Pod Save the World - Trump’s TikTok Flip Flop

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

Tommy and Ben discuss plans for delivering aid to Gaza through a maritime route and floating pier, US “red lines” over an Israeli invasion of Rafah and the public war of words between Biden and Netanyahu in weekend interviews. They they talk about Viktor Orban’s visit to Mar-a-Lago, concerns from the intelligence community about giving Trump classified briefings during the election, the debate over banning TikTok, election news in Portugal and Turkey, a mass kidnaping in Nigeria, a failed constitutional amendment vote in Ireland, and the photoshop scandal that is fueling even more rumors about the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton. Then Ben does a deep dive on the deteriorating situation in Haiti, which has become overrun by gangs, with Renata Segura, Deputy Program Director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the International Crisis Group. 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.

Welcome to Pottae of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. And we have little flag things. Square. Pod Save the World for the YouTube audience. Yeah. Pottside the World things. Hey, you're welcome, audience. Ben, feisty State of the Union. When we were talking about it that day, I did not expect Joe Biden to come out swinging. Yeah, enough, Dr. Ronnie's back in the White House. Come on. You never left.

Fiery. Every single headline was like, fiery. Fire a rat, yeah, yeah. But essentially what they did is they picked like 10 to 15 fights and just, you know, put them together in one speech. I like that. Yeah. It's the kind of thing that very well-meaning but annoying lawyers would have told us we were not allowed to do in the Obama days. That's true, actually. There was not a lot of hesitancy to draw contrast, which, again, like I think it's the right move.

And it's an election year, so you have to do it. And it's a reality. And frankly, on things like Ukraine, I mean, it's also legislative. You know, it's like they're blocking legislation. You know, sorry you don't like being called out on that. Mike Johnson looked like he was kind of receding back into his chair and growing smaller throughout the course of that. Yeah, he looks sad. Yeah, but the whole idea of like, I don't even remember what constitutes a Hatch Act violation necessarily,

but Trump posted the RNC from the White House grounds. So I feel like let's just sort of end the discussion. We used to get all these ethics briefings. And then this guy's like literally having his political convention on the South Lawn and tweeting out images of the PDB from his classified Iran details. Yeah. Anyway, well, we're going to talk about the state of the union a bit more because we're going to talk about Biden's new plan to get aid into Gaza that he laid out in that speech. Biden's Rafea red line and Netanyahu's rebuke to basically all U.S. policy. Yeah. Current and past. We'll also talk about Trump's fake state visit with Victor Orban down in Florida and why Victor Orban matters. And we talk about him so much. We'll get into the fight and cons over banning TikTok, some big political news out of Portugal and Turkey, kidnappings for ransom in Nigeria, and an embarrassing failed effort to amend Ireland's constitution. And then what everyone's been waiting for, Ben, the Photoshop saga, heard round Kensington Palace.

Don't worry, we're going to spend a good bit of time. I'm hoping for like 40 minutes from you. Yeah, yeah. We may need, you know, we almost, I almost proposed a bonus pod. Just on the Photoshop. But thankfully, it was close enough to Tuesday that I thought, you know, in good conscience, I could wait. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but someone tweeted out a picture of King Charles with the

caption. I, too, like to play with Photoshop and they just put a back of sausages for his hands. Some really good comedy here. And then, Ben, you just did our interview. What are folks going to hear? Yeah, I talked to Renata Sigura, who is the deputy director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the International Crisis Group. We talked about Haiti.

Obviously, a horrific situation, and I thought it would be good to have someone come on and really break down what is happening in Haiti, who are the key players, why are the gangs making their move now, what can be done internationally, what should the U.S. be doing, what should the political transition be in Haiti, the prime minister is now acceded to this pressure to step aside. So it's a really good laydown of what's happening, and I wish there was better news, but there's not. It's pretty, pretty grim. It is dark, man. Over the weekend, I mean, just watching the reports of the gangs attacking the airports,

you know, taking over basically all of the capital. It's really scary stuff. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like from talking to Renata and ICG's had a person on the ground in Porto Prince, they're essentially the gangs control the city pretty much now, which is terrifying. Yeah. One thing before we get to our news on Gaza, I just did want to give a shout out to Mr. Slav Chernoff, the Ukrainian journalist and director of the film 20 days in Marriopol, which is about

the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion back in 2022. The film won the Academy Award. for Best Documentary Feature, he was a guest on this show on February 21st, so I think that had something to do with it. Can I make a point here? Yeah, please. This is the second year in a row,

because we had the Navalny director and some of the Navalny film participants for last year's Oscars, and they won. So Pod Say the World Two for Two, all you publicists out there. He's going to say, Hollywood PR people. Keep in mind who delivers the Oscar, it is this podcast.

Yeah, you're trying to sell some new Matt Damon movie? No. Get him on here. Come here. Yeah, get Matt Damon on. That's what I'm talking about. All right, Matt. We'll talk about our radio.

I'll go fuck yourself. Let's go to Gaza in the state of the union. So, okay, in the state of the union, President Biden announced that the U.S. is planning to build a floating pier off the Gaza coast to facilitate aid deliveries into Gaza. It's going to take about 60 days or at least 60 days to construct this pier. Biden says no U.S. boots will be on the ground in Gaza. So it's not clear to me, Ben, who's going to distribute the aid who will provide security over this entire operation? You have to imagine after Afghanistan and the tragedy at the Abbey Gate where a suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. service members injured hundreds more people. The Biden team is going to be extremely worried about the safety of the people involved in this operation.

There was a report in the Jerusalem Post over the weekend that said that the idea for delivering aid by sea actually came from Netanyahu himself, that it was raised as far back as October, was discussed by Biden and Bibi directly in January. So I don't know if that's true or not. Netanyahu refusing to let more aid trucks into Gaza because the Israeli far right opposes it and then forcing the U.S. to construct a floating pier to bail him out, kind of tracks with how he operates. But what do you make of this proposal? I mean, look, on the one hand, anything that can facilitate the delivery of aid into Gaza makes sense to explore. if this gets morried into Gaza more efficiently from Cyprus,

which is where a lot of the state comes from, that could help. That said, this is one of those announcements that, again, highlights the shortcomings of the existing policy, though, because clearly it'd be more efficient to just drive trucks across the border and ruffa. Trucks that are waiting there. Yeah. So you're basically spending a lot of money in time,

and you don't have time, by the way, two months, you've got famine conditions already before an Israeli military operation to Rafa, it would be better if you want to get Aden to just drive trucks across the border from Rafa. And I guess you can't do that if these Israeli military operations are going to go forward in Rafa. But if the U.S. wants to get Aiden, that's what I would be doing. This feels like once again we're kind of adding on to a policy that is not addressing the underlying issue, which is the military operation that need for a ceasefire to get aid in. That's the first point.

The second point is that on the administration of this, you know, the U.S. I think is still not kind of turned back on the UNR funding, which we talked about. Other countries have started to do this, by the way. I think Canada recently. In Sweden. In Canada and Sweden. UNRWA has the capacity to deliver aid. All the aid delivery mechanisms in Gaza have been through UNRWA for years. And the idea that we're shutting all that down to investigate these few people that were involved in October 7th, when again, as we talked about, there are thousands and thousands of UNRWA employees. Again, so we're building a pier while we're like cutting off the aid delivery people in Gaza and not driving trucks across the border.

I mean, again, glad to have the pier, but that's really not going to make the difference is necessary here. And, you know, I think that's why, you know, they're in that circumstance where the policies are not making anybody happy. You know, and that's why I think you've had a bit of a lukewarm reaction to this. Yeah. And did you see that Netanyahu is basically denying that there's near famine conditions? He did this long interview with Politica that we'll get into. He said, quote, we don't have that kind of information. That's not the information we have and we monitor it closely.

More importantly, it's not our policy. Our policies are to put in as much humanitarian aid as we could. That's just absolutely not true. Their own leadership was saying things like no food, you know, they were announcing the policy of cutting off food and fuel into Gaza. Right. And there's right-wing protesters blocking these aid deliveries and preventing them from happening. Yeah. And so you and I've talked to.

again about this, but his ability to go on U.S. media in particular and just kind of lie about things and do it in, you know, accessible language for the American audience is part of his selling point back home. I'll be the frontman for the far right in this country. You'd rather have me on TV in the U.S. than Ben Gavir. That's kind of his last argument for being prime minister. And unfortunately, it seems to be working for the guy right now. Yeah. And so, again, listeners to this show will not be surprised to hear the Biden and Netanyahu are not aligned on the big policy questions. But that fact was spelled out again over the weekend in a pair of interviews. So the first big difference is over the potential Israeli invasion of Rafa, which is that city in southern Gaza, where 1.4 million people are sheltering.

