Pod Save the World - Xi’s Just Not That Into You

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

Xi Jinping comes to Washington, the UN struggles for relevancy, and the Russian parliamentary elections turn out exactly as expected.Tommy and Ben break down Chinese President Xi Jinping's first state visit to Washington since 2015, including Trump’s personal airport greeting, and what leverage China has on everything from AI to rare earths to Iran. Then a new list of disturbing AI headlines: a Bloomberg investigation on how AI-assisted targeting contributed to the US strike on an Iranian elementary school, a CNN report on how AI nearly triggered a war with China, and the Israeli election is being flooded with AI-generated slop. It's also UN General Assembly week in New York, where Trump met with Zohran Mamdani, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and threatened Iran. The Houthis keep expanding their military campaign in Yemen, attacking Riyadh and Saudi oil facilities, and Trump can't seem to decide whether to help the Saudis or not. Russian parliamentary elections are setting Vladimir Putin’s party up for its largest majority ever. The far-right AfD wins again in two more German regional elections, and Ben and Tommy give some thoughts on Trump’s arch and the Pentagon’s height and weight requirements. At the end of the show Ben speaks to Maher Bitar, executive director of National Security Action, about new polling that reveals why foreign policy is on the ballot in the midterms.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.You can request a transcript by emailing [e-mail]. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.

Welcome back to POTS of the World on Tommy Duthor. I'm Ben Roads. Ben, right before we started recording, 404 media reported that a hacking group says it has penetrated the FBI and stolen data, unquote, all FBI employees and applicants. A rep from this hacking group says they have the agent's names, home addresses, phone numbers, and information on their spouses. Do you think that if Cash Patel had spent a little less time, you know, helping FBI agents who had been involved in bestiality get into the force that he might have, you know, locked down their IT systems or is that unrelated? They did. I'd have to go back and review the tape here, but my hazy recollection of the early Doge days was then dismantling some of the cyber defenses of the U.S. government. Yeah. They got a lot of attention and a bunch of nerds were warning that this is.

going to lead to catastrophic hacks. So yeah, maybe Cash's priorities of flying to the boondoggle ranch and paving the way for bestiality enthusiasts to join the Bureau is not not turning out so well. Yeah, firing everybody who was involved with prosecuting like January 6th, insurrectionists. Maybe you should have focused elsewhere. Yeah, when asked a representative from this hacking group, they were asked like, well, so what are you going to do with this information now? And they said, what we plan to do is not something I'd call extortion, maybe coercion. That's pretty ominous. It's not great when the FBI is getting hacked. It just, it feels like that shouldn't be happening, cash, like, you know, from cheap seats here. Yeah, I mean, I mean,

there's so many things you could say about this. I just point to one, which is the FBI is the entity that does counterintelligence, like, i.e., the people that are supposed to uncover hackers and people spying on us. And you don't have to be a fan of the Americans to know that probably not good if the hackers have all this detail on the people doing the counterintelligence. All their identities. Ben is in New York this week. He's at the UN General Assembly. You have having a good time? Do you feel more international this week every year? I do. I do love Unga Week coming to you here from my childhood bedroom, which was redecorated as soon as I went to college. But it's, yeah, I'm seeing a bunch of different people, activists, politicians. And let's just say

the mood, though, is not ebulent at Anga this year. There's a kind of, you know, grim face. to listen about what Trump's going to say. And, you know, so we'll see. There's a lot going on, though. At least he's only there briefly. We have a great show for you guys. So we're going to preview President Trump's state visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, talk about what they are likely to discuss, maybe where the hell all of our leverage went

in these talks. And then we're going to geek out about AI for a bit, especially the ways AI adoption that's currently happening is leading to national security problems today. We are going to tell you all about this week's UN General Assembly meeting. We'll talk about the latest with the Houthi rebels offensive in Yemen and how it has put Trump in this just brutal, strategic bind with the Saudis. We're going to cover elections in Russia that just happened, elections and air quotes. We'll talk about some other elections in Germany that really are a problem. We'll talk about why so many European leaders seem worried that Russia might test NATO.

There was this sort of like cacophony of social media anxiety about it over the weekend that Ben and I were sending back and forth to each other. And then, Ben, I want to end this up a new, which is a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure section about national security stupidity. You're going to get to decide how this episode ends. So I'm excited for that. And then you did our interview today. What are folks going to hear? Tommy, we have another exclusive here on Potset the World, which is Mahar Bhattar, who runs National Security Action organization. I'm on the board of progressive advocacy organization.

they commissioned a poll ahead of the midterm elections on public attitudes about foreign policy and national security. And I have to say, like, I've read a lot of those polls over the years. And this is a particularly interesting one because it's quite different than any poll I've seen before. You know, like the things like tariffs and corruption and the one Iran are the foremost concerns of voters. People are connecting what's happening in the world to what's happening in their lives. So we talk a bit about what the lessons are Democrats should take from that. We talk about AI and how some of the risks people are seeing in the economy and society are not yet mirroring risks that people see on the national security side and how Democrats

might address that. And then just kind of what are the takeaways on issues like Israel and Palestine where there's obviously been public opinion shifts and how should we think about the landscape for the midterm elections and the upcoming presidential campaign? And amazing, that's going to be upon us soon. Day after the other terms, buddy. It's starting. The engines are sounding. Yep.

So it's a great time to do that conversation. And Ma really unpacks it well. Excellent. Well, I know we have a lot of congressional staffers and members of Congress and others who listen. So pay attention to that section because this stuff will be applicable. But let's start with Chinese President Xi Jinping's meeting in Washington this week. So he's coming to D.C. for his first state visit since 2015. He's skipping the UN General Assembly, as far as we know, maybe he'll make a surprise appearance, but I kind of doubt it.

