Pod Save the World - War in Venezuela and Al Qaeda 17 years after 9/11

Episode Date: September 12, 2018

Tommy talks with new LA resident Ben Rhodes about the bizarre Trump NSC memo naming him leader of the Echo Chamber, the state of al Qaeda and the war in Afghanistan, talk of war in Venezuela and weird old John Bolton.

This is a very special Pod Save the World episode for me because the Echo Chamber has officially moved west. Ben Rhodes, now a Los Angeles resident, is sitting in studio at Crooked Media, Global HQ, Ben. Yes. It's so great to actually see your face when we're talking. Yeah, the entire infrastructure of the Echo Chambers now here. The entire. In my iPhone. Now, let's explain to people for one second what the hell I'm talking about.

There was a New Yorker story, which we briefly mentioned on Pod Save America, that talked about our Trump's national security staff. actually circulated a memo that was written like an assessment of a foreign insurgent network. But it was about us. You are running the echo chamber along with Colin Kahl, who is Biden's national security advisor. But the broader network included me, Fyfer, Favreau, some others. Lovett was a little upset. He was left out. We won't get into that. What did you make of this stupid memo? Well, you know, there were a couple of strange things about it. Yeah, described Colin as the operations chief, like kind of like Al Qaeda's number three, like the guy who keeps getting whacked.

I think what was weird about it is, first, they really did write about us as if we were Al Qaeda. And so people who should be spending their time at work, like thinking about- Like writing about Al-Qaeda. Yeah, writing about Al-Qaeda are going and thinking about us. And the mindset is that we really are an enemy of the state, just like the media is to Trump. I should know, yeah, we're recording this on 9-11. Like, they really should be thinking and writing about Al-Qaeda.

the national security stuff. Yeah, they should not be viewing people who are basically just expressing opposition to Trump as an enemy. The other thing that was strange in reading it is they wrote it, they seemed to believe this. You know, like they seem to actually believe that, you know, there's a constant plot to, you know, kind of overthrow or undermine the government when really it's just people expressing opposition to Trump's policies. And it just shows you how deeply embedded the kind of conspiracy theory mindset is in the White House. And that's very, people should understand, like, that's very abnormal. You know, we had lots of critics.

We didn't sit around in national security meetings and write memos, you know, viewing Breitbart as, like, the enemy of the state, you know, aiming to overthrow the government. Though I'll say personally, your listeners may not remember the Black Cube thing where there was a bunch of Israeli former Mossad guys hired to dig up dirt on me and Colin Kahl and our families and they contacted our wives. What was striking to me is that this memo mirrored exactly what came out in that Black Kube thing, me and Colin as the leaders of some echo chamber aiming to undermine Trump. So to me, the forensics are pretty obvious that this memo was kind of the point of origin of whatever effort ultimately led to that. And similarly, as with so many things we see

today, the idea of hiring, you know, foreign spies to essentially undermine your political opponents in the United States, that's not normal. And it speaks to, again, an administration, a White House that, you know, is so profoundly outside of what people should expect in our country, in our democracy, they see legitimate dissent as intolerable. They see the media as intolerable. And they're essentially, even though they're inside the most powerful building an institution in the world, you know, they still feel like they have this conspiracy theory-minded chip on their shoulder. Yeah. I mean, right, it seems clear to me a couple of things. I don't know this for sure, but it seems clear to me that Seb Gorka had a hand in writing this memo. And you made the point

on our ongoing text chain that he had literally nothing else to do. because he had a security clearance. The guy couldn't get a clearance. He's sitting around thinking about us. He couldn't go to meetings. So he was reading our tweets. And the memo said, like, these are the people who, you know, attacked Seb Gorka for being an anti-Semite because, like, I retweeted a forward article

about how he belonged to an asemitic organization. I mean, just the self-absorption to see everything through a prism of how it affects yourself when you're supposed to, again, be in a job where you're looking out for the whole country, you know, is deeply, deeply strengthened. range. Yeah. So there's that weird part. I mean, there's the very strong likelihood that this a national security staff product was fed to a shadowy group of former intelligence operatives. I mean, is there a precedent for something like that? Are there implications that you think people should understand of how kind of serious that actually is? We want to make fun of it because it sucks.