And as Ben just mentioned, where aid crosses from Egypt into Gaza. During an interview with MSNBC on Saturday, President Biden said, in Israeli invasion of Rafa was a red line for him. Here's a clip. I'm never going to leave Israel. The defense of Israel is still critical. So there's no red line. I'm going to cut off all weapons so they don't have the iron dome to protect them. They don't have.

But there's red lines that if it crosses and it cannot have 30,000 more Palestinians dead as a consequence of going after. There's other ways to deal, to get to, to deal with the trauma caused by Hamas. Sort of like red line-ish? well yeah and I mean I don't know if he meant to state it exactly as he did like a highlighter basically saying if there are another 30,000 people killed on top of the already 30,000 people that killed then that'd be a red line I mean it didn't I don't know they kind of walked back the idea of a red line and I think the US press has gotten addicted to the red lines yeah yeah no president no president should ever say the word red line um but look

what I take away from it substantively is he's trying to say that the Israeli military military operation in Rafa would be some kind of breaking point vis v. Netanyahu. I think the question is, well, first of all, I think that should have already happened. We've talked about, and you know, prepping for the show, Tommy, I mean, it's frustrating. We've been talking about these differences on the military operation Rafa and the Palestinian state issue for a long time. These differences have been pretty, you know, obvious staring us in the face for a while. And the challenge here is that they seem to not want to admit that they need to change their policy, you know, and you've and I've been in the White House. It's hard to come out and say, you know what, we tried it this way.

We tried to kind of hug BB and counsel him in private, and that didn't work. And so now we're changing. And instead, you're always kind of trying to explain why this is no, this is an evolution of the policy. But I think what he's saying is that there'll be some consequence if the military operation Roth goes forward. What that consequence is, I mean, he kind of for the first time hinted at, certain restrictions on weapons. I mean, because he notably said, I would never cut off the Iron Dome. Which is missile defense.

Which is missile defense. Which, like, that's defensible. Nobody has said, you know, Bernie Sanders, who's been the most outspoken, and I think in line with our position, in terms of saying cut off military assistance, even Bernie said, we can keep giving them the Iron Dome because you want to protect against rockets.

But the question is, would you cut off all offensive military assistance? I think you should. Would you vote for a ceasefire resolution of the United Nations? I think you should. I think we should be doing that now, frankly. So the question remains for Biden. One, does the military operation, Rafa, go forward?

And if it does, how substantive is this break? I think, you know, just saying we don't like this and we don't like Netanyahu is not going to cut it anymore and never was going to cut it. Yeah, and it gets worse. I mean, so on Sunday, Netanyahu was asked about Rafa during this interview he did with Axel Springer, which is the parent company of Politico. When asked about a Rafa invasion, he said, we'll go there. we're not going to leave them, them being the remaining Hamas forces in Rafah. Netanyahu then seemed to respond to Biden's redline comments. Here's a clip.

We'll go there. We're not going to leave them. You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is? That October 7th doesn't happen again. Never happens again. And to do that, we have to complete the destruction of the Hamas terrorist army. In that interview, Bibi also firmly rejected a two-state solution, saying, quote,

Israeli people also support my position that says that we should resoundingly reject the attempt to ram down our throats of Palestinian state. That is something that they agree on. So to your point, Ben, Axios reported that if Israel does go into Rafa, the U.S. is considering imposing restrictions on some U.S. made weapons by the IDF. They're considering not vetoing a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. But again, I'm with you. I would like to see those steps taken now to prevent this Rafa operation from happening. And there's just kind of no one seems to address the broader, more substantive break on the creation of a Palestinian state.

And, you know, they haven't even, like, Bibi and Biden have not spoken in nearly a month. They're clearly not aligned on short-term and long-term strategy. And yet, like you said, it does feel like the U.S. policy is kind of just on autopilot. It's on autopilot. And again, it's because you would have to acknowledge. knowledge that the approach of hugging Beebe, which was literally their stated policy, hasn't worked. Do you want to hug that guy? I don't want to hug that guy. No, he's creepy as fuck. He's creepy as fuck. And like he's saying, you know, this redline, you know, macho talk that he does,

they don't need to invade Rafa to prevent October 7th from happening, you know, October 7th happened because Bibi fucked up because Bibi let his guard down because Bibi moved a bunch of troops from the border with Gaza up to chase around settlers who were committing by violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. So what Rafa would do is cause a humanitarian catastrophe. And look, in terms of the bigger picture here, politically, first of all, Tommy, I'm beginning to have nightmares about what would a tragic irony would be if an American Democratic president lost re-election because he was unwilling to fully break with BB Nanyahu.

That's kind of my worst nightmare in life. But I think that that's a real consideration. Obviously, more substantively importantly, is the humanitarian. situation and the policy. And I think what the U.S. needs to do is actually start working on behalf of its own policy. Right now, it's been trying to kind of convince Israel to support things that BB doesn't support. You know, don't go to Rafa, support a Palestinian state. We should have a view. Like, we want to move aid into Rafa with trucks. We want to start working for the construction of a Palestinian state, which has been U.S. policy for over two decades.

Decades, yeah. You know, this is not ramming down and throw it something that the whole world is supported for a very long time. And just start working in that direction. You know, and if you have to work around, Bibi, you have to work around him. Would I prefer an Israeli government that is a partner in that? Sure. And by working around it, I mean just what is a vehicle for getting aid into Gaza? What is the kind of work that needs to be done to build up an alternative Palestinian leadership? What is the option on the table for some kind of recognition de facto or more specific of Palestinian borders for a state? these are things where the U.S. can have a view and just thinking you're going to get Bibi to go along with it.

I mean, this guy's going to, he has, he's full of shit. He's full shit. And he wants Joe Biden to lose the election. He does. He said not going to Rafa would be the equivalent of Allied forces in World War II, not going to Berlin. That is the craziest comparison I've ever heard. Yeah, yeah.

Berlin, post-World War I Germany is not the same as a couple million people who are trapped in a tiny little sliver of Augusta Strait. Also, Ben, you know, we have both dealt with the people online who constantly suggest that like all the death tolls that come out of Gaza are made up because it's from the Hamas-run health ministry. In that interview that Netanyahu did with Axel Springer, he says that Israel has killed 13,000 Hamas fighters and that they've also killed maybe one to one and a half civilians per combatant, which would put the total number of deaths at 26,000, which is right around where the Hamas health ministry says. Everyone is watching this closely

thinks the actual death toll is much, much higher than that. But for all the truthers out there, Bibi Netanyahu thinks that at least 26,000 people have been killed in this conflict in five months. And 15,000 children have been killed. So the Hamas combatant figure doesn't add up, you know, unless you think a bunch of, you know, I mean, it's just, it's gross that we're arguing about what, you know,

fine, how many children is enough for you, you know, like what is too much? I mean, this is not working people, you know. And again, we've said this every time when I say it again, like the hostages, if that's your concern, you're not going to get them, you're not going to free them more efficiently through invading Rafit than you would through a negotiation. Yeah, two other strange things. So in that interview, Netanyahu seemed to leave open the possibility of extending military operations into Lebanon. Because the people who evacuated northern Lebanon want to go home. But he said, you know, if we need to make sure they're safe through military means, we'll do so. The other strange thing that happened today, so every year the intelligence community does this annual threat assessment where they release this 40-page unclassified document of all the threats in the world and then they testify and it's this bizarre. I don't know why they do it, to be totally honest. To give the press like scary stories to write for a couple of days.