The visit comes as Trump is badly losing the war with Iran, as concerns about AI are increasing, and as the Chinese economy is sputtering pretty badly, actually. So the obvious ways to address those issues and more is with useless ceremonies and fancy dinners. So on Wednesday, Trump is going to greet Xi at the airport at Joint Base Andrews. Ben, can you think of a time when Obama ever met a foreign leader at the airport? I couldn't. I can't. I mean, I think maybe Pope Francis, who would be a higher on my list than Xi Jinping.

But I think this is, you know, Trump, this is what, you know, Trump is so much projection. He's obsessed with how he's received. And he clearly has this, like, deep affinity for Xi Jinping because he's a dictator. And so I guess he likes to roll the red carpet. I don't know, man. I was talking to some Asia experts say, like the Chinese are huge on protocol. but this looks like a supplicant. You know what I mean?

Like the person who meets you at the airport usually carries your bag and gives you a ride home. I don't know that they're going to view this as charming as much as a week. We'll find out. For what it's worth, she did not meet Trump

at the airport in Beijing. He sent the vice president. Then there's a state dinner on Thursday. That'll be attended by a bunch of the usual tech CEOs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Jensen Wong, Sam Altman. Then she departs the U.S. Friday after tea in a visit to the National Archives.

the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, the pissy cadaver in charge of our money, he met with his Chinese counterpart to prepare the meeting. They reportedly talked about trade, tariffs, agriculture, and AI. On AI, Besson said the U.S. has proposed a, quote, notification mechanism to share information about AI threats to national security, which I saw that, Ben, I was like, okay, it was like the bare minimum, right? Bare minimum, yeah. Politico reported that the notification mechanism is literally just like,

Besson in his counterpart saying like, let's not set our phones to silent at night or something. Like, that's the whole thing. It's not like a bunch of experts. It's not some trigger of a notification event if we hit artificial general intelligence. It's just like Bessent talking to some guy in China. So that's, that felt a little insufficient. We'll dig more at the AI in a minute. But just a couple more things that could be on the agenda for Trump and for for Xi. I suspect then that Iran, he'll, Trump will try to get some help from Xi on Iran. They'll obviously try to announce some sort of economic deal. It seems like rare earths will come up.

Ag purchases will come up. Taiwan will come up. There's a bunch of reasons. I think Trump is in a pretty weak position on a lot of those issues that we can get into. But just first, like, let's just pause there. Like anything kind of jump out at you about this visit? Big picture or anything you might expect from this one. Well, I think the big picture is.

that a U.S.-China state visit is usually like an enormous opportunity slash responsibility to address really foundational events that are shaping the world. And instead, this is going to reflect what Trump has done to the presidency. So he will probably be trying very hard to get Xi Jinping to go along with more economic pressure on Iran to buy less Iranian oil. cooperate with U.S. sanctions. He will be going to going around the bend once more on, you know, this detente we have on trade that, you know, occasionally flares up. And he will be focused on, you know, like the protocol, like we said, but also, you know,

impressing his buddies who are enriching him, you know, these tech oligarchs, including Elon Musk, who's, you know, in for what a quarter of a billion bucks on the midterm elections on me. I don't know, like rewarding him with access to Jesus to, he's a bit of. where there's huge economic interests. Like that's what's happening in not kind of like, you know, if we didn't have the enforced errors of a dumb trade war and a dumb war in Iran and a protocol-obsessed president who likes to surround himself with oligarchs, this would probably be entirely a summit about artificial intelligence

with some secondary issues in geopolitics and the economy. So it's going to be a reminder of what we're not doing that we should be doing. Yeah, I was talking to Evan. Madero's, who's an Asia policy expert who we worked with at the White House. And he said, like, what's the takeaway for him was like there seems to be no serious preparation, very low expectations, and no clear deliverables that have been articulated in any way. I mean, on Iran, yeah, I'm with you. I think at a bare minimum, Trump could say to Xi, hey, could you please stop letting, you know, Chinese entities provide satellite imagery to the IRGC that's being used to target American service

members and kill them. We'll see if he even does that. But I agree with you. Like, it seems very unlikely. that Trump will be able to talk the Chinese out of buying, what is it, 80 to 90 percent of Iran's oil. The best case on an economic deal seems to be that they'll just kind of continue the detente on tariffs. A couple of places that Trump is weaker. I mean, we've discussed ad nauseum now the fact that Xi Jinping and the Chinese have all this leverage when it comes to rare earth elements. Those are like the magnets and other rare earths that are used in missile guidance systems and smartphones and, and, you know, EV batteries. China has a near monopoly on them. The Financial Times reported that in August, shipments were actually down 13% from August the year before and 20% from July.

So it seems like the Chinese are sort of sending a little signal that's like, hey, we can still, you know, screw you with these things and cut you off. They're nowhere near like the kind of Liberation Day tariff, Nadir, which was, you know, maybe a tenth of what the exports are today. but it's sort of, that's like the lever she can press that can, he knows, can kind of break Trump and push back on anything. I imagine Trump is going to hype up some random economic deals. Remember when he was in China, like they pretended that Boeing was going to sell all these planes. I don't think that's actually happened yet.

The New York Times had a great piece on how back in May China agreed to all these ag purchases, but the actual purchases are way behind. you have to imagine that Xi will continue to kind of methodically press Trump to try to weaken his or the U.S. commitment to Taiwan, maybe you kind of roll back some of these arms sales. It's interesting, though, Ben, like what's not even on the table is human rights or, you know, like Hugh Hewitt, Trump's buddy is always talking about Jimmy Lai, this publisher in Hong Kong. That doesn't seem to be discussed. Speaking of press freedom, though, Ben, this moment from Trump and the Oval Office the other day jumped out of me. I thought you'd enjoy this. China is one of the most repressive countries for journalists in the world.

