Pod Save the World - Trump’s Shocking Ukraine Reversal

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Tommy and Ben take a break from impersonating Marco Rubio to cover Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington to kiss Trump’s ass, the ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas in Qatar, the IDF’s latest plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza, and shifting opinions on Israel within the Democratic Party. They also discuss Trump’s confusing about-face on sending weapons to Ukraine, the continued incoherence of Trump’s tariff policy and his needless antagonism of the BRICS countries. Finally, they talk about the finger-wagging at Tucker Carlson for his interview with Iran’s president, the border crisis in Afghanistan, the Dalai Lama’s succession plan and how China could interfere, the dispute between Thailand and Cambodia that’s caused a political meltdown in Bangkok, and the administration’s cruel termination of Temporary Protected Status for Hondurans and Nicaraguans. Then, Ben speaks with Representative Jason Crow about how the “Big Beautiful Bill” will tank America’s global standing, intelligence in the age of Trump and Tulsi Gabbard, and where the Democratic Party needs to go on foreign policy.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

POTS of the World is brought to you by Bilt. What if paying rent could help with your student loan payments? With Bilt, you can earn points on your rent and use them to pay down your student loan balance. It's a win-win. Here's how it works. Built is the rewards program for where you live. It's free to join, and by paying your rent, you rack up flexible points that can be used towards some of your biggest expenses, like rent, travel, student loan payments,

and a lot more. When you pay rent through Bilt, you unlock two powerful benefits. You earn one of the industry's most valuable points on rent, up to one-time's built points every month, no matter where you live or who your landlord is. Second, you gain access to exclusive neighborhood benefits in your city, which are things like extra points on dining out, complementary items at built partners, and unique experiences that only members can access. And now, Billet announced that you can redeem these points toward your student loan balance,

offering you even more flexibility with how you use your rewards. So if you're not earning points on rent, my question is, what are you waiting for? Start paying rent through Built and take advantage of the industry's most valuable points by going to joinbuilt.com slash world. That's j-o-in-b-l-t.com slash world. Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you, join built.com slash world to sign up for built today. Welcome back to POTSave the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, have you seen the reports that someone is calling around impersonating Marco Rubio? Yeah, I did. I saw that today. I was going to flag it for you. Then I figured you saw it. I love it. I guess they contacted three foreign ministers, a governor,

and a member of Congress by sending AI-generated voice and text messages. And I was just wondering, how do you think you train an AI to sound like Marco Rubio? Do you just feed it like hour after hour of like cuck videos and stuff like that? And why Marco Rubio, right? Of all the people, it's just kind of funny and perfect that it's him. That's the guy that got nabbed by some, you know, some anonymous hacker type guy with some pretty rudimentary AI. Yeah, like I think we're all going to get got by AI soon.

or later, but it is funny that there was a signal account with the display name Marco. Roobo at state got .gov. Then they got all these people like, I don't know. I'm guessing that's not his email address. It's just somebody with a good sense of humor that they chose Rubio. That's what I appreciate. Is it someone out there like, you know what? I could do any one of these guys.

Let's take Rubio. It's the biggest lightweight among them. Yeah, let's have a good time. Yeah, like Hegseth is almost too believable. You know, you just assume he's drunk again and signaling you. Anyway, we got a great show for you guys today. We are going to talk about Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu visiting Washington again. We'll talk about all this hope and sort of pre-trip signaling that Trump was going to push him for a ceasefire in Gaza.

We've some interesting new polling about how Democrats view support for Israel or support for the Palestinians. We're also going to talk about Trump's headspending policy change when it comes to providing weapons to Ukraine, the latest kind of naive idiotic commentary from him about Putin. And then we'll talk about the latest news on tariffs. We were supposed to have a bunch of big trade deals done by today. We'll update you on whether that happened and what Plan B and C looks like. We're also going to do some Iran updates, including Tucker Carlson's interview with the president of Iran. We'll explain why there's a growing border crisis in Afghanistan. Some big news about the Dalai Lama and who comes next to the reincarnation.

We'll update you on some just crazy stuff happening in Thai politics. and then the latest awful U.S. immigration policy news. Then, Ben, you did our interview today. Yeah, I talked to Jason Crow, who is on the Armed Services Committee. He's a congressman from Denver, veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and just one of the better guys up-and-coming Democrats. He's actually in charge of recruiting candidates with D-T-T-T-Rexe. So we talked about Iran intelligence.

We talked about what Pete Hegset is doing to the military. We talked about what worries him in the big, beautiful, bill. He was pretty chilling actually on the ice funding, among other things. And we talked, you know, really interesting about where the Democratic Party needs to go on the issues that world those care about. It's a pretty wide open slate. And let's just say Jason Crow agrees that wherever we go, it's not going back. So we definitely agree on that. So it should check it out. We covered a lot of ground. We're not going back. That's a slogan from the past. You know, I really like Jason Crow. I think he's a good guy, a principal guy. It's an important.

important conversation. And Ben, I didn't realize until like a couple days after the big, beautiful piece of shit bill passed that when fully funded, ICE will now be a larger force than like the Israeli military and a bunch of militaries in Western Europe. So that is pretty unnerving. Yeah, yeah, it is. And Crow was pretty chilling about it because it's also like with purpose, right? I mean, they're building a network of concentration camps across the country, right? And they have basically more money than they could possibly spend. And as you know, particularly when militarization is involved, if you lot the money, it tends to get spent. So it's very worrying. Yeah. When you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When you're a military, everyone

looks like the war on terror. It's not good. All right. Well, let's start with our first story, which is Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's visit to Washington again. So this is third visit since Trump took office. Netanyahu arrived at the White House with his lips firmly puckered. Here's a quick clip from his little press avail with Trump before their dinner Monday night. I want to present to you, Mr. President, the letter I sent to the Nobel Prize Committee. It's nominated you for the Peace Prize, which is well deserved, and you should get it. Thank you very much. This I didn't know. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. Coming from you in particular, this is very meaningful.

Yeah, I'm sure the Nobel Committee is very swayed by an indicted war criminal. So anyway, Netanyahu is also visiting Capitol Hill on Tuesday. He's going to be back at the White House again Tuesday night for more Gaza talk. On the Hill, he's meeting with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Chuck Schumer, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators who all apparently just don't care that Netanyahu has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. of Netanyahu's visit, the Trump team was spinning to reporters about how tough he was going to be on Netanyahu, how he was going to push him on a Gaza ceasefire deal. Nothing is materialized as of this

recording. It's to 13 p.m. Pacific on Tuesday. It seems like if there is no deal, it will be for familiar reasons. Hamas wants to permanently end the war while Netanyahu just wants a temporary ceasefire and hostage release deal. And it's just hard to square that circle. Also, Ben, I mean, at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, you had Steve Whitkoff saying they were in proximity talks, that they had resolved all but one issues that he expects maybe some news by the end of the week. I don't know. We'll see. Meanwhile, though, in Israel, Israel, Katz, the Israeli defense minister announced that he has ordered the IDF to prepare for the construction of what he called a humanitarian city on the ruins of the city of Rafa in Gaza.

So Katz's plan is to move 600,000 Palestinians into the area and then prevent them from leaving. phase one, and then I guess phase two is to eventually force all two million Palestinians into this tiny area of the Gaza Strip before implementing a forced emigration plan. So in other words, a full ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, which is a crime against humanity. It feels like the, or at least felt like going into this visit, the Trump administration was kind of trying to cook up yet another narrative that the Israelis have agreed to a peace deal and the only impediment is that Hamas won't take it, therefore they're at fault for the war continuing. kind of blame game is a tougher sell when the defense minister is simultaneously pitching a plan

to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip. But I don't know. Do you have any hope of some kind of peace deal coming or ceasefire at least coming out of this trip? I mean, very little. I mean, this depressing thing about this, Tommy, is that, gee, we've seen this play before. Joe Biden ran it a bunch of times. Joe Biden used to love to say that the Israelis had agreed to a ceasefire when they hadn't. I mean, they just hadn't.

They're the ones continuing the war. And look, the idea that they need to continue the war, for what purpose? Hamas is not posing some threat to Israel right now. They're just not. Like if you're convincing yourself of that still at this point, they're not like fighting back. There's not like a necessity to cut off assistance. And there's certainly not a necessity for this kind of clear in the open, planning for ethnic cleansing. So if the idea is that we want to just have a ceasefire, get the

hostages back, and then resume the ethnic cleansing and the bombing and the killing and the war crimes, that's not agreeing to a ceasefire. That's just not what that is, you know. And they did the same thing Biden did to kind of message this, you know, visit through, but there's nothing there. Now, I hope that they get a ceasefire. I hope that there's some, you know, lull in the fighting. I hope. hope the hostages are returned, but there's just so much cynicism piled on top of cynicism here. And then meanwhile, they're just telling us out loud that they're literally going to build camps in Gaza for these people and then move them someplace else. That is the definition of ethnic cleansing. So I don't know. I will say on the Nobel Peace Prize, I don't know if BB listened to our last podcast on me. I don't know if that, you know, he was. I'm guessing not. Maybe the intel guys. I don't know if he like slid into the comments, you know, but I mean,

It is, there's just something so cynical about kind of essentially trolling any morality, right? When Trump says this means something coming from you, he's talking to an indicted war criminal who has been responsible for the deaths and maiming of tens of thousands of children in Gaza. And, you know, whatever you think of these really strategy, they've launched wars in, you know, more countries than I could count now in the Middle East. And so down is up, you know, black is white, truth is lies. I mean, that's all you can take away from this facade. And actually, and we'll talk about the Democratic Party, the fact that this kind of gets treated normally and, you know, there's bipartisan people meeting with Netanyahu and even the kind of a lot of the tone of the media coverage is it's like a here's Israeli prime minister coming to meet to consult on Middle East issues.