Yeah. I mean, it led clearly to a bunch of stuff. I mean, people may remember the Devin Nunez stunt, right? Where he claimed that he had. had this information that Susan Rice and I were unmasking Trump officials, and it turns out I didn't unmask anybody. But it led to all of this effort to throw up, you know, dust to say, you know, Obama wiretap Trump Tower. The reality is this is not how the U.S. government should function. And the reason it should be concerning, you know, number one, it sends a pretty chilling message. It's the same thing of yanking Brennan's security clearance to people

in the government, right, who are not like us, who are actually, you know, career people, foreign service, people, intelligence analysts, you know, that if you deviate from, you know, some, you know, fielty to Trump, you might be punished. You know, there might be foreign spies

hired to dig up dirt on you. If you wrote this op-ed, God knows what apparatus of the intelligence community is going to come after you. They're threatening them at the podium. Exactly. And that is what authoritarian governments do. You know, they come into power and they purge their enemies, they punish their enemies, they harass their enemies. That's what's unprecedented here, is that it will potentially have a chilling effect on the advice that comes to Trump, people's willingness to

speak truth to power inside of government, the ability of Congress to conduct oversight because the Republicans have essentially signed on to this project. So it leads to, you know, really a lack of accountability inside of the government and frankly a chilling effect on the ability of people to raise their voices in opposition to what the government is doing. Yeah. Weird article. Okay, so like I said, today's the anniversary of 9-11 will release this on September 12th. Over the weekend, the Los Angeles Times had a story where they assessed 17 years after 9-11 attacks, what is the strength of al-Qaeda? And they suggested that al-Qaeda might actually be stronger than ever. I wondered what your take on that was if you saw that piece? Yeah, I saw it. I mean, I don't think that's right,

because you have to separate out two things here. How much is there support for extremism and violent extremism as practiced by al-Qaeda in different parts of the world? But also, how capable is this terrorist network of carrying out an attack? You know, I worked with the 9-11 commission. The hijackers were highly trained individuals who spent years designed that attack, learning how to fly planes, learning the vulnerabilities in our aviation system so they could bring box cutters onto those planes, picking the targets of the World Trade Center in the Pentagon. They were able to do that because they weren't under pressure. They could just sit there in Pakistan in different parts of the world in cells that they had in places like Germany

and plan this catastrophic attack. That capability does not exist anymore. Those kind of seasoned terrorists who have time and space to exploit open societies, they're under a lot of pressure. So, yes, while there may be a lot of support for the vision of al-Qaeda or ISIS in different parts of the Muslim world, there's not that type of network that has the time and space and frankly freedom of movement and action to plan another 9-11 style attack. Right. The piece had some graphics where they estimated the number of al-Qaeda fighters. affiliates in countries like Syria and Yemen and Libya and Somalia. And to me the common thread there was like these are failed states.

There's no governance. There's no jobs. There's no infrastructure. There's no army necessarily in some of the places. I mean, Yemen is an interesting example because they're getting bombed constantly, right? Like there's kinetic attacks all day, every day with horrific results? Is there a lesson that we should learn from that map about reorienting counterterrorism policy towards diplomacy and development and not just like bombing the shit out of a

country like Yemen? Yeah, look, I think the really difficult thing for Americans to recognize is that we got the response to 9-11 in a lot of ways wrong. Yeah. You know, it was wrong to obviously invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9-11 and essentially, you know, blow up and open up the Pandora's box of sectarian conflict in the heart of the Middle East. I think it's wrong that we're still in Afghanistan fighting a war almost 20 years after 9-11. We did some things right in getting better at hardening our defenses and going after in a pinpoint way terrorist networks. But it's notable that we have kept the threat away from 9-11-style attacks in the United States, but we've also contributed to the breaking apart of these states.

And the military effort in Yemen being led by our so-called ally, Saudi Arabia, is a case in point. Like, where is that leading? It's not leading anywhere other than to further breaking. apart that country, potentially radicalizing people, creating openings for extremists. And so I think at some point we have to make a pivot away from this kind of permanent war across the Middle East and parts of North Africa towards more diplomatic approaches. Because if we're essentially moving from one war to the next and breaking apart, you know, any capacity of these states to govern themselves, either because of what we're doing or because

of what Saudi Arabia is doing. Ultimately, you're going to have this constant festering soar of failed states and ungoverned spaces where, yes, it may be hard for a terrorist organization to kind of just hole up and plan a 9-11 attack for a couple of years, but there's going to be fighting, there's going to be radicalization, there's going to be ISIS-type attacks and places like Europe where individuals who are angry about what's happening in the Middle East commit acts of violence. So I think that, you know, task for the next Democratic Congress, next Democratic president is going to be how do we definitively end these wars and pivot to a more diplomatic approach coupled with some counterterrorism capabilities.