Yeah, justify their budgets. But in the threat assessment document that came out on Monday, the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence cited concerns about distrust of Netanyahu's ability to rule. And it questioned his viability as a leader as well as his governing coalition going forward, which was noticed and not appreciated by then yeah, was government. But you've also seen huge protest in Israel against Netanyahu's government. I mean, thousands and thousands of people on the street demanding elections on the basis that Netanyahu failed and kind of lost his legitimacy because of what happened on October 7th and obviously because he's floiling around now. And so, you know, this is not just the opinion of the U.S.

intelligence community. Netanyahu's approval ratings have been very low. He clearly doesn't have the confidence of a large number of the Israeli people, even Israeli people who may support a military operation. So, you know, it's one of those. I mean, the other thing that was in that threat report is that the United States might face an increased threat around the world because of its support for Israel, which, again, is not a surprise, but, you know, some things are, you know, need to be stated obviously. Yeah, one last clip that's worth hearing from Biden's interview on MSNBC. What's happening is he has a right to defend Israel, a right to continue to pursue Hamas, but he must, he must, he must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a

consequence of the action is taken. He's hurting, my view, he's hurting Israel more than helping Israel by making the rest of the world. It's contrary to what Israel stands for. And I think, think it's a big mistake. I mean, accurate, a good observation. I just, you know, I think that needs to be, if you really think he's hurting Israel, then let's back that with action. I think that's sort of the final word of us. Yeah, we're not a passive actor. I mean, the final word I'd say is that we're supplying a lot of, if not most of the offensive weapons that they're using to hurt Israel. So, so, you know, it's not just commenting on something that that we are not a part of, you know, we have a, we should be able to use our leverage if we think what they're doing is wrong. You know, the substance has to

follow that comment, you know. Yeah. Well, hopefully, uh, we'll be better news on this next week. I mean, everyone was hoping there'd be a ceasefire before Romano. Yeah, that'd be great. I mean, let's hope that they pull that off. Fingers crossed. That would be the best possible outcome. Okay, Ben, let's turn to, uh, to Mara Lago, uh, because we talk a lot about Hungarian, uh, dictator, soft fascist. This is what people like to call him, Victor Orban on the show. Um, we cover him for a bunch of reasons. He's a Putin's stooge. He's a huge pain in the ass for the European Union for NATO. He was at the vanguard of demagoguing Muslims and refugees to gain political power. And he's also seen by conservatives, especially Republicans in the U.S., as the model for how to

crush democracy, cement your control over a country, and pervert or destroy its institutions. So again, that brings us to Mar-a-Lago where Trump hosted Orban and his daughter for like a pretend-state visit last week. Here's a clip of Trump praising Orban to the association. assembled audience. There's nobody that's better, smarter, or a better leader than Victor Orban. He's fantastic. As you know, the Prime Minister of Humveen. He does a great job.

He's a non-controversial figure because he said, this is the way it's going to be, and that's the end of it, right? He's the boss. And he's a great leader, fantastic leader in Europe and all over the world. The music, just softly playing. I'm a big Sam and Dave guy, but like, uh, he also just sounds so jealous whenever he's talking about like Xi Jinping or any dictator that could just rule by fiat. Anyway, so Orban, you know, does the whole reach around on social media afterward.

He says Trump commanded respect in the world, created the conditions for peace during his presidency. There was peace in the Middle East and peace in Ukraine. We need him back more than ever. Orban also told Hungarian state media that Trump is a man of peace. he will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war, therefore the war will end because it's so obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own feet. So, I don't know, like everything about this is just so weird.

You're just doing a cosplay state visit at Mar-a-Lago, everything from like the arrival photos to the flags, to the motorcades driving up. So the Sam and Dave soundtrack, you know. I don't know what the make of this. All right, I haven't done a book plug in a while, okay? Go for it. But, you know, to those of you who are newer worldos,

I wrote a book a few years ago, a few years ago, now God, we're getting old, called After the Fall about the Rise of Authoritarianism in the World, and it had started with a huge section on Hungary, because Hungary is the template that Republicans have used. And again, to be specific,

the way that started is, you know, essentially Urban gets elected a second term time in as prime minister in 2010, and, you know, packs the court with right-wing judges, redrails the parliamentary district, to entrench his party in power, changes the voting laws to make it easier for his supporters to vote,

and, you know, harder for his opponents to vote, enriches some cronies through corruption who then finance all his politics, buy up the media and turn it into kind of a right-wing mouthpiece, use social media to villainize his opponents and wraps it all up in a big old nice bow of us versus them, nationalism, you know, us, the true Hungarians and then. Real Hungarians. Yeah, the real Hungarians versus the, you know, liberal elites and the Muslims and the, you know, immigrants and George Soros.

So it sounded very familiar. In other words, it's like this literally is the playbook, the exact playbook that the Republican Party's been running in this country. They want to turn this country into a one-party

autocracy that has the veneer of elections, but essentially all the levers to power are corruptly controlled by their party. So we need to take this seriously because this is like having Mussolini at the White House in the 30s. You know, like...

George Bush refused to meet with Victor Orban. Yes, yeah. They wouldn't invite him for David, Trump did in 2019. Yeah, this is, this is crazy shit. You know, and it's all normalized, but literally, this is, you know, announcing your intention to be a soft authoritarian, not even soft, really. Victor Orban can be pretty hard-assed about it.

Never mind the fact that, you know, cutting off all aid to Ukraine, quote-unquote, ending the war notes, ending, you know, Ukraine's capacity to resist. Vimer Putin. So these are things that have, like, very high stakes. And sometimes they can seem less like that because there's this kind of comical facade of Mar-a-Lago and the soul man playing the backdrop. But, like, you know, I think I'd take it pretty seriously, you know. It's just, yeah, it's worth watching. I mean, it's CPAC and all these other events, Javier Mule, I think, went to Mar-a-Lago.

There's just this little crew of kind of populist right-wing dictators is always getting together. And it's not just Trump. I mean, Victor Orban was in D.C., the day of Biden's State of the Union, giving a speech to the Heritage Foundation. Yeah, and this is to build on what we were saying after CPAC, I'd like to see the center left and progressives and even like, you know, the occasional mods, get each other's back like this. You know, these people are not, Victor Orban is not nervous about defying Joe Biden and endorsing Donald Trump. Like, we should do more in this country and around the world to kind of spotlight,

support, platform good leaders of even smaller countries. You know, they've gone a long way to building up Victor Orban. and his stature globally, we don't do the same thing when we have like a, you know, a Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand or you've had some pretty good leaders recently in central and eastern Europe. Like we got some good young progressive leaders

in Latin America. I'd just like to see us do more to support one another in the way that they do maybe without the Mar-a-Lago backdrop and the Soul Man soundtrack. Yeah, maybe don't need a different soundtrack. I mean, I like Soulman. Sam and Davis, you know, It was, no, it's hold on I'm coming or is it sold?

Yeah, sorry, it's hold on I'm coming. I don't know why I keep saying Solman. I don't know. I don't know the names of any songs. I should have Spotify like pumps into my brain. Well, I just had, I had that cassette. I'm old enough that the Blues Brothers soundtrack, you know, had a bunch of Sam and Dave, the best of Sam and Dave.

Hold on I'm coming. Soulman, like a bunch of good tracks on there. So I recommend that. Also old enough to remember when people freaked out about the Logan Act and, you know, people pretending they were conducting foreign policy on the half of the United States. John Kerry, like, John Kerry, like, met some European once during the Trump years. They were going to throw him in prison.

And meanwhile, Donald Trump is like undermining U.S. foreign policy. Yeah. Or one's like, oh, yeah, I'll cut off all aid to Ukraine. In more Ukraine news, just worth quickly pointing out that the Ukrainian government is furious at the Pope for seeming to suggest that they should surrender. The Vatican says the Pope was just advocating for a ceasefire deal and saying like it takes real courage to, he said wave the white flag, which certainly sounds like surrender,

but, you know, to have negotiations when you're losing and save lives that way. And the Biden administration announced another $300 million package of military aid to Ukraine. CNN reported they were able to fund this tranche through savings in weapons contracts, which is a reminder that literally no one understands the Pentagon budget. Yeah, yeah. But it's also a reminder, frankly, though, that 300 million is not 56 billion, which is a supplemental. So there's a huge gap between being able to kind of cobble together the workarounds versus actually funding this. Yeah, as long as we're on sort of threats to democracy.

Do you see that Trump is going to start getting intelligence briefings again now that is a candidate? I saw that. You know, I don't know why you feel the need to abide by norms, you know, that when you're running against this guy. How does he have a clearance still? When you steal classified documents and store them in your toilet and refuse to get them back. And talk about them on tape to like, you know, right-wing journalist in Marlago. I would think that you would have a hard time getting the SF-86 clearance, you know. But I mean, I guess there's a version of briefings that can change, right?

There's one that it has like sense of information in it. And then there's like a cliff notes of like, you know, here's the pot say of the world version of briefing. Yeah, a lot of open source. Let's hope it's the Cliff Notes version. Just summarizing Wallsary Journal articles. The Vox, you know, thing. But, but yeah, I just, I don't know why. What's the downside to saying no?