And just kind of no basis for evaluating. how extreme what's happening is. I think that's going to make people cynical on the left and the right, for that matter. I totally agree, man. We'll get into that in a second. I mean, yeah, one interesting note, just on this ethnic cleansing plan, I mean, this would have been unthinkable to say out loud two or three years ago, even if people like, you know, Ittmar Ben-Kavir wanted to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip.

But I was listening to this Ha' Arat's reporter talk about how when Trump first kind of outlined this ethnic cleansing plan, like kind of like Gaza becoming a result. Yorktown. It really did just open the floodgates of Israel and allow the political space for every minister in the Lakud party or to the right of Lakud to adopt this position too. Ben, it's also just remarkable to me, like the volume of coverage about anti-Israel comments made at the Glass and Berry Music Festival last week as compared to the amount of coverage of Israel cats outlining a plan, the defense minister outlining a plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza's It's just it's glaring and shocking, and I think speaks to just how broken the conversation is around this stuff.

No, we're still talking about, you know, Bob Villain like two weeks after the fact or whatever it was. And it's the same thing, by the way, that happened with the protest at Columbia. Like, it was convenient for people to talk about this. But if you, what is more important in the world today? What Israel's doing in Gaza? Or like what Bob Villain, somebody that nobody had heard of, that's a pretty small circle of people, said in kind of the same. second stage at Glastonbury. I mean, the people that want you to be focused on that, I mean, some of them have earnest concerns about it, but a lot of them are just people who want

you to focus on that so they're not focusing on Gaza. Yeah. So, you know, we talked about Glasson last week and just sort of and what it says about the shifts in support for Israel among young people in particular. CNN highlighted some numbers from Quinnipiac polls that sort of put some data behind this conversation. So voters were asked in a couple of surveys, if they sympathize more with the Israelis or the Palestinians. In 2017, Democrats said they sympathized more with Israel by 13 points. Today, Democrats sympathize with the Palestinians by 43 points. So that's a 56 point swing. The change was even greater among Democrats aged 18 to 49. They swung 71 points towards being more sympathetic with the Palestinians. So this is a political sea change. But like we were just saying,

like people in Washington have not caught up with it. Like establishment Democrats have not caught up with it. That's why you end up with someone like Andrew Cuomo running this hard like pro-Israel campaign against Zoran Mandani and really like actually probably motivating his voters more than he helped himself. Yeah. And it's deeply unhealthy for Democratic leaders to be this out of touch with their own constituents, their own voters, the people they need to mobilize and appeal to on a pretty fundamentally important issue. It's just not healthy.

The same, let's just say it, too, is true of kind of a lot of the people that work in foreign policy, national security. They don't look at actual public opinion. They're constantly still looking to like very small numbers of people who are kind of the arbiters of opinion on these matters, right, that nobody else listens to. If Democrats care about young voters, if Democrats care about seeming authentic, this is a way to turn those people off. This is a way to make them cynical. This is a way, and it's not just about Israel. You can't just get a pass on this. And this is what drove me nuts about the reaction to kind of the uncommitted movement, right?

It was like an inconvenience. You know, why are these people inconvening us by caring about what's happening in Gaza? They're not going to believe you on health care and other things if they think you're full of shit on this. And that's what I think people have to realize that there's a cost of this. And the last answer is that if you think you can continue to take money from APAC, you know, whether you're Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer or whomever, APEC is part of the constellation of forces that have delivered this country into the hands of Donald Trump and Steve Miller.

And you cannot give them a carve out. And we need to have this fight as a party because these are the wrong people to have under your tent. I'm usually a big tent person, but the kind of people that are supporting Bibi Nanyahu and Donald Trump, I don't want them like, you know, my leaders of my political party, like cozying up to those people. Yeah, and APEC spent the last few cycles, basically, funneling money to front organizations that primary progressive Democrats. I mean, it's really infuriating.

And Ben, so we're talking about this like sea change in public opinion on the left. There's something very interesting happening on the right as well. Like, I don't know how closely you're tracking this MAGA revolt over Trump's DOJ saying Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself. But I've been consuming a lot of right-wing media about it. And in all these conversations, it's just like it's taken as an article of faith that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent or maybe a CIA agent, but probably Mossad, probably both. And some of these guys are even saying that like the release of this DOJ memo saying Epstein didn't have a client list was timed for Netanyahu's visit. And so like, look, I raise this.

I've been consuming this stuff because it's fun to watch like Cash Patel and Dan Bonino get crushed by the MAGA right. for coming out and saying, actually, Jeffrey Epson did kill himself. No, there is not a client list when those are the guys who were like fanning the flames of this conspiracy for years and years and years. But there's a serious point here, too, when it comes to U.S. support for Israel because like this Epstein stuff is just another data point that is driving negative views of Israel on the far right. In this case, it's like weird and it's kind of specious and unfair maybe, but it dovetails with the conversation around the war with Iran. And I just think it's like it's going to have a political impact and none of it bodes well for strong U.S. Israel ties over the long term. Yeah. Again, if you are, you know, someone who's, you know, more supportive of Israel than than we are on certain things, what I would say to you is if you

criminalize, and that's actually what's happening, right, kind of just criticism of the Israeli government, Right? If you just try to banish it from the mainstream because in some cases, literally by statute, you say, you know, it's against the law to boycott, you know, Israel or, you know, or at least we're going to shame people who criticize Israel. Zerran Mamdami is like not, you know, we're going to denaturalize him because of his views on Israel, those kinds of things. You're going to drive the criticism of Israel to the dark. darker spaces. If you cannot have an honest and open discussion of things like Gaza in mainstream spaces, it's going to migrate to conspiracy theory spaces to the darker sides of the right and the left. That's what's happening, you know? So one reason to have healthy criticism as part of how you discuss these issues is to prevent, you know, pushing it to the fringes like this. Yeah. And look, just to telling myself a little bit more, because I'm a weirdo and a sicko. I watched the other night, like a two-hour debate on... You're an enthusiast. Dude, you're not ready for how fucked up this is.

I watched a two-hour debate hosted by Alex Jones on Info Wars between Dinesh DeSuzza and Nick Fuentes. Nick Fuentes, for those who know, is this 26-year-old young guy, like straight up anti-Semite, neo-Nazi, like really, really bad, scary dude. But my takeaway, from watching this. First of all, it was incredibly, like, it was, it was not an ugly debate. It was very history-focused and substantive, and, like, they treated each other respectfully. And the fear, the scary thing I took away from it was that Nick Fuentes, despite having, like, vile, extreme views, can be really compelling and convincing sounding. And I think when someone, like, seems like they know their history,

it seems like they're rational and reasonable. Suddenly it's a lot easier for them to launder, like, deeply anti-Semitic, fucked up views kind of like into the mainstream. And I think that like when people like Charlie Kirk and other kind of more, they're not like mainstream Republicans or mainstream mega type, influencers type,

like kind of look out at the landscape at the competition. It is that fringe far right. That is the problem. It is not the kind of, you know, me Dems who are left over in Washington. You know, well, like, it's funny. I had a thought that going to Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones and Janice Jesus is like kind

of skipping from the marijuana to the heroin. But then to like actually extend the metaphor because it actually works, if you make the marijuana illegal equally to the heroin, then you make people think, well, like if I criticize Israel, you know, I'm already out of bounds. So I'm going to go all the way over here, you know. And that's what I mean by like creating a, you have to create a space where you can have an actual open discussion or else people are going to be like, well, you know, wait a second, like I'm not finding this here. Maybe I can find it there, you know? And then that's when you get into conspiracy theory and ethno nationalism kind of views. And that's when shit gets real dangerous. And the guys who

were having this debate, like Jones and the two panelists, were saying explicitly what you were saying, which was this debate would be kind of banned anywhere else, which is why we're having it here, which is why I bet they did big numbers. But anyway, I'm bogging us down. I'm sorry with my freakish content consumption. So Ben, last week we talked about this Pentagon sort of surprise announcement that weapons shipments to Ukraine, including air defense missiles and precision munitions, were on pause. And there's a lot of weirdness around it. Like the State Department was reportedly caught off guard by it and not informed. The move seemed to contradict statements

that Trump had made like just days before at the NATO summit. Here's one example from the NATO press conference that I think stuck out to a lot of people. It was back and forth with a Ukrainian reporter. Where are you from? I'm from Ukraine. So my question to you is whether or not the US

is ready to sell anti-air missile systems, Patriot to Ukraine. We know that Russia has been pounded in Ukraine, really heavily right now. Are you living yourself now in Ukraine? My husband is there. Wow. I can see you're very, you know, it's amazing.