Obama moved us in that direction by bringing home well over 100,000 troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we didn't get all the way there. Yeah. I want to ask you a little more about Afghanistan in a second. But before we go to that question, I mean, drones, you can't talk about counterterrorism without drones. And I read a lot these days, sort of just stated as a fact that drone strikes create more terrorists than they take off the battlefield. And at this point, it's been, what, five years since I've seen any intelligence on this stuff. So I don't really know the answer. But what's your take on that assertion?

I think that there's something to it. You know, anybody can say with certainty that this, you know, cause had this effect in terms of a drone strike, it's a hard thing to measure. Here's what I do know, though, is that drones were a useful tool in taking out, like I said, kind of irreplaceable leaders of al-Qaeda, like people who had certain skills, right? They knew how to make bombs or they had contacts around the world or they were financiers of terrorism. My worry is once the U.S. government has a capability like drones, they don't like to give them up. And they can always find a reason, well, there's a threat from this place. And so if we don't take these drone strikes, there's going to be a threat.

and we can't live with that threat. And my concern is, what is the plan to phase these out? Do we need to be taking, you know, how do we separate out extremists who really do merit a potential drone strike from just these seem like bad guys, so let's take them out? Because I think where you do have a problem is, you know, take a country like Pakistan, you know, we're in this constant situation where, you know, we're potentially taking actions inside of Pakistan that the local population doesn't like, and it seems to never end. And Pakistan continues to have radicalization in large parts of the country, continues to have

a government that cannot really appear to be working closely with us because the public in Pakistan is so angry about drone strikes. You know, that's not sustainable over time. And so in these places like Pakistan and Yemen, where there has been a lot of U.S. counterterrorism activity, I do think over time there needs to be planned to say, we're willing to to live with a certain amount of risk here because continuing to take drone strikes is going to continue to turn the local population against us. And at what point is the value of taking out some extremist outweighed by the fact that, you know, it's not a sustainable model of security

to constantly have a foreign government, the United States, you know, taking military action to kill people in these countries. Yeah, you're talking about the point in which smart counterterrorism policy intersects with stupid politics in our country. And boy, is that a fucking And, you know, you sat in the White House. It's tough, right? Because, you know, people come to you and they say, well, if you don't do something, there could be an attack. Right. And once somebody says that to you, it's like CYA is scary. You know, you're thinking, well, I'll be responsible if there's an attack. And someday someone will sit in a congressional hearing and say, well, they were warned that if we don't take this strike in Yemen, you know, something bad could happen. And so there's always a reason to bomb some other country. But at a certain point, we have to say it's time to rethink that approach. Yeah. So right after 9-11, 9-11 attacks, we invaded Afghanistan. We're looking for bin Laden. We're trying to dismantle the al-Qaeda network. And we have been there ever since.

Yeah. 2,200 Americans have been killed. We spent more than $840 billion with a B fighting the Taliban and paying for relief and reconstruction, which the New York Times noted is more expensive in current dollars than the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe after World War II. When you look at those numbers and that time frame, on balance, was this worth it? Were we wrong to surge troops in 2009 and refocus on Afghanistan? Or was it kind of broken at that point?

I think, look, first of all, we should be out of Afghanistan. I think this should be a priority for Democrats if they take back Congress. I'd like to see Democratic candidates for president saying we should be out of Afghanistan. And I look at this way. I was in New York on 9-11. I saw the World Trade Center get attacked. I saw the first tower fall. And, you know, I wanted to go get the people who did this.

Yeah. If somebody had said to me this kind of angry. 24-year-old kid walking around the streets in New York on that day, worried about whether I knew anybody was killed, hey, we're going to go in Afghanistan, and we're going to topple the Taliban, and we're going to take out Osama and Laden, and we're going to take out essentially all the people responsible for this. I'd say, okay, that sounds good. If they said, oh, and by the way, we're also going to still be in Afghanistan 17 years from now, trying to prop up a government, fighting constant insurgency and spending a trillion dollars, I think, well, that makes no sense.

I don't think anybody in the United States would have thought that that made sense. And at a certain point, you have to say, we've accomplished the objective that we went there for. We took out the people who did this. We delivered justice to bin Laden. We took out the Taliban. And now it's time to leave. And again, there's the same problem where they'll say, well, if we leave, the Taliban could come back and take over parts of the country. They already have.

