those questions of war and peace going way. back to when Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize, and Samantha, Ben, and John Favre, who was in the house somewhere, were wrestling over the draft of how to accept that speech as he escalated our wars as we were en route.

Fast forward to another speech that you guys were fighting over. There's a scene in the film where there's this heated debate about Obama's final speech of the UN. He argued that life expectancy, education levels, et cetera, has never been, there's never at a better time to be alive, essentially, and that the world, generally speaking, is less violent, more prosperous. Samantha, you thought that tone was sort of discordant and too optimistic, given what you were hearing all the time. Syria, 65 million people are displaced, the general trend lines on democracy. Wrestling over the tone and substance of a set of remarks is like a daily

combat in a White House, but what was the bigger issue here for you? Why is it problematic, or in Ben's view, I guess, important for the president to set this sort of hopeful tone. Well, it's been interesting because we've had the opportunity to screen the film and a lot of different audiences, and thus we've had the chance not only to litigate the question of that speech or those larger issues in the film, but also in discussions like this one.

And I learned from listening to Ben, what I guess I wasn't really seeing at the time. So in the film, there's basically back and forth between us where I'm arguing, in Ben's words, you know, that we should be acknowledging kind of how bad the moment is. And I think in the film, I come off as right, more right than Ben does. He comes off as, in the film, I'm about to say something in tension with that. In the film, he comes off as more right on Syria, in my humble opinion, than I do. That's Greg's fault. But on this, no, seriously, I think it just because Trump wins and because Putin's everywhere and doing everything terrible all over the place,

this idea of saying there's never been a better time to be alive looks discordant, I think, in the film as it's projected. But I think what I've learned from Ben in listening to him is that, you know, part of what Obama is doing in that speech is contesting the Trump carnage perspective that is out there. So in a way, I wasn't meaning to associate myself with carnage, as I'm arguing, you know, again, I think for that room and at that moment, maybe appropriately, that we try to meet people where they are. Like, we grappled with this throughout. You know, people, as we've learned, you know, people are afraid during Ebola, which Obama, you know, managed to handle despite the fact that most people,

you know, majority of polls at least, wanted us to stay away from that. And Obama said, no, if we're going to deal with it and keep the American people safe, we're going to have to go into the belly of the beast in West Africa. People were really, really afraid. And Obama found a way, and Ben and you and everybody, found a way to speak to people and somehow just barely basically get by on that, sell the policy. Now, had we had more infections and more people die in this country than just a single patient, I'm not sure that that could have been sustained.

but I think where I was at the UN was dealing with 65 million displaced, which isn't just every one of those individuals who's a member of a family or a parent, like trying to deal with their kid and not having a home and not having school and all the horror that that connotes. But it became emblematic of like a world on fire and institutions like the UN, the one I was working at and the U.S. government, the one I was working in, incapable of kind of keeping up. So all I think our back and forth really was about was me sort of pleading that we meet people where they are, namely afraid that ISIS is going to blow up their airplane, you know, feeling like the system that, you know, the kind of world is going around on its axis faster than we're able to keep up and then meet them where they are and then try to transcend that and persuade them.

but I think cracking the code on how you meet people where they are and not cause them to wallow in where they are or get pulled down into this darker ether that Trump wants us to be in, I think that's a genuine challenge. Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is that what Obama had in mind very much was Trump. I mean, it's not like we didn't see the fears that were out there. I mean, you know, Favros here at Hill, you know,

We worked together for so many years on this, but Obama always wrestled with this issue of our media and our politics are designed to scare people. And Obama always tried to lift people out of that. I mean, we all know the statistics, right? Like more people die slipping in their shower than from terrorism, right? And more people had married Kardashians than had died of Ebola. Then had died of Ebola, right?

It's another way to put it. And so when we had the ISIS kind of spike in fear, you know, where people are, you know, ISIS is an existential threat to America, was kind of the phrase on every Republican's lips. Well, no, like, ISIS has no capacity to destroy America. And the challenge that Obama was trying to address in that speech is, you know, if I go too far, in succumbing to this notion that everything is terrible now, especially when I know, as the film shows,

we had a World War II where 60 million people died. We had Vietnam, where we killed 3 million people and 50,000 Americans died. The notion that this is, we were living in some unique moment of horror, that's Donald Trump's narrative. That's the narrative of American carnage.

And if I succumb to that narrative, he's always going to be ahead of me in that one. I'm never going to outdo Donald Trump in saying how terrible everything is right now, when in fact we know that poverty rates have never been lower and life expectancy is never been higher than actually levels of violence or lower than they've been for certainly the bulk of the 20th century. And he was trying to find a way to say, yes, there are huge challenges in the world. But, you know, we are not living...

Yes, we can. Yes, we can. We're not living in American carnage, you know. and I don't want to feed this kind of media political orientation that always leads in the direction of fear, because that's how you get a Muslim then. I mean, if I'm up here saying that ISIS is an existential threat to America, well, then, yes, let's keep out all the Muslims.

Or if I'm out here saying that the refugee crisis is, you know, is, you know, corroding the entire international system. Then it's like, for Americans, let's keep out the refugees, not let's bring them in. So he was trying to find that space in between recognizing the very real challenges we face, but not delivering a speech delivered by, or rid by Stephen Miller, before the United Nations. From Santa Monica, where I live, down the road. Very hard-scrabble streets of San Monica, yeah. So one of the most emotional issues, I think, in the film is Syria.