And me with the kids, I mean, also actually, because he wanted me to be. Is your husband a soldier, no? He's there now? Yeah. Wow, that's rough stuff, right? That's tough. Let me just tell you, they do want to have the anti-missile missiles,

okay, as they call them, the Patriots. And we're gonna see if we can. make some available you know they're very hard to get we need them to we were supplying them to israel and uh they're very effective a hundred percent effective hard to believe how effective and they do want that more than any other thing as you probably know that's a very good question and i wish you a lot of luck i mean i can see it's very upsetting to you so say hello to your husband okay so it's kind of like the closest trump seemed to ever get to empathetic there but um so ben after this announcement happened you know politico

initially pointed the finger, as did a lot of people on Twitter at the Undersecretary Defense for Policy. This guy, Eldridge Colby, and said he was responsible for the decision. They reported that he was concerned that our weapons stockpiles were running dangerously low, which is something I've actually heard from other defense experts. But NBC said the move was actually a unilateral step by Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth, even though a report by the joint staff on weapons numbers found that some stockpiles of these high precision munitions were at lower levels than we want, but we're not at like critical minimums yet. Apparently, though, this is like the third time Pete Hegeseth has ordered weapons shipments to be paused only for those decisions to be almost

immediately reversed by Trump. So something weird's going on. On Monday, though, Trump said we'd be sending more weapons to Ukraine, saying they have to be able to defend themselves. They're getting hit very hard. This change of heart followed a call Trump out on Friday was Zelensky, where Zelensky said afterwards it was the best conversation he's had with Trump, that it was maximum. productive. And then I guess Trump had spoken to Putin the day before, got nowhere and said publicly that he didn't make any progress of Putin. So, and by the way, a couple hours after that conversation, Russia launched its largest aerial assault, I think ever on Ukraine. I think this is on July 4th. So for those who keep score of these things, Trump is currently down on Putin. Here is what

he had to say about Putin on Tuesday. We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin for you want to know the is very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless. Who could have predicted that except for everyone has ever dealt with a good character? Yeah. So, Ben, I've been talking to some defense geeks for a long time who are genuinely, like, sincerely concerned about the U.S. stockpiles of interceptor missiles in particular, mostly for the Patriot system, because between U.S. weapons shipments for Ukraine, support for Israel against Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, and then U.S. intercepts of missiles fired by the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

We are burning a lot of these suckers, and we just, like, don't have the capacity to replace them that quickly. So there was some honest concern. The Houthies are ramping up, by the way. I think they sank a ship on Sunday, and they killed two sailors and a separate attack on Monday, so that threat's still out there.

But I'm just wondering, like, what did you make of how this all went down? Like, is this really, Heggseth freelancing? Did Trump just decided he cared at some point? Like, it's so incoherent, and I can't wrap my head around it. Well, I think, look, first of all, I'm glad that these shipments are resuming,

particularly for things like the Patriots and the Aircraft, you know, that saves lives. And that's the only thing that they have. Otherwise, they're kind of defenseless against these Russian bombardments. People should know this is not like some big new shipment. This is just kind of continuing the pipeline of stuff that was already allotted for Ukraine. And yeah, maybe some of this was his peak at Zelensky. Some of this was being concerned about the drawdown because we have shoveled so many of these things out the door to Israel or had to use them in the East. The two things that's down to me.

The first is we've talked a lot on this podcast about how weird it is that they have no national security council, right? Marco Rubio is currently the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor. The NSC has been downsized dramatically, the people that would normally coordinate the different agencies of the government. Seems like wonky stuff. This is what we mean. There's no process here. There's nobody running a process. It's like one guy decides to like pause stuff.

Another guy decides to resume it. Like you get a sense that there's a handful of people with power, you know, Eldridge Colby, and then, you know, there's Pete Heggseth and then there's, you know, somebody sitting at the White House. And there's not people sitting around a table working this through a process to make decisions. And this is what that looks and feels like. And we'll get to it on tariffs too because that feels the same way. It's all episodic. It's all ad hoc.

It's all short term. It's all tactical. It's all about like, how do we feel today about things? How are we going to get through next week? that's not a way to make a strategy. Whatever you think about Putin, he has a fucking strategy that he's been implementing for years, right? And you're not going to combat that week by week.

And that leads me the thing about Trump. I mean, it's flabbergasting that he can just, it's obvious Putin lies to you. Like Donald Trump's the last person on earth who realizes that a lot of what comes out of Vladimir Putin's mouth is bullshit. That's been clear to everybody. And I don't do this that much. But if any other U.S. president had spent five months. after saying you'd end this thing in 24 hours, just wasting everybody's time, right?

Like, think of all the things that failed here, right? The ceasefire, the one-month ceasefire, the three-day ceasefire, the negotiations in Istanbul. What do we get from that other than the U.S. apparently making a bunch of concessions to Russia for nothing in return? And now we're right back where we started. And the thing is just resuming weaponship and it doesn't really matter if the Ukrainians don't know what they can count on six months from now, one year from now at the negotiating table. So, yeah, this is like a, you know, half step in the right direction.

But this is not like, you know, inspiring a lot of confidence. Yeah, I hope it represents a bit of a sincere and broader change in terms of Trump's views on the matter and like that he's not just primarily angry at Ukraine. I do worry that this is going to be kind of like another log on the fire that's burning and kind of the right wing now. of all the things they're mad about, right? Because they've decided that Ukraine is evil and that this was going to lead to World War III in part because Trump told us all these things. Told them that. Yeah. Yeah. So who knows? It is a no-brainer to give defensive weapons to Ukraine. You read these, like I was reading a firsthand report from a journalist the other day, kind of like how for a while in Ukraine, people from eastern Ukraine would come to Kiev because

it was just so much safer because of missile defense systems. And now people are getting killed far more regularly. They just have far less layered defense. People are, you know, high-rise buildings are getting hit all the time. Innocent people are dying. There was a poet who wrote this famous poem about how, you know, it just sort of like felt like, you know, they all circled up when the missiles were fired and the, you know, it was only luck that saved you. And then that person was killed in a strike that hit a cafe, I think. So it's just a, it's a tragic, awful situation. Hopefully Trump is fucking whising up here, but I don't know. You just can't tell it. And just like, you know, it's like we were talking about it on Gaza. It's kind of been normalized, right? Oh, here's, it's the biggest

war in Europe since World War II, you know, and it's just something that's happening. And they're just firing weapons. And I mean, we, you know, there's Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Prime Minister, like the Brick Summit with everybody yucking it up and, you know, Trump's talking to Putin on the phone, even if he's saying he's full of shit. Like, we've, we've learned to live with way too much risk and war and violence. And we have to kind of keep our antennas up that that's not normal, like a war in Ukraine is not normal. Bombing Iran's not normal. Like hundreds, if not thousands of war crimes and gods are not normal. And, you know, Putin is counting on grinding people down into just accepting that he can continue this thing as long as he wants. Yeah. Okay, we're going to

take a quick break. But as you probably know, Republicans in Congress just passed one of the cruelest and least popular pieces of legislation in history. And many Republicans who voted in favor of this bill only won their elections last cycle by very slim margins and are going to face really tough re-elections this year. It is our turn to hold them accountable politically and take back the House. You can donate to Votesave America's Take Back the House Fund now to support must-win house races. Go to Votesaveamerica.com slash house for more information. Paid for by Votesave America. You can learn more at Votesaveamerica.com. This ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. This is an ad by BetterHelp. Work can be stressful, especially when your

work entails talking about new wars in the Middle East all the time and stuff like that. Yeah, and that's just the tip of the ice. And that's just the beginning of it. Workplace stress is now one of the top causes of declining mental help with 61% of the global workforce experiencing higher than normal levels of stress. To battle stress, most of us can't wave goodbye to work. But we can start small with a focus on wellness. You know, going for a walk, working out, talking to friends. There you go. A holiday is great, but it isn't a long-term solution to stress. Don't forget that therapy can help you navigate whatever challenges the workday or any day might bring. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million

people globally. And it works with an app store rating of 4.9 out of 5 based on 1.7 million client reviews. It's convenient, too. You can join a session with a therapist at the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life, plus switch therapists at any time. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can help provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash Crooked World. That's BetterHelphelp.h.h.com slash crooked world. All right, Ben, so this episode comes out on Wednesday, July 9th.

That date was supposed to mark the 90 deals and 90 days deadline to the Trump administration. to settle the global trade war that they started. Trump has now, of course, delayed his own deadline again to August 1st, art of the deal. So Trump says he has preliminary trade deals done with the UK and Vietnam, but those are mostly just kind of like sort of political agreements. The devils and the details and the details are not done. But it gets way more complicated from there.

So Trump threatened new tariffs on Monday. basically the old tariff rates on 14 countries. On true social, Trump released these letters he had written to each country that were clearly thrown together at the last minute. For example, the letter to Bosnia and Herzegovina misgendered the president. Not sure that was proof read well. At a cabinet meeting Tuesday, Trump also said he was going to impose a 50% tariff on copper and then a 200% tariff on pharmaceuticals, but those might not go into a place for 18 months,

which is, again, confusing. Trump also picked a fight with the BRICS countries. It's Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, as well as the UAE, Egypt, Iran, and Ethiopia. He posted a truth, social message that said any country, quote, aligning themselves with the anti-American policies of BRICS and, quote, will get additional 10% tariff with no exception. So it was just a mess. Here's Trump kind of ranting about these BRICS countries earlier today at this cabinet meeting. Because BRICS was set up to hurt us. Bricks was set up to degenerate our dollars.

and take our dollar as the standard, take it off as the standard. And that's okay if they want to play that game, but I can play that game too. So anybody that's in Bricks is getting a 10% charge. I thought Bricks was, you know, I said this about a year ago, and it largely broke up. But, you know, there are a couple that hang around, but I thought it largely broke up. Bricks is not, in my opinion, not as serious debt. But what they're trying to do is destroy the dollar. I like he talks about like a band that broke up, which absolutely did not happen.