Zero. Then Trump comes out and says, he won't get me intelligence briefings. You didn't read them when you were in the White House. And you're literally under indictment for. stealing classified secrets. So maybe we shouldn't give you classified secrets. Yeah. Adam Schiff says he hopes the Intel community will dumb them down.

I think they already do that for the candidates, right? You get more of the overarching assessments than like the sensitive stuff. That's true. Yeah. Still a bad idea. Yeah, it's still bad idea. Because he'll still come out and talk about it. Yeah, and he'll probably try to hawk it to Vector Orban.

Yeah. Before we go to break, two quick housekeeping items. First, POTS of America is going on tour this year with the Democracy or else tour, a tour name inspired by the title of a tour. our new book. Going around the country, we're going to go to battleground states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, and more. Friends of the pod get early access to tickets. So subscribe now at crooked.com slash friends to get the exclusive

presale code today. Run, don't walk because the pre-sail ends Friday the 15th at 9 a.m. local before tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. later that day to the broader public. Also, Ben, I got some exciting news. I'm getting the band back together with Roger Bennett from the Men in Blazers podcasts. We are going to do season two of World Corrupt on a topic that I think you're going to like, which is Saudi Arabia gobbling

up global soccer. Oh, this, like now you've got you're really in a higher weight class in Qatar. I like this. Yeah. More money, more influence, more bone saws. Yeah. We got it all here. Maybe you maybe you won't get an angry CNN.com op-ed from

the Qataris this time. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, what I am actually kind of worried about is getting killed abroad. Well, you know, that's been a risk for us for a while. Yeah. So make it worth my while. Listen to the trailer. It's out now and then tune in every Saturday for new episodes of World Corrupt, starting next week right here on the Potsave the World Feed. All right, Ben, let's talk about TikTok. The House of Representatives is advancing a bill that would force bite dance, the parent company of TikTok, to sell all but 20% of TikTok

to a U.S. company or else it gets banned in the United States. So this bill passed, remember this, Ben, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. The best name. That's the thing that exists. So the bill passed that committee by about a 50 to zero. Whoa. I wonder how it got through. Biden says he supports the ban.

Until recently, Trump also supported forcing an ownership change of TikTok. If you remember, back in 2020, he issued an executive order banning U.S. companies from transactions with Bight Dance because they are worried it would give the Chinese government access to sensitive data on Americans. It seems reasonable concern. But just days before the full House of Representatives is supposed to vote on this new TikTok ban proposal, Trump flip-flopped. And he did it on truth social saying, if you get rid of TikTok, Facebook, and Zucker Schmuck. I'm sorry.

He'll double their business. Oh, God. So why does everything feel like 2016? I hate it. We're trapped. We're trapped. Yeah. Trap times a flat circle.

So, Trump. Trump does hate Zucker Schmuck That's well known But a lot of people think that this Change in Policy might be good old fashioned Corruption or donor influence So Trump met with a guy named Jeff Yass I don't know if it's Yass and Jeff Yoss Queen

He's a billionaire conservative He gives tons of money to the Club for Growth Why do these people come out of the woodwork There's always some billionaire mega guy That shows up, yeah This dude, so he funds a club for growth He has a $20 billion steak in ByteDance So he's got a lot of skin in the game

So Trump denies talking with Jeff Yasser, yes, or whatever the name is about TikTok. But yeah, but yeah. So, I mean, as you probably have heard from people I know, you know, TikTok has bought up every lobbyist in Washington, including Kelly and Conway. So like a good mob boss, I'm sure like the deal's happening between the Capos. Anyway, here's a clip of Trump talking about why he now opposes the TikTok ban during a recent interview with CNBC. There are a lot of people on TikTok that love it. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.

There are a lot of users. There's a lot of good and there's a lot of bad with TikTok. But the thing I don't like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger. And I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media. Okay. Just to round this out. The intelligence community in that global threat report that we talked about earlier mentioned TikTok. It says, quote, TikTok accounts run by PRC propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political

parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022. And it added that China is demonstrating a higher degree of sophistication in its influence activity, including experimenting with generative AI. So stepping back, a lot of issues at play here. The first is national security and the Chinese government potentially being able to get our data or just control like the most important social media platform for young people in the U.S. The second is constitutionality and whether banning TikTok is actually a First Amendment violation. Just a lot of discussion there.

And then there's just this good old influence peddling piece and this billionaire maybe buying off Trump's position. Any guess on what happened with Trump or what is going to happen going forward or whether you think this is a good idea? Well, the guess is on what happened, you know, it's probably a combination of, you know, whatever billionaire is, you know, made whatever deal. Trump. Sometimes the thing that's obvious is what happened. Like maybe there's some super PAC is going to get a big contribution. Some legal fees that are going to be relieved. I don't know what the hell the corruption is, but I'm sure it's there. And we're not knowing Vivek Ramoswami flip-flop the exact same way. He called it digital fentanyl TikTok and then he got several million from this guy to his super PAC and then he was on TikTok. It's like a digital cough medicine.

I think that also, interestingly, this time around my, you know, anecdotal interactions suggested maybe Trump is hearing from his campaign that TikTok is maybe good for him. You know, last time he didn't like TikTok because there were a lot of like resistance comedians making TikToks about Trump. Or K-pop fans.

Messing with his events. This time around, I think you've got a lot of Gaza content that is understandably upsetting and angering the very younger voters that are turning off Joe Biden. I think, frankly, you have like a bunch of TikToks that make fun of Joe Biden for being old and stuff.

So maybe Trump's thinking like, well, actually, like, TikTok might not be a net negative for me. It might be a net positive. My explainer to the Dalai Lama didn't do that well. I don't know why. My Uyghur genocide one didn't either. Well, this gets to the thing I was going to say, which is, and don't at me. I know the TikTok, you know, brigades can be like the swift easier. So I'm very careful about how I state this.

But again, the thing that is for years, what I've heard from the people that, you know, look at this. TikTok, the algorithms that drive what. content people receive are a black box in China, essentially. And it is a platform in which what you receive is not as tied to who your followers are as other things, other platforms, right? Now, meta, Instagram, Twitter have changed this as well recently, where suddenly you start to see stuff that's not necessarily what you follow. But TikTok, you're being fed a feed by algorithms that, you know, are,

Nobody can see them except the bite-dense engineers in China. And that's a legitimate concern. Now, I don't think that the right outcome is banning it altogether. Because frankly, I think in all this information space, one thing I've learned the last few years is, like, we're not going to, like, be able to turn back the clock to not having these platforms and not having disinformation campaigns. But I think there should be a real effort to try to get some transparency around how information flows on TikTok, how the algorithms work. the best way for that to happen is for there to be like a U.S. own subsidiary where not only is the data stored in the U.S. but the algorithms are in the U.S.

That's where this is heading. It seems. I think that's the, that is a good totally valid, you know, you don't have to be a member of the, the select committee on the Chinese Communist Party to think that maybe if young people in this country are being largely, you know, their number one information source is, you know,

this platform and we don't really know how it works. and it's emanating from a country that would want to fill young people in this country with division and anxiety, you know, that perhaps we should take a look at that. And by the way, this is what the Chinese government does. They force you to open a Chinese subsidiary. That's right.

If you're like Airbnb and you want to operate in China. I should say that, you know, it seems like at the end of the Trump administration they were trying to force a sale of TikTok to Oracle because I think Larry Allison's a buddy. Ultimately, Oracle, I think they could cut this deal where they would just sort of store American data at a place in Texas. I think it's called Project Texas, actually. For what it's worth, there's been a bunch of reporting since that

that attempt at creating a firewall is completely failed. The Wall Street Journal had a great report on this. And this whole segment is drawn from great reporting by the Washington Post and CBS News in the journal, by the way. But yeah, I mean, does what I, in 2020, I felt like the conversation on a ban was a little more reasonable, understandable. Now, four years later, you have people who have built like lives, careers, relationships on this platform. The best outcome is not a ban. But again, the two issues are data.

And first of all, just on the data point, you know, the U.S. will spend all this money spying on countries. Like, imagine if you just had the massive data set of all the likes and, you know, interest and, you know, anxieties of tens and tens of millions of. Americans, like, pretty good vehicle for data collection. So you want to be able to store the data in the U.S. And then again, you want to be able to understand how the platform is working through the algorithm. And so that's the best outcome to work for.