I think Obama would say unequivocally that it was the most difficult and frustrating and the worst outcome of any challenge we dealt with. I'm sure you guys would agree. There was considerable disagreement with Obama and his team among members of Obama's team. So this clip is about sort of that conflict. There's no issue that we've worked on where there was such a divergence among people who, on some issues might be aligned, but on this just saw it very differently. Samantha and I, we have split in some important ways.

She sustains that kind of original idealism around our ability to save lives and make things better. I sit close to the president, and when you're president, he has to think about, what is Congress going to do about this, how is this going to be received by the American people, how am I going to measure this against every other priority I have in the world? Certainly what's happening in Syria is beyond frustrating. frustrating. It's haunting. There is no issue where my thoughts and my feelings and my ideas have made such a marginal impact on desperate people. The regime of Bashar al-Assad, Russia, Iran, and their affiliated militia are the ones responsible for what the UN called

a complete meltdown of humanity. Of course I asked myself had I made an argument differently. I think We could have tried other things, but there's a whole, there's a whole drama there. So was there's a whole drama there. So was there specific moments or arguments that you lost that you think looking back, like, that could have been an inflection point that changed the outcomes on the ground. So I think that's like, if we're going to learn from this, I'm less interested in sort of who was where, when on issues, but like, did we fuck stuff up that we should have gotten right? Well, this is something I think we're all going to be grappling with for a long time. And the first thing I think anyone has to say is we have no idea, right? What would have worked? What wouldn't have? I mean, this is the problem with the counterfactual. One of the things that defines this exchange when someone says, well, you know, what is your biggest regret?

Okay. My biggest regret, of course, is Syria because of how it turned out. It isn't just that half the population is displaced, that kids have been gas, that a whole generation is out of school. It's also that we had mass population movements into Europe that may have been the contributing factor to Brexit. And would we even have Trump, if not for that sense of that chaos and that world spinning too fast?

So I think my argument throughout was we have to measure the risks of any particular action we're contemplating against the status quo extended forward. Foreign terrorist fighters, what happens to the countries around Syria, and I wasn't even thinking, as I should have been well beyond that about those consequences.

But making that argument, as I just did, is very compelling, but then what's the right answer? I think one thing we can say, I think, is that the energy that Secretary Kerry dedicated in the last year and a half, which Greg really captures,

frenetic. I love this man. I mean, just, there's a scene in the movie where he can barely carry himself up the stairs. You know, he just, as he says, will never give up on the possibility of peace. Now, the problem is he's negotiating with Putin and the Iranians

and, you know, who are patrons of Assad, who didn't want to negotiate, and there wasn't a balance of power on the ground. But was there a time earlier where that kind of frenetic, diplomatic push of the kind that we made on on Iran in the nuclear space, could that have paid dividends, bringing the stakeholders under

the same tent like he did at the end? That's one example, I think, of something that might have, again, prior to Russia's military involvement on the ground made a difference. And then the second time is the time in which President Obama said he was going to use force and we then made the judgment a little bit belatedly that we were going to go to Congress and seek their authorization. and we were in those debates internally. We had in the room, I don't know, probably close to 100 years of legislative experience,

if you combine Vice President Biden, Secretary Kerry, Secretary Hagel. I mean, real people who had their finger on the pulse on Capitol Hill, we had the Israeli government and all our closest allies in the region supporting the president's decision to use force because this was chemical weapons. This was after 1,500 people have been gassed to death. and it was clear that this weapon now, Sarin, was like a conventional weapon of war to Assad. It was going to continue to be used.

And terrorists were going to get their hands on it. And the president decided to use force, but made the judgment that it was unlikely that if we used force, that we would just snap our fingers and the war would end. Nor would we snap our fingers in chemical weapons use would stop. So he belatedly, I think it was, you know, if we were going to make the decision to go to Congress,

it would have been good to make that decision on the front end, but belatedly decided like a week later, few days later, decided having said we're going to use force, that we're going to go to Congress and seek approval. And what was misjudged, no question, was Congress's appetite for supporting the president. And that seems crazy when you think about what Congress or what the Republicans in Congress had been. I mean, basically, if Barack Obama said up, they sit down. He said black, they said white. And so we ended up getting stiff-armed by Congress or would have had it come to a vote.

And the president then ended up having Secretary Kerry and then me up at the UN embark upon a major diplomatic initiative to try to dismantle the chemical weapons program using the specter of the threat of force, which Russia must have believed, even though had they been polling members of Congress, they would have seen that we were not going to get very far if that went forward. but fundamentally Russia did team up with us to dismantle the declared chemical weapons program. Now what's the problem with that? Assad is a liar and a war criminal. So he kept a little stash for rainy days and we've seen him employ that, but I do think even though I think

if we were going to go to Congress, we should have gone to Congress right at the beginning. We should have had a more compelling, you know, sort of account of what we were seeking to do with military force, probably in retrospect we shouldn't have gone to Congress because they were not at the level, as it turned out. But, you know, we did manage to dismantle

the declared chemical weapons program, which is, again, declared is a bit of a lawyerly way to talk about it. But what that means is, you know, all these tons of chemical weapons were not there when ISIS ended up, you know, coming in and taking over large parts of the country. Those are weapons and stores of chemical stocks that would have been very vulnerable.