I think he's mostly mad that they're like currently having a meeting and they're like disagreeing with us bombing Iran. Like whatever. So look, guys, if this segment has you confused, join the fucking club. None of this makes sense. The best example of why this process makes no sense and is so stupid is South Korea. The U.S. signed a free trade agreement with South Korea in 2012. And Trump just put out a letter that he says he's going to slap them with a 25% tariff, like make it make sense. So Ben, sports fans may have heard of Red Panda.

Do you know Red Panda? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, guy, right? She's a Chinese American acrobat. She rides on an eight-foot-tall unicycle. She, like, juggles these bowls and flips them up with their feet and catches them on her head. Pretty badass. Trump's trade policy right now to me is, like, Red Panda style.

Like, it's cool. It could work for a minute. It's distracting for a minute. But Red Panda recently fell and broke her wrist. And so I think that's what's going to happen to Trump here eventually. That is my metaphor. There's so much just bullshitry here, too. I mean, I do think with the bricks, too, first of all, you know, Trump likes to sound like smart about stuff.

But you can almost always tell that like one person got to him and was like, hey, these BRICS countries, you know what that's about? That's about a bunch of countries that led by China that don't want us to have the dollar be the reserve currency anymore. Which, by the way, is something that anybody who's ever like paid any attention to a BRICS meeting has known for like a decade. And he comes out and says it like he's, you know, dropping. some like penetrating insight, right? What about his buddy, Modi, right? Like, isn't he best friend? Like, what does he think the fucking eye is in bricks?

Right? It's India. Like, like, you're a good friend, Narendra Modi, you know? So I don't, I probably couldn't even name the countries in the acronym. An acronym, by the way, it was coined by a golden sax analyst, right? So hardly started like in the way that Trump said. This tariff stuff is the only thing that Trump cares about is that he has the power and the capability to turn the dial up and down. He loves the attention.

He loves the corruption potential. Part of what happened in that Vietnam scenario is that lo and behold, a $1.5 billion golf course was approved during an Eric Trump visit to Vietnam right after the suspensive terrace. He loves being the center of attention. He loves the bricks are having a meeting in Brazil,

so he's going to grab the camera and put it on himself. A lot of this is just about that. It's about like, I control this. I can make this pain go up, go down. And I think what people have to realize is a lot of these countries, almost, I think, too much, you know, including in Europe, they kind of kiss his ass a little bit, like, you know, to try to avoid the tariffs. But what they're going to be doing behind his back is all kinds of planning to de-dollar.

What Trump is doing, far more than anything the bricks have ever done, Trump is putting the dollar as a reserve currency at risk. Because who the hell wants their entire economy tied to the currency of a currency of a dollar. a country led by a complete maniac who's just weaponizing tariffs on every country of the world. Like, he's far more disruptive to the U.S. leadership of the global economy than like a BRICS. meeting is. Yeah, him and the Republican Party's policy of just ramming like $6 trillion worth of debt through Congress.

I mean, yeah, it's not. And by the way, the only way you're going to finance the debt is to hope that the BRICS countries continue to buy our treasuries and the Japanese continue to buy our treasuries. he's spreading 25% tariffs in Japan that recently said for the first time, like, hey, we might have to go away from the dollar here. If you want to look for a reality check, I'm going to nerd out here a little bit, but watch the bond markets, right? Because the stock market continues to, like, snort whatever white powder is making them think that this is all okay. The bond markets are not. The dollar is down more than it has been in a very long time.

Like 10% or something. It's massively down. Because people are like, I don't want to put my stuff in. And by the way, if the bill comes down. do. I think what Trump is just hoping is that the bottom falls out after he's gone. But at the rate he's going, like, you know, it may not be the next Democratic president. It may happen, you know, sooner than that. Yeah, it's, uh, it is not a good setup. But yeah, so I think the BRICS meeting, they, they criticized U.S. policy on Iran. So that brings us to some Iran updates, Ben. So over the

weekend, you and I both were reading these, I think the Times in the Post, Washington Post, dug into something we had talked about on the show the last couple episodes, which was this surprising bizarre Israeli strike on even prison in Iran. This prison is this notorious hellhole torture chamber where Iran often houses political prisoners. So the Israeli defense ministry said the the goal of the strike on even prison was to target government repression bodies in the heart of Tehran. But these, you know, the reporters who dug into the impact found it did the opposite. The Times found that the strike on the prison angered Iranians, including dissidents, and that the attack killed or wounded, quote, visiting family members of prisoners, social workers, a lawyer,

physicians and nurses, a five-year-old child, teenage soldiers guarding the doors as part of mandatory military service, administrative staff in residence of the area. Again, I think the strike happened at like noon, so it was during visiting hours. The death toll stands at 79. That is almost certainly an undercount. But it seems like a pretty catastrophic mistake if the idea was to ferment regime change or turn people against the regime. In other news, Ben, Tucker Carlson, who's been a vocal opponent of war with Iran, spoke with Iran's president, Massoud Pesachian, in an episode of his podcast that was released on Monday. It was about 30 minutes long. There wasn't a ton of groundbreaking stuff. I thought this was probably the most interesting revelation to come out of it. Let's listen to a clip.

the Israeli government tried to assassinate you? They did try, yes. And they acted accordingly, but they failed. So I take everything he says with a bit of a grain of salt, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if there was an attempt to decapitate the leadership of Iran, even though that's long been seen as taboo in war. But Ben, I mean, I think like my biggest reaction to this whole thing was how annoying it was to have people attacking Tucker Carlson just for conducting the interview.

Like, I'm not a Tucker Carlson fan, but like the idea that we can't interview people we disagree with is so annoying. Like, you and I watched an excerpted and made fun of Tucker's interview with Vladimir Putin because the substance of it was bad. But like the, I like, I will defend to the death his ability to interview people we find odious, just as we would like defend the right for diplomats. to talk to countries that we disagree with. Otherwise, like, how are we ever going to learn, like, abridge our disagreements or learn more about them?

It's just such a fucking stupid, stupid argument that drives me crazy. Yeah, no, and look, I mean, it's not the first person that's interviewed an Iranian foreign minister. I mean, I remember, you know, both Rahani, the president and Zarath, the foreign minister did multiple interviews with, like, major U.S. media outlets in the bomb years. and we weren't upset by it because it actually was kind of helpful to see what their message was. Like, it's actually you learn, you know, even if you don't like them, you kind of learn like, oh, what are they serving up? Like, what's their message, right? Like, you kind of learn what their strategy is, you know? So, look, I do think that it connects to the Aven prison thing, though, because there's this kind of weird sheen on how this war is being presented.

Like we just bombed these nuclear sites. Many people were killed, you know, far more by Israel and it's bombing. And the even prison thing, you know, Neelu Trabrizi, who was on this show a couple weeks ago, did participate in that Washington Post investigation. The Times runs great too. People should check it out. Why would you bomb the place where the dissidents are? It's not like a prison break bomb. It's not like your precision blowing up a wall so they can escape.

Like they're like six strikes. Yeah, these are big bombs. They're literally bombing. So what it tells me is that there's always been this kind of faux bullshit like we stand with the Iranian people like M.O. from the hardliners in Israel and the United States. And it used to drive me nuts with those people would come after people like us, you know, because you don't care about the Iranian people. You want to use their suffering to justify what you want to do militarily against the Iranian government. That is what's happening here. Why does Bibi Nanyahu, when he gives speeches to the Iranian people, he gives them in English.

He doesn't give them in, you know, Farsi, right? Or even in Hebrew, right? It's for Americans and, you know, Western journalists so they can say, see, look, we actually stand with these people. That's not what's happening here. Even if you support, even if you hate the regime, this only strengthens the regime's position. and, by the way, gives them like a pretext to crack down more and more on people. And again, to come back to the Tucker thing, it's the absence of an ability to kind of speak openly about this, like, leads to bad outcomes.

And this is one of them where it's like, you know, it would have been a much bigger story a few years ago if you bombed even prison and killed potentially at least dozens of not hundreds of people there. And now it's this kind of side note to, you know, debating whether or not, you know, how much Trump obliterated like a couple of sites. Yeah, I just, the debate, like the platforming debate is so stupid. It drives me crazy. And it happens in everything. Every, you know, every, like everything is debated about that, you know. Yeah. And it's just like it is censorious. It is anti-free speech. I regret that the Democratic Party is embraced it at times. And it's like, why is like ICC indicted BBN

Yahoo allowed to go on five Sunday shows a week. But like, you can't interview the president of Iran once. Why not? It's newsworthy. It's interesting. Maybe he'll say something that provides an opening for diplomacy in finding middle ground. Often those sorts of signals are sent in public remarks because they're hoping they'll be picked up when there isn't a diplomatic relationship. So this shit just drives me fucking crazy. Patsy the World is brought to you by American Giant. In the 1960s, 95% of American clothing was made in the USA. Today, that 50% of American clothing was made in the USA. Today, that figure is plummeted to just 3%. Fast fashion is complicated clothing production by outsourcing cheap parts globally, leading to rising costs for consumers. American Giant simplifies the process

by keeping production local, ensuring their products are unaffected by tariffs. By choosing American Giant, you directly support American manufacturers. I got some really comfortable sweatpants and a big cozy sweatshirt of American Giant, and I really like them. They have great clothes. They got good clothes. I like their t-shirts. Lots of variety, great clothes, good quality, and not expensive. And they also show up really fast. And, you know, what you're all used to is mega corporations obsessed with growth churning out cheap crap from poor materials. Like many of us, the founders of American Giant were dissatisfied with how clothes are made and decided to do something about it. They created their own company to make better quality clothing. Choosing American Giant means

taking a stand for hardworking people, local communities, and quality clothes. They believe in a new kind of conscious buying because small changes can add up to something big. It all started with the greatest hoodie ever. Then came jeans, T-shirts, and more. Support American made to tear-free clothing with American Giant. Get 20% off your first order when you use the promo code world at American-dash-Giant.com. That's 20% off when you use the code world at American-dash-giant.com. All right, so the war in Iran is also exacerbating this border crisis with Afghanistan. So the Iranian government says that there's about 6 million Afghans who live in Iran,

about 4 million are undocumented. The New York Times reported that since March, over 800,000 Afghans have returned home to Afghanistan. This came after Iran announced that all migrants and refugees had to leave Iran by July 6th. But on top of that, Afghans were getting increasingly blamed for economic and social problems in Iran. And then there was this conflict. So meanwhile, as we've discussed on the show before, Pakistan has been conducting its own campaign to expel the three and a half million Afghans living there. that's leading to thousands of families crossing basically every single day into Afghanistan.

