Pod Save the World - Trump’s Unrequited Love for Kim Jong Un

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Tommy and Ben walk through a week of leaders making bad decisions. President Trump kneecaps military exercises with South Korea, Vladimir Putin’s paranoia reaches new heights, and British PM Andy Burnham gets pranked.They start with Trump's decision to scale back joint US-South Korean military exercises, what it means for an ally facing a rapidly modernizing North Korean military, and why Trump’s love for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un remains unrequited. Then, Jared Kushner heads back to the Middle East to reassure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel won't actually have to live up to its obligations under the Gaza peace plan, even as violence in the West Bank keeps escalating. Next, they look at Vladimir Putin's extreme paranoia and subterfuge techniques, like his secret train and decoy offices, Trump’s history of making racist comments about Somalia, and why Andy Burnham and other world leaders keep getting pranked. Then Tommy speaks with Natalia Oliverio, independent journalist and Navy veteran, about the horrible conditions and the mental toll that an extended deployment is taking on sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.Hate listening to ads? Become a Friends of the Pod subscriber for ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, Runaway Country, Offline with Jon Favreau, and more—plus exclusive content, including bonus episodes of Pod Save America. Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends, on Apple Podcasts, or through the Pod Save America YouTube channel.To watch this episode with subtitles, click here and turn on closed captions (CC).You can request a transcript by emailing [e-mail]. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.

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Thank you, Remy, for sponsoring this episode. If you miss some of your favorite crooked pods this week, don't worry, you can now catch up on the week's best moments on MS Now on Saturday nights. MS Now is streaming an episode of highlights from your favorite crooked pods, packing as much analysis, funny moments, and 100% correct opinions into 40 minutes as humanly possible. Crooked on MS Now airs every Saturday at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. Welcome to Potsay of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Roads.

Ben, before we came in here, I just read this piece in the Atlantic called The Wrong Kind of American. It's the headline by a woman named Julia Curley. She's a former CIA officer rose to the rank of PDB briefer. Briefed Vice President Mike Pence for a year. I worked for the Trump administration, not because of sharing their politics, but because she's a patriot. And then it was driven out because I think Laura Loomer figured out that she was a trans person. She loomered her, yeah. And it is enraging.

Yeah, people should read it. It's really good. She has a tremendous reputation. She served in the Biden administration too, but, you know, apolitical civil servant served in multiple administrations. I will say, in addition to being utterly reprehensible to target someone because of their identity like this, do we think that the non-woke national security apparatus filled with the likes of Pete Hegseth is performing better than she would have? No, absolutely not.

It seems like maybe diversity is good because you get smarter people. than fucking Pete Hegseth. Yeah, real meritocracy over there. Pete Hegseth. He was like doing a D.E.I. higher. Doing a bang up job running the Iran war. I mean, things are going so badly

and it's all sort of stuck in the same place that we don't even have a big Iran section for you today in part because Pete is an idiot. But, no, it's a, it's such an enraging piece. I mean, there's all these great people. This is just one story of a great person driven out of the U.S. government because of politics. And I'm sure there's hundreds or thousands of these.

It also is a reminder that it's, easy to, like, you know, for some people at least to demonize trans people in the abstract. But whenever the camera settles on a person like this, who's like a human being, who's very capable, you're reminded of how grotesque that is. Just trying to do her job, surf her country, and be herself. Highly recommend reading it. We got a great show for you guys today. We are going to talk about why President Trump randomly lashed out over the weekend,

started posting photos of himself with Kim Jong-un and then started screening. As one does. I mean, you and I should do that before this publishes, people will wonder. Then he tried to cancel joint military exercise with the South Koreans. We'll explain what the exercises are, why they matter, and why we think he did this now and kind of the global security implications of it all. Then we're going to talk to you about Jared Kushner's trip to the Middle East, but he was re-upping that venture capital fund, you know, some meetings of the Saudis or other autocrats.

We'll talk about what it meant for Gaza, his conversations. We'll talk about this explosion of settler violence in the West Bank. then secret plane rides in subterfuge by presidents. It's very hot right now because of Trump. And Natalie. And Natalie. Because of Trump, you know, basically hiding out in a catering cart in Turkey with Natalie. So we're going to tell you about the links that Russian president Vladimir Putin goes to to avoid being monitored by foreign intelligence services, the media, really anyone. Amazing story in the New York Times. We're kind of basing this off of. Finally, we're going to just quickly highlight how Trump talks about parts of Africa and then why British Prime Minister Andy Burnham should probably just stop using his own cell phone. I mean, that's a good message for any political leader in the world.

Yeah. Probably. Run it through your office. I'm just going to say, yeah. We'll explain why. Then you're going to hear my interview with an independent journalist named Natalie Oliverio. She broke the story about the horrible conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln. That's the aircraft carrier that's been at sea.

I think she said like 265 days in her interview, like nearly nine months, thanks to the war with Iran. She talks about the toll on the sailors, their families, the fleet itself. It's unbelievably stark. Yeah, and it's a story that one thing I just want to say about Tommy is it kind of brings everything together in a strange way, because the reason they're in such horrible conditions is because they were sent there with no clear mission or end point to their mission. the mission itself changed. Incompetent people like Pete Hexath run the Pentagon, so they didn't kind of plan for resupply. Our base in Bahrain got obliterated by the Iranians.

And they had no plan B. They didn't tell us that. So no transparency led to no spotlight on this. And then they called it fake news and showed no empathy. So like all the incompetence and the cruelty and the stupidity and the rashness. And like, oddly, this is one of the stories that is even bigger than like people being in such squalid conditions. Some people are trying to jump off an aircraft carrier because it kind of gets it everything about this war that is just wrong. The lack of strategy and planning is head spinning.

I mean, yeah, like you said, I think the Iranians on day one bombed this U.S. base in Bahrain that is absolutely critical to resupplying any mission in the Gulf. And instead, the resupply ships are having to do like 10-day round-trip missions to get food and provisions. Like Diego Garcia. A thousand miles away to get provision. So that's one piece. Second, you know, I saw president, we'll play the clip for you later. President Trump basically belittles these concerns or complaints from these sailors, being saying he talked to some admiral who was like, when I was their age, I was on chips for longer, right?

Like, we'll explain why that's bullshit. But also, you know, I saw this prick on Fox News sort of like shouting down these sailors. Some of these, the younger sailors, they're not allowed on the deck. They are in steel boxes. in this aircraft carrier going on 250, 260 days. Like, could you imagine the nightmare? People are so fucked up by this that they're trying to throw themselves off the deck of the aircraft carrier.

One guy did. Yeah. And, you know, these Fox Newspeople who cheerlead these wars and would never fight them themselves, like at some point there needs to be a reckoning with these people. I will just say that when you have no – because the other piece of this, that came out and sent the reporting from the families. And I don't know if you get in this in the interview, Tommy, but like the morale, when you don't know why the fuck you're fighting a war, there's no reason to be fighting the war. Nobody's articulated why.

The country's not behind you. Congress didn't vote for it. Like, that's, if you were like fighting the Nazis, you probably put up with being in the steel box, you know. When you're there to open the effing straight that was open before the war, like that's not exactly the most inspiring mission. Yeah, when you feel like, you know, maybe Netanyahu is the reason we're at this war. Or, you know, maybe we're there. The current mission is to reopen the Strait of Form moves, which was open before we started the stupid war.

Yeah, the whole thing is just a mess. And it's just like, it's just a piece of the cost of the war that is underdiscust, which is the toll on the U.S. service members themselves and their families because a lot of times these guys can't communicate home for operational security reasons. So imagine, you know, your loved one is in this floating prison in the Gulf for 200 days. And you're just sitting there wondering like, okay, is one of these? Iranian missile is going to get through. Yeah.