So something good came out of something, but that's the moment where when you have the precipit of that kind of attack, had we struck quickly, you could imagine conceivably, but we'll never know, a cascading set of events where we actually could have come in

on the back of that with a diplomatic initiative to try to lock things down. Ben, you're very honest in the movie about you were initially, I was sitting with you at the time. You were in favor of military intervention in Syria, but you were swayed by Obama's argument that essentially we were lacking the basic necessary conditions for success,

like congressional support and international support for a military action. Can you talk about his argument? Was this something he would be making in the situation room to the full team? And why did that convince you when you started in a different place? Yeah, no, well, you know, it's one of the several ironies of my tenure that I can now look back on is that I kind of became the person most identified with the defense. of the Syria policy that when I had argued for years, including when you were there obviously to intervene militarily.

But I don't mind that and in the film embrace that role because I feel like what Obama did in 2012 and 2013 is test the proposition of whether or not there is an option that is available to him, that could succeed or they could make a positive difference. You asked a question earlier about how we use military force. And in that moment around the red line that Samantha discusses, we're a democracy and Obama essentially decided,

I know that, okay, I could bomb Syria just to show that I'm responding. And Trump did. He blew up a runway. Nothing changed. It's not like that had any discernible impact on the direction of the conflict in Syria. It led some pundits to say he was presidential that day. And what he realized is if we're going to go in, we're really going to go in. Just like when we're into Libya, we went into Libya to protect civilians in Benghazi.

And that led all the way to getting rid of Gaddafi. It's a tragic thing. well, the principal tragedy is a human tragedy in Syria. It's also a tragic thing to acknowledge there might be limits to what we can do to curb suffering in the world. And Obama acknowledged that truth, and that was a very contentious thing for him to do.

But I came to see that I couldn't tell him, yes, if you take this risk, it will make things better. And if I couldn't, how can he stake his presidency? his moral authority on that. When we know that sometimes in the past, when we've gone to war, with all the best intention in the world, we've actually made things worse. And there's no, I don't say I, the right answer is counterfactual, but there's no way of knowing that if we were in there, there wouldn't be just as many refugees and just

Americans fighting in Syria. And that was the push and pull of the human tragedy and the dissatisfaction with the outcome, which is clearly terrible, and the sense of, well, but nobody has the option to make this better. And I do want to echo one thing Samantha said earlier because it's a really important point. Only one. No, no, no, more than one.

But I'm just going to focus on one. You know, this whole debate, and you lived some of this before you left, should Obama have bombed Syria in 12 or 13, or should he have armed the rebels, nobody even really defines who the rebels are that we should have armed. Nobody says like, in 2011, what was your guy's diplomatic strategy? You know, if John, and she said it very well, if John Kerry was working as frenetically in 2011 as in 2016,

you know, like, did we miss some, did we get it wrong on the front end of the conflict before things went off the rails, and before the Russians were pouring in arms, and before ISIL was pouring into the country, and before al-Qaeda was hooking up with Nistra, did we miss a diplomatic option? Because if we view this purely as a military issue in the rear-view mirror, should we have intervened militarily,

then the only tool we're going to reach for the next time there's a burgeoning civil war is military action. And I do think we should, when we look back at Syria, think about our diplomacy as hard as we think about these military questions. Today we sort of talked about the debate around military action, but there was no debate about the need to improve lives on the ground by allowing access to relief workers and getting civilians out of harm's way and supplies into places like Aleppo. But even those efforts were stymied at the UN by Syria, by Russia, by Iran.

Smith, you kicked the shit out of those three countries in a speech at the United Nations. Let's watch. Are you truly incapable of shame? Is there literally nothing? that can shame you? Is there no act of barbarism against civilians, no execution of a child that gets under your skin that just creeps you out a little bit? Is there nothing you will not lie about or justify? So there was a time where Russia would work with us at the UN and a variety forms. We had an arms control agreement, we got sanctions on Iran and North Korea, we were able to authorize military action

against Gaddafi and Libya. What changed? Like, when and why did Russia, decide to block everything we did in addition to hacking John Podesta's email and all the other shit that we've since learned about. I mean, obviously when President Putin came back, there's a correlation between the kind of aggressive and illegal actions they take, you know, certainly domestically the crackdown, then the invasion of Ukraine, the takeover of Crimea. and there's a kind of playbook that they put in play in Ukraine of, you know, I used to call it at the Security Council, I used to, in these speeches, because we had like, you know,

40 or 50 emergency security security, I don't know when it ceases to be an emergency security council session, but they were called emergency security council sessions on Ukraine. And I would usually lead into my, you know, equivalent of that on Syria by some, saying we're back in upside-down land. And it honestly was, it's a, listening to the Russian representatives described what they were doing just with no relationship

to what was going on was a precursor to some of what we hear from officials in our own government who say things that just aren't true. And I'd be there and be like, but that's not true. And I remember at one point the French ambassador said my Russian colleague

seems to have forgotten that the internet exists. You know, and unfortunately they hadn't forgotten. Yeah, they had not forgotten that. Exactly. And they were using the Internet in a range of ways. But so I think Ukraine was really a sign that the international order, such as it had evolved over the 70-plus years, benefited the United States, especially under an Obama that was willing to play by the international rules of the road and invoke them. That was pretty new for an American president to sort of situate our country. in that landscape, and that drove people in this country, some people, a little bit crazy

because they, you know, like the John Wayne image of the United States out as an actor unto itself. But Obama said, look, these threats are shared threats, climate. We can't do it without other countries. These terrorists are crossing international borders. We need other countries to be part of this coalition. We should situate ourselves in this way. Well, that order gave Putin very little.