Like one day last week, I think there were 30,000 people who passed through in the day. And all of this has led to people arriving who are exhausted, hungry, they have no money, they have nowhere to go. And they're landing in border towns that are not even close to equipped to handle that many people. And then plus, I mean, we probably don't have to say this, but Afghanistan is having its own humanitarian crisis. There were decades of war. Then there was the U.S. cancelling aid for Afghanistan. There's ongoing sanctions by the West and the U.S. in particular. And the U.N. warns that this many returnies could destabilize Afghanistan in the region.

And again, like, you know, while life could be awful for women, for example, in Iran, life under the Taliban is going to be even worse, especially for women who are forced to travel alone because the Taliban will not let them move freely or work. So it's just like another example of a truly awful man-made crisis that is getting next to no. attention. Yeah, and like the two things that add to that, one is it shows you how much all these different things connect, right? I mean, you have like bombing in Iran, you're going to, you know, drive people back in Afghanistan. Like you've got a complete mess and dysfunction in Pakistan, same thing. But the other thing that really worries me, and I mentioned this to Jason Crowe, because he served in Afghanistan, cares a lot about this. We are about to be deporting a bunch of Afghans who are in this country, right, including people that worked with U.S. military, including people

who are women's rights advocates, including people that work with USAID, you know, people who didn't kind of get fully naturalized or get their status fully in order. But, you know, a lot of those people that a lot of people helped get out in that chaotic evacuation are kind of here and they're ripe, you know, they're the kind of people that have been targeted by ICE. And I cannot think of anything more chilling than someone that worked with the United States for all those years or believed the things we told them about values and came to the United States and came here, expecting that they were going to be resettled and now being risked at being put on a flight to God knows where, you know, if not back to Afghanistan, you know, South Sudan or somewhere, right?

So it's just another reason to keep some attention on trying to protect at least that population of Afghans who are here. Because right now, things are so bad in Afghanistan is just like whatever individual you can help, that's one less person who's kind of dealing with this absolute nightmare. All right, yeah, we're going to talk about some more

terrible immigration news in a minute. Ben, but let's bounce around a bit first. On Sunday, thousands of people braved monsoon-like rain and turned out to celebrate the Dalai Lama's 90th birthday in Darimshala, India. I bet it was a rager. That's the location of the Tibetan government in exile. So in a video, the aforementioned spiritual leader of the Tibetan Buddhism announced that the centuries old tradition of his form being reincarnated after his death will continue.

That is very important to the Dalai Lama's followers because the Chinese Communist Party claims they alone have the authority to approve the next Dalai Lama. But this time, the Dalai Lama says the identity of his successor will come with preconditions, including the child must be born in the free world. And the office of the Dalai Lama will have, quote, sole authority to recognize the future. reincarnation. So we don't have time to go through all the history here, the long history of China and Tibet's conflict, but a bit of recent history just for context. So the Dalai Lama fled China in 1959 after the Chinese military brutally crushed a Tibetan uprising. He's lived in exile in India ever since. The Chinese government views the Dalai Lama as enemies, called the Dalai Lama a separatist, a wolf in monks grobes. They've instituted this regime of just far-reaching repression

and indoctrination of people in Tibet. And the question of reincarnation and succession for the Dalai Lama is especially important when you understand the history because in 1995, after the Dalai Lama identified a six-year-old boy as the chosen reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, who was seen as the second holiest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, the Chinese government disappeared the child and his family and installed their own pick. And so this six-year-old kid and his family literally haven't been seen since. So, Ben, you know, the U.S. and I think, you know, Western countries generally now have so many issues with China that Tibet has really like kind of fallen way off like the front page.

But I wonder if you think that'll change if Beijing tries to appoint the Dalai Lama successor and then like bully the world into following along with it. Because there still is like, I think like Richard Gere was at this Dalai Lama's birthday party. There is some like, you know, lingering memory of how important this issue. was for many, many years. I mean, the sad truth is probably not. You know, the, and look, anybody that's kind of so frustrated with the U.S. right now that they're tempted to kind of, you know, start being sentimental about the Chinese Communist Party should just look at Tibet, where essentially not only has there been this erasure of the Dalai Lama, but they've really, you know, repopulated parts of Tibet, tried to eradicate the use of Tibetan language, culture, and, you know, literally trying to

some Chinese party functionary is going to pick the next Dalai Lama. Like, I mean, how cynical do you get here? I do think, and something kind of sad about it because, you know, I met the Dalai Lama a couple of times. And like, you know, let's just say there's not many people you're in a room with where you're like, oh, that guy's, the guy lives up to the billing, right? You know, like this guy, truly spiritual, holy, good person. Him in his later years in this kind of isolation is kind of a sad commentary in how far we've come from like, you know, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 89 when things were looking like history was moving in one direction.

Trump should have got it that year. Now, what I will say is that I think that if the Chinese mess with the succession, which I probably will, I think it'll rekindle, first of all, there'll probably be a reaction in Tibet. and the Chinese will be nervous about that and they'll probably crush it. But we've seen this before. And tragically, sometimes it involves like self-immolations too. But I also think that, you know, the Dalai Lama clearly chose to do this. He didn't need to do this. And I think he sees it as an effort to kind of keep this flame alive.

And I do think enough people will care that there will continue to be this movement of a Tibetan exile community, a Tibetan exile spiritual community. And yes, that spiritual community has made inroads into cultures around the world, too. So the hopeful point I would make is that you're not going to extinguish this, you know. The flame will pass to somebody else. It's just maybe a while before China's changed enough that that flame can get any traction inside of China. Really tells you everything you need to know about that government that they took a six-year-old boy as a political prisoner and just disappeared him for 30 years. And they bully, they bully you the hell out of government.

to not meet with... I mean, you remember this? Like, they really, you know, they'll use all their muscle to, if you meet with the dialama, suddenly you're cut off from China entirely. For years. Yeah, penalized for years.

Yeah, creepy about it. Yeah. All right, switching gears a little bit. So crazy shit has been happening in Thailand and our incredible producer, Michael, will probably quit if we do not tell you about it. So buckle up. No, I'm kidding.

This is actually a legitimately really crazy story. So just to set the stage a bit here, so Thailand and Cambodia, they share a 500-mile land border, which has been disputed since 1907, thanks to French colonial boundaries drawn by the French. Again, thank you. Colonizers. So fast forward to late May, Thai and Cambodian troops shot at each other in a disputed area of the border,

and a Cambodian soldier was killed. Both sides blamed the other. Since then, there has been this escalating tit-for-tap between the two countries. Cambodia has banned produce, media, and fuel from Thailand. Thailand has blocked tourists. from entering Cambodia. That was a particularly big blow to Cambodia's lucrative casino industry, which Ben, I think you and I spent some time in together back in the day on an Obama trip. And it's a weird spot. And then both sides have shut down some like land crossings.

So that's obviously bad. But the story heats up when Thai Prime Minister, Petong Tarn, Shinawatra, had this ill-fated, an unfortunate phone call with former Cambodian leader Hun Sen in an attempt to ease tensions. So we talked about Shinawatt last year when she took office. She's part of this Thai political dynasty. I think her dad and aunt also served as prime minister. She is very young. She's 38. She's the daughter of a billionaire.

She is not remotely qualified. She's a degree in hotel management. So in this 17-minute call, the Cambodian side recorded it. And then they leaked it. And in the call, she called Hansen uncle. He was like an old buddy of her dad's. And she talked about how, quote, the other side, in other words, the Thai military commander who has been handling the border dispute, quote, just wanted to look cool

and said things that are not useful. And when this leaked, it really, really pissed off like everybody. It pissed off her coalition. It pissed off the Thai public. They did not take kindly to her deferential tone, the disparagement of her own military. And despite like a lot of groveling, there was a public apology that she was trying to spin it and say, look, I'm just being conciliatory to the Cambodian side. is kind of a negotiating tactic.

She is now in a full political crisis. The second largest party in her governing coalition pulled out, leaving them with a tiny majority. Then last week, she was suspended from her job by the Constitutional Court pending an ethics investigation. And the government is already on, I think it's second caretaker prime minister. So it's a total mess. One of the big questions here, Ben, is whether Thailand is vulnerable to yet another military coup.