Yeah. If it re-escalates, what could happen? Yeah. So it's a very important story worth, worth seeing on top of because, you know, things aren't going to get better for these sailors anytime soon. I mean, if they get home, it's going to be in a couple months. It's like by like Halloween. So we're going to start with a different sort of military challenge for President Trump,

which is this dust up with South Korea. So on Sunday, President Trump posted the following message on truth social. I'm going to read the whole thing because it's just so weird. based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, I'm not happy with the fact that the United States has long ago agreed to participate in joint military exercises with South Korea. These exercises are not only costly with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America, as usual, but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile to a country that as long as Donald J. Trump has been president has been unthreatening and respectful. Therefore, based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I've instructed Secretary of War Pete Hegeseth to substantially reduce the joint military exercises, while somewhat related. Parenz question mark. I don't even understand that. I recently asked the president of South Korea if they would like to join us in the denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And they said,

no thanks. Thank you for attention to this man better, President Donald J. Trump. A lot to unpack there. We'll get to that in a second. So, Ben, it's not the first time Trump has whined about these joint military exercises with South Korea. It's not really clear either how much the exercises were scaled down because he basically fired off this post when the exercises were already underway, like all the assets were pre-positioned. But it's still a huge deal in South Korea, both politically and for their national security. So for context, these are called the Ulci Freedom Shield exercises. They're one of two major annual military, joint military exercises conducted by the U.S.

and South Korea. They're 11 days long. 18,000 South Korean troops are involved along with thousands of U.S. troops. And Trump complains about these things being agreed to long ago. Like, they were agreed to in like 1950s, like 1953, when they, you know, the Korean Armist Agreement was signed and established the ceasefire that's still in place. I caught up with our buddy Danny Russell earlier today to talk about all of this. Danny was Assistant Secretary of State for Asian Affairs, work with us on Asia issues in the White House.

And he was explaining to me why these exercises are actually so important. First of all, South Korea has a conscription in mandatory military service for men aged, you know, of the able-bodied men of a certain age up to like 29. So you serve for 18 to 21 months. So that means like these South Korean troops are constantly rotating out and you actually do need like real training for them or otherwise you're just it's the first time you're going to be you know serving the exercises they're not like a war game at a think tank where it's like a you know laptops and a simulation it's like essential basic training and coordination between these two big militaries and then second he was just talking to me about the way the pace of growth in North Korea's

military capabilities over the last five years has just grown like exponentially so they've gotten real battlefield experience in Ukraine. They got a crash course in drone warfare. Their cyber capabilities have drastically ramped up. And they got all this new hardware and money from the Russians, right? And the U.S. capabilities obviously evolved too. So you really do need to like drill this stuff. And so I think the question is why kind of like given those clear security equities would Trump decide to flip out about this and hang them out to dry? Lucky for us, he kind of elaborated on his fit of peak in the Oval Office on Monday. Let's watch. South Korea has been protected by us for many, many years.

When I called recently, the president of South Korea, who I like, I think he's very nice, actually. But I called him, I said, would you like to give us a little hand? We don't need help with Iran. But if you'd like, give us a hand with Iran, he said, no thanks. And I said, we have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong-un, your next-door neighbor. And you're not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran? That's strange. We can't go around and protect all of these countries, especially when they're not there to help us.

So just for what it's worth, Ben, the U.S. has closer to 26,500 troops in South Korea, not 39,000, as he said there. It's also a lie to claim that South Korea paid nothing, that Trump got them to pay $3 billion, and then Biden kind of killed the deal, but whatever, I digress. What do you think happened here? What do you think made Trump pop up? about this? And what do you think about him tying it to Iran? Divining Trump's, you know, decision to true social geopolitics on any given days is always

difficult. I mean, I think there's a few things that I might point to as possibilities. The first is that he's being utterly humiliated by the Iranians. He's losing. He's being emasculated in front of the whole world. So like a bully on the schoolyard who's, you know, just got punched really hard in the stomach, he just, you know, was looking for someone else to slug. You know, like, that's the most likely reason. Second is he's done this to some European countries, too. Like, he demands that they help him with a war that he started by himself for no reason without even telling them that is hurting their economies more than ours. They're screwing the Korean economy. A lot of these Asian economies. Yeah, we've talked about how

dependent they are. You've been very good on this time. They like they get far more of their energy through the Strait of Hormuz than we do. And then, you know, then he's upset that they don't do what, by the way, what are the South of Green is going to do to tip the balance in the Iran war? Because one more ship, you know, like next our ships. Like that makes a lot of sense. And then the other thing, though, that I think is actually more worrisome to me is that he's had this like accumulated set of grievances that are like kind of weirdly consistent over the decade that we've unfortunately had to get to know him very well. and it's like he's not going to get through this second term, his last term, without kind of coming back around to all of them, you know, in the same way that he had to kind of come back around to like James Comey and, close some accounts. And John Brennan and, you know, he'll come, guarantee, mark my word, he'll come back around to like Greenland again and the Panama Canal.

And like, he's been banging this drum on the Koreans like, well, we're going to come back around to this one. And, you know, like, there's a disturbing sense of, like, the declining man in the high castle whose, you know, powers. Because the other thing about that tweet, that truth is, you know, when he would do this, like, shortly after he came into office for the second time, it was crazy. But it was also kind of like, thank you for attention to this matter was a little scary. Now it's like, fuck you, dude. Like, the South Koreans aren't going to, like, change and join your war on Iran.

Like, there's a pathetic nature to it that is actually a little alarming because you get this feeling he's just going to be like lashing out at all these accumulated targets he's had throughout his whole miserable life, you know. And if the cost is, are basically like the permanent destruction of American alliances and are standing in the world. Because I do want to say just one thing because there's so many things you can say about what he said is wrong. the cost that we pay, like this note that he hits it. Obama also hit, by the way, that like we bear too many burdens. It's not the fucking bases in South Korea. It's the dumb wars in the Middle East. You know, like if Trump was serious about not having trillions of dollars in debt on wars,

that's not the kind of baked in, you know, presence of U.S. troops and bases that have been there for decades that we get a ton out of because basically the entire global economy is tilted in our direction because of South Korea and Japan and Europe and our network of bases and alliances and the dollars of predominant currency. Like, that's not all this extra post-9-11 costs of these wars. He's focused on the wrong fucking problem. Yeah.

Just on the why he did this now, it's like the Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan book gets at the fact that the Oval Office is just like this kind of like undisciplined free-for-all. Someone described it to me as a Greyhound bus station where just like randos come through. They just pop off about whatever, or maybe someone walked into his office, tried to brief him on these exercises.

Someone in there is like, sir, you're still getting screwed on this, right? So he's in a pissy mood about Iran. So he pops off at South Korea and also threatened to bomb Oman. I think that same weekend. And the question that I'm curious what you think this time, because the question that drew the kind of massagenist rant in the Oval Office was from a CNN reporter about, did Kim Jong-un ask you to do this? And he didn't answer it. I mean, I don't think he did.

I think your scenario is more likely that's like buried in his briefing because I've been in the briefings where it's like and by the way the joint exercises is running today. That sets off the guy, yeah. But I mean, it does make you wonder like because the Kim Jong-un piece of this

could come back to life too. He may want to go back to North Korea. Yeah. So I think it's a combination about being mad about losing the war, this old hobby horse like you said about South Korea spending. And then I bet he's hoping he can get the media

to chase the kind of like North Korea diplomacy kind of like bright object over here. to get them off of the Iran stuff, which sucks for him. Which is an unmitigated failure. Well, it was a total failure. And also, it is ridiculous to claim that North Korea is not threatening. They were literally firing off ballistic missiles earlier this week. And it's just worth saying that, like, Trump said in that briefing, like, he basically said

that Kim, he was asked if Kim had responded to his overtures. And he kind of like, let the question hang in the air. Then he was like, yeah, which is probably a lie. Because Kim has no reason to reengage. Like, he has money and new weapons from the Russians. He has this new big partnership with them. He doesn't want to deal with the United States in South Korea, browbeating him into reforms or the Chinese and the Russians. De-nuclearization, right? He basically has said like the precondition to talking with us again is you guys stop talking about denuclearization.