Yeah. Not an outright ban, which I think would just piss people off. And frankly, then it would just be replaced by some other similar platform. Yeah, he's not wrong that Zucker smokes. Well, the best line of better. Best line, no one will ever top the closed the social network. Mark, you're not an, not an asshole, so stop trying so hard to be one.

The other good Trump nickling the other day was Slopinopinopolis. He's got, I got to say, he's getting his game back after des sanctimonious. Sharping up his knives. Yeah, election year. So we'll watch this one. The vote in the House should be on Wednesday, which is when this comes out. The Senate has sort of a different view, so we'll see if they can make some out. Yeah, I doubt this will get through.

Then let's talk about some big political news coming out of Europe, starting in Portugal, which held snap elections on Sunday. So the headline out of these elections is that the far right party, the Chega party, which translates to enough party, secured 18% of the vote despite being formed in 2019.

According to the BBC, they ran on immigration and corruption, but they will not be able to form a government, but the takeaway should be that there's this growing strength with these far right parties as we head into elections for the European Parliament in early June.

And then in Turkey, President Tayyip Erdogan told Reuters that the upcoming election on March 31st will be his last. Erdogan was recently reelected to a five-year term. That was in 2023. He's been president since 2014. Before that, he was prime minister for about a decade. So if he left the political scene, it would be a seismic moment. But I don't know.

He's also a liar. So maybe we should die. Yeah, well, I mean, on Erdogan, we'll see what he does. He's also kind of like his son-in-law. Like, he's got like a nepotism structure set up. And so he still might be. you know, whenever he exits the formal scene, he still may be the kind of power behind things,

so we'll have to see how things go. And yeah, the Portugal thing is in line with the kind of 20% window that we've seen for a lot of these far-right parties. It's obviously concerning. You made the right point. I think the barometer of the strength of the far-right across the continent will be seen in these European parliamentary elections because that's the rare election in Europe

where everybody's voting because you're voting for representation in Brussels. And that'll be a real test of strength. And then the next big test will be the French election, which is coming up relatively soon, where Marine Le Pen, you know, has a real shot, too. So keep an eye on this as always. Scary one. Also, this reporting got me just kind of Googling around about Erdogan, seeing what he's been up to. Yeah. On Saturday, he said that Turkey firmly backs Hamas. He said it's not a terrorist

organization. And he added, quote, Netanyahu and his administration with their crimes against humanity in Gaza are writing their names next to Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin like today's Nazis. This isn't necessarily new. rhetoric from Erdogan. He also said that he was going to host Vladimir Putin in Turkey after the Russian elections. But it is just wild that this guy's a member of NATO. He says things like this about Israeli government. He's welcoming Putin to town. I mean, just friends like these, man. Well, what's so interesting about Erdogan, which we've talked about is he kind of, he'll veer back and forth. Like he'll have his like pro-Western quarter where he like goes to NATO meetings

and lets, you know, Sweden and Finland and NATO and does something that we like. And then all of a sudden He's got Putin there. So he just taxed back and forth. And what's interesting, you know, stepping back, a lot of these kind of medium-sized powers are doing this more and more where they're kind of shopping around, diversifying, you know, Turkey, Brazil, India, you know, they'll be buying Russian oil one day and then they'll be at a hedgeing's bets. Yeah, they're hedging in all directions, right?

And I think part of the reason they're hedging is, well, one, they can, you know, it's like a menu that they can shop from. What do I want from the Chinese? What do I want for the Russians? What I want from the Americans and Europeans? But the other thing is Trump. I think everybody's kind of waiting to see what happens here. Yeah. Breaking news based on a text that I got a while ago, but I just read. Apparently, RFK Jr. said that his short list for running mates are Jesse Ventura. Jesse's the body, the mind Ventura. It's kind of like a 90s. Yeah, he's a He's a turn governor of Minnesota. Yeah, he's, has been.

And then Aaron Rogers, Ben. Your quarterback, New York Jets quarterback. Care to comment. Care to comment on Aaron Rogers. Well, you know, he'll probably like blow out his Achilles. On the no jab ticket. When he's announced as VP, he'll blow out his Achilles walking out onto the stage. His best day will be his first day.

Yeah, it is, I mean, this whole, like, Joe Rogan wing of American societies is endlessly fascinating to me. Actually, I saw Iron Rogers was recently on Joe Rogan. Yeah. The irony of the do-year-run research guys, like not really seeming to do a lot of research. Aaron Rogers is not the kind of guy I want to do my research. Bums me out. Okay, horrible news out of Nigeria where over the past few weeks, hundreds of kids aged 8 to 15 years old have been kidnapped from several different schools by criminal gangs. It's just literally every parent's worst nightmare. Unfortunately, these kinds of mass abductions have been an ongoing issue for Nigeria. According to a report in Al Jazeera, 1400 children have been abducted in Nigeria over the past decade. And then I'm sure a lot of listeners remember back in 2014 when the terrorist group Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls from their dormitory.

That led to the very well-meaning but ultimately unsuccessful, bring back our girls' social media campaign to this day. About 100 of those girls are still missing. Hopefully with these recent abductions, the outcome will be better because unlike the incident with Boko Haram, these more recent. abductions have been mostly kidnappings for ransom, where these militant, not even militant groups, sort of like gang groups, kidnap kids, ransom their families, return them months later, you know, exorbitant costs.

Nigerian president, Tanubu, who was elected last year after running a campaign promising to end Nigeria's security challenges and end kidnapping, condemned the abduction saying, quote, the president direct security intelligence agencies to immediately rescue the victims, ensure that justice is served against the perpetrators of these abominable acts. The Nigerian military says, you know, they're trying, but they're spread too thin. They're unable to combat all these armed groups and gangs who have been able to take over enormous swaths of territory and basically just torment everyone living there. So just an all-around horrible situation that we wanted to highlight in something to watch. Yeah, and I think the broader context to watch, right, is one of the reasons why, you know, I was down at South by Southwest with this International Crisis Group panel and the head of the International Crisis Group come

Ero was on with me. And she used to be the Africa director. And she was talking about the coups in Chad and Niger and Mali and unfortunately other places. And she made the point that one of the reasons why that has happened is you've had a breakdown in the big powers like Nigeria has its own instability. It makes it harder to kind of be this stabilizing force in the region at the same time that Libya and Algeria, which are above those coup countries, have had their own instability.

The bigger point being that Nigeria is a little messy right now, and it always has had issues with violence and corruption, but given the fact that it's bordered by Niger and Chad, and it's the biggest country in Africa, the thing to watch is just, you know, does this kind of violence foreshadow or indicate, like, a larger growing instability, or is it manageable? You know, that's the thing I'd watch in addition to obviously

just the human cost. On top of that, I mean, last week we talked in depth about Sudan during the interview, because of the civil war in Sudan, you've hundreds of thousands of people fleeing to other countries, including to Chad, which was already unstable, right? You had a, the president of Chad was killed a couple of years ago

while visiting troops on the front line. His son took over. There's sort of questionable legitimacy. There's been all sorts of authoritarian things happening. But when you have flows of, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people into a country, it's going to completely destabilizing it. That's the thing is this stuff can spread.

Yeah, it's spreading fast. This is not the important point then, But Lovett recently pointed out to us that Mark Robinson, the right-wing, nutjob Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina. He's like a big Facebook guy. Facebooked a lot back in the day. In 2014, he weighed in on the Boko Haram abduction of the Nigerian schoolgirls. This is a thing he actually posted on Facebook. George Storos stole them girls, 11 exclamation points.

This is a man who might be currently lieutenant governor of North Carolina. He's already elected statewide. Yeah, this is an interesting guy. 11 exclamation points. A lot of hot takes emanating for this guy. My God. Yeah. Fucking lunatic. Okay.