Like, this was not a prospering country. if the status quo is just extended forward. So I think, you know, playing to Russian history and glory and vanity, even if it meant, you know, really crippling his own economy, but, you know, tapped into something. David Remnick wrote a beautiful, really powerful piece in the New York at one point, calling Putin's relationship to the former Soviet territories a kind of phantom limb syndrome, you know,

that there was something in Russian culture and history and pride to be tapped, and the sense that they were on their backs, and that he would raise them from their knees. But we still managed to cooperate at the UN in the sense that there were a set of issues that you could still function on. You could still send peacekeepers into sub-Saharan African countries. You could still sanction specific war criminals around the world. but as our time toward the end,

you know, as we got closer and closer to the end, the number of issues that were uninfected by the Putin problem and the desire to kind of block everything and make the international order itself stop functioning, that list grew shorter and shorter. Ben, we made fun of Mitt Romney in 2012 when he said that Russia was our greatest geopolitical foe,

and that sometimes gets thrown back in our face and maybe doesn't look great in hindsight. I heard you articulate an explanation in the film that was different than maybe that Russia was our geopolitical flow, which was that the mistake Obama made when it came to Russia was that it took too long to figure out that Putin doesn't pursue Russia's national interests. He pursues Putin's interests. What does that mean, and how did that belated insight change your thinking? Yeah, so this is a really important question. So let me just try to do this quickly.

So Putin is an FSB, KGB guy. He gets installed in the presidency, you know, at the end of the Yeltsin administration. He kind of tries to run the traps. He's kind of awash in oil wealth in the 2000s, and he, you know, establishes a bit of a cult of personality in Russia, funded by his oil wealth. So he looks good because he's spreading the money around. Standards of living are going up.

he's also trying to get along with Bush, but the Iraq war pisses him off because we knock off somebody who was close to Russia. Then the Bush administration is seen as somewhat involved in, overstated by Putin, by the way, color revolutions in Ukraine included. Then Putin leaves office to Medvedev. Right around that time, though, they do invade Georgia. I mean, so people forget that in 2008, well, we're running for president. and they invaded and occupied the European country

and still occupied two pieces of that country. Then Putin becomes prime minister. And what we probably underestimated is we thought Putin was still pulling the strings. But I think Dmitri Midev was actually pretty far out ahead of Putin. Medvedev, you met him, he's kind of the Russian that if he wasn't in politics, he'd probably be living in London, you know. He likes to wear nice suits and winds or nots

and hang out at good restaurants and probably owned ghost real estate in New York going by Donald Trump. He and Obama hit it off. I mean, we would read these transcripts. I'd be like 45-minute long calls. They just really liked each of them. They did.

But Medvedev was Western-oriented. He clearly felt more comfortable in the European club than in the goon club. And he, you know, pushed and pushed, and he did Iran sanctions with us. and then he allowed us, he abstained on a resolution at the UN for us to go into Libya, which Putin then objected to publicly, he broke from Medvedev. And so what was clear is that Putin, I think, was uncomfortable by how far Medvedev had reset relations with us.

And it was context for that Romney campaign. Then Putin comes back in. When Putin comes back in, the oil wealth is gone because oil is not $130 a barrel, it's plummeted. the Russian economy is tanking. Well, what is Putin going to do to stay in power? He needs to gin up the external enemy. He needs to gin up nationalism because he doesn't have the money

to make people buy into the cult of Putin based on the fact that he has all the money. And what we saw is him becoming more and born-born belligerent. I also think he felt like, you know, the U.S. has come too far. You know, they did NATO enlargement in the Baltics. Then they get a NATO enlargement plan for Ukraine and Georgia. They're into the former Soviet Union with NATO. And the next time they cross a line in one of these amputated limbs,

you know, I'm going to pounce. And that's what happened when Ukraine fell. And he saw it as a U.S. orchestrated thing. And it wasn't. It was an indigenous Ukrainian movement. for anti-corruption and democracy. I actually think he probably does think we were more involved in it than we were. And you would recognize this as a communications person.

There's a moment where he crossed a line that explains what happened in our election. And this is really important for your audience understand, who probably is still trying to figure out what happened in our election. I remember sitting at my desk and seeing a news report that Russia, or no, somebody, had released a transcript of a phone call from a U.S. diplomat. A woman named Tori Newland, who was a citizen secretary of state for Europe, was on a cell phone pacing in Kiev, talking to our ambassador, in the height of the Maydawn protest, about who should be the next prime minister?