There have been at least 12 since 1932. And it runs in the family. Her father was removed from office by a coup in 2006. I think a coup followed her aunt's removal from office by the Constitutional Court in 2014. So all of which is to say Thai politics, never boring. Never boring. Like there's layers of this that are really interesting. So let's start on the Thai side because, yeah, Thaksin, her father, you know, really rich guy, but a populist rich guy, he gets asked by the military.

Yingluck, who is his sister, the aunt, we went to Thailand and, you know, Barack Obama met her, you know, during press conference, things like seemed like things were going great. And then the military put her on a plane to London, I think, you know, like two years later, right? So military coups can happen with regularity. And there was this kind of strange deal, remember, between the Thai military and the kind of Thaksin dynasty to kind of let him return, let her. take power. But it was always kind of tenuous. And part of what was creepy about the deal is that they completely sidelined the one hopeful, progressive, younger political party in Thai politics. So if you're wondering who the good guys are, the good guys are the people that got muscled out of the picture by the- No one mentioned before. Yes. Good guy. Yeah. And so nobody's

that sympathetic to the military here, even though, you know, she handled this poorly. People always also forget Thailand is a treaty ally of the United States. Now, I don't think anyone is expecting we're going to come to their defense on the Cambodian border dispute. But the problem here is that, you know, you just don't want the military to be, I mean, part of what she was probably indicating is that maybe the military is ginning this up because, you know, they want to kind of reassert their, you know, position at the vanguard of nationalism. I will say also, Hun Sen, really creepy guy. Like, not a good guy. Like, like, this history goes all the way back to Camer Rouge. He's crossed the opposition. Not a lot of good actors in this. What you would like to do, though, is

obviously calm down. You don't want, like, a border dispute in that part of the world. You don't want violence in that part of the world. And you would hope that there's some process to maintain a civilian government in Thailand. But yeah, this has the rumblings of a situation that will probably not lead to better outcomes in either Thai or Cambodian politics. Yeah. And also, watch what you say on an open line. Never good. Yeah. Yeah.

Everybody should be learning that lesson. I mean, Marker Rubio. Yeah. Watch who's, you know, sliding into your signal messages. Your TMs. Final story, Ben. So let's just end on some immigration news before we get to your interview. So on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security terminated yet another temporary protected status designation this time for Hondurans and Nicaraguans.

This comes on the heels of the administration's efforts to get rid of TPS for migrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Afghanistan. Cameroon, Nepal. So a U.S. District judge blocked the DHS termination for Haiti last week. So we'll see how long that last, though, given that the Supreme Court has rolled in Trump's favor over and over again on immigration. For example, allowing the administration to NTPS for Venezuelans in May and letting them deport eight men to South Sudan just last week, as you mentioned earlier, only one of whom is from there. So lots of terrible stuff happening on this front. But the people impacted by this, the recidivist, the designation for Honduras and Nicaragua. So it's estimated to be about 72,000 Hondurans and 4,000 Nicaraguans. They will now have 60 days to comply with the termination. Luckily, about, I think, 21,000 Hondurans and 1100 Nicaraguans have green cards, so hopefully they won't be affected.

But, and then there's also some of them are being encouraged to use like this self-deportation app, which gets you a free plane ticket and like a thousand dollars cash if you leave. But Ben, just like stepping back, if you believe the State Department, they have a travel notice up that says Nicaragua and Honduras are not safe places to visit because of crime, limited health care, sliding democratic norms, corruption, and repression. And then the most recent Human Rights Watch World Report for Nicaragua says that President Ortega and his wife are seeking to consolidate power overhaul the government and have, quote, expanded the use of forced exile and citizenship revocation as a way to target critics. But we're still going to send all these people back

to their home countries anyway. And addition to those like political and safety considerations, that make this just a gross, shitty thing to do. The decision just is unbelievably cruel, given the history, because TPS was granted to Honduran and Nicaraguans in 1999 after Hurricane Mitch tore through Central America. It killed over 11,000 people and was just devastating. I think 7,000 people died in Honduras, a million were displaced, so just decimated these countries.

And so, you know, I think the critics of TPS would say the T&TPS stands for, temporary. And sure, that's fair. But like what we're talking about doing here in practice is expelling people from the country who have lived in the United States for over 20 years. They have jobs. They have families. They're part of communities. There's a guy, you know, who had worked in construction around New Orleans for two decades who told a Fox affiliate. Basically, if I lose my TPS, I lose my dream of becoming commercial pilot, like, you can't get hired if you aren't in good legal status. So we're just like, we're, we're creating these. nightmare scenarios for all these people who are in the country legally trying to do the right

thing, responsible parts of communities. Like I don't think, but the Republicans, like, whenever some horrible immigration thing happens will be tweet like, I did vote for this. Like, I don't think anyone voted for, you know, Honduran whose home was destroyed in 1998 to be sent home in 2025. Like, it's just like completely unnecessarily cruel. Yeah. I mean, one thing about the Trump administration you have to, there's that, I think it's that quote attributed to Stalin, right? You know, one death is a tragedy and, you know, whatever, how many million is a statistic. Like Trump wants to numb you with the scale of this. Think of how many absolute human tragedies are unfolding before our eyes.

Like people who have been here for decades, who are good members of the community, who give back to the community. Not only are they going to be subject to the kind of terror of being returned to places that they don't know where they're losing their dreams, where they could be subject to violence or have no means of making a living. But think of all the people that they'll be separated from, maybe family members or maybe just people in their community, the ripple effects of this. The other thing that bears saying is, yeah, Hurricane Mitch may have been the proximate cause of TPS, but American fingerprints are all over how messed up Central America is. You know, I mean, these are the places where the United States was backing death squads, right? These are the

places where we were meddling in politics. And so that bears in mind, too. This didn't just happen out of nowhere. And frankly, a lot of the best immigrant communities in the United States come from these places, you know, like El Salvador, like Vietnam, you know, where, frankly, you know, we had a complicated history, but the only positive that came out of it is like people made something of themselves in this country. And just to try to wipe that away, to me, is like a real tragic loss for this country, even if it's a big win for Stephen Miller. And so we really just do need to keep the attention on this

because this is not normal. And the only political point I make and I hesitate to make it, but some of these communities, you know, because obviously I deal with this on Cuba, right? The Cuban Americans, the support of Trump, and now there's a Cuban American that died in a ice facility and they're deporting people back to Cuba.

Same thing with Nicaragua, where a lot of people didn't like Daniel Ortega. Well, now they're sending people back to Daniel Ortega. A lot of Venezuelans. The Republican Party's been selling you a fiction that they cared about the Venezuelan people or the Nicaraguan people or the Cuban people. They didn't.

They used it as a wedge political issue in places like Florida to call Democrats a week or to call Democrats communist. What they're doing now tells you everything that they actually believe about those people. Yeah. It's cruel. it's stupid, it's unnecessary, I think it's going to hurt our economy. It's politically unpopular. Pew had a poll last month that found 59% of voters opposed ending TPS for immigrants who fled

war, natural disasters. That's exactly what we're talking about. You don't find very many issues that poll at like 59, 60%. I mean, that's like overwhelmingly unpopular. Joe Rogan and John Fabro agree about it. Yeah, yeah, right. Stephen Miller might like, you know, sit in his like sad little cuck chair at night and like get off to this stuff, but this is the second cuck comment I made. I'm really out of control. But no one else. else wants this to happen and it's just it's wrong and we should talk about it. We should not be scared about this. No, we should not be scared to talk about this. Because it's both the right thing morally and politically. You made this point just end on the lighter note because we need

a little levity here. Stephen Miller is 39 years old and he looks, he looks literally like the emperor from Star Wars. Fascism ages you, man. He looks like a 133-year-old man who's just being eaten alive from the inside, right? It's better to not be cruel, you know? It's better for your help. Look, I know I got some bags under my eyes after I crossed the 40 Mendoza line and with two kids. But boy, when I read that he was 39 years old, I could not have to leave him. He looks like a 59-year-old man and, you know, the 39-year-old dead soul at a 59-year-old man's body. Dead eyes. Fucking worst.

Anyway, that's it for the new section of show. But stick around for Ben's interview with Congressman Jason Crow. You will not want to miss it. This podcast is brought to you by Wise. wise is the smart way to manage your money internationally. Sending or spending money abroad, major banks may be taking a cut. With Wise, you'll always get the real mid-market exchange rates. You can use money around the globe with minimum fees and maximum ease.

Setting up your WISE account is easy and you'll have access to over 40 currencies in just a few seconds. From buying overseas properties to tapping your card on the metro, get the real deal for your money all around the globe. And with 24-7 live support and real-time transaction tracking, you know your money is secure. before Wise, this process was a total black box to me. You would pay for something abroad. It might as well have been Monopoly money. Same.