And I think he said like end your hostile policy towards North Korea, which basically means like don't do anything I don't like. And that could be, you know, abandon South Korea, abandon Japan, get your bombers out of Guam, end all sanctions. And meanwhile, this guy's sitting on 60 nukes. He can make 20 more a year. He's got ICBMs that could reach the U.S. He's developing a nuclear submarine. It's an enormous threat to the U.S. and South Korea and the whole region. Yeah, what's so crazy about what he said is the threat that people surmised North Korea opposed to the United States through successive administrations was not the personal relationship

but between the leader of North Korea and the leader of the United States. It was just the fact that they were developing nuclear weapons that could hit our troops in South Korea or Japan or reach the United States or certainly reach Hawaii and Kwan. Like, that's the threat. So he did to much media fanfare that Singapore summit that got, like, you know, he got his flowers from the media. It was like the Abraham Accords of East Asia. Yeah. You know, like.

Everybody touched his foot in the DMZ and everyone. Oh, look at Trump. And meanwhile, like, everything has gotten worse. Like, North Korea has developed its nuclear weapons. It's developed its ballistic missiles. They've sent all these troops to the front in Ukraine. They've gotten this. Tip the balance from Russians in a lot of ways with the shells, too.

Feligah did the time, right? And meanwhile, let's also point out the fact that our aging president, who's often described as the most powerful men in the world, I'm beginning to have some questions about that, is clearly in some kind of unrequited love affair with a 41-year-old dictator of Madrid. That's true. Because Kim Jong-un has never once, like, evinced any of the same affinity for Trump that he consistently... Bro, you don't read the letters. I mean, this is a guy that, like, his long-term future and survival is tied to the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party, which will be there after Donald Trump, to the Russian government and Vladimir Putin, who, unless nature intervenes, will be there after Donald Trump. He makes no indication that he gives a shit about how good Donald Trump feels about him. Think of how pathetic it is.

It's not just, you know, I know there's a kind of resistancey thing to say, like, oh, my God, he's, you know, he's paling up with dictators. he's actually not. He's like chasing this dictator of like the hermit kingdom. And Kim Jong-un isn't even really doing anything in response. You don't think you're sending the occasional like spicy selfie, like kind of a name, like the mirror, the bathroom or something? He doesn't even, that's what's so amazing. He doesn't even have to. Like in the first term he did.

We don't even, I mean, because I guarantee you if he had sent a love letter to Trump, he'd probably truthpost that motherfucker right away. So it's kind of, it's actually kind of pathetic that this guy can't even like get Kim Jong-un to pay attention to it. It is quite pathetic. And also just like two other big picture pieces of context. The first is that this flare up from Trump about these joint military exercises happened as we're learning that the USS George Washington, which is one of America's 11 total aircraft carriers, is getting taken out of Japan and sent to the Middle East to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln. We get into all the reasons why in the interview. But that means that the United States is going to have exactly zero of its 11 aircraft

carriers in the Western Pacific. And so that means we just have like a reduced capacity to respond if the Chinese do something on Taiwan or the North Koreans do something stupid. And it comes after the U.S. pulled, it was the THAAD missile defense systems out of South Korea. I think that was last year. It might have been this year. No, some of it was for the war in Iran. Yeah, some of the war and and Iran. And then second, a couple weeks back, we talked about that nuclear deal that Trump had offered to the Saudis. Danny pointed out to me today that, you know, that initial deal allowed the Saudis to enrich nuclear material and that South Korea has been trying to get that kind of deal offered to them for about 25 years. So now they're dealing with a stronger, richer, emboldened,

North Korea, a weakened, distracted United States, and Trump ranting about the U.S. troop presence in South Korea once again. And so you've got to be sitting there, like, if you're some general in South Korea, you've got to be sitting there thinking, okay, by the end of this guy's term, we might have no U.S. troops in the Korean Peninsula or a bunch less. What is our security guarantee? We should maybe be talking about getting a nuke ourselves before it's too late. Yeah. And to connect some of these threads, because South Korea has choices. And they could just decide, you know what, we don't like the Chinese that much, but we're right next to them.

They're going to be here. The Americans are totally unreliable. And we better just start cutting some deals with the Chinese, like right quick or else it could be kaput for us. And look, you may roll your eyes and say, I don't care. I mean, let's connect some of these dots. He is destroying the relationship with South Korea potentially. He's threatening to bomb the shit out of Oman at the same time that he's demonstrated to each of these countries that having U.S. military presence may be more dangerous than not having one, right? He's threatened to invade NATO territory.

If all of a sudden countries feel like it's more dangerous to be friends with the United States, it's not just that the United States can be kind of annoying or elect a crazy person every now and then. It's literally dangerous to have your security tied to the United States. it is going to set, like, and that's kind of already happening. It's part of what's sending the world into this tailspin of instability. And as we've also been pointing out, if it starts to look like, because that is why the dollar is a reserve currency. Like the reason the dollars is reserve currency, that's why we get to have trillions of dollars in debt.

That's why even as expensive as shit is, our standards of living are way higher than they should be and they are in other countries because we can spend more than we take in because of the debt that accrues from the dollars is reserve currency. Well, if suddenly the thing that undergirds at, which is the U.S. military and its global presence, is unraveling, like, shit can get very real here for Americans. Like, I'm all for, like, drawing down base presences where it doesn't need to be, including parts of the Middle East. I'm all for spending no money on stupid wars. But if you're dismantling things like Japan, South Korea, and Europe, and you're not anywhere in the Middle East, like everything changes pretty quick. Boy, also, J.D. Vance is out there saying, like, I don't know if it's good for the dollar to be the reserves currency.

Like, what are you talking about? Good luck servicing that debt, man. Yeah. Which, by the way, like, keep an eye on the yield on the 30-year treasury right now. Like, bonds are going crazy right now. There's a lot of bad things happening in the global economy. Yes. I mean, like, I know we raise this a few times because this is like the, this is the thing underneath the tip of the iceberg. Because, again, you may wonder why we have trillions of dollars in debt that we can. can seemingly carry around. Well, it's because countries have to buy our treasuries because they have to deal with us as a hegemon with the dollar. And this is the kind of stuff that is just chipping away that iceberg. Yep. And the system works until it doesn't. This episode is sponsored

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That's selectquote.com slash world. SelectQuote.com slash world. They shop, you save. Lucky for all of us, Jared Kushner is back in the Middle East. He's the guy who solved the war in Ukraine, ended that one. Thank God. And negotiated an end to the war in Iran, got that one done. So now he's back in the Middle East checking on Gaza.

He's just sort of a global emissary for peace. Jared met with officials from Hamas on Sunday in Egypt, which, by the way, I'm glad he's doing that. And I hope that Democrats just remember that going forward and meet with anyone they want. I don't care if they're labeled a terrorist group or whatever. Trump did it. Jared Kushner did it. I don't give a shit. Jared Kushner can meet with Hamas, but if a Democrat goes on Hassan Piker,

then asymmetry here. Yep, there you go. Jared also met Israeli Prime Minister, Bibi Nanyahu for about four hours on Monday in the Netanyahu meeting where Nikolay Mladenov, the high representative for Trump's Gaza Board of Peace, and then Tony Blair for some reason. Jared said he met with Netanyahu to clarify like misconceptions and correct misinformation about Trump's 15-point Gaza peace plan. I remember Trump announced.

and then Netanyahu immediately rejected. So Jared says he assured Netanyahu that, quote, the U.S. doesn't expect Israel to refrain from taking action against imminent threats by Hamas. A Board of Peace official later said that, quote, there will be no idea free deployment from Gaza until Hamas is fully disarmed and all of Gaza is demilitarized. So we don't know what's going to happen here. Hamas seems to have agreed to kind of like a phase disarmament approach, but now the Times of Israel is reporting that the Board of Peace might nix that approach.