Not just a transcript, a tape. A tape, a tape. Who should be the next prime minister of Ukraine? And she said, Yots would be good, Yotsnik, who became the next prime minister of Ukraine. And then, you know, the ambassador said something about the EU negotiating, and she said, fuck the EU. right? Perfect Russian propaganda because it showed the U.S.

picking the next leader of Ukraine and divisions in the U.S. and Europe. Now, the fact that they released this tape, this tape was crossing a major Rubicon because the unspoken agreement is everybody hacks everybody else. You know, some people ask me, like, well, when did you learn of Russian hacking? 2009, you know? I mean, like, China, Russia, you know, some other countries, including some of our friends,

we all hack each other. We just don't release the stuff. And that was Putin saying, I'm crossing the line. I don't give a shit, you know? I'm willing to break every norm, just like I'm willing to violate every norm in Syria and lie about it,

just like I'm willing to violate every norm in annexing Crimea, I'm willing to hack your stuff and release it for my own political benefit. And that was the Rubicon, in Ukraine. Then what I saw is them create a capacity where when MH17, the plane that was flying over Ukraine got shot down, there were thousands of Russian bots creating fake news stories. They were flooding European internet platforms saying that the Ukrainian shot it down. When we found out, well, no, actually it was Russians or at least Russian-backed separatists. And they created this

capability to manufacture disinformation and flood platforms with it. And that's when Putin figured out that the West has no anybody so that, because we're open democracies. We can't take things off of the Internet. We can't say to Facebook, here's a thousand Russian bots, don't let them recirculate fake news stories about Hillary Clinton's health. And so he found the soft underbelly of the West to attack, which is, I can't. can create information and funnel it into your system. And so division and chaos to suit my purposes. But the point I was making in the film about Putin is

a man without oil wealth, a man without oil at $130 a barrel, a man with a shrinking economy, needs to manufacture whatever nationalist narrative he can. And because we had such a good working relationship with Medvedev, and because we presumed that Putin was supportive of that, working relationship. It took until Ukraine to figure that out. Now the fact is, after Ukraine, we figured it out and we put massive sectoral sanctions on Putin in ways that Trump is not going to do. But that was the gap I was talking about. I don't think Russia is going to lift the sanctions

again, too, anytime soon. Yeah, no, I don't either. Well, thank you God. Thank God President Trump created the fake news awards to help us sort through all this, all this bullshit that Putin is spewing on our system. So until this point, In the film, you guys are just plugging away on your day jobs, doing the most difficult foreign policy challenges on the ground in the world, and laboring under the assumption that Hillary Clinton will be the next president, and then the election happened. Samantha, you threw a big election night party.

How did it feel that night to be surrounded by representatives of 37 foreign countries? Did you, like, have a flood of UN representatives and ambassadors calling you, saying, like, what the fuck? How do we make sense of this? Well, I think they were, the women there, because it was really mainly women and my husband and father, but they were reading the same polls we were. Putin was reading the same polls as we were. Trump was reading the same polls as we were.

I mean, you know, I don't, there weren't, I mean, the most radical thing you could do is be Nate Silver and just say it was 6535, right? That was heretical. So just again to situate us in the mindset that we had, which is I think captured quite well in the film, as we're, I guess you could say, in denial, or we just didn't, these late-breaking factors, we didn't take into account. But for audiences who watch the film,

the scenes, I think, are for not all audiences, I'm sure, but quite painful, because I think people go back, back to their own election night experience. And the arc that I'm presuming anybody coming to hear Pod Save the World, the arc that somebody that night experienced was very much like that, which we experienced. And there's a scene after things have turned.

And, you know, you had the women ambassadors coming up to me throughout just saying, I mean, very sweet, like the Vietnamese ambassador, just saying, when will it be over? You know, what time will it be over, you know, as if there's a, a set time like, oh, you know, I mean, we'd all live through prior elections, you know, that went to the next day. And then others just assuming that something was going to change. Like, you know, it's such a weird system in a way. If you're foreign and you're trying to understand the electoral college, that in itself is, requires ample preparation.

But there was a moment, you know, where you could just feel the air kind of exit, the room. And you know, like anything, it's children who keep you honest. And so my kids were there, my then seven-year-olds, and he just kept coming up and saying when is she

going to get to 270. You know, he had in his mind, he's a big sports fan, my little boy, and he just, when are we in the ninth inning? You know, when is she going to hit that threshold? And at a certain point, you know, I just said to say, you know, I'm not, it's not clear that that's going to happen tonight. And he's like

Trump? You know, that's not in the film. But the woman who is in the film who helped me do my job over the eight years who's been nanny to our children and enabled me to live this crazy national

security life had been, that year in 2016 had been naturalized as an American. She'd come from Mexico. Maria Castro's her name. She's the person without whom I wouldn't be able to do anything even to this day

and Declan of course very close to Maria and Maria's from Mexico and so for him Trump meant Maria something's going to happen to Maria you know and he just started bawling you know and just the thought that it could be Trump because

I mean in a way he was through his parents watching the same polls too and so that there's the dawning of you know of things have gone a different way. And then there's the dawning, and Ben captures this really well, and one of his comments in the film of what it's going to mean for individuals.

And my son had that reaction right on the spot before it had even been called. And then, of course, I stayed with Gloria Steinem. She stayed till the bitter end, like she would not leave until it was called. And so there we were, you know, all the women ambassadors from around the world, having left, kind of hoping they'd wake up in the morning and hear something else. and Gloria and I sitting on my couch, you know, till whatever it was, two in the morning, sort of still hoping that something would come out of left field. It's still awful to watch those clips.