What signal does it send? Well, I don't know about that. I think we're repressive also. We get fake news. We don't repress, but they write fake news. So that was before he kicked a bunch of news outlets out of the White House. So hopeful stuff. Yeah, well, he would obviously prefer to have the press environment that Xi Jinping has

where, you know, everybody's required to study Xi Jinping thought, you know, in China. I think you make a good point about, like, people should be mindful. for the spin that's going to come out of here, right? Because, you know, Trump will spin something on Iran, for instance. Like, beyond not buying oil, there's another thing that I think he will want from Xi Jinping, which is that one of the reasons that oil prices didn't go up more is that China has a significant amount of energy reserves. And they simultaneously started using less energy, which we've talked about, to keep prices down,

to keep demand somewhat down. and we're able to tap into like their substantial reserves. So the favor that I'm sure Trump would like to get before the midterm elections is some Chinese policy that, you know, releases some of the pressure, relieve some of the pressure on oil markets. We'll see if, you know, Xi Jinping is in a giving mood on that or not. My senses he'll probably do very little, but maybe a little bit that Trump tries to spin as bigger than it is.

But yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, they'll be pushing on Trump on Taiwan. Maybe this is the first summit since Trump, you know, disparaged South Korea. China's obviously allied with North Korea. I'd watch for whether, you know, in the Chinese readouts, they seem to get anything from Trump on Taiwan arms sales. I think there's a very significant Taiwan arm sale that's kind of frozen right now. I think $14 billion. So not an inconsiderable amount.

So, you know, nothing about this will feel quite normal, including the fact that Trump will be envious. Not only will you not be raising press freedom and human rights issues, he will be envious of the system that Xi Jinping leads, which accounts for part of the reason why he's going to meet him at the airport. Yeah, to lick his boots. All right, let's turn to AI because there's a bit a lot of discussion lately about kind of existential threat to humanity that AI may or may not pose.

The honest answer there is like no one really knows. Everyone's kind of speculating or guessing. But there are a lot of ways that artificial intelligence is impacting our world right now that have national security implications that are worth discussing. So a couple examples, Ben. First, Bloomberg has a big piece out this week about this series of failures that led to the U.S. airstrike on the Iranian elementary school in Minab that killed over 150 people, including 123 children.

The problem started with the fact that the U.S. was using dated intelligence and satellite imagery for its targeting that didn't show that what was once an IRGC facility had been renovated and converted at least partially into a school, an elementary school. But then Centcom relied heavily on artificial intelligence for its targeting processes, specifically this Palantir program called Maven, that pulls together all these different data points, like 150 data points, to create a list of targets. I think military planners, according to this report,

wrongly thought that Maven would identify and kind of like sort out outdated intelligence, but it did not. And Maid replaced in minutes with AI, these processes that used to take human analysts hours and hours of painstaking work. And then on top of that, Pete Hexath got rid of like 90% of the people

who are supposed to step in and review targeting packages to prevent civilian casualties. So this cascade of failure that led to the worst civilian casualty incident and the 21st century involving children. The second piece we wanted to highlight was CNN of this article about how AI nearly started a war between the U.S. and China. So the story was this past spring,

there was a military analyst who used AI to create a report, and the report falsely claimed that a Chinese ship was carrying nuclear weapons components. This flipped out everybody in the Pentagon, and luckily they kind of like double-checked this AI-generated Intel before U.S. forces literally boarded the ship, but apparently it was a very close call. They were like hours away. In more broadly speaking, the article gets into the ways that the Pentagon and the intelligence community is really pushing itself to use more artificial intelligence today.

But that adoption has been messy. It's different systems at different parts of the government using these different tools. And there's no real way to kind of account for the fact that these things just hallucinate shit sometimes and get stuff wrong. And the third Ben is there's been a bunch of reports about artificial intelligence being used in elections. The New York Times wrote up some examples of state-backed efforts by Iran and China to basically spam social media with these AI-generated posts. There's also private companies in Israel offering similar services. And the Wall Street Journal had a big piece about how the upcoming Israeli election is just like flooded with AI-generated videos and slop and crap. One Israeli research outfit found that one in eight recent Israeli election relations,

posts, social media posts, was created or altered by AI. So it's just this like deluge of garbage. So Ben, I mean, obviously those intelligence failures at the top or horrific and tragic and, you know, kind of like things that need to be addressed immediately. I would say like in terms of the biggest risks I worry about in the kind of medium term from AI, it's like people like Trump or BB Dent Yahoo or other bad actors using artificial intelligence to rip our society apart, both through kind of like election disinformation, but also just like generally by spreading disinformation online.

Yeah, I think let's kind of catalog some of these national security risks because, you know, we'll posit that people are worried about mass job dislocation. People are worried about data centers taking power and water and other resources. Peter, people are worried about, you know, their kids being taught by chatbots, you know. But if you take a step back, the national security risks are really, cute. One is cyber risks. And so we saw in the hugging face incident, the open AI agents kind of escape human control for a time and, you know, hack into the internet. I mean, massive cyber disruption because the AI got loose or got curious or just trying out different things. That

should be a concern to people. Just the ability to do offensive cyber and the ease with which you can do it, I think should be a concern for people. the risk that you can use AI to build biological pathogens to create biological weapons, something anthropic has warned about, you know, that's a concern. And then, yeah, as you point out, like AI being implemented into kind of commanding control and targeting decisions before we put guardrails around it, look, it's not a war crime if the AI is the one that picked out the girls school, like it still is. And in the rush to adapt this technology and to think you're cutting edge, you know, I think most people would be pretty uncomfortable with AI making totally autonomous

decisions to kill people, which is something that I think is, you know, happening with an alarming degree of frequency these days. You hear some of this in the Russia-Ukraine war. And that's just a flavor of it. I mean, in the Biden administration, they were trying to negotiate the Chinese around getting AI out of any nuclear command and control for quite obvious reasons. And look, you talked last week, Tommy, about the Houthis using. AI to mimic the voice of Commander in order to get them to surrender. I mean, let's say

the AI wants to mess with us, you know, well, one way it might be interesting in a kind of war games, and if anybody remembers that movie, but like, let's try to get the U.S. and China into a war. Like, that might be interesting for the AI to observe, you know, humanity or something. So

these risks are very real. And that comes back to the Xi Jinping thing. I think it's very important for us occasionally to do the thought exercise of what would be happening if we had competent leadership because what I think would be happening is we would not be in a war with Iran,

like I said, we would not be in trade war. And this entire UN General Assembly would be dominated by concerns around artificial intelligence. And you would have a U.S.-Chinese summit that is setting up, you know, and I know people say, well, the Chinese, they may not want to negotiate this either.