So it's just not at all clear what is going to happen going forward. But regardless, Jared did a rare TV interview while in Israel, which gave us a window into his thinking and some of what he talked about. Here's a bit of what he said on Fox News in this interview on Monday. Let's watch. For Israel, we think this is a win-win situation because if Hamas actually gives over the weapons and the tunnels, you know, willingly over the next 60 to 90 days, that obviously would be the elimination of a huge security threat for Israel, almost an unthinkable achievement. And if they don't fall through now in their commitment, everyone will see that they're not genuinely. and about peace, and then Israel will have a lot more support from the U.S. and others to go and finish the job in the appropriate way. So, Ben, I found those comments incredibly ominous because it's like,

okay, basically Israel gets a pass on living up to its end of the original ceasefire bargain. But if Hamas doesn't immediately capitulate and hand over all its weapons, which obviously we want it to do, but I can understand sort of their thinking here, Israel gets to finish the job whatever that means. It sounds like kind of green lighting them restarting, the conflict in a major way. Yeah, and I want to say, like, if you're going to be like a Nepo Baby Kushner, like, better to just buy the Lakers than try to insert yourself in Middle East Peace. What a sweet gig.

Seems like his brother had a better life plan here. It's extraordinary to me that the last two weeks we've, you know, talked about this utter humiliation where they announced this huge breakthrough in the implementation of the so-called ceasefire terms leading to the demilitarization of Hamas. very predictably and very publicly. Netanyahu is like, nope, we're not going to do this. And Jared, instead of going over there and saying, yes, you are, because we've fucking provided you with every weapon that you dropped on Gaza, we're going to cut you out, you dragged us in this dumb war on Iran. He goes over there and it's like, thank you, sir, may I have another.

We're now accepting your frame of this exactly. And if Hamas doesn't do everything that you direct them to do with Israel doing nothing, then we, what, could go back to full-scale bombardment of Gaza? I mean, that's kind of what he's suggested. And listen, again, as we said a million times in the show, not a fan of Hamas, think they've done more damage to the Palestinian people than almost any other organization. You know, terrorist groups, October 7th is unjustifiable. Attacks on innocent people are unjustifiable. But that should also apply to the Israeli side, because as Jared is giving this interview,

the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gavir said, quote, I think targeted assassination should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night, not just those who pose an immediate threat. There are people who are not worthy of life. They shouldn't live. They're not even people. I mean, that's the quote. That's the context of saying, go finish the job. You've got people like who don't like it when you say that Israel is committing genocide. And then you have the national security minister of the current government of Israel making genocide, the most genocidal statement imaginable. They're not even people, right? And that's what's happening. like before our eyes here. And again, just on this Hamas point, would I like if Hamas just

disarmed out of the blue shore, but that's not how this works. Like even the United States and all these other parties understood that you were going to have like any diplomatic agreement, like a phased approach where each side takes steps together. So Israel has to withdraw as Hamas verifiably demilitarizes. And then a peacekeeping force goes in to fill the security vacuum. that's not what's happening anymore. What's happening anymore is that they tried to do that plan. Israel is the only one that vetoed it. And now they said, okay, if Hamas doesn't do something that they're clearly not going to do,

which is unilaterally disarm while Israel's occupying more of the Gaza Strip and not letting assistance in, then Israel can just kill as many people as they want. Like that is not diplomacy. That is just like Jared taking dictation from Netanyahu and repeating it on Israeli television. nonetheless. Jared just is fully on board with the Israeli side. We're not doing it in Iran section today because, again, like I said, nothing's really changed.

But Kushner did tell Fox that, quote, we are having very positive and active conversations probably more robust than it's ever been with Iran. And then on Tuesday, Trump posted on truth social, quote, there are no talks or conversations with Iran. So I don't know if he was just slapping down, Jared, if Jared was lying or what the hell was happening there, but just notable. The one guess I'll make on this. and RIP, the MOU that was supposed to end the war in Iran that achieved precisely nothing.

My guess is whatever talks are still going on are basically Qataris or Omanis or, I don't know, maybe even these Pakistanis that have been involved talking to the Iranians and then talking to Americans. And Jared is so like the center of his own world, but even if he's just getting read out on those talks by like, I'm guessing here. I don't know this to be, but like it feels like if he's getting a readout from like the Gulf, he's like, yeah, we're in really active talks. Like, when meanwhile, Trump is threatening to bomb the shit out, Oman, this troubleshooter in the region, right? The Omanis, you'll recall, and this bears saying, like, they're the ones that helped us get some Americans out of prison. There are three hikers that randomly decided to hike into Iran got detained.

Oman got them out. They're the ones who hosted the initial talks that led to the Iran nuclear deal. like they are notoriously kind of this, I don't want to say Switzerland because it's even more active. They're this kind of, you know. They try to facilitate peace talks. And they try to get along with everybody. Trump saying we're going to bomb them. And that's good for us.

If it wasn't for Amman, we wouldn't have had a venue to have talks. And by the way, Trump has taken advantage of that too. And now we're threatening to bomb them. Do you think that's going to make it more or less likely that they'll go along with Iran's scheme to toll the straight-of-form moves while giving Amman a cut? It's crazy. Pretty sure it's a lot of. Yeah. And so while Gaza is stuff.

in this kind of nightmarish limbo, things in the West Bank are steadily getting worse. So the UN counted a minimum of 1,380 attacks by extremist settlers in 250 Palestinian communities in the first seven months of this year. Also, according to the UN, over 1,100 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7th. Most of these incidents get no media coverage, but what's happening in the village of Kusra actually broke through. It's worth just sort of talking about why for a minute. So if you haven't followed the story, The gist is that earlier this month, these terrorist Israeli settlers decided to hold a bunch of Palestinians hostage in their own homes. They cut off water and power to several Palestinian-owned homes on the edge of Kusra.

They set up roadblocks. They camped out outside of the home just as menacing as humanly possible. And during this siege, settlers actually blocked an ambulance from getting to the home to rescue a sick two-year-old. Now, they block ambulances all the time, but doing it to a sick two-year-old. It's disgusting. another ambulance got in and they got the kid out, but, you mean, give me a break. They also blocked activists from getting to these houses to provide food and water, even after the residents had run out of food and water.

So they're trying to starve and kill kids. IDF soldiers were called in to disperse the settlers. They were instead spotted hanging out with them, praying with them. And they basically only evicted activists who were trying to help the Palestinians. But what was different in this case is that one of the homes is owned by a Palestinian American who lives in Ohio. He had cameras kind of like live streaming and filming everything. that footage got pushed out to international press. It got international attention.

So after a couple of days, the IDF got sent in again. They finally dispersed the settlers. But as soon as the IDF left, the settlers came back. That led to the idea of starting a larger, kind of messier operation, which cleared out some of the settlers, but not all of them. But it's almost kind of like beside the point because this is just temporary. And these settlers are hell bent on this kind of like messianic mission to ethnically cleanse the West Bank. The U.S. Ambassador, Israel, Mike Huckabee, actually weighed in on the Kusra siege on Twitter,

and he referred to the settlers as terrorists, which was surprising from him. But then he also tweeted the following, Ben. Settlers are not the problem in Judea, Samaria, that's the West Bank. Un settlers are a very small minority who do great damage to Palestinian families in Israel. Real settlers like Israel, Gans, governor of Judea Samaria, condemn the actions of the few. Let's hope the media gives attention to this and balances their stories. So I think it was worth kind of highlight that tweet as a jumping off point because of how unbelievably wrong it is. This is not an issue of like a few bad apples in the settler community. As friend of the pod, Jasper Nathaniel wrote, the violent settlers are the tip of the spear

of the state-backed annexation process. So the settlers have backing from senior members of the Israeli military, some of whom are settlers themselves, from top political aides or top political officials like National Security Minister at Tamar Betten Gavir, who is the most kind of openly genocidal political leader is also a settler himself. Smotris is a settler. Yeah. And then on Friday, Ben, Israeli defense minister Israel Katz announced that, quote, all responsibility for enforcing civilian matters and maintaining law and order in the West Bank will be transferred to the police, which is actually a huge deal because it would constitute a big step

towards Israel annexing the West Bank. I think that might sound counterintuitive to listeners, but under international law, the occupying powers military is responsible for security in an occupy territory because that occupation is supposed to be temporary when you transition to like civilian police that's de facto applying Israeli law to occupy territories and it goes against the Oslo Accords, which say that has to be Palestinian security forces or the IDF. So Ben, I just I'll pause there because the question I have is, do you think this is exploding in advance of the election this October when everyone is kind of trying to outright wing each other? or is the story worse?