Let's play that clip of Ben talking about what it means in personal terms, but also in terms of the Obama legacy. You think about the people around the country who are afraid. My assistant who works for me as a Muslim who wears a hijab, and she was crying for days. That's what's meeting on your mind. And then you're thinking about things that we worked on, Cuba, Iran, climate. You know, what is going to happen to those things?

And I can not stress to you enough. There's no back stuff here. I mean, I think people assume, well, there's some grown up somewhere, right, who will make sure he doesn't, you know, screw up too bad or something. There's not. There's no, this is it. Like, you're in the office. You decide whether to take a strike that kills somebody.

you decide whether to start a war. He will have to make hundreds of those decisions. That will happen every week here. And there's not anybody else who will make those decisions for him. Make you feel better? It's funny. I remember having that conversation with you in 2009, because we had all these meetings about, I think, Sudan policy.

And one time after one of them, you and I were talking, just like, holy fuck. You always think when you're outside of government, there's another room where the important people are really calling the shots, and suddenly you're in the room, and it's not always the best feeling. Has Trump been as bad as you guys feared that night, both in terms of sort of unraveling what Obama accomplished climate, Iran, Cuba, but also just sort of generally doing damage to our reputation? Yeah, I'll take this one.

I just want to make sure I get the first crack at this. You know, he's been worse. And here's why. Like, yeah, the scorecard, Paris, Iran, Cuba, you know, pull out of Paris, half-rollback Cuba, not quite be smart enough to figure out how to get out of Iran. But, you know, I've thrown a lot of red meat in there for him. Sorry about that. David Deep-stater.

But what is more concerning to me is underneath that, you know, the hollowing out of the State Department cannot, it can't be overstated. I mean, I don't think people can even get their minds around the extent to which, like, he's removed us from the fields in the world. We don't have, this isn't secretaries of state, we don't have a functioning state department. And so I anticipated, you know, the acts to the Obama legacy

and the kind of wild hacking at the Obama legacy, but this kind of systematic dismantlement of government, you know, and this emptying out of state and this hollowing out of EPA playing any function of environmental protection, which is the name of the organization, you know, is really, really stark. But I think one of the things that people don't appreciate yet is we're not the leader of the world anymore.

that's gone in one year. One of the things, Tommy, I think you probably realized when you got the job outside my office is, you know, something would happen around the world, and we'd put out a statement about it. You know, a crisis happened somewhere, or political development happens somewhere, and you have this very strange experience where we write a statement, it could even be issued from Tommy Vitor, National Security Council spokesperson. From the back of a cab on your black guy? And an hour later, the British put out the same statement, and then the French, and then the Germans, and then the EU, and then the Japanese, and then the UN is coming in.

And you get the sense of the weight of the fact that the rest of the world kind of looks to you to call the play. And that's been the case for 70 years. even under, you know, President like Bush, who was not necessarily the most popular guy around the world, that was still the case. 70 years. It's gone. We are not the leader, well, let me phrase this certain way.

I want to phrase this certain ways as I'm mischaracterized. Like, the actions he is taking and the way in which he's acting in office. Because this is another piece that's important. You know, here the reality show gets consumed, it's kind of, maybe it's interesting that he drinks a lot of Diet Coke and watches television and tweets at Kim Jong-un and calls him Rocket Man.

Around the world, they could give a shit about how many Diet Coke's he drinks. And they don't think the Rocket Man thing is interesting or entertaining. It's terrifying. I mean, it's fucking terrifying. Like, these are countries, like Japan and South

Korea, who have banked their entire national security And when I say national security, I don't mean like a policy thing on the shelf. I mean the existence of their nations on the United States being a rational actor. And he's given that away in a year. And it's not a reality show. It's not like a story in the New York Times about how Jared doesn't get along with Steve and Donald drinks seven-died coax and he had two TVs installed. That's not the story.

The story is that he is debased. the office of the President of the United States in the eyes of the world. He's taken us off the field in the world. We are no longer respected around the world. Our allies don't look to us to run the play. They have to run their own play

without us to mitigate the damage that we are causing. That's what's happening around the world. And I don't think we've fully absorbed that. I think we're incapable in some ways of fully absorbing it, in part because there's a completely complicit governing party

in Congress, in part because it's a hard story to tell, in part because we don't want to hear it. And the last thing I'd say is it's tempting to think, and this is how I kind of make myself feel better, that the pendulum will swing back.

You know, there'll be a correction. But the rest of the world is looking at this and thinking, not just like who's Donald Trump, they're thinking, who is this country that elected Donald Trump? And can we trust these people? Because we basically trusted these people to run the world for 70 years

and to have troops in all these other countries and to tell us what to do and to run all these international institutions and we elected Donald Trump. And this is why it's not important just that he loses. The scale of the defeat is really important. Because I'm serious. You know, if the Democrats pick up 26 seats and eke out a House victory and then somebody wins with an electoral college, you know, they get the Wisconsin-Pensilvania thing, right?