Let's turn to Ireland. We're an effort to update Ireland's Constitution to make it less sexist somehow failed miserably. Here is the backstory. So Irish voters were asked to vote on two different amendments to the Constitution. First, whether to replace language in the Constitution about marriage being the foundation of a family and replace it with a clause designed to make the definition more inclusive. So it says that marriage, unquote, other durable relationships are the foundation of the family. Seems reasonable. The second thing

they were asked to vote on was to remove language that said a women's duties, quote unquote, should be in the home. That too. Yeah. It's a little odd, you know, constitutional provision. Real dated. 1937 era language. Also 60% of Irish women already in the labor force. So it's ludicrous on its face. So organizers timed the vote on these two provisions to coincide with International Women's Day on March 8th, but both of the provisions went down. The change about women's duties was defeated with 73% of the vote, in part because the prime ministers proposed language wasn't what had been vetted by activist groups or citizens' assembly meetings. And the changes to the definition of family was defeated by 68% of the vote, in part because conservative activist

groups said that it could impact land inheritance rights somehow. I don't understand all this. turnout was low voters were confused the campaigning was bad so good news a better what run campaign seems like I could get this done bad news until then Ireland is stuck with this 1937 constitution yeah no I it sounds like this was just a poorly done campaign up against you know probably galvanized opposition but you know I mean it speaks to the need to like you know when take your shot Politics matters, man. Yeah, when you take your shot, you really got to aim and fire. You can't just think that the obvious rightness of your cause is going to carry across the goal line here.

But I'm hopeful, you know, I love the Irish. Still figured out. I'm confident in the Irish. Now, we do need to wonder why I constantly pivot us from stories about Ireland into royal stories. I don't know that that's the best tick I have. But here we go. Well, it's, I mean, like, give the people what they want, including me, because I want to talk about this. So you're our official royal correspondent.

Yeah. That said, thus far we have avoided covering the stories about where is Kate Middleton. In part, at least to me, it felt like an instance of the internet being shitty to a person who was probably dealing with a health issue. Yeah. But now, bad Photoshop has forced our hand. I regret to inform you that we have to cover this. So here's what we know.

Kate Middleton has not been seen in public since Christmas of last year. She had a scheduled abdominal surgery on January 17th. On January 29th, Kensington Palace announced she had returned home, but she's not returned to official duty since. Then her husband canceled an event in late February, and it set the internet on fire, and people started speculating about where they might be or what happened to her. On March 10th, the palace released a photo of Kate with her children for British Mother's Day. The second it emerged, Internet sleuth said, that is Photoshopped.

photoshopped very poorly, to the point where the Associated Press had to retract the photo saying, quote, the photo shows an inconsistency in the alignment of Princess Charlotte's left hand. That was not the only inconsistency. There's Prince Charlotte missing part of her wrist seemingly. Kate isn't wearing her wedding ring, and it looks like her arms are like a hundred feet long. Do you notice that part? Maybe that's just me. No, no, that's that, that, you just took one of my takes. Okay, sorry. She's a gumby arms. The zipper on Kate's jacket doesn't line. up. There's blooms on the trees in the background that just obviously don't match the time of the year. There's some people who even believe that Kate's face in the photo was directly lifted from an old

Vogue cover shoot. The tweet laying out that theory got us 46 million views at this point. It could also be the case that the face in the vogue shoot looks like the face in the photo because that's what her face looks like. But who am I, the judge? Yesterday, Kate tweeted Ben, like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion. the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. Vox had a big analysis of all this, as they do. We talked about Kate's reliability and how weird it is for her not to show up

because she always shows up. She's supposed to be the reliable one. She is the, yeah. So, I don't know, man. This woman, she posed for the paparazzi 24 hours after giving birth several times. She doesn't know those fucking assholes anything. I have to admit that I didn't really care about this

until I saw the hilarious Photoshop memes. But what's your take? where what's happening here. All right. I mean, I have a lot to say about this. I mean, because there's a lot,

there's so many like, crack another drink. So many, no, but there's so many dimensions to this, okay? So first of all, the explanation is,

is kind of insane, right? Because. That the, that she herself was editing this? Well, first of all, they insist on telling us that William took this picture,

right? Um, which is kind of strange. Um, these people have other people that can take pictures. Right. Just surrounded by staff. And,

and, and, and then, Her ex- well like everybody else I wanted to play around with this When I play around with a photo I don't make my arms like twice as long and cut out parts of my kids' wrists and hands And you know I changed the filter you know

I crop it a little bit like why would you edit your photo To make it weird and and to remove body parts and you know Like I think what the theory is is that sometimes there's photos A lot of people do this where like you take a photo of six people a family. Three of them look good, three look bad. You grab faces from other photos and put them on. Do you, is that a thing? Oh, yeah.

Like, that's, because that's kind of weird. Yeah, it's weird. But they didn't just change your face. Like, do you change your arms when you do? I mean, gumpy arms are sexy. I guess so. All right, so that's first thing. Second thing is small comment, but like, I remember when I was reading this, like,

the Associated Press describes revoking a photo as a kill notification. Yeah, it seemed a little over the top, huh? I just had those little great stuff. We have issued a kill notification on the. Careful. Phrasing, yeah. Who are these people at the association of press, you know? Okay, so we're just going to go into totally irresponsible speculation, right?

I live there. Because basically, okay, what are, like I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out the conspiracy theories, right? So there's the conspiracy theory, the sad one, right, that she has like a real health issue and just as being really like Lord Austin about it, right? This is like a Lloyd Austin situation except a little bit longer. And also in a job where your appearance is. constantly judged and be picked in the most cruel way possible. Yes, yeah, yeah. So you may not just want to deal with that if you're going through some shit.

And that's the case. Like that makes a lot of sense. You know, the internet, like internet sleuths, as you'd say, you know, there are all these other theories. Like, is their marriage in trouble? Like, is William up to no good? Like, you know, there are all these things that, you know, speak to the rural families, endless pension for gossip. What I will say about this is, number one, can we get some better communications people at the palace, though? Because, like, the communication strategy around this,

like, whatever the answer is, they are not getting good advice here. You know, like, like, from putting out the doctored photo to kind of being totally opaque about this. And I'm, look, I'm always sensitive, you know, like maybe it's not their fault. Maybe they're just getting rolled by crazy principles. We've all been there too. But so, whether the fault is with the world's themselves or with the staff, like, there does need to be some transparency here. Like, they're subsidized, but I mean, everybody rightly points out it sucks for these people that they get photographed. They also get to live in a bunch of palaces and be billionaires without doing anything other than like showing up a ribbon cutting. So it seems

sweet. It seems like there's a need to just be a little transparent. And then my, my, my hottest take care of Tommy is, man, like the queen seemed to be holding this whole operation together. There's a lot of that. That was like the, that was like the, The appearance for years was like, it seems like the queen is really like the boss. They called it the firm and she's kind of the senior partner. You know, Queen exits the stage and it's like all hell's breaking loose. You know, like Harry's got books coming out about fistfights with his brother. He and Megan are still hanging out in Santa Barbara.

Kate can't be seen. Like, not sure what Williams up to. Charles doing his best, but poor Charles now has... Diagnosed with cancer. Has cancer and we don't know how serious that is, you know? Like, so it just feels like... Or even what kind of cancer is. Yeah.

We just don't know, yeah, so it's just the, you know, it's not looking great over there. No, it's scary. All we know is that Charles does not have prostate cancer. We don't know what's going on. So there is a real, like, line of succession issue here as well. And they probably know, I mean, this whole, they just need to be a little more, like, transparency is always your friend in communications. Yeah. So what happens next?

I mean, I guess you just have to figure out a time when you bring in the interview. The interview. I mean, now I'll ask you the question as a communication strategist extraordinaire. I mean, is the answer here like a sit-down interview where they're holding hands? Is the answer like, you know, a carefully managed, like, you know, documentary? Is it like a written thing? Like, what do you do here? Well, obviously, Pod Save the World would be number one.

Two, imagine if they had a sense of humor and they just started putting out hilariously Photoshop. There you go. That's the other way to go. Fucking Snapchat filter videos all over their Instagram. You have so much fun with this. My daughter, when I FaceTime her now, is figured out how to put like a lizard head on or an alien head. You could do that, you know.

Yeah, Lizette really, really, really likes FaceTime, but likes to grab the camera and kind of like, and sometimes wonders, like, when my mom was here in person, was sort of wondering why she wasn't in the phone, I think. Well, I have to say, like, no, my wife's been killing for this, but like, so my daughter likes to do the animal heads, But the other day I was talking to her in like half the conversation she's got the turd head. And I'm just like, come on.

Can we just change? Can we go back to like the dinosaur head or the cute dog head? You know, like this is not good. Yeah. But they could do that. Kate could, you know, be like call a press conference online and do that. It would be so funny. And that would be funny.

Just release a bunch of terrible photoshop. I mean, hopefully there's not something serious underpinning this. No, no, no. Like the best case, right, is she like got a no job or some sort of elective surgery. You know what? Like, hopefully it's something. No, like we should be clear. Like, I've always liked Kate, you know.