And is this kind of like the settler movement trying to complete annexation in the next two years while Trump is still president? I mean, I think it's actually both. The first thing I want to say is that I saw the Huckabee tweet. I also saw a lot of people online who are usually kind of rabid defenders of Israel, like condemning this one instance. I fucking hate that, man. Like, you're going to virtue signal. You're going to act like you're concerned about settler violence by taking the most high-profile incident that this is the most obvious. obviously bad in condemning it, but you have nothing to say about...

And it involves an American. Yeah, and it involves an American. The 1,100 people have been killed, the systematic repression of Palestinians, the systematic demolition of Palestinian homes, the systematic abuse of Palestinian prisoners. Like, you just get, you get to pop up online and see, like, see, I'm even handed. Like, I just, I have very little patience for that. We have to see that this is a systematic effort. Netanyahu spent years saying what Huckabee said in his tweet, which is it, oh, there's

some juvenile delinquents. He always uses language like that. There's just a handful of bad apples among all these other virtuous settlers as if it's not a systemic issue. The reality is the two people, they're most extreme in the Israeli government, Smotrich and Ben-Gabir, are the two people most focused on the West Bank. So Smotrich is literally the leader of the settlers, and he's the finance minister, and he's very much in charge of making sure that the people in the West Bank, the Israeli settlers get what they want. Ben Gavir is in charge of the police as a national security minister. So when this is shifted, if it shifted to the police, that's not good, that's not good, right?

And I think what people have to reckon with, including Democrats, is no, it's not like we're going to get through one election and it's just election season. These are people who believe profoundly. I mean, just calling a Judean Samara gives away the game. It's not the West Bank. It's not Palestinian land. It is ours. And they want it as soon as possible. They see a win of opportunity with Trump.

They see a win of opportunity with Netanyahu. This West Bank story is not going to go away. There's going to be more violence. And so you cannot cast this as some isolated extreme incident. This is just the one that popped up above the transom because it's an American and it was live streamed and all the rest of it. Yeah. I think we're going to return to this again soon in coming weeks. I think it's an unbelievably important story.

It's one that needs to get more focus because it is urgent. I think there's a ticking clock. here. You know, we've talked about Jasper Nathaniel's coverage over Infinite Jazz, his substack. It's really worth reading that if you want to learn more. But we'll definitely should put a button in this and come back to it soon. Last week, Ben, we talked about this Trump secret flight home from the NATO summit in Turkey, the decision to secretly use the press and his own staff as human shields and make them kind of unwitting decoys for Iranian missiles. I'd be thrilled to learn that would happen to me. After that story became public, the New York Times had to say,

amazing story with the headline for Trump's secret flight was a stunning ruse for Putin a regular Tuesday. It dug into all the ways that Putin and his paranoia and the way he uses like lies and deception and subterfuge to avoid threats, you know, sort of hide where he's located. And it was just kind of fascinating and interesting and worth kind of digging into. So a couple of great anecdotes from this story. Putin just routinely lies about when meetings took place. And so reporters have had to resort to studying plants in the background in his office to see when the leaves have wilted as kind of like rough time stamps for the meetings. I think that's fucking brilliant, by the way.

Yeah. They also look at the haircuts of the other officials in the meetings and then compare them to their other public events to like see if their hair is grown. Putin is also believed to have three identical offices at his various residences so that no one knows exactly where he is. Imagine if like, you know, Obama had an oval office in like Chicago. Right. Identical.

I guess he does now. So journalists, like, they look for little discrepancies, like the seams on a wall or like a door handle to try to like ID the room. In 2023, a member of Putin's personal security service defected gave testimony to like another, you know, country's security service and talked about what it was like to travel with Putin and set up comms for him. The AP kind of wrote up the transcripts of this. And he said that since the war in Ukraine, Putin is almost exclusively traveled by train because he doesn't like the airplanes can be tracked. He said that Putin doesn't need internet access. When he goes to places, he doesn't ever use a cell phone. He said, the quote, in all my service, I've never seen him with a mobile phone.

And quote, all the information he receives is only from people close to him. That is, he lives in a kind of information vacuum. I think that kind of tracks with what we've heard about him getting bad information, leading to bad decision making. And then finally, CNN just had a great story on Putin's personal train, which, according to leaked government documents, runs on secret tracks. There's secret stops all over the country at secret stations that can't be found on a map. And the train includes a gym and a spa, which looked pretty sick, to be honest.

So, Ben, you know, a lot of this, like, got worse during COVID and the isolation there. I think Putin made people quarantine for two weeks before meeting with him. But I can only imagine how paranoid he must be now with all these Ukrainian, like, deep strikes into Russian territory and how much worse it will get. I do think there's an opportunity for the next U.S. president, though, to bring back the white. House train, that would be sick. I'd love to write on that. It's kind of funny, but it's also kind of terrifying because when a leader is this paranoid, I mean, this doesn't give a huge vote of confidence how Putin feels about public opinion

towards himself, right? He goes a lot less places. He's never very rarely in public. It's very staged when he is. But I mean, when a leader gets more and more out of touch like this and more and more isolated and is living in this kind of alternate reality that has been wholly constructed, they do more rash things. You know, I mean, the most famous example of this, right, is Hitler in the bunker, you know, when he still believes he's commanding all these armies and he's just sitting there taking drugs

and, you know, watching everything burn above ground. And the reason I say that is because we already know from like some pretty good reporting, we'll never really know what was in Putin said, that what contributed to his decision to do the full-skill invasion of Ukraine in 2020 was in part his isolation. And people only telling what he wanted to hear, him sidelining people, told him anything different. We've talked about the concern about escalation. Like, does Putin try to do something in Europe? Does he try to do something in the politics in Moldova? God forbid it in anywhere, but also in like Poland. This kind of isolation makes that more or not less likely.

Like if you're this cut off from public opinion, you're this cut off from the consequences of your own decisions, there's no accountability loop, there's no real information getting to you. Like, that's my concern. And also by the, it points to why we're worried about Trump. I mean, I'm not saying Trump's there.

But this is why you don't even want to open the door to like catering carts to, like, once your leader can just disappear, like it opens the door to weird shit happening. I mean, you made the joke last week about like, maybe he stopped by to see Putin. I don't think he did. But the point is, is that the more, like, the president can just go off grid, like, the we're weirder shit happens.

No, it's not good. It's not, like, we can't normalize lying to the White House press pool for any reason. It's just, like, not acceptable. Also, you know, there's been a lot of coverage recently. We talked last week about these Ukrainian deep strikes on wild berries, the kind of Amazon.com of Russia. It's clear that, like, those are really having an impact. They're bringing the war home in a way that even the oil and gas strikes have.

haven't done. I didn't realize that Putin had managed to kind of reroute oil and gas flows to major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg and kind of prevent like his inner circle or kind of the elites from feeling the pinch of like waiting in four hour lines for gas or something like that. But I don't think he's been able, he can do that with the wildberries strikes. And it's like, it just, this feels very escalatory right now. And then we're about to go into another winter for the Ukrainians where I remember last year, the whole conversation was about people basically freezing to death because Putin had blown up all the energy infrastructure and people couldn't heat their homes.

So, yeah, this is just, we're just heading in a very dark place over the next year, even if the kind of Ukrainian side feels like it has got some momentum right now. Yeah. Just because they can hit stuff deep in Russia with drones doesn't mean that it can't get worse. I mean, it means it very well may get worse. Yeah. Before we take a break, as you guys probably know, in less than 80 days, voters are going to

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That's 60% off at Simplysafe.com slash crooked world. Plus, when you order, write in our show name in the How Did You Hear About Us survey to let them know we sent you. Don't forget there's no safe like Simpliave. Speaking of the kind of paranoia, Russia's parliamentary elections coming up from September 18th to the 20th. On Monday, the Supreme Court held this ruling, barring this political party, Yablakov from participating. It's like the oldest liberal party. They're openly against a war in Ukraine. They have no chance at winning.