Like us being there is not a stabilizing presence. It just is feeding this perpetual insurgency, this perpetual war there. And us staying is not accomplishing the thing that people say will. And so I think we were wrong in, I don't think we were wrong to surge some forces there and to go after Al Qaeda. I think we were wrong in not being clear at defining the acceptable endpoint at which point we could get out. Right. Because there were always, you know, the Taliban, they're just people who live there. I mean, you talked about assessments of numbers.

Every year, they'd say, well, the Taliban is like 20 or 30,000 fighters. We were killing like 10,000 people, probably more than that each year. I don't know the exact number. Clearly, but that number never changed. No, it's always a stalemate. It's always a stalemate. And the fact is that these are tribal networks of people who live in Afghanistan and are going to be fighting to control the areas where they live.

The Taliban is not tried to conduct attacks against the United States like al-Qaeda is. So it's not our job to eradicate the Taliban. And we're not going to do it and we shouldn't try to do it. Yeah. A potentially even crazier idea for a war that is being floated currently. We know from leaks. We know from Bob Woodward's book. We know from Trump's own public statements that he is seriously talking to his national security team about invading Venezuela.

And in fact, had to be talked out of it if you believe some of the reports. Now, it's a level set of Venezuela. It is a humanitarian disaster. People are starving. Hospitals have literally no supplies to use to treat their patients. there is the potential for a massive refugee crisis in South America. So this is like a huge, huge serious problem. But what do you make of these ideas for a military option for Venezuela?

Like even I think Marco Rubio seems to be seriously considering this. I think it's totally insane. Venezuela, I mean, first of all, you have to, Nicholas Maduro, who is the president of Venezuela, is your kind of classic Latin American leftist. you know, revolutionary ideology guy, right? And what he depends upon is the United States as a foil, you know? In other words, you know, he is constantly telling people that he has to stay in charge because otherwise the United States will come in and they will depose his government and put in some with echoes of, you know, coups that we've sponsored in the past in Latin America, you know,

that's his legitimacy. And so any time that we are seen as plotting a coup to overthrow Maduro, or to invade Venezuela, it is fueling his capacity to rally some modicum of support because he's saying, I'm the one standing up to the United States. And so we're giving him oxygen. We're giving him what he wants, which is some legitimacy to stand up to the United States. And what we need to do, what we should be doing is diplomatically working with other countries in Latin America, with all the different factions in Venezuela to say there needs to be a way out of this crisis. There needs to be some kind of unity government that can come together, There needs to be some way to get foreign assistance into the country to deal with the humanitarian crisis.

Frankly, how are we going to get foreign assistance in the country if we're also saying we're going to invade the country? That's not going to work, right? And by the way, the consequences of this could be, yeah, like a Syrian refugee crisis, something of that scale in America's, right? Millions of people. People coming to Colombia, people trying to get up to the United States. And so we should be focused on this diplomatically. Militarily, how is this going to work to invade Venezuela? It's a large country.

There are people who will resist us. we will have no legitimacy for it, no support for it in Latin America from neighboring countries. We'd be totally isolated. I mean, it's a completely crazy idea. Frankly, I worry that when Trump is looking for some type of distraction, something to do, that they might actually seriously consider this. Yes. In compounding the problem, the New York Times reported over the weekend that the Trump administration

held secret talks with Venezuela and military leaders to discuss a plan to overthrow Maduro. So exactly the thing you're talking about him being paranoid about. is actually being discussed. I mean, like, I looked at that report, and I thought they are crazy for even taking that meeting because, of course, it was going to leak. But what did you make of that? And do you think is it legal for us to have those or participate in such a plan? No.

I mean, you know, and we had gotten out of the business of sponsoring coups in Latin America, you know, a long time ago, decades ago. I mean, there's not a good history of it. No. From Chile to, you know, Cuba, of course. The other thing is, here's what would happen. I mean, just even if you take it at face value, if there's some coup that the U.S. has its fingerprints on, there will be massive street fighting in Caracas and across Venezuela.

So the violence will just get compounded. We will be universally condemned around the world. So we'll have no political or diplomatic support for this. Venezuela will be this failed state where the violence will, you know, probably just get worse. And the migration folks will just get worse. And what's the plan after that? So it just doesn't make sense. And again, there's not a legal basis for the United States to support, you know, the undemocratic removal of even an odious guy.