We fucking have to negotiate on this. And you'd be setting up working groups and all these different aspects of AI and the guardrails needed and the communication necessary to avoid misunderstandings or cyber attacks that can cascade. And that bilateral summit

would, I think, probably inform some broader UN-type process where other countries are able to participate in a discussion about guardrails. And it is just very striking that that's not happening. At the same time that more and more people are figuring out, wait a second, we're not really ready for these to be unleashed on the world.

Yeah, Trump mentioned artificial intelligence during his UN General Assembly speech on Tuesday. Let's watch that excerpt because it's sort of telling. The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a global scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, here and after officially called superintelligence, changing the name,

and that the use of the word, of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It's actually amazing. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this point forward, all of United States documents, and hopefully the world's will be changed to use the much more accurate term,

super as opposed to artificial. So it's super intelligence. So he's worried about the brand for AI and at the same time not in any ways. He's actually refusing to regulate it, put a sort of global framework in place to protect us from the downsides of it. So that's great. Can you imagine being in that room and being representative of some country that is not developing these crazy models that could kill us all? And you've got Donald Trump, the one person in the room who could actually do the most to put guardrails around this stuff.

And he's just talking about a branding exercise and has some. super it is and, you know, probably reading an excerpt that was prepared by like, you know, the all in pod. Stephen Miller, yeah. David Sachs or something. I mean, because Trump's concerns about AI, I think, amount to two things. One, it inflates the stock market. The whole stock market is kind of like this AI pyramid scheme where a bunch of companies

keep passing the same money around. Like they build the, they invest in the frontier companies that then, buy the data centers and, you know, it just keeps on going around. And he doesn't want to stop the juice because, like, the stock market matters that much to him, of course. And then the other thing is that his big donors, like Elon Musk and, you know, all these other tech pros, you know, the market indreasons of the world, Peter Thiel, they all want an unregulated thing and talk about the globalist elite that wants to regulate things like AI. And that's all he cares about. And frankly, you know, he's 80 years old. He's not going to be around for.

the species extinction and that is that is, you know, being predicted as 10% chance in the next decade. Not the leader we need for this moment. That is for goddamn sure. Speaking of super intelligence, Ben, CrookedCon is coming up and the lineup is here. We'll have a bunch more announcements to come. But you just want to announce some of the first batch of names, including some elected officials, some campaign strategies, pollsters, organizers, and some of your favorite crooked hosts. Some early names are people like Congressman Jamie Raskin, who you know is a critical voice on oversight. Chris Van Hollen, Maryland Center, Chris Van Hollen,

who's been a really important progressive voice on foreign policy. Ben Wickler, master organizer from Wisconsin. Jennifer Welsh from the I've had it pod. There are many, many more people on this list. I have like 30 names in front of me. I'm not going to read them all. But Crooked Khan is going to be amazing. It was a blast last year.

The vibes were immaculate. We expect nothing less this year. Please come join us. Prices will go up on October 6. So get your ticket now. Go to CrookedCon. for more information and to get tickets. That's crookedcon.com. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Mental health is top of mind for a lot of us these days and for good reason. If there's a persistent

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All right, so as we mentioned, Ben, the UN General Assembly is upon us. Ben is there for it. It's the week-long meeting where the 193 member countries, organizations are given the opportunity to come together, give a speech, they do some UN business, and then they have a bunch of meetings on the sidelines with each other and try to get stuff done and destroy Manhattan traffic. Last year, Trump accused the UN of triple sabotage. Remember this? Because of the malfunctioning escalator. Oh, I forgot the elevator. Teleprompter and the audio issues.

So it was a triple sabotage. So hopefully it doesn't fall victim until I'm like Antifa elevator or something this year. But like the Metball, Ungah has a theme. Let me run this one by you, Ben. Restoring trust, managing transformation, a United Nations that delivers for all. It's good to see that like bad focus grouped democratic slogans have made it to the UN, huh? It's real stirring. Yeah.

I don't think that that one's going to pass a smell test with anyone. And look, the reality is there's very little that the UN and its staff and leadership can do. This is where I defend them, right? because if you've got a permanent five members of the UN Security Council that include Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and have veto over, you know, the most important issues in the world, like in the U.S. withholding dues and things like that. It's just you're not going to do whatever that word salad suggests.

Yeah. I mean, Trump's building a board of peace that he personally controls with a slush fund to be like a counter-institution. So I don't know. It's nice that the UN gets people together. It's still a convening force. It's still a place where people can have dialogue on all these issues. So it still matters.

But it's not, you know, you were there in the Obama years. This felt like the center of the world. It was a lot bigger deal. Yeah, it felt like we were actually, you know, issue by issue taking on everything that was happening in the world. And that wasn't unique to us. I mean, that was the case for any U.S. administration for most of the last 80 years. Like now Trump parachutes into insults on people, a few meetings, probably raises some money and takes off.

Yeah. I just like that they have terrible branding like other Democrats. So as you mentioned, though, Trump's, like Trump's not a fan of the organization. He's tried to undercut it in a million different ways. He's cut off their funding instead of the Board of Peace, although the Board of Peace is just utterly failed. A big focus this year is AI, no surprise. For some reason, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is hosting an AI event at the UN.

I'm not sure what's happening there. This is the last Ungah for outgoing Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez. he's going to give his final address to the General Assembly on Tuesday morning. His successor has not yet been selected. CNN says that Costa Rica's former vice president, Rebecca Grinspan, is the leading candidates to replace him. But we all heard Trump float. FIFA president Gianni and Fantino for the job over the summer.