You could get ripped off beyond belief and you just have would have no idea. Wise makes it simple and easy. It's one app where you can do everything you need, 40 different currencies, pay for stuff, use your cash all around the globe. It couldn't be easier. 12 million customers managing their international money with Wise can't be wrong. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. terms and conditions apply. I'm very pleased to welcome to the podcast Congressman Jason Crow from Colorado. He is from the 6th District there. He serves in the Armed Services and Intelligence

Committees. He is a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan. He is somebody that you should know and pay attention to. So Congressman Crow, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, Ben. Glad we could put this together. Thanks for having me. I know. This is great. Well, we'll have to make this a a regular appointment. So there's a lot to cover. I want to start with the, you know, bill that just passed. I hate to, it feels weird to be a grown up and call it the big, beautiful bill, or even call it one of the pejoratives. Yeah, what do we call it? Yeah, I know. The piece of garbage has just passed. But, you know, there's so much focus,

rightly so, on, you know, the inequality, on the Medicaid cuts, on the harm it's going to do to Americans. I think, you know, probably less front of mind for people, though, is it there's a bunch of dimensions where this is potentially dangerous for our foreign policy and our global competitiveness. I mean, I could run the gamut from our long-term fiscal health to our ability to compete with China to the strange fixation on missile defense. But I just want to start by asking you to frame for people, you know, kind of a national security or foreign policy or your competitiveness argument against this massive bill that just passed Congress? Yeah, well, I mean, the energy production tax credit rollbacks,

the wind and solar tax credit rollbacks are probably one of the largest national security strategic blunders that we've seen in years, if not a generation, right? At no point in American history has there been a closer tie to our ability to produce quick, clean, safe, low-cost energy and our ability to have economic and military might, then at this point in American history, right? You look at AI, you look at the data centers, you look at the new defense systems that are in development or that we're fielding right now,

extremely energy consumptive. Right. So that tie is very, very close. And China knows it. China is doubling, tripling down on this. They've actually, Actually, last year, they produced more wind and solar than the rest of the world combined. They are investing in this very heavily because they know this to be true. So the rollback is going to be really, really devastating for the production of energy that we're going to need for both economic and military might. There's just no other way to put it. Yeah, I want to ask you a follow-up question about this because I kind of can't understand something about the Trump administration, which is, on the one hand, they talk a lot about, you know, China and,

competing with China, but they also talk a lot about critical minerals and the kind of supply chains that are necessary for clean energy and the kind of technologies of the future. And yet at the same time, they're doing these massive, massive cuts in clean energy and this kind of bizarre effort to kind of bring back coal, right? And whether you look at that from a climate change perspective, and energy cost perspective or national security perspective, it doesn't make sense. How do you square the fact that they're talking about the supply chains for things like batteries and solar power while they're cutting the investments in it? Do you see the internal inconsistencies that I'm struggling with?

Yeah. Asking me to square any of the inconsistencies in this administration is quite a task and, you know, frankly impossible in a lot of respects, because you just can't. The way that I make some sense of this is that there is an internal ideological battle happening within this administration between what I would call defense hawks, traditional conservatives, which is a small and dying faction of mega world, and then the isolationists, those who are more focused on the culture war aspects of this. And it's that wing that won out on this renewable energy rollback, right? That wing that basically just said, you know, this is liberal progressive energy,

right? Renewable energy, wind and solar, even though, I'll say, even though Texas, a red state, and most of these large projects are actually in red states, Republican-governed states. So senators voted for things that are going to roll back hundreds of billions of dollars of projects and cost tens of thousands of jobs in red states. What wanted these tax credits and advocated for it. But, you know, that mega ideological wing, which went out this battle, is prevailing more and more. And we're seeing this. I mean, it is a dying faction, you know, these kind of national security hawks of the Republican Party.

There are very few of them left at this point. Yeah. Well, actually, that's a good transition to – I wanted to ask you about Iran, where the national security hawks were able to, at least for a couple of days, get Trump to obviously bomb Iran in its nuclear facilities, although then he kind of abruptly halted that bombing. I want to ask you about the intelligence piece of this, though, to start with, because, you know, you sit on armed services. I'm sure you're supposed to be privy to briefings about battle assessments, damage assessments of the Iranian nuclear program. Obviously, this is a hugely consequential action. But it all, you know, battle assessments, damage assessments of the Iranian nuclear program. Obviously, obviously, this is a hugely consequential action.

But it all depends on how far we set back the Iranian nuclear program, whether that's sustainable, whether they decide to go covert and develop their own nuclear capability without anybody being able to get access to their facilities. And, you know, Trump said it was obliterated after really clearly lying about, you know, the fact that, you know, there was an imminent weaponization. And he kind of forced Tulsi Gabbard, his DNI to take back. their own assessment that they did not think around was weaponizing. The question I want to ask you is, how do you trust the information that you're given as a member of Congress? How should we trust what is told to us publicly when it is so clear that they are essentially directing intelligence agencies to give them the information they want? And there was even a story that Tulsi Gabbard is

fired intelligence officials who won't kind of bend the facts to fit their narrative and that she is hoping to get access to emails and chats of people in the IC and use AI to see who's weaponizing intelligence. This is not seem like people trying to get the facts, right? So how do you, as a consumer of intelligence, how do you deal with that? Yeah, I'm asking myself that. Actually, it kind of goes to the core, one of the core questions of how long will the professional civil service be able to hold out in this administration, right?

And whether this is the IC, whether this is DOD, whether this is. whether this is EPA, whether this is FAA, you have these lifetime civil servants, you know, spies, intel analysts, air traffic controllers, you know, weather forecasters, you can fill in the blank. And, of course, if their intelligence doesn't meet the narrative, if it doesn't match what the public narrative is for Donald Trump and Maygo world, then they come under fire. And that's, of course, why in May, Tulsi Gabbard literally fired the acting chair of the National Intelligence Council because they came right out and they said there is no evidence that shows that the gang, Trennairagua, is controlled by the Venezuelan government. Gabbard and Gabbard's

chief went back to the chair of the Nick and said, this does not match what we're saying, what the president is saying. So why don't you take another look at it and rewrite it, which of course they did not do and they lost their job. So that is my question is how long can this, how long can they hold out? I mean, we're an eighth of the way through this administration, right? And you all look at what's happened so far. And, you know, you fast forward another six months, another year. It could be a dire, it could be a really dire position where, you know, the information

that we're getting on Capitol Hill or that, you know, people are getting downrange in the co-coms or not getting good information. So what I'm doing is I'm looking at changes. Right? I have a pretty good steady flow of regular CIA wires. We get our weekly brief, you know, members of Congress that sit on the Intel Committee. We fly in every Monday. We have hotspots.

We get our briefing book. We read through all the briefs for all the major conflicts in the world. We take deeper dives in areas of special interest. I've taken special interest in covert action programs and a variety of other counterterrorist things in Russia, Ukraine. So we take a deep dive there. So I'm looking for changes and I'm looking for shifts and I'm looking for who changes and who is doing the briefing too. And right now that seems to be holding and I hope it can hold longer because I'm worried

about it and deeply worried about it. Yeah, I mean, just to play this out, you know, it's hard to believe that if six months from now, right, the assessment is, oh, actually the Iranians, you know, they They took their fuel and a handful of events, centrifuges, and they kind of went off the grid with them. And, you know, it doesn't seem like, you know, it seems like Trump would rather have the narrative be that these strikes solved the problem, obliterated the facilities, than he'd want people to give him bad news, right? Or give Congress bad news. So I guess to your point, if you start to see that the kind of, whether it's Iran or any other issue, that the people are changing and the news is. always good for Trump, you know, then do you think there's a capacity to come out and kind of

blow a whistle and be like, hey, we see what you guys are doing here? I think so. I mean, there's a, there's a, um, to the extent that the law matters for this administration, which also is a open question. There are special and certain laws just for the I-C that allow whistleblowers to come forth to Congress, actually. So there's a whole different whistleblower system as you're well aware from your time in, in the administration. Um, So protecting that system is going to be really important and maintaining whistleblower capacity is going to be really important. But there is a truth here, right? I mean, Iran either will or won't reconstitute its program, right?

The three facilities that hit either were obliterated or they weren't obliterated. And Israel has a dog in this hunt, too. Right. And if Donald Trump says that they were obliterated and doesn't want anybody else to say differently and he's willing to move on, you know, Israel, if they're not obliterated, is probably going to speak up and take action as well. So I see there being a potential wedge between Donald Trump's narrative in what Israel wants to be able to do here. And many other countries, by the way. I mean, again, as you know well from your time negotiating these agreements, pretty much nobody wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon, right?

Including China, including Russia, nobody really wants this to happen. And we know we have a pretty good sense for what Iran is doing. And we also know that you can't bomb your way out of this, which is why, you know, you help negotiate that agreement. Because unless it's permanent and unless it's verifiable, we will always be doing this, right? We will always just be playing the game of whack-a-mole and bombing them every six months or year or 18 months if that's the strategy, if that's what you want to call it to this administration. Yeah, yeah. I want to come back to that at the very end on the Democratic Party on Iran, but I do want to ask you just two more things about Trump because knowing your personal expertise in history, right? So you're a veteran. And when you look at Pete Heggsath and what he's doing at the Pentagon, how concerned are you that the combination of the changes they're making at the kind of general officer level on down, the cultural kind of Uber. MAGA, you know, Hexethian approach to things, right? Donald Trump, you know, military parades. Everything Trump says is right. And the deployments to the U.S. military, right, in the United States.