That's one thing. If there is a rebuke from this country of Donald Trump, of a wholesale rebuke, I mean a dramatic take of the House, a take-back of the Senate, and then a landslide defeat for Donald Trump, then and only then will the rest of the world say, okay, this is the America that we thought we knew. Right. I agree with that. Yeah. Having just gotten back from being in Europe, I heartily agree with your assessment. And, you know, as a country,

we don't always take criticism from other countries well. We end up renaming French fries or some other stupid shit rather than listening. Samara, has this been as bad as you thought maybe that night or the day shortly after? No, I mean, I agree with everything Ben said, just way, way, way, way work. than we anticipated.

And for me, it's, you know, that the, just the systemic cruelty and coldness, the way in which there's also no definable ideology or algorithm other than what did Barack Obama want or do, and how do we do the opposite of that. I mean, a friend of ours tweeted, you know, if Barack Obama had discovered the for cancer, Donald Trump would be bringing it back, right? That there's, and it's an obsession, you know, it's, it's, so there's that. But I think, you know, I couldn't agree more wholeheartedly with, with Ben's point about how fulsome the rebuke needs to be.

I don't want to wait, though, I think it's, we, we can't wait till our elections to define who we are. And I do think it's incumbent on all of us. to take what has happened in our country already and do our best with what we have. The executive branch has a huge amount of power. But fundamentally, America is more than the sum of the decisions or tweets that our president does.

We are also our courts who have refused to allow him to expel transgender people from our military. We are the 25,000 women who are now running for office. shattering the record set according to Emily's List has been around now for 32, 33

years. The prior record for a single year of women who'd engaged in Emily's list to get involved was 962. And now it's in a single year 25,000. That gives you a sense of the Trump effect, I'll say. But when our checks and balances

are pressed, you know, that have managed to get rid of cabinet secretaries in this even though the party, the GOP, you know, seems disinclined to scrutinize nominees in any way, or appointees, no matter what they do. But, you know, we are, this is part of the story we will tell. So one part of the story needs to be, look, at our earliest occasions, we rejected everything he stood for. You know, districts that went for Trump by 20 points, even state Senate districts are now swinging, you know, 35 points. So it's a 15-point edge yesterday, I think, or Tuesday in Wisconsin in a state Senate race. You know, the more of these data points we have extremely important.

But we also have to show that there's continuity of the kind that Ben referenced earlier in our institutions and that, you know, in a period even that extends as long as four years, that there are other entities that are defining American decision-making. Let's take some questions from you guys. You've listened to me, ask questions for 90 minutes. The mic's down there. If you have something you want to ask, feel free to line up. Come on down.

Hi. I just want to say thank you for your public service that you've done for this country. So I'm from Hollywood, and I've been born and raised here my whole life. And one of the things that has impacted me is the Armenian community here. I'm not sure if you're aware, but Hollywood has the highest concentration of our Armenians outside of Armenia. And when Senator Obama's running to be a candidate, he promised to recognize the Armenian genocide.

That was a promise that was not fulfilled in President Obama's administration. And I think, you know, I would like to know why, you know. That's for you, Ben. No, it was a mistake. And we should have recognized Armenian genocide. and, you know, Samantha and I were, I didn't think, in agreement. Every year there was a reason not to. You know, Turkey was vital to some issue that we were dealing with

or there was some dialogue between Turkey and the Armenian government about the past, and it was one of those issues, you know, frankly, here's a lesson, I think, going forward. get it done in the first year, you know, because if you don't, it gets harder every year in a way. But we did have a second chance. I mean, I think 2009 was crushing, excruciating for the Armenian-American community that had believed not only what President Obama had said as a candidate, but what many of us who had earned the trust of the Armenian-American community said on his behalf. I mean, I went out and said, every candidate says they're going to recognize and then doesn't,

you know, he's going to be different because he was different in so many ways. And he proved he was different on Cuba and Iran and so many of the taboos that he confronted in his presidency. But in that first year, you know, I think there were people in our government who argued that a Turkey-Armenia normalization process was going to give rise ultimately to a, something more indigenous, less foisted, and there were people who argued that if we got out in front of that, as they put it, that that would set that process back. I think that was inaccurate. I mean, at the time, I thought it was inaccurate.

I thought there was a lot of evidence that the Turkish president was, in a way, staying in that process just as a way of getting through April 24th, frankly. And I think history proved that true, that in a sense he was alert to our calendar and our politics and also alert to something that I really admire in President Obama. I mean, he is, and, you know, when I use this phrase, it's so wonky that it doesn't, it's not exactly catching on,

but he's a consequentialist. He always thought, you know, okay, I could feel good, I could meet a campaign promise and deliver for the Armenian-Americans to whom I've made this promise. And then what? Like, what if it sets back this thing that could be much more promising? I think he really believed that it could have that perverse effect because he was told that by people who studied the region and knew the region.