Let's be clear. Maduro is a terrible guy, you know, but you'd like to see him removed through some political process inside of the country, you know, leading to an election, not through some foreign intervention in cahoots with a faction of the Venezuelan military. Yeah. It's a ticking time bomb. It is. People should watch this thing, though. I mean, because it's got all the hallmarks. They might be thinking the Trump White House, you know, this is closer to home.

Maybe it's not as complicated as going to the Middle East. There's some, you know, hardline political support for it in Florida. You know, maybe Rubio can get on board. So it's not beyond the realm of the possible, but what are we going to end up doing if we're, you know, responsible for essentially a complete failed state in one of the largest countries in Latin America. Yeah. This is a kind of idea that if it got serious where people should take to the streets again and go another women's March style protest. Switching gears a little bit.

There are a lot of challenges in the world right now. We talked about terrorists. We talked about North Korea's talks appear to be falling apart. What is Trump's team talking about his national security advisor? John Bolton went out yesterday and gave his speech attacking the international criminal court, otherwise known as the ICC. That choice was confusing for me. Can we start with the basics?

Can you talk a little bit about what the ICC does and why the United States has historically had an arm's-length relationship with it as an entity? Yeah. So the ICC is set up to enforce, you know, international justice. It's generally been used to prosecute war criminals, right? So Slobod on Milosevic, the Serbian, you know, war criminal is the most high-profile guy who's prosecuted. It should serve as a tool that the international community has to say, if we see war crimes

developing, people can be held accountable through the ICC. Frankly, even though the U.S. isn't party to it, which I'll get to in second, we've used it in the past to say it's a threat to a guy like Gaddafi, for instance. Once the ICC opens up an investigation, you know, it's a message to the people in that country that this guy is a war criminal. Or in parts of Africa, you know, it's been used to signal when ethnic violence starts. If you keep going down this road, you're going to face international justice and that's going to make it very hard for you to have any maneuvering room. The U.S. has resists. joining it all the way back to the origins of it in the 90s because of some concerns that our troops could potentially be prosecuted because the U.S., unlike most every other country in the world, has a lot of troops deployed in a lot of places, and, you know, we're sovereignty-conscious and particularly the right wing does not believe that, you know, we should risk the possibility that U.S. troops could be convicted in the ICC. Or, for instance, people like Henry Kissinger, you know, could be held accountable for their work on.

It's forbidden, right? I mean, let's face it. Can I tell you a little funny, sorry about that? So right after Obama was elected, between when he was elected, I think this was to the U.S. Senate. I can't remember if it was a senator-president. He went to a dinner at George Will's house with, like, George Will and some D.C. Mukty-Mucks. It shows you how long ago 2008 was.

I know. Like, my brain is just like, they can barely remember these things. He was chatting with George Will's kid, who was, I think, doing, like, you know, mock debate or debate prep or whatever that you do in high school. And the question he asked President Obama, then Senator Obama, was about the U.S. membership in the ICC. So it was clearly in that zeitgeist. Anyway, sorry. I think, you know, the point is that, look, Trump has managed to attract the very worst people, you know, promised the very best, but the people who have kind of both been willing to check their principles at the door and accept White House jobs.

John Bolton. You know, it's the third or fourth tier of people. And you take a guy like Bolton, and he's kind of easy to laugh at because he's got like a weird mustache. He went on Fox News for 10 years, fulminating and when you go to war everywhere. But the other thing about John Bolton is like this guy is like this kind of unconstructed right-wing guy from the 90s, right? So his hobby horses are these weird conservative causes that are like 10 or 20 years at a date. Like the ICC is not the pressing issue in the world today, right? But he's been pissed off about the ICC for like 15 years.

Nobody would hire him. But now he's got this like plum job, the most influential national security job in the Trump administration. So it's like he's going through a checklist of things that have pissed him. off and the ICC is one of them. So he's going to say, you know, we want nothing to do with you. The related thing of what he said is he kind of coupled this with the notion that we're also going to cease all assistance of the Palestinians, right? And this is another thing. Israel doesn't like the ICC because, you know, they're worried that, you know, when they have a Gaza war, that, you know, the ICC could try to hold Israel accountable. And that is something that we've been

concerned about too. But at the same time, you know, they said in cutting off assistance to Palestinians that this was meant to try to get them into a peace process. I mean, anybody who in any way thinks the Trump administration or the Netanyahu administration is sincere in pursuing peace, give me a break here. They'd like to mouth words about wanting in a peace process while just kind of muscling the Palestinians into the ground here. And so that too, it's another thing on Bolton's checklist here, like let's defund the Palestinians, let's pull out the ICC. But my question is like, why? With all the challenges in the world, why is this your agenda?