So this could always get dumber. A couple notable things about this week. Trump delivered his speech Tuesday. It was mostly the same bullshit. It did include the AI comments we played earlier and then a threat to Iran that will play later. So Trump took timeout to meet with New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani at Gracie Mansion. He also met with Ukrainian president of Vladimir Zelensky on Tuesday. He's going to meet with French president Emmanuel Macron and have a poll aside with Venezuelan President Delci Rodriguez.

Our excellent producer, Anisha, mentioned Ben, that Nicholas Maduro, Rodriguez's predecessor, is really only like a 30-minute subway ride away. True. They wanted to do a unique photo op. They could go to the prison, kind of, you know, TikTok style, like, what's her name? Who's the fired DHS person? Chris, you know. Thank you. Her name is already erased from my brain.

Trump's going to meet with British Prime Minister Andy Burnham for the first time. Then he goes back to D.C. to schlep she's bags or whatever and lick his boots. Israeli Prime Minister, Bibi Nengu's coming to town. Sadly, Azora Mamdani will not be able to arrest him. But that hasn't stopped BB from putting out super lame videos like this one. Let's watch. Shame on you, Mr. Mamdani. Shame on you for supporting the Hamas terrorist monsters who butchered our people.

Shame on you for inciting riots against New York Jews. I'm coming to the UN. I'm going to tell the truth about our heroic soldiers. And I'm going to tell the truth about you. It's just like every word of that is a lie. Also, like everyone hates Netanyahu. That's only going to help Mamdani. Like Israel's critics hate Netanyahu, Israel's supporters hate Netanyahu,

Democrats hate Netanyahu, Republicans hate Netanyahu. And he's just like, like the Israeli ambassador to the UN was saying on TV that Mamdani should be arrested. It's like, this is going to backfire on you fucking morons. I know you're playing election politics in Israel, but this is harming you here in the U.S. Yeah, I mean, if you stacked Zeramamani's approval rating against Bibi Netanyahu's globally, like, you know, this is not a close call. And frankly, the percentage of people on the world,

agree with Mamdani about Israel and Palestine and Gaza is got to be, I don't know, 80, 90%, you know. So, yeah, obviously Netanyahu is only speaking to like his shrinking sliver of audience among American elites and some smaller number of Americans than used to be the case. But it's just so stupid and hackish and it's offensive, right? Like, I was offended to see the Israeli ambassador be like, they should arrest Mumdani. Like, what other ambassador of a foreign country would, like, call for the arrest of the mayor of the biggest city in the country, you know? And two other things about this, Tommy. Like, one is, I was mentioning this to our producers before we came on, but, like, I'm struck when I talked to audiences, like, yesterday I spoke to a group of kind of activists from around the world.

They followed Mumdani very closely. Like he is wildly popular around the world. Like people are tracking his Instagram account. People are tracking what he's doing. So Bibi's just elevating that. I mean, I guarantee you that that kind of video just redounds to Zohaamadani's benefit. No doubt.

It's not persuading a single person to change your mind about Mumdani and probably introducing some people to Mamm Dani in ways that they probably end up agreeing with. The other thing, I'm going to make the mistake, Tommy, of like responding to the comments a bit. which is there's a narrative. Well, there's a narrative sometimes that I've heard that, you know, Mimdani shouldn't have called Bibi a war criminal

because then he'll use that in his politics and it could help him in the election. Let me tell you this. I have heard that same fucking narrative every election for the last like 15 years that Israel has continued to, you know, choose Bibi Nanyahu's its prime minister. And what that is a recommendation of is just never criticize Israel. It's the same mentality like Joe Biden to never break publicly with Israel.

It's like we can't criticize them because if we do criticize them, they might use that criticism in their politics. Well, that's an insane way to go through life, that we should never use our voice because someone might try to manipulate further. they're already, you know, like we've not gotten a very good window in the health of Israeli society in the last few days with the release of this new documentary film, Naza, about the genocide in Gaza, where they're going to try to denaturalize, like the Israeli citizens who made it. Like, I'm sorry, I'm glad Mamdani speaking out. And frankly, the fact that they react so hyperbolicly indicates that they know they have a problem. It indicates that they know that that's hitting the target.

Yeah, and they think it's good politics. I just don't. And also the Trump administration once again denied a visa to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. So he has to join events virtually, which like someone explained to me someday how that helps the peace process or, you know, get to a two-state solution as far off as it is. So, yeah, I mean, that's the gist of Ungabend. Anything else kind of you're looking at this week or just kind of another underwhelming

week here? The only thing I'd say, again, like in the, you know, demerit category is that this, like as ostensibly, I think, climate week at the UN, like I said, climate week. And it is striking how much that's fallen off the agenda, given what's happening in the world. It might be time to bring that back a bit, given the gas prices that we're paying right now. Yeah, or the, like, super-elian you know, we got out here. All right, let's turn to the Houthis. Last week, we did a deep dive into the how the Houthi rebels took control of all this territory in Yemen

and how they now essentially control access to the Red Sea via the Babel Mandup Strait. We're not going to revisit all of that. So check out last week's episode if you want the kind of backstory. But since then, the Houthi military campaign has expanded. On Saturday, they launched a bunch of missiles and drones at Riyadh, and at more oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. They are fighting at the same time to take control of more territory in Yemen's southwest mountains.

Basically, what they're trying to do is control some territory that would allow them to cut off government forces in a city in the southwest, which would be a big deal militarily. A couple things worth just sort of noting. The Saudis claimed the Houthis fired a drone towards Mecca. That would be a bit of an unsettling escalation bend in a huge, you know, sectarian ramifications. The Houthis deny it, but just something to watch. The UN says that 130,000 people have been displaced over the last few weeks by the fighting in Yemen. Thousands of people actually crossed the Babel Mandeb straight to Djibouti.