Again, I think we were played a little bit. And then the second opportunity, though, was with the 100th. And I think that's, Ben's right, that it would have been easier to do it in 2009 on the heels of the campaign. But the 100th was also a very useful time because you had post. Francis coming out and saying it, you had the European Union, you had the German parliament, I think you had a number of countries pulling the Band-Aid off. And what so, Ben had this great line, which I think the communications team lived by Tommy,

you'll tell me, but which I now use in my marriage, which is get where you're going to get. You know, like sometimes you just, you agonize and you end up, you just contort and you know where you're going to get. you're going to get there. Like, you know, it's just like Cuba. The embargo in Cuba is going to be lifted. Just get where you're going to get already. And on this, you know, we can't, I mean, imagine a future where American diplomats are just called upon

to distort history and to contort. And, you know, if you've ever seen someone testify before Congress, ask this question, you know, well, it was mass atrocities and horrible history and all these euphemisms. It's un-American. Just tell the truth. It's safer in the long run.

And frankly, even leaders like Erdogan who have grown even more erratic and wild with time, you know, fundamentally, if we actually had a consistent record of telling the truth, they'd get used to that. And if we just said what we knew to be factually true, that would be only to the good. But I'm sorry. I'm sorry that we disappointed so many Armenian Americans.

Hi. I guess first I think all of you for all the work you've done. I have a question. In Ambassador Powers book, Problem Hell, she outlined how after the withdrawal from Vietnam, the left skepticism of the rights and the Ford administration's warnings about developments in Southeast Asia impeded our action against like Cameroog, this presidency is particularly motivated by the need to contrast himself with the previous Obama administration. And I want to know when we take back the Congress this year and the White House in 2020, is there a way we can't unaculate ourselves from such partisan motivations and should we? So I think it's a good question. And the fact of the matter is and I was talking about this with Favre earlier today, but Trump is so unusual that in a way it opens up a space on foreign policy and national security that is kind of postpartisan to use a 2008 Obama word.

But basically, I think there can be a sense of a renewal of like the things that we all care about, like we value alliances and we want to promote democracy and human rights and we want to re-engage the world and we want to reinvigorate diplomacy. You could see an incoming president really kind of rally the country, the Congress, the government around just a complete reset of let's be who we are in the world again and let's re-engage the world again. Let's re-engage the world again. to be America again around the world in a way that doesn't have to be, you know, contemptuous of Trump, but can be more about celebrating, you know, who we are. I mean, one of the things that I've reflected a lot about is I got into this,

and Greg, this first interview with me, I got into this whole thing as a 9-11. You know, I was 24 years old, and, you know, I was, as Republicans like to point, out a lot about me trying to write fiction. And suddenly that seemed absurd compared to the scale of this event that I witnessed with my own eyes because I was a New Yorker. And there was a sense in the days after that of like, we're all on this. Like, let's just, let's deal with this together.

And one of the great tragedies of my life is that that's not what happened. you know, we had a party run in 2002 using that as a wedge against the other party and we had a war in Iraq that is a just complete catastrophe that changed what 9-11

meant because 9-11 was invoked to do something really catastrophic that had nothing to do with 9-11 and you had this kind of politics of fear that emerged and and the end of the Trump presidency in some way, ways is going to be our chance to reset that.

You know, Obama, because he never got a chance from the Republicans, wasn't going to be able to do that. He was able to reset the global financial crisis and, you know, take 150,000 troops out of Iraq. But I think there's actually an opportunity for whoever the Democratic nominee is in the next cycle to say, I want to bring us all, we may not be able to agree. about every element of, you know, our health care policy apparently or, you know, or even our immigration policy.

But, you know, we should be able to agree about some fundamental things that we do around the world about what we represent, about how we feel about Vladimir Putin, or how we feel about dictators, or how we feel about democracy, you know, how we feel about independent media. And so I think that the way to avoid it just being an anti-Trump thing, oh, I'm just going to undo the Trump stuff, just like Trump undid Obama stuff, is make it about America and what America means to the rest of the world.

You know, one of the things that is really profoundly moving about being in a job like what Samantha and I had is in the people around the world really care about America. I mean, it's almost, it's humbling how much people I mean I went to Hiroshima with President Obama and this is that's in the film but we dropped an atomic bomb on this city

and there were thousands of people lining the streets cheering for our motorcade that's interesting and you know that's what I was getting it before. And I think that people just want us to be the America that they like. And look, Gregs lived abroad.

There's an America they don't like. They don't like the coups that we've sponsored and they don't like the foreign policy mistakes that we've made and, you know, they may not like drone strikes. But there's something that they really, really like about a country that supports an independent media and doesn't call them the enemy of the state. and wants to have peaceful protest as a sign of a robust democracy and doesn't diminish it,

and wants to be ahead of everybody else on promoting inclusion, whether it's for African Americans or gay people or transgender people, they get that we're going to be ahead of the rest of the world. They just want us to be us again, you know? and if the next president can tap into that and try to, and look, I'm not, like, someone who's lived through 77 Benghazi investigations, I'm not suggesting the whole Republican parties can get behind us and it's going to be great. But I think a lot of Americans would.

I mean, just to feel like I can not be embarrassed when my president goes abroad again and that we're going to be who we are and that we're going to articulate this as what we're before, and not just against Trump, but, you know, I think there's no need to make it partisan because that's the message that the world wants to hear. And frankly, it's the message that most Americans are going to want to hear after they're exhausted by however many years of Trump that we have. All right. It's a good place to leave it. Thank you, Samantha, Ben, Greg, for coming out. Thank you, Bengolia Pictures. Thank you guys for coming out tonight. And go see the final year. It's in theaters. It's on iTunes.

Check it up. Good night.