No one thinks this will be a free and fair election. But Putin apparently got so spooked by an online campaign encouraging people to support them, vote for them as a way to like legally voice dissent. that he must have just engineered this bullshit legal takedown of this little-ass liberal political party. It doesn't suggest a confident leader. When you can tolerate, like, the most minuscule dissent, it tells you everything about how confident he is in the – I mean, I don't doubt that there's still some people that like Putin in Russia, but when people point – and this has been a hobby resource of mine for a long time, Tommy, but when people point to, like, public opinion polls in Russia, like, somebody fucking called me on the phone in Russia. I was like, do you approve

of Vladimir Putin's job as president, saying no feels like a not something I would do. Never ever. And also like when your entire, when you only consume state-run media, that's highly effective. I think I also suggest that maybe his personal popularity is higher than United Russia as like his political party. Right. He's not on the ballots, parliamentary. Also, you had highlighted this story about kind of Russian interference. And was it Belarus or Moldova? Moldova. Did you want to talk about that at all? Yeah. I mean, I thought that what was interesting about this is that, In addition to, like, this was a pretty methodically reported story and it tracks of things that, you know, I've heard.

Sure, that they were interfering in the election, you know, online and all these other ways. But they also had, like, training camps set up. In Serbia, right? In Serbia, where people were doing, like, military operations, like sabotage-type operations, training with weapons. Like, it suggested, like, an ominous risk of the kind of typical Russian interference tipping into. to violence and really trying to kind of destabilize countries. And it's the playbook that you fear. It's the playbook that they used in eastern Ukraine before the invasion that people have long thought if they did that in the Baltics or in Moldova, like things could really escalate quickly.

And so that's what called my attention is like this wasn't just like another troll farm operation. This is like their guns involved in this operation. Yeah. And it also, it just gets out a shift in tactics. which is like, you know, Russian sabotage operations don't necessarily mean sending some grizzled GRU veteran to another country to stage a thing. It's like them offering tons and tons of people in a country like Moldova money on telegram if they'll do some sort of thing, which they, you know, they disguise what it is, what the goal is, who's behind it? And all of a sudden, you know, some 17 or 8-year-old kid is like buying a quadcopter drone at Walmart and flying it at some target or taking surveillance.

Yeah. is getting arrested or implicated or does, you know, in worse, does something really bad. Well, and they also hit, like, some of the power generation that goes into Moldova, like causing blackouts. Like, they're clearly trying to destabilize the government, made the government unpopular. They can't keep the lights on. But that just speaks to this, like, slippery sloper on where, sure, first you were just had troll farms, but now we're at the point where we're like, you know, you're bombing the electricity generation for a country. And if Russia decided to do that in other parts of Europe. Like this gray space we're in between kind of asymmetric and information war and

cyber war and real war like starts, that spectrum starts to get a little hazy, you know? Yeah. By the way, have you seen these stories in photos about how all the rivers in Germany and other parts of Europe are at such low levels that they can't even fill like barges to transport goods? Yeah. I was reading the Financial Times estimated that it could, this drought, this climate change driven drought could cost like 150 billion euros. It's like staggering. It's hot. It's really fast.

And people don't want to talk about climate change. I get it. We keep hearing how people don't want to talk about it, but it's fucking hot. When things get really hot, like things like this happen. It can cause irreversible damage like nuclear power plants, not being able to operate. So the other day, Ben, two more things. So the other day, Trump made some comments about Somalia that were not necessarily surprising coming from him, but we're just like shockingly racist from a president.

of the United States. And I think the worst part was they got almost no attention or media coverage. So we just asked our team here to pull together a few examples like this, just to show how vile and frequent this shit is from Trump. Let's watch. They come from, let's say, as an example, Somalia, they're not smart. They have no aptitude. They have nothing going.

And they're telling us how to run our country. I don't want them in our country. Their country's no good for a reason. Their country stinks. It's devastated. It's crime-ridden. It's a mess. It's a disgrace. A backward country, probably the worst country. Somalia is a third world, maybe a fourth world nation. It's not even a nationist.

Just a people walking around killing each other. It's filthy, dirty, disgusting dirty. They come to our country, low IQs, and they rob us blind. $19 billion in fraud that was stolen by Somalian bandits. Can you believe that Somalian? They turned out to be higher IQ than we thought. Why is it we only take people from shithole countries? We always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right?

Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they're good at is going after ships. They come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch. We don't want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it. The evolution of it is just amazing. Remember, like, the quote-unquote shithole country is, was like a report in the Washington Post that the White House denied.

And now it's just the thing he says at rallies. You know, the racism is so open. When people look back on the Trump era, one of the things that is going to be most baffling and repugnant to people from history is the fact that we even had some kind of debate about whether Trump is a racist. It's crazy. And whether racism is central. central to the MAGA movement.

You were scolded in 2017 if you called him a racist. Yeah, you didn't understand the grievances of white working class people. Like, this is, this man has one kind of language that he uses to describe people that are black and brown. That is different from the language that he uses to describe anybody else. And he, you know, Somalia is the kind of most acute example of it, but it's how he talks about Haiti. It's how he talks about most of Africa. It's how he talks about neighborhoods in American cities that are predominantly black or brown. It's how he talks about immigrants in this country.

It is fundamental to his political identity. And the fact that it is so normalized that we've gone this far backwards over the course of this decade. I mean, this is a man who has banned all refugee admissions to the United States except white South Africans who are the, like legacy apartheid people. You get like a white nationalist welcome kit. Yeah. I mean. It's like a whitewashed literally like history of our founding.

Yeah. And what does he know about Somalia? Like does he know any Somali people? And what, it is an odd fixation actually. And bear in mind that we're committing violence there. Trump has ramped up drone strikes there. Nobody talks about that. It's just normalized that we just kill people occasionally there.

And, and then Trump, you know, runs down their country. Is this because he doesn't like Ilhan Omar? It feels like that's the most of it. Which is bizarre. Like there's a single member of Congress who happens to have origins. And by the way, the people he's talking about who are refugees have been through so much more than he's ever been through in his life. And most of them are just people that want to be safe somewhere.

Yeah. Look, she's black. She wears a headscarf. She's Muslim. So he views her as like an easy political target. You know, he's just like the most nakedly racist. Yeah. I do just hate how like the backlash to wokeism.

has kind of smokescreened some of this stuff. And I think now we're living with the discomfort of like, wait a second. It's like we were saying at the very beginning of the show about the trans woman. Like, can we talk about this again? Like we don't have to make the culture wars the leading political argument we make. But it's going to look a little strange that like this man just says these things on the regular. And it's like we all decided we, you know. I think it's important and good to like call him out when he's racist.

just call out the lack of human decency, the treatment of individuals. And that's why the story we talked about at the top, the Atlantic piece by Julia Curley, are so important because it's a human being. It's like she puts an identity in a human face and a human story on the impact of these bigoted policies. Yeah.

And there's a way to do it. I mean, can I very quick detour? Because I know you like Rob Sand. Governor Kennedy in Iowa looks peculiarly like you. Yeah, I've been separated for it. But I went to a few town halls, wrote about them through New York Times. And it was funny, somebody raised this in a question. They said, can we just get back to being a state where we treat people nicely?

And I don't care what color there. I don't care like where they came from. It was like a very powerful, simple Iowa statement. And I thought one of the things that Rob Sand did that was so interesting was he did, you know, validate this woman's concern. People are here playing by the rules. we should give him a chance. But he cited Bob Ray, who was a Republican governor of Iowa, who was very conservative on some things, but very pro-refugee.