And she seemed like The Rock, right? So that's why people are a little, you know, unsteady about this. Dwayne and the Rock Johnson? John Cena, naked. Did you see that? That was a lot. That was a lot. Yes.

It's always weird when people have like Audi abs. Like your abs are so ripped, they kind of extend outward. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I'm saying, Alona? He's just so ripped. It's like, what's happening?

I feel like we've made Alona a lot. today more than that much. I think she's just coughing. Yeah, it's a wishful thinking. I don't know. But yeah, like, like, like, unfortunately the, the best explanation would be the worst news, which is that she's really dealing with some issues,

and we hope that's not the case. And if it's not the case, yeah, then do your advice. Everyone is entitled to their privacy about all things medical. So, like, I could imagine why you wouldn't want to release information before you're ready. I mean, that's basically what happened to Lloyd Austin, right? You've got this scary news about his health. He didn't want to put it out there. He's a very private person, whatever.

person, whatever. But when you're in these public positions, you kind of know that you don't know that this level of crazy is going to happen, but, you know, when you're a royal, you know what the paparazzi does and the amount of speculation and there's this whole cottage industry built around you. Well, and as rural observer, you know, part of what, Kate's usually been very good at this. Like, Kate has been the one who's handled this like, you know, very elegantly for a very long time. So So that does make you worry that there's something not great going on. Yeah. Who knows?

I mean, yeah, who knows. Okay, well, that's all the speculation from us. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, you'll hear Ben's interview with Renata Sigora about the situation in Haiti. So please stick around for that. So last week we talked about the situation in Haiti after armed gangs kind of banded together, stormed prisons, released thousands of inmates, fought with police. The prime minister had been in Kenya trying to.

to finalize a deal for Kenyan police forces to come to Haiti. But then he was prevented from returning to the country. And now the prime minister is officially resigned following a transition counsel being established. The U.S. military is helping to airlift non-essential staff from the U.S. embassy. Other countries have done the same. So it's a very chaotic situation. Thankfully, to help us shed light on the situation today is Renata Segurda, who is the deputy program director for the International Crisis Group in Latin America and the Caribbean. ICG is obviously a tremendous organization that has helped us make sense of difficult events in the past. So, Renata, thanks so much for joining us. No, thank you for having me. Okay, so you and your team have

done a lot of reporting on the situation in Haiti. How would you describe for people that are not following it that closely? Just what has been going on in the last few days and weeks? What are the major players and what do they want? Why are they making this move right now the gangs? So we have seen a radical change of strategy and really of what's happening in Haiti since last Sunday a week ago. Essentially since the assassination of President Juvenal-Mois in 2021, we have seen a strengthening of the gangs. We should probably note that gangs have been historically a feature of Haitian politics for a very, very long time, for decades. And they had been a sort of private army for either political or commercial elites that have

used them to further their interests. After the assassination of Maurice, we have seen that these gangs had been strengthening. They had been gaining more and more territorial control. And we have also seen some separation between these elites and the gangs, In part because of the sanctions that have been imposed particularly by Canada on several very high-profile politicians, including ex-president Marpe Lee, that had sort of sent a message to some of the elites that they shouldn't continue supporting the gangs, at least not so openly. So with that, we had seen a shift in the way in which the gangs had been operating, and they had transferred their attention to really extort private companies and individuals and also kidnapping. And they were doing that to make up for the laws, revenues that they were not being, they weren't receiving from these elites.

However, until very recently, what we had seen was a confrontation between gangs, right? G9 and GEP, which are the two biggest coalitions, were fighting each other to, more territory and more territory obviously means more power and more money. However, as Crisis Group noted in the report that we published last January, there had been a building of a coalition between the gangs, something that Cheriseet, one of the most notorious gang leaders, has called Viv and Sam, which in Creole means living together. This was a very short-lived coalition last fall in which,

He had said for the good of the people, we're going to stop fighting. That fell apart very quickly. However, we knew from sources in the ground that the gang leaders kept communications lined open and that they were thinking that they could bring together this coalition again if the multinational support mission that was approved by the UN and is being led by Kenya was to arrive or eventually to fight the state. And so that is what has been happening in the last week. So we have gone from a scenario in which gangs were fighting each other, and now we have

a scenario in which gangs are allied together, fighting the state. This has been obviously a message for Henry, who as you know, it was out of the country, and they were asking for his resignation. But we very much think it was also a message for the Kenyans. And they were saying, we are going to be a force to be reckoned with if you decide to come. And so that is the situation where we are today. With the gangs allied, you know, ready to confront a multinational support mission if it is to arrive and searching to expand to control. At this point, almost they have the majority of the city and they could soon control 100% of Port-au-Prince and then

likely expand to the rest of the country. Okay, well, that's quite clear. So essentially the prime minister, Prime Minister, Henri goes to Kenya to kind of finalize this mission. And so the gangs make the move while he's out of the country to prevent that Kenya mission from coming in. And they seem to have succeeded in doing that in the short term. And also may have succeeded in, you know, preventing Prime Minister Henri from kind of resuming whatever governing authority had, which is probably not much to begin with. Before we get into kind of what the option, you know, what the option. are for dealing with this situation. I just want to ask from the reporting that your team is done, you know, when we look at this from the outside, we see kidnappings. We see, you know, people being killed. Do you have any sense of what life is like for just ordinary people on the ground in Puerto Prants in the circumstance? Yes. I mean, it has been very, very difficult until now, and it has just increasingly worsened in the last week. So until, until let's say two weeks ago,

controlled by the gangs. So people would only be able to leave their neighborhood to go to work, for example, if they had permission from the gangs. The gangs were also very interested in having people stay in the territories that controlled, you know, like even though there's hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Haiti at the moment,

the gangs were trying to prevent that from happening. So for example, if a family has three people that work, only one person will be able to leave the neighborhood, There was incredible amounts of sexual violence that being exerted. Women were being forced to be sexual partners of the gangs. And there was obviously a humanitarian situation in terms of access to food, to health services. Schools have been closed for a very long time.

And with a crumbling state, essentially no protection services were being offered. That has only been made worse in the last week because particularly access, to gasoline is incredibly important in Haiti. Most homes in Haiti don't have electricity and they depend on plants that are run by gasoline. People have not been able to leave their houses to get gasoline. So that means they don't have electricity and the majority of the people also have water plants because there's no portable water that comes into their houses. And people are running out of food. But when you leave the house, there's so much violence on the street that you really are risking your life. So what we're seeing is that people have been inside and they're running out

of food. And for those people that have been hurt by the violence that is occurring on the streets, there's almost no health services. The gangs have ransacked the biggest hospitals, Doctors Without Borders and other international organizations have small clinics, but they are clearly overwhelmed. Not to mention people that just have regular medical emergencies that need to be attended, women that are pregnant. etc., etc. I mean, Haiti had already a humanitarian emergency in terms of food. More than half of the country needed food assistance, 30% in what the World Food Program calls critical access. And that is just gone through the roof in the last week. So it's really

nightmare scenario what we have right now. So, I mean, you're, you know, what you're describing sounds like both the definition of a failed state, essentially, with gang. having more power than any governing authority and a humanitarian catastrophe that could get worse as people lack food and water, potable water. You know, even the proposals that are now on hold of having, you know, one to 2,000 largely Kenyan police come in to support what is already a pretty small, I think under 10,000 active duty police in Haiti, it feels insufficient to deal with the scale of the challenge you described. I mean, what kind of recommendations has crisis group made? And what do you think the international community should be thinking about in terms of

options for dealing with the situation? Yes, the situation is very dire and the announcement of the Kenyans that they are going to put pause until there is a more clear governance structure in place in Haiti does make the situation very complicated. I mean, for very understanding, reasons Haitians have been very reluctant to international forces coming into the country. Right. There is a long history from colonial times to invasions by the US, through the sort of checkered results of Minusta, etc. that have left people with a very sour taste. However, at this precise moment, because the situation is so dire, most of the Haitians that we have spoken two are very, very supportive of the idea of the mission.