The BBC had some great coverage from a refugee camp there that's worth everyone's time. And the World Food Program says more broadly that, 18 million people are facing acute food insecurity in Yemen. The AP reported that Houthi officials met with the U.S. staff in Oman and basically reaffirmed their commitment to the ceasefire with the U.S., which gets to our next story, which is the New York Times had this big pullout about Trump's indecision over what to do about the Houthis. Basically, the gist is on Wednesday of last week, Trump was not going to get involved.

Then on Thursday, he changed his mind after another request from South Saudi Crown Prince, Muhammad bin Salman. But then on Sunday, Trump, like, apparently changed his mind. Again, like, right as attacks were about to begin, as, you know, bombs are being loaded on the planes. And so it just seems like, look, and I'm glad the U.S. is not getting deeper involved in a fight with the Houthi rebels again. I think people forget that we were bombing them for, like, 50 days last year, and it didn't really do much. But it seems like Trump is in a terrible situation then, because if he goes after the Houthis, they're going to start targeting Uthi's. U.S. ships in the Red Sea. Oil prices will go up. Voters will hate us getting sucked deeper into the war. But if he hangs MBS out to dry, the Saudis are more likely to figure out, I think, a path forward

that just sort of ignores U.S. interests. And I think Trump seemed to be alluding to the fork in the road he has generally about Iran policy during his Ungus speech. Let's listen to that excerpt. But I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that? that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before. Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations? But I believe we'll make a deal right after the election, because it doesn't make sense

for them not to. They're waiting to see how I do in the midterm election. What they don't realize is that I'm not running. So there's a little genocidal threat from the well of the UN General Assembly. Ben, what did you make of the speech and kind of the reporting on, you know, Trump and the Houthis and sort of what's been happening on the ground over the last couple weeks? Yeah, I mean, to continue the theme of, like, what's happening and what should happen, it is not tough or strong six months into the dumb war that you started that is creating massive

global economic shortages that is screwing over every country that is representing that hall to stand up and be like, I have a decision to make. I could, like, guess what? Everybody's read the true social posts where you said the exact same fucking thing for like five months about this decision to annihilate them or not, you know? And nobody believes it because the reality is nobody thinks that the Iranians are begging for a deal because the Iranians are winning the war. And the Iranians are pretty transparent.

They say out loud that they're using. their leverage to impose as much pain as they can on the United States vis-a-vis the global economy and to even put at risk the dollar is a reserve currency. Like the Iranians are very, the world understands the Iranian strategy. They may not like it because they're suffering shortages. What they don't understand is what Trump is doing. And when he gets up there and says, I don't essentially know what I'm doing, I could do this or I could do this and these are two wildly different things, doesn't instill a lot of confidence.

And pointing to a midterm election that you are very likely to lose as like the key, barometer of your decision-making kind of... So weird. I mean, I think what he was trying to tell the Houthis is like, don't play me for time to get past this election because I don't care about the election, but all it did in practice was show how focused he is on the election, that he is actually mentally tying the issues together. It was just like, seems self-defeating. Everything about it was self-defeating. I mean, I just can't imagine who's like, oh, this is a great... And we should say, by the way, that the United Nations was

founded out of the vision of the United States and Franklin, Roosevelt to be a place where you prevented nuclear annihilation from happening and to be a place where you tried to prevent wars. And so we have fallen a very far distance in the 80-plus years since that we now have a president of the United States standing in the well of the UN threatening to destroy an entire country. That's not like something that we get a pass for here in the U.S. Now, I should say, like in terms of what happened or what should happen, there's plenty of good reasons to not start bombing the Houthis, right? And one of them is that we've tried it.

Like Trump tried it, Biden tried it. I mean, one of my favorite Joe Biden quotes was when he said, and do you remember this one, Tommy, where he said, is it effective the bombing of the Houthis? No. Will it continue? Yes. Like, that's a thing that Joe Biden said out loud, right? They kind of summed up the insanity of American post-9-11 foreign policy. And the reality is, like, what needs to happen with the Houthis,

as with Iran, is a negotiation about the future of Yemen. Like, we have to accept, and the Saudis have to accept, that these people are not just, like, going to go away or surrender. They live in Yemen. They want some say over their lives, whether we like that or not. And, you know, unless we want this country to be a permanent humanitarian disaster in which there's periodic bombing campaigns and offenses and, you know, ceasefires that are routinely violated. Like, we need to negotiate something in Yemen, just like we need to negotiate something with Iranians. There's not a military solution to these problems. And, you know, 25 years after 9-11, like, that should be apparent to us.

Yeah, just a couple more odds and ends about the war in Iran generally. So the Washington Post had a report last week that says the Pentagon is lying about the number of U.S. troops who have died in the war. So the official casualty count or death count is 18, but the Washington Post cites a couple of sources. One who says actually 22 service members have died and others says 23. Three contractors have also died. The post says, quote, not all of the undisclosed deaths are directly tied to the conflict, but have involved U.S. personnel who were in the Middle East amid ongoing hostilities. This person said, so just another piece of evidence about how this administration is lying

in covering up the true cost of the war. And then Alex Ward at the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration is proposing a $5 billion fund to help countries in the Gulf rebuild their energy infrastructure and kind of get around the Strait of Hormuz, which does not suggest that the Trump administration, or Trump's team is confident about them solving the problem in the near term and kind of loosening the Iranian grip on the Strait of Hormuz. It seems like they are making long-term plans for the Iranian to be in control of it, which is, I think, you know, again, another sign that they are losing. It's a sign that they're adapting to a world in which Iran is quite likely maybe in partnership with Oman to extract revenue from the Strait of Hormuz. So they can talk tough, but their actions tell a different story,

that they're adjusting to a reality created entirely by their war. This was not a problem before the war. The other thing is, I'm not even sure that it's effective because the Saudi pipeline that was another way to get energy out of the region to global markets has been bombed and taken offline by the Houthis and other Iranian proxies. So it's not as if we stay in this kind of forever war they were with Iran. It's not as if they couldn't do some damage to other infrastructure that is built to try to get oil and gas out of there from some other route. Yeah, they seem like the Houthis have been creative and their tactics have adapted and the U.S.s have not.