And there are these refugee communities in Iowa that did have done incredibly well. And he's like, remember Bob Ray? Like, remember we didn't have to like use these issues to divide each other? You just had a Republican governor who was like a decent guy. Like you got to find ways to appeal to people like, do you want this? Like you can have a lot of things that I disagree with and not do this. this. There's a way to kind of avoid the culture war while still making that fundamental appeal to decency. And I thought Rob said that pretty well. That's good. Finally, Ben, every new world

leader makes a couple of rookie mistakes. You usually just chalk it up to inexperience. British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, had his own little, you know, welcome to the NFL moment after Politico reported that he had been exchanging text messages with someone that he thought was a White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Spoiler alert. it was not. Burnham says he figured out that something was off pretty quickly and that it was a quote minimal exchange of information of zero consequence and then he like reported it up the chain immediately. But it seems like this incident spooks number 10. And it was also not the first time someone had like gotten Susie Wiles's phone book and it had been impersonating her to people.

The Guardian then reported that at least three UK cabinet ministers have had their mobile numbers published online. And it's also just worth noting that this is hardly the first time we've seen a politician kind of tricked like this into having a conversation with someone that said they were someone else. In 2024, then Foreign Secretary David Cameron did a video call with someone pretending to be former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko. It was not. In 2018, Boris Johnson, British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson spoke over the phone for 18 minutes with someone pretending to be the Armenian Prime Minister. And then in 2022, these two Russian, like they call themselves professional prank callers, but they seem to have some ties to the government. They got the British

Defense Secretary Ben Wallace on a video call, and they tried to bait him into saying some very damaging things. Here is part of a clip that they released. We would like to continue the nuclear program in order to protect ourselves from Russia. It's a difficult question, but we think to start it. Okay. But do you think, I mean, I think more than being, neutral Russia would really hate that. For sure, we are, we know this, of course, but it's one of the question that we're interested. Clearly, trying to get him bait him into being like, yeah, yeah, yeah, get a nuke, no big deal. For what it's worth, you know, the British government said at the time that the video had

been doctored when it was released, I'm sure it was. So, Ben, like, the easy fix here is for Andy Burnham, just not to do any more official business on his personal phone. Have that for family, have that for friends only, if that route everything else through the number 10 switchboard, even though sometimes they get got, but at least then you can blame someone else. But can you imagine how much worse this shit is going to get with AI, making easy to generate, like, realistic video and just clone all of our voices. Like, we're screwed. Yeah, Andy Burnham getting calls from some scammers saying, like, you know, we have your friend or something. Right.

I will say, by the way, just first of all, Andy Burnham has delivered as a much better political community. communicator than Kier Starrmer, just kind of watching it. Like, jury's still out. We'll see how he does policy-wise. But, like, he's raised the bar. Look, just get rid of the personal cell phone, though. We went through this. Obama didn't want to get rid of his Blackberry famously. He was allowed to keep one, but they went to these extraordinary lengths where he had, like, a fake name,

and only a certain list of people were allowed to be in communication with him. Like, you can allow a political leader to have some capacity to be in personal communication. with both staff and friends without just like keeping your cell phone, you know, and like your WhatsApp number that is easily taken from you. I will say my favorite ex-British Prime Minister's story of the week, Tommy,

was the video of Boris Johnson singing Pink Pony Club. I don't know if you saw this? No. Pink Pony Club. West Hollywood. What is that from? This is an Instagram that was posted by Boris Johnson's wife. Is he doing cameo now?

Yeah. Well, as someone who had a lot of Chaparone in my house because I've got two girls, you know, you watch an artist grow through that cycle where they're the cool, new outsider to, like, world famous superstar to like, it's not good if Boris Johnson singing your song. No, you don't want that. So Chappelroen's going to have to, like, come up with some new, you know, more counterfeit. or cultural material. That's a good one to denounce Chapel Rhone. You can talk shit about Borchonton.

He doesn't even know the words, though. So maybe you got that. He doesn't really know the words at all, does he? He just knows pink-poly-court. Yeah, and West Hollywood. Right here. We're right here. Yeah, we're here.

Shout out to Count Binface for giving it the old college tribe against Nigel Farage. Yeah, he's got like 10,000 votes or something. I'm a little sad. I DM'd Count Binface a long time ago to say, like, are you doing any intergalactic media outside of the UK and I never got a response.

How do you feel about in your, you know, a 40s DMing a man who won't run a trash can on his head? Surprisingly good about it. I would do the same thing. So I'm in the exact same boat. It's just less a commentary on you and more commentary on how politics has changed. That's true. Because if someone told you like, hey, like, you know where politics in the world are going to be in 2026? We're all going to really want to talk to a guy who has a garbage can on his head because he's running against Nigel Farage, who will no longer be a marginal figure.

he'll be like a likely future prime minister of the UK. That's where we're at. Good stuff, everybody. And Boris Johnson's singing Pink Pony Club. And we got Donald Trump as president. Yeah, well, yeah, the biggest glass house in the world. We know of people. All right.

We are going to take a quick break. But when we come back, you're going to hear my interview about the horrible conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is this aircraft carrier that's been deployed at seas for like 265 days because of the war with Iran. So stick around for that. Positive of the World is brought to you by Quo. Mist calls and slow follow-ups are silent. business killers and one of the easiest ways to leave money on the table. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled QUO, the business communication system built so you never

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My guest today is an independent journalist, entrepreneur, and Navy veteran who covers the military defense policy and veterans affairs. Natalie Oliverio, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. You wrote an article for the Military Times last week where you revealed some very disturbing details about conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. which is the aircraft carrier that's been stationed in the Middle East for a very long time. Can you walk listeners through who maybe didn't read the story, like what the conditions were,

what these families were concerned about? So the biggest concern were mental health concerns. We have heard reports of several family members telling us about their service member, struggling to the point beyond their breaking point. One sailor was reported to have jumped off the flight deck with a life vest on, And about an hour later was recovered and it was designated by the Navy as a cry for help, a mental health issue, right? Not a suicide attempt. There are other reporting firsthand from service members who, one, had a spouse attempt to go overboard.

And two, had a spouse that was one of the people on watch who stopped to pull this individual back towards the deck. That God. I mean, can you survive a fall off the? an aircraft carrier like that? How tall are these things? You can. I would say the flight deck's probably like 60 feet off the water. If they were climbing to the top of the mast, maybe like 200 feet. Yeah. But I mean, I've only been on a guided missile destroyer personally, and I have jumped off on swim call. And yeah, you can absolutely survive that jump. It's the, it's what happens after. It's being left in the middle of the ocean, potentially in the dark, and all the dangers that exist with that.

Yeah. What happens when an aircraft carrier can't get to port for, I believe, it was 200 days is the latest stat with the Lincoln. What maintenance is not happening? What does the impact on, you know, military readiness and just quality of life for the individuals on that ship? Yeah, it's actually, it's close to 260 days. Wow. It's getting further and further. And so the biggest supply is food, right? So the photos that have been all. over the internet and social media of the food, like the mystery gray meat. This is not new news. This has been reported the USA Today broke it in April. And they were showing, you know, strange mystery meat, boiled carrots, strange food items that you would not expect to see. We saw reports of sailors saying they hadn't had milk in three months. They were eating dry cereal for breakfast.

to the naked ear, maybe that doesn't sound like that big of a deal, but we're not talking about one bad day at sea. We're talking about extensive strain and over extension and pressure under load over time, day after day after day. And a lot of people don't know that junior enlisted sailors cannot even go topside on an aircraft carrier. So there is a large population on that ship who have not even seen the sky. They literally have not gone outside in months? Months. Jesus.