And really what we are hearing from Haiti today is true panic at the sense that nobody is going to come and help. Simultaneously, the US has made it very clear that they are not keen on sending troops, at least not at the moment. I would imagine that if boatloads of Haitian migrants start arriving in Florida, that might change the calculation. But at this point, it isn't. What we're hoping is that this governance structure that was proposed or that came out of the

meeting in Caricom yesterday sort of takes place quickly. And then the Kenyans feel that they do have a counterpart in Haiti that would be sufficient. And that the Kenyans get some sort of support from other donor troop and territory countries and are able to land in the country. I mean, obviously the idea of an invasion by US security forces seems like not really a recommendable notion, but the fact that the security situation is such as what we're seeing right now, it also, it's a tremendous challenge for the Kenyans who are sending, let's remember, police and not military. And so what it was supposed to be mission that was going to go into the neighborhoods to gain control of,

roads of, you know, safeguarding state structures has now turned into something more complicated. So it seems unlikely that they are going to be able to successfully do the work against the gangs unless they are accompanied by a more robust military force, even if just temporarily to allow them to settle into the country. Simultaneously, however, we do think it is very important to keep lines of communication, with the gangs open. And I think it is important to make a distinction here, right? Cherisier, who has become sort of the does have political ambitions himself.

He has hoped to be part of government in the past, and I'm sure he would be hoping that they would be included in this new transitional government. That seems really far-fetched, and I don't think neither the Haitians nor the international community would really be supportive of that idea. However, there are multiple people in Haiti because the gangs have existed for so long that have good channels of communication to them. And we're talking about local people,

you know, members of the church, local leaders that have been negotiating humanitarian access in certain neighborhoods, that have been, you know, helping with specific people, movement, et cetera. Those channels of communication are vital at this moment to negotiate with the gangs some sort of violence reduction, particularly to protect the population, but also to eventually

allow this new government to take shape. Obviously, the gangs have the upper hand at this moment, and so it's going to be very difficult to convince them to step down. But if they were to see a force that comes that looks strong enough, that it would really give them a run for their money, I think there would be a bit of intimidation. It's difficult to know because right now there's almost no counterpart for the gangs to know how strong they would be if they were faced with a well-trained force such as the one that Kenya has. Benin has also offered troops, etc. It's a different calculation to see them now when they have the run of the place

vis-à-vis what would be the case if there was some. some serious security forces that will be facing them. So what we're hoping is that there could be a two-prong approach. Clearly, a security intervention is at this point the only solution to at least bring the violence down a little bit. But also we're hoping that the local government and also hopefully the international community do keep these lines of communication open

and try and convince the gang leadership that it is in their best interest to lower the violence, particularly against the communities. So it sounds like, you know, what you're saying is there needs to be probably a bigger international force than even the Kenyan contingent in order to both try to stabilize things and maybe to create a basis for some negotiation with the gangs. Right now, there's no reason for the gangs to negotiate if they have control. Another part of this equation, as you mentioned, is the political structure in Haiti itself.

The U.S. government had kind of supported the idea of a transition from Prime Minister Henri. The U.S. State Department urged a transition so as to facilitate a multinational security mission. You mentioned Karakom, the Caribbean country's meeting to try to work through what a transition might look like. I mean, if Prime Minister Henri seems like he's moving out of the picture here, what do you think the kind of transition? plan should be for Haiti's government. Is it even feasible? Because the U.S. always ties these things to elections, but elections sometimes don't solve any problems. They just kind of create another vehicle for unrest and instability. I mean, how do you see the political situation that is required in Haiti going forward to make this work? I mean, I think what came out of the Caricoe

meeting yesterday is promising. And it's something that could work. understanding that Henry is out of the picture. It's sort of unfortunate that it has taken this long for Henry to accept to resign. I think this is the sort of main structure was agreed yesterday in Jamaica, is the main structure that has been discussed in political negotiations in Haiti for the last almost two years. So this is not incredibly innovative. And what it does, it sort of echoes the structures that are created by the Constitution. So we're talking about what they're calling a presidential council, which will be for now a replacement of the president, right? We don't we don't have a president. So this presidential council will have seven people. And those people would be representatives, both of the main political groups or the political alliances, but also private sector and key civil society groups such as the Montana court, which has been,

kind of the leading voice of the opposition coming from civil society. So that would be one part of the government. And then once that presidential council is formed, they will come together and appoint a prime minister, and that prime minister will appoint its cabinet. And so that sort of presidential council, prime minister and cabinet would be the transitional government. I think that calling for elections at this

point would be completely insane. There hasn't been electoral authorities in Haiti for a long time. From the technical perspective, it would be almost impossible to know where people are so that they could come to the voting polls. And we have seen in the past how poorly prepared elections have actually not helped. They have been very detrimental for the stability of Haiti. So running into an election of that sort would be a mistake. However, where we do have a transitional government that represents the majority, it's never going to represent every single Haitian, right? But if it does represent the majority of the political and social forces of Haiti,

and it can work together to bring the mission and to work with foreign partners to try and address the security and humanitarian situation, then at least that will be a start. It's not going to be easy. Haitians had been fighting on the small, you know, what are the details of what these governments should look like for a long time. Caricom had asked them to bring forward a proposal and they couldn't get together, they couldn't agree on one. So they ended up sending seven proposals to Caricom and it was only yesterday when in Jamaica, everybody locked the doors, called people on

Zoom and was like, we have to come up with one agreement and that's it. And, nobody leaves until we do that, it is too bad that it had to become such a terrible crisis before everybody came to the table with the willingness to make these kinds of compromises. But hopefully now there is an understanding of what would be a terrible risk if these government doesn't work and that it's really the only way forward for Haiti to be able to start addressing the other two terrible crises that it has. So we're hopeful that, you know, within the next day or two, we should have the names of who are people that are going to be part of the presidential council and soon thereafter the name of the new prime minister. So last question. I mean, part of what you're describing, what's interesting here is you have lots of different countries playing a role here.

You've got Karikam, the Caribbean neighbors of Haiti. You've got Kenya and Benin potentially providing these troops or police. You obviously have the Haitians themselves. In terms of the U.S., which is now drawing down part of our embassy, has this very complicated and often bad history of intervention in Haitian politics, but, you know, has more resources than anybody else in the hemisphere, the world, really. What do you recommend the U.S. policy be going for? Where can the U.S. try to help in this circumstance? I mean, I think obviously speeding the support to the multinational support vision is going to be

crucially important. We know that's not the government's prerogative exclusively and some of this money has been stuck in Congress and it hasn't been approved. So that is problematic. But really trying to solve that issue and find ways to bring the key equipment that the Kenyans need and the support, be it in kind or in cash, it's hugely relevant. I think for the U.S., and they're not the only the actor, they're used to only working with their institutional counterparts, right? And they were very attached to Henry as a counterpart because it made sense, right? He had been appointed with kind of if he processed, but a little bit of legitimacy. But there needs to be an understanding that the social forces in Haiti go beyond the institutions and that with such a state in crumbles,

there needs to be consultation that is very wide and open. And that's something that had and happened for the international community was very reluctant to engage with civil society in Haiti for a very long time honestly for way too long and that was part of what dragged this political crisis that long so I think from now on understanding that what's happening in Haiti is very different that what's happening in other parts of the world and that there needs to be an engagement with social forces too will be key but I think there is one thing that has been incredibly important and that we've been haunting on this for a long time, but nothing has happened, is that a lot of the weapons that are being used by the Haitian gangs come from the United States.

And they come mostly from Florida. They are purchased in the states, and then they are hidden in the cargo that takes other products into Haiti. And this is a relatively easy problem to solve. Yeah. It's one that for some reason, I think we can only imagine what is the political reason behind the reluctance to get involved in that. There's been very little action on the parts of the states. But at this point, if the gangs are not receiving new weapons, if they're not receiving particularly more ammunition, the equation on the ground would change dramatically. And this is something that it would not be very costly and it would be actually fairly physical.

for the United States to do right away. I think experts have identified out of what ports these guns are leaving Florida. And so that should be really straightforward. And we're hoping that this tremendous crisis is what finally pushes the American government to do that. Well, in a sane world, we would not have guns weapons of war for sale across the United States, but in a world where we do, the least we could do is try to stop those weapons from moving to Haiti. Look, thank you so much for giving us so much information.

We really appreciate it, and hopefully people will listen to the recommendations coming from the Crisis Group on this. So again, thanks for your work, and we'll keep in touch on this. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks again to Renato Sigora for joining the show. And Aaron Rogers, man, I don't know.

It might be a better VP than the quarterback. these days. Yeah, we might need a kill notification on that one. I can't believe they called it a kill notification. I kept reading that stories. It's really jarring. Just to Photoshop guys. Just not printing the photo because they have weird sausage hands.

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