Like, I'm from Los Angeles. Like, the military is in my streets, literally. How worried, what are you seeing, you know, about, and how worried are you about the, you know, because people always thought the military would be the last, you know, the hardest nut to crack for Trump, right? It's the biggest, you know, most entrenched kind of bureaucracy that there is. There's millions of people in it. But are you worried that they could be trying to remake the military in Trump or Hegset's image and that that might open up the door to the use of the U.S. military in the United States in ways that we've not seen before? Yeah. Well, a couple of things. Number one, the way that Pete Hegsef operates, his leadership style, again, if you want to call it that, even. And Donald Trump has completely

antithetical to everything I learned in the military, right? This notion of servant leadership, you know, from day one of boot camp when I was a private and then when I became an officer, it's drilled into you. It's servant leadership. You know, when you're a paratrooper, you jump out of the plane first and then your soldiers follow. You, you know, eat last. You go to sleep last. You suffer with your soldiers. You know, this administration and the, you know, what the, the message they sent over and over again is the rules don't apply to me, right? They applied to everybody else, but not me, whether it's Signalgate, whether it's kicking out trans members from the military, restrictions on women in service, and on and on.

It's truly abhorrent stuff. And, you know, you look at my own combat experience. You know, I went to war three times in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it was that experience that underscored for me the importance of protecting civilians. billions in conflict zones, the importance of diplomacy and humanitarian aid and all of the tools in our toolbox as a country, not just military power, and frankly, the inherent limitations of military power. Those are the lessons that I took away.

And I see what's happening now that basically the only thing that does matter is hard power and military power. It's a recipe for disaster. And it's not going to end well. And then you add on top of that, you know, per your previous question. You know, I went to war in Iraq based on politicized intelligence. You know, we spent 20 years in the war and terror and a good chunk of that in Iraq, trillions of dollars, thousands of U.S. soldiers' lives, hundreds of thousands of other lives,

ruined because politics was driving the intelligence. Yeah. Yeah, well, and to just kind of tie it together to one other issue, I know you care a lot about, which is Afghans or Iraqis that served with us who are in the United States. I had the kind of haunting feeling that you could have the U.S. military deployed in support of ice raids, as is the case in Los Angeles, that are going to roll up Afghans who are here without permanent status and try to send them back to Afghanistan. I mean, is there anything that can be done to protect particularly, you know, people like

from Afghanistan and Iraq who, you know, served with U.S. military? or supported the values that we were standing for there? Well, we're, I mean, there are in action quite a few Republicans who are still involved in this issue. We started in 2021, we started the bipartisan honoring our promises working group in Congress. There's a number of Republicans that we continue to work with who served with Afghans during the war, or whose families served with Afghans who are working with us to push back on this and try to protect them on an individual basis. So there's that piece. But then to go back to your point about the use of military domestically,

obviously a big concern of mine. But what keeps me more awake at night is the provisions of the big beautiful bill, if you will, Donald Trump's disaster bill last week. This is really what keeps me awake. That bill just tripled the budget of ice. And in one fell swoop, it gave it a budget that is now bigger than the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, and Customs Service combined. Right. It made it the largest law enforcement entity in American history bigger than the U.S. Marine Corps.

Right. So they're going to hire loyalists. They're going to hire. They're going to create this ice force. almost from scratch, and it's going to have very broad jurisdiction and authorities within the United States. It's going to be tens of thousands of new agents, and it's going to have unbelievable amounts of money, including an incarceration camp, an incarceration camp system around the entire country. That is scary as hell.

Yeah. That's kind of the ultimate manifestation of the kind of darkness that we're dealing with in of this period. And I want to ask you one last question that should be the beginning of a conversation, Jason, which is essentially about the future of the Democratic Party on these issues, right? Yeah. So I noticed in the Iran debate some of the old kind of left-right, you know, cleavages in the party between people who were opposed to the strikes or opposing them on their unconstitutional grounds, as you did, or that they're not the best way to solve the problem. and then maybe people who weren't necessarily supportive, but who just were very quiet about it, including some of the leadership and the party. And look, to be blunt, like these issues often get pretty intense, obviously around Israel and Gaza or Israel and Iran.

I think also traditionally they've been on defense. They've been on China. And it's usually framed as a left center difference. And frankly, you could bring the border in refugees, right? Some people who want to be more welcoming of refugees. Some people want to take a harder line. it feels like Trump is scrambling all this anyway, right? I mean, in part because what he's doing is so extreme that everybody opposes it, like, the ice money you just talked about,

but also because he doesn't fit naturally an ideological spectrum. So, you know, you're involved in leading Canada recruitment, for instance, for the D-D-C, the Democratic Congressional Committee. And you're someone who's navigated, I've noticed over the years, you know, between these different wings. You know, you don't have to be just, you know, dogmatically this way. progressive or centrist, just trying to find things that make sense. How do you think about this? How do we take what is kind of a blank slate after Joe Biden, I think, of what the Democratic Party stands for in foreign policy and try to both build consensus, but also consensus it isn't just like, hey, let's run back the tape to, you know, the rhetoric about American exceptionalism and, you know,

act like it's permanently the 90s. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a couple of ways I think about this. One is that Americans want something different. And if Democrats are not serious about that and honest about that, if our solution is, hey, we're just going to fight back to Trumpism, and we're going to try to preserve institutions as they are, and we're going to build what once was, that will be a massive failure. We will have missed the point.

We will have not heard America, which is telling us very resoundingly, that we want a new foreign policy vision and national security vision. So it has to look different, has to feel different, has to deliver differently. So that's A. And this is Democrats' opportunity to say, you know, we don't want everything to be destroyed and torn down, but that is what Trump is doing. So if they're going to dismantle this system, then now we have the opportunity to build something new. right what is the new progressive vision for national security and foreign policy for america

that delivers for american people that communicates with them that has an ecosystem and an infrastructure that looks more like the american people rather than you know the same people over and over again making making policy in this town right which are great people like a lot of them are great friends of mine and they're really smart people but listen the the sad reality is, and I'm running all around the country doing this recruiting, helping candidates, campaigning, doing this work. And I can tell you, people are pissed off. They think the system has failed them. They don't want to go back. And they want it to look and feel and be different. And they want some different people doing it, too. So we have to learn that lesson. And then the second

piece is the two camps. The camps who are the one camp that is willing to allow unbelievable presidential power. We're in an era of the height of presidential power versus the camp that says, no, Congress is going to take it back. Right. So that's this is a whole different way of looking at the Iran thing. So much of the rhetoric around the Iran strike is, was it obliterated? Was it not obliterated? Was it successful? Was it not successful? Well, that that lens is a might makes right lens. Yeah, it was illegal. Right?

Like, you'd serve with that, right? Yeah. It was illegal. Right? I mean, so much that it was frustrated that the hell out of me because it was like, wait a minute. All we're talking about is, was it successful or not? Because the assumption is if it was successful, then it's okay. No, it's not okay. No, you shouldn't do things that aren't necessary that are illegal, even if they blow some things up, you know?

Right. And I've been pretty consistent about this, you know, that for over 20 years now, Democrat and Republican controlled Congresses and Democrat and Republican controlled administrations have allowed war powers, have allowed immigration authorities, have allowed all sorts of things to go outside of the control of Congress as our Constitution divisions. And I'm, you know, me and Tim Cain and others are like, no, it's time to take it back. Right? We're not going to allow that to happen anymore. And the reason you have 20 years, sorry, I'm on a, I'm on my soapbox here, But the reason you have 20 years, you get 20 years of a war that should have ended much sooner.

We spend $3 trillion, thousands of lives, lost credibility, lost opportunity, is because we stopped having a debate. We financed it with debt. Congress literally took one vote, the entire 20-year period, and it stopped. And, you know, I get jazzed about it because obviously I went and I fought in those wars. and I saw people give their lives in these wars, and it should have ended much sooner. And if Congress were involved in the way that our Constitution envisions, I think it would have. Yeah. No, and not to mention the fact that the extraordinary immigration sanctions and other powers that were kind of accumulated in the war on terror, that's what Trump is using right now. People should know that for everything from tariffs to deportations.

It's all these extraordinary, you know, declarations of national emergencies, you know, all these things that he's doing are kind of part of this infrastructure of presidential power. So I want to leave it there, but you have to come back to talk more about this. I think this is a great starting point, though, which is one way to think about it is before we start solving what our China policy is, let's just agree on maybe we should actually have checks and balances in the Congress that reigns in the out-of-control executive because, frankly, you'll get more progressive outcomes, as you say. if you don't concentrate power like this. But Jason Crowe, I want to thank you so much. It's a wide-ranging conversation. We'll have much more to get to. We'll have to have you, obviously, back on before the midterms

to talk about kind of where this is all going as a party. But thanks for your work on this and for joining us. Yeah, thanks, Ben. Good chatting. Thanks to Congressman Crow for joining the show. Ben, thanks again to you for podcasting late from Europe. Yeah, I'll be back in studio next week. Well, I'm excited to see you.

Bring me some Chatea Nuf de Papp. I will. I will. It's on my list. Order a case, my friend. You will not regret it. All right. Talk to you guys soon.

See it. Patsy of the World is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is Alonamikovsky. Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith. Saul Rubin is helping out this summer. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, and Ben Rhodes. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our audio engineer.

Audio support by Kyle Segglin and Charlotte Landis. Thanks to our digital team, Ben Hethcote, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David Toll's, and Ryan Young. Matt DeGroote is our head of production. Adrian Hill is our senior vice president of news and politics.

If you want to get ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and more, consider joining our friends of the pod subscription community at crooked.com slash friends. Don't forget to follow us at Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter for more original content,

host takeovers and other community events. Plus, find Pod Save the World on YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content, and much more. If you're as opinionated as we are, please consider dropping us a review. Our production staff is proudly unionized by the Writers Guild of America East.