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Let's turn to Russia. So Russia held its first parliamentary election since the war in Ukraine began. This were votes for the lower house, the Duma, which happened every once every five years. Here's what we know so far about the results. In a shocking turn of events, Ben, United Russia, which is Putin's party, is on track to have its biggest majority in history with a record 355 seats in the body of 450. The other parties that will have seats in the Duma have basically support the war and don't oppose the Kremlin in any way. So, again, was not a real election. Turnout was reportedly 59%, but outside observers think

those numbers are inflated. Russians were also encouraged to vote online this year because what could go wrong with that? And Putin even put out a video of himself like playing with his mouse at his computer ostensibly claiming he's voting. As the voting was happening, Ukraine launched a major attack on Moscow. They hit an oil refinery. They hit a bunch of neighboring residential buildings. And Russia carried out a barrage of missile strikes on industrial facilities across Ukraine this week. Bigger picture, Ben, it seemed like the anxiety about Russia potentially testing NATO in some new way hit kind of a fever pitch over the weekend. It was a combination of maybe fake news or misleading or alarmist news on social media, but then also real comments from European intelligence

officials and European political leaders about growing concern about Russian hybrid attacks. There was French President Emmanuel Macron. He said he ordered a plan to protect French critical infrastructure, and he did this big briefing for a bunch of the political parties in France. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Russia was planning drone and missile attacks on NATO countries that support Ukraine. Last week, we talked about that Russian drone strike on a train that shortly after, the train station shortly after a train went through, they had a bunch of European national security officials and at Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister of the UK. So I don't know, Ben, you and I were texting some of this stuff

back and forth over the weekend. Like, what did you make of the increased anxiety? And, like, is there anything to say about the Russian elections? I feel like, of course, Putin's party did well. Yeah, the Russian elections are no surprise. I have to say, like, I was alarmed by some of the messages out of Europe. And I talked to some people that, you know, are close to European governments. And they, everybody kind of swears that, no, this is real. Like, I mean, Macron, for instance, you know, gathered all the potential presidential candidates in the next French election in their parties to kind of brief them, kind of an extraordinary show of,

like, this is a national issue, national emergency. The talk out of Poland was about the inevitability, essentially. of Russian attacks on European soil. You know, and these run the gamut from, you know, potential military actions into the Baltics to hitting European countries directly that are providing support to Ukraine. You know, in talking to people, what you hear is that the intelligence about, you know, escalating these kind of gray space things that have already happened,

like kind of drone probing, potential kind of sabotage attacks, potential drone attacks themselves, that that's kind of what's in the intelligence, that this could become increasingly, you know, kinetic to use a jargony word, but blowing stuff up in Europe, which is, again, already happened, but, you know, could escalate.

And that, you know, that should get people's attention. I have to say also, Tommy, after kind of freaking out about that for a couple days, when the Ukrainians, like, do the single largest strike on Moscow of the war, which they did a couple days ago. It makes me nervous. Like, do I understand the Ukrainian desire to impose a cost on Russia?

Sure. But, like, I also think that, you know, at a certain point, that's going to lead to an escalation into Europe. And that, again, what should be happening is, like, a negotiation by people other than Jared Kushner and Steve Wittkoff to try to de-escalate this thing. because right now we're going in one direction, and it's not the right direction because you don't want to see attacks in Europe.

I get the Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil and gas infrastructure because there's an obvious strategic path. There's an obvious strategy there. It did seem like the strikes over the weekend were timed to be at the end of the Duma elections to send a political message and maybe scare the population, which I agree with you. It seems like on one hand I get it, on the other hand,

it does seem likely to get Putin to further escalate because it seems like that as his only speed. Yeah, and it seemed like it was meant to kind of personally humiliate Putin, right? Who in the past has not taken kindly to any effort to, you know, when Hillary Clinton criticized his parliamentary election, you know, 2011 or 12, I forget which year, you know, Putin responded pretty forcefully. So again, like, I know people could say, well, you know, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you. can't put any constraints in the Ukrainians. I don't know. Like I just, when you have a bunch of Europeans saying that they're going to start attacking Europe and killing people in these countries, I'm not sure like a massive drone bombardment of Moscow is like, you know, the right approach. Well, look, from a Ukrainian perspective, like, I'm not saying they want any Europeans to get

hurt or killed, but they would certainly love them to be dragged in and to be part of this conference. To be involved in the war. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I don't, I don't want to assign that intention to the Ukrainians. Yeah, I'm not saying that was their intent. But, I mean, if that's what happened. Yeah, but, you know, one could draw that. And again, they're the ones fighting. They're the ones dying. They're the ones who got invaded.

Like, none of this is their fault. They did not bring this upon themselves, and they're fighting an existential war. But I do think that that's why it's important for external parties, Europe and the United States, to be doing more to try to turn the temperature down, in part for Ukraine's sake, too, right? Because it's not as if, you know, they're not suffering in this war, too. it just, it feels like there's no blueprint for that other than Jared Kushner giving interviews in which he demands that the Ukrainians, you know, accept all Putin's terms. Right, exactly.