You know, and it raises all kinds of questions. I'd say Bolton, another thing that hasn't gotten a lot of attention, should get more, is these connections between Russia and the NRA. I mean, one of the things that surfaced when Bolton came out was this video of John Bolton doing a video to the Russian people about how they should support gun rights. That was so strange. It was so strange. But then we've subsequently learned about all this money coming into the NRA from shadowy, Russian,

interest, you know, NRA potentially being, it just shows you that this is really a story the Trump administration of all the worst people. Yeah. That somehow, you know, if I told you two years ago that this Russia story is also going to lead to the NRA, you'd think, oh, come on, that's too convenient. Well, actually, it seems it does. I know. So Bolton, you know, is bringing a lot of baggage into this job, bringing a lot of grudges

into this job. And instead of standing up to Russian interference in our elections, he's like standing up to a European, you know, centered organization at the hate. as like some threat to national security. It's so funny. Like, yeah, none of these people ever thought they were going to win an election or be in a position of prominence again. Or else, like, how else could you understand

General Flynn getting paid off by every country and, like, plotting kidnappings of, like, you know, anti-goulinists? Bolton, Manafort, Flynn, all these guys, like, didn't seem to think they'd actually win. And once they won, all this kind of corruption, the dark underbelly of what they've been doing for the last decade, you know, is now out in the open to sea. and then their own ideas for what to do with power

don't amount to much more than some right-wing checklist from the 90s. The gutting the assistance of the Palestinian thing is very strange to me. Dan Shapiro, our former colleague on the NSC, and then the U.S. ambassador to Israel pointed out that the Israelis wanted us to keep that assistance going because it helped them continue peace talks or it helped develop the things you want developed in the West Bank, like infrastructure or security needs.

The Palestinian Authority, which depends on this assistance, collapses, it leaves only Hamas as the most powerful faction among the Palestinians, right? And so the Palestinian security forces help provide a lot of security in the West Bank. They work with the Israeli security forces, provide security in the West Bank, and they offer, you're not in any way a perfect form of leadership, and they've had problems with anti-Semitism that need to obviously be spotlight and addressed. But the fact is if you pull the rug out from the Palestinian Authority and they collapse, all you have is Hamas.

Right. And all you have is a situation where, you know, the Palestinians have no political recourse, and so they're more likely to turn to violence. Yeah. My last question for you is, you know, we're recording this on the 9-11 anniversary. There's also a terrifying hurricane barreling down on North Carolina, South Carolina, the East Coast. Back in the day, when we were in government, prepping for these anniversaries, like we would spend weeks scrubbing all intelligence and like seeing if there was anything that needed to be done to prepare for maybe some sort of terrorist attack marking. the anniversary of 9-11. When there was a horrific national disaster, like an earthquake in Haiti,

for example, or a major hurricane, we would spend hours, days at a time in the situation room, like coordinating, planning. Do you get the sense that those homeland security-focused pieces of the government, whether it's FEMA or the FBI or the intelligence services, are like still humming along and doing the things they need to do? Or is the Trump administration screwing up those vital components that usually, you know, have some good continuity between administrations. Yeah. I think it's a problem. I mean, first of all, I'd say that whenever there was like a hurricane or major natural disaster, you remember Tommy Craig Fugate? Yeah, yeah. So we had this guy who ran FEMA who'd spent his life, you know, working in disaster response, working to respond to hurricanes.

Like he'd walk in the room and I'd just feel better. You know, like this guy was on top of it. It was going to, government was going to function. And, you know, this is the right wing hostility to government. You hate government until you need government to come in. and deal with a hurricane, right? And it takes a lot of preparation, takes a lot of coordination with state and local governments. I'll tell you one thing that didn't get a ton of attention, which is there was a guy who was responsible at the NSC for that Homeland Security function named Tom Bostert, right? And he was just kind of, you know, he was a Homeland Security Advisor. So the same job that, you know, John Brennan had and Lisa Monica for us. You oversee

counterterrorism and you oversee hurricanes and Homeland Security functions. And this guy was a kind of traditional Republican guy, you know, probably not like the first choice because he went to work for Trump, but recognizable. When Bolton was hired, he was out the next day. He shoves him out the door. He shoved him out the door. I forgot about that. So he gets rid of the kind of semi-competent guy who knows how to run this process because he was clearly trying to consolidate some power in the NSC. So for all I know, I don't think that they've gotten that position filled in good order. And so, you know, one of the things that I think is really important for people to understand is that the Trump people, for all the chaos we've watched, haven't really dealt with that many crises. No.