Months. I mean, the mental toll on the healthiest, most fit for duty, always ready shipmate, it doesn't matter who you are. On a human level, you need food, you need rest, you need your basic needs met in order to be fit for duty, no matter who you are. And I've heard, you know, people who have served on aircraft carriers talk about hearing loss associated with, you know, if you're on the runway and, you know, planes are taking off around you all the time. It's obviously incredibly loud and can damage your hearing. There's real concern about exhaustion and lack of sleep and what that does to your sort of mental awareness and capacity to react to events. Can you just talk about the risk and the dangers involved in these jobs on a good day and the way they are, um, magnetism? with the deployment of this length? If you can imagine an air traffic controller who hadn't slept more than six to eight hours

between drills, between your workday, between any watches that you're standing, any other ancillary responsibilities or collateral duties, there are only so many hours in the day. So you're stretched. And the last thing you're going to get is sleep, let alone peaceful sleep. You don't just knock off to your rack and let the, you know, the water hit against the ship and go to sweet dreams situations. You're worried about what's happening when you close your eyes. This is a combat zone. This is an active deployment.

And so that fear of uncertainty is already hard enough. Add on mental load, brain fog, lack of nourishment. I mean, it is hard to put yourself in those shoes. And we tend to look away from what's difficult and we don't understand. We don't know how to console military families. We don't know how to offer them anything right now. And so the pain is still there and the suffering is still there. Regardless of how resilient our sailors and our military are, there is real suffering on the other side.

The Navy's ability to resupply the Lincoln and other ships in the region has been greatly impacted by Iranian attacks. on the U.S. base in Manama, Bahrain. Can you talk to listeners about what it means when you lose a logistics hub like the Navy lost in Bahrain and just sort of the impact on the ability to conduct the mission? Absolutely. Losing that supply hub in Bahrain was essentially losing the most important resource for that strike group. So now they have to travel five days each way.

out of their way to get some of the same supplies. That's a 10-day round-trip effort now, because our headquarters of Fifth Fleet is not that supply hub anymore. Secretary Hex-F and the Secretary of the Navy, they denied your reporting. And then President Trump had this to say, let's watch a clip.

The Lincoln has been out there for a period of time, good period of time, but over the years, we've had them out there much longer. I was at a group meeting and an admiral came up to see me over the weekend. And it was at a big group and he happened to be an admiral retired. He said, I've been on ships. They're out there much longer than that, sir. And I know people on the Lincoln, they say it's beautifully maintained and beautifully taken care of.

And other people went out and they found out to be true. It was fake news reporting from CNN. So I'm just wondering what your response is to those comments just on a factual basis. And whether you've heard from any military families about how they, feel about hearing your reports denied or President Trump suggests like actually everything's great. Yeah, it's unfortunate and really sad for a lot of these military families. They're sad when they hear this because this is not just the president, Donald Trump. This is our commander and chief, the man in charge of these beloved service members. And when you're a family member, you don't get a

handbook on how to deal with this. You don't get a class, a master class on how to survive deployment at home and how to mitigate all the things you feel when you hear things in the media and you see things you know are true from your service member, someone you know, or your trusted resource. It is scary. One military spouse told me that it is infuriating to hear the commander and chiefs speak this way when her husband is literally suffering on a floating metal prison. That is how one spouse feels. So for that spouse to hear, they're fine. They've been out much longer. It's a beautiful ship and it is a beautiful ship. Here's the thing. If he's talking about shifts that have been out there much longer, pretty sure he can only be referring to the USS Gerald

R. Ford, which just completed an actual historic deployment, breaking a record that was Vietnam era. So, and between Vietnam and May 26, the longest carrier deployment record was broken by 326 days on the USS Gerald R. Ford. So I'm confused by that statement. I know our families are too. And to have that kind of brush off that, well, I talk to so-and-so who knows more than these families know, and to be said that these families should be told

that they're not really suffering. They're not concerned. It's really hurtful to them. And we already ask a great deal of our military family. his hair at home. And it's sad to see leadership not supporting them. Yeah. And the Ford, I believe, famously had some real issues, including the toilets not working and some nasty stuff going on. And also, if Trump is talking to, you know, a retired admiral, I'm guessing that individual is more likely to have contacts in the upper echelon in the higher ranks of the Navy and not talking

to the grunts who, as you mentioned earlier, are trapped below deck for months and months at a time. in sort of nightmarish conditions with moldy toilets and showers and disgusting food and, you know, all the worst things that you've been reporting out. You referenced earlier these reports that the Navy is sending a carrier from Japan to the Middle East. This is the USS George Washington with the, you know, sort of stipulation that maybe that could be wrong. That carrier is normally positioned in Asia in case that that that happens, let's say China makes a move on Taiwan or the North Koreans do something stupid.

What's the impact on military capacity and readiness when you, you move that carrier from Japan to the Middle East? So, number one, the South China Sea is unattended to right now. Our Western Pacific Command has literally set off of the Middle East. With that command, there is a whole battle group in tow. One of those ships is the USS Benfold, which at the end of July, just a couple of weeks ago, was left powerless for four days in the water. and they are directly supported by the George Washington carrier.

So without the carrier there, they have lost their biggest resource, right? If case that happened again, they were towed into Subic Bay in the Philippines, and they also went to Yakuska, Japan, and now they're back out. So the problem has been remedied, but we're talking about four days. Just a drift? A drift in the water, right? So just that alone. I mean, imagine, we're talking about.

a guided missile destroyer, maybe 330 to 350 people. You've got like two female birthings, maybe three or four male birthings, and that's below decks because the war rooms are on the higher, on the higher parts of the ship. So I really can't imagine just those conditions alone. And that's not even mission oriented to the consequences that we could potentially be facing by making this kind of reroute. Yeah, that is terrible. The United States, is 11 aircraft carriers total, but they require serious maintenance. It can put some out of commission for a very long time, especially if, you know, the fuel rods have to be replaced. We're talking about, you know, nuclear energy. What is the status of the fleet right now? And what do these long,

kind of grueling missions do to the Navy's capacity to deploy these aircraft carriers in places where we need them? That's a really good question. And it goes along with a part of what we were talking about earlier. So the Navy's own optimized fleet response plan lays out a life cycle of 36 months. That includes maintenance, workups, training, and it allots for eight month slot of time for deployment. That's one deployment every 36 months. Okay. So you can already see immediately where the gaps are in that plan. So I'm, I've not seen anything. pointing to some kind of an update or newer guidance, I'm seeing our own processes not followed. Trump reportedly ordered the Navy to go back to steam catapults to launch these aircraft instead of the magnet-based systems.

That will cost billions of dollars to change. He's also reportedly wants to change the design of the aircraft carriers. So the command center has moved to the center of the ship. I think that's purely for aesthetic reasons. he wants it to look like older models. What is the impact of this kind of meddling? And I'm old enough to remember when Barack Obama was criticized for kind of micromanaging the Pentagon. This feels like micromanaging on a scale that would not go over very well within the Navy,

but correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think you're wrong at all. I question, is this the best use of our funds? Because we're having trouble paying for our current veterans, our current service members, who are about to become veterans and the future service members who will be our future veterans. We're not we're not balancing that that checkbook, right? So that's kind of a cost. I'm not sure what the end goal is. I haven't done enough research or seen enough reporting on the value of steam versus our current fleet plan. So it's interesting, but I don't think that from what I know in the Navy,

think that they're very supportive of that idea. I'm guessing you've done more research into the actual value of steam over magnets than the president has in this instance. Natalie, where can folks find your work, follow you, get more of your reporting? Absolutely. I am a Pentagon correspondent at military times, so they can find my work there. I'm also independent journalist for the Warhorse News. And so we stand by the stories that we tell, the reporting that we do. It means a lot to the readers and the viewers, and we take that very seriously. Well, thank you very much for telling these stories.

I know it's probably very hard and scary for these family members to come forward and talk about what their loved ones are experiencing. I mean, I worry that they could be afraid of their retaliation or punishment in some sense, but it takes a lot of courage. And I think it does really suggest how dire the situation is that they would even do this to begin with. So thank you for your work. Absolutely.

Thanks for having me. Thanks to Natalie Oliverio for joining the show. and thanks you all for listening. And, you know, if you're still listening, subscribe, download, refresh, follow. Like, five stars, reviews, all that stuff. We love you. Thank you. Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production.

Our show is produced by Alona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Bonnergy. Our team includes Matt DeGrope, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffitt, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.