They dealt with one in Puerto Rico on a hurricane, and they did horribly. And there are Americans today who are still suffering because of how poorly they handled that. And, you know, Donald Trump went down there and threw toilet paper people and said nobody had died or a small number of people died when it turns out thousands had. And so my concern is whether it's this hurricane, an epidemic disease. like Ebola, a major terrorist attack, God forbid, as we speak on the 9-11 anniversary. What happens with this level of chaos? And it's all well and good to talk about anonymous op-ed in Bob Wood's book. But, you know, when the shit really hits the fan and you have something like another catastrophic hurricane or disease, how is this White House going to function?

How are people also going to trust the information they get? Like, you want to talk about the consequences of people like Sarah Sanders lying. Well, in a crisis, like you need to be able to trust the information. you're getting from the White House Press Secretary. Yes. You know, you've had to be, I mean, Tommy, you remember you used to put out these, like, very detailed statements right, after hurricanes, instructing people about what we were doing, what to do.

Do you look at any sense that that would be happening now? No, basic. Yeah, right. We would try to give people a basic understanding of, like, president met in the situation room with his team and the following individuals for an hour and a half today to review what's going on. The following steps were taken after. Just so people kind of had a window into what was happening and they could like what they

heard. They could hate what they heard, but at least we tried to offer some transparency. But you're right. Like Sarah Sanders has no credibility. Listen, the piece of me that is increasingly nervous about the situation you're talking about wonders, if something really bad were to happen, is there any doubt in your mind that President Trump would offer support to his supporters first and help and not others, right? Like, I also think about what he might do with the intelligence community if something really scary happened. Yeah. And the way that that would just open. up their ability to monitor all kinds of Americans. So yeah, it's unnerving. And this stuff is hard. I mean, you went down to Haiti. I mean, how big of a logistical, you know, after the earthquake

that killed hundreds of thousands of people down there, the logistical expertise required to just set up any response that could save lives, right? I mean. It's extraordinary. And all these things we've talked about, you know, potential wars, potential terrorist attacks, you know, hurricanes. This White House is completely unprepared to deal with any of those things. And the ability for chaos or the ability for, you know, malevolent actions like you described taking advantage of a terrorist attack to get more powers of surveillance, to go after political enemies, you know, we could be tested in ways that we have not yet been

as chaotic as the last year and a half feel to us if any one of these shoes drop. Yeah. And honestly, like a lot of the gossipy stuff from Woodward's book is leaking out and rightly getting covered a lot. But I think that's his fundamental point. And he seems actually scared when he's doing these interviews about how dysfunctional it is in there. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, we all dealt with Bob Woodward books. But the thing that feels different this time is it usually gets a bunch of damaging pieces of gossip. And it's a pain in the ass to deal for a week or two. And, you know, you wonder who said what. This isn't a portrayal where it's like, oh, there's this one shiny object from the Woodward book that we can talk about, even though there are a shiny object. It said, like, this is a completely chaotic. White House that can't function led by someone unfit in any way, shape, or form for this office. And that is a danger to this country.

We should believe them. We should believe them. And where we still have potentially over two years of this presidency, a lot can happen in two years. Yeah. That's why we need to win the midterms. Go to vote saveamerica.com, if you haven't yet. Ben, I'm so glad the resistance has moved west, the echo chamber. With decamped west.

I had to, for safety reasons, get some distance. And I will thank your listeners who came out on some of my book tour events. Yeah, it's a fantastic book, the world as it is. The world as it is. So if you haven't picked it up, great fall reading. I've had so many people tell me how much they loved your book that don't actually care about foreign policy. They just thought it was like a bunch of great stories. They were like fun to read and riveting and like brought them behind the scenes.

And it's counter programming in a way. It's like, you know, we didn't get everything right. let's stress that, but like, this is a portrait of like how government functioned before the fall. Or at least tries. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's like Pompeii. It's like hardened. Yeah.

Anyway, thanks, buddy. Great to see you. Thanks. Good to see you.