And then meanwhile, you know, we talked to a couple weeks ago about these election results in Germany where the far right, in some cases, neo-Nazi, AFD party, took 44% of the vote in this region of Germany called Saxon-Haltz. It's a small state in eastern Germany. There were more elections in Germany over the weekend, and the results were once again terrible for German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz and the CDU party. First, there were elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommin. The AFD got the largest share of the vote there with 38%. But the CDU didn't even reach the 5% threshold required to get a seat in the state parliament. Now, I think that will not be as a dire an outcome there because the social Democrats did well enough that they can probably cobble together

a coalition that will keep the AFD out of power. But it's still, you know, the trend is the The AFD is doing well and the CDU is collapsing. And then in Berlin, the left-wing DELinka party beat out the CDU and the mayoral elections. So again, you have these centrist establishment parties getting crushed from new, more extreme parties from the right and the left. There was a poll released Tuesday by a broadcaster in Germany called RTLNTV. They found that 55% of voters in Germany would support Mertz stepping down as chancellor. There was another recent poll found that only 13% of respondents thought,

Berz was doing a good job. He has vowed to stay in office, Ben, but boy, like, given all that we just discussed about threats to NATO and Trump and destabilized, you know, the UN being destabilized, it's not the best time to have, like, a hobbled German chancellor as the, you know, far-right neo-Nazi party rises. Yeah, I mean, if you're looking at a pretty unstable era for the next two years, where the war in Iran could drag on with acute global economic challenges, maybe some financial crisis on the rise in. AI could lead to kind of like cyber disruptions like I talked about. Russia could escalate into Europe. We're dealing with a situation in which Friedrich Merz, clearly does not have the confidence of his own public, right? And so much so that a far-right

party, the AFD is kind of replacing the CDU as like the right-wing party in Germany. Emmanuel Macron is a deeply unpopular lame duck president as they prepare for an election in which Marine Le Pen from the far right national rallies, probably the frontrunner in that election, right? Andy Burnham became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom like a few weeks ago, right? This is not the ideal situation to be going through really acute political challenges in Europe. And, you know, like, Burnham is off to a pretty good start, so that's a good sign. But, like, man, there's a lot riding on the direction of French and German politics in the next. couple years.

Yeah, it's a little scary. Finally, Ben, we're going to try something new to close the show out. So we're going to do the classic kind of choose your own adventure novel style ending. You get to choose how this episode ends. I'm going to give you three options for stories about military genius during the Trump administration and you tell us which one you want to dig into, okay? Option one, loading the Triumphal Arch with drones and sniper ammo. Option two, the Pentagon implementing a waste-to-height requirements and grooming standards for

anyone who wants to attend Pete Hacksett's state of the force speech, whenever the hell it is. Three, operational security over the, for the F-35, our fighter jet. We could talk about how fighter jet components disappeared in Hong Kong or could be accessed in Saudi Arabia by the Chinese. Which, which option tickles your fancy? I think you just kind of identified the third option. I have one question for you before I answer, which is which of those three Trump scandals do you think I did an MS Now hit on. Oh.

Ooh, the arch. Hight to wait, man. Oh, no way. That is like great programming. Yeah, yeah. Why that one? Because it's just so absurd, right? It's just like so, you know, Pete Hags has weird obsession.

I'm going to go with the arch though. Yeah, I think loading a fucking arch with ammo seems a little more absurd, but you tell me. And because here's, like, you know, I heard you guys talk about this a little bit on Pats of America. I share your concerns. that filling a gigantic landmark that is unobstructed from all directions with a massive amount of explosives that could detonate on some charred is probably not a good idea. I will tell you that I'm so authoritarian-pilled too, though, that I was like, well, wait a second. Will the military coup in 2008 begin from the arch?

Oh, yeah. I was literally like, is Trump going to be like pre-positioning? like drones and ammunition around Washington so that when he calls Pete Hegseth and Raisin-Kane or whoever's left in the military and says, like, we must not allow this Asoff election to go forward or whoever it is. I'm not picking a favorite. That thought weirdly, like, was the first one in my mind, more than the operational security. Maybe they'll fill the Kennedy Center with weapons to make it a national security imperative to rebuild it.

I don't know. That's where my head went. I think that the earliest triumphal arches, the Roman iteration, were commemorating when they sacked a city. So they would like take Jerusalem or whatever and build one. So I guess this is Trump just like showing us all that he's taken Washington and taken our politics and now owns it. I hear you on the anxiety about this being where the insurrection could begin. I mean, like, the idea that, like, you need to fill this thing full of drones or sniper ammo or any of, like, have a sniper pad on top of it is such obvious bullshit.

Clearly, he thinks that there's going to be all these legal challenges to the arch, like there are to the ballroom. And he thinks that some sort of made up national security argument will help him get the construction greenlit and through the court system. Maybe that's right. It's probably right, given kind of what we've seen. But, like, unlike the ballroom, which, like, I hope. hope, I'm not really all that, look, it's stupid. I wish they didn't do it. I'm not like hell-bent on Democrats tearing it down.

This arch, I hope, just never gets constructed. Or if it does, I would rip it down fucking immediately because it is like a monument to authoritarianism and it's completely unnecessary. It's a monument to authoritarianism. It's potential risk to flights, right? But it's also, like, again, not to be, I'm very really nostalgic about my time in Washington. I do think one of the best and most beautiful things about Washington is that you have the Lincoln Memorial

and then Memorial Bridge, which goes to Arlington National Cemetery, which was a Civil War cemetery. And our guys, the radical Republicans, after stomping out slavery and defeating the South, intentionally put that cemetery right in front of where Robert Lee used to live. You know, so that part of D.C. is all about our Civil War history. And to just plop down some fascist arch in the middle of it kind of ruins the whole vibe for me.

I should also say, you know, putting coup concerns aside, which we probably shouldn't entirely, there's a kind of militarization of Washington. I mean, you know, I've been in cities where the capital of a country is like a very militarized place and you see troops in the streets and kind of shows of military force. It's like D.C. is creeping. I mean, the National Guard out in the streets, and now we've got ammo dumps in the arch, and we've got some giant bunker underneath the ballroom that's being built. And we're starting to feel like a little, you know, I don't want to impugn any region in the world, but like one of those countries, it has like a military, militarized capital. And that's, you know, it's a little disconcerting. Yeah, it's not the vibe I want. It's not good in any way. It's strange. It's like, it's bizarre to be. he wants this of all the things the ballroom like there is some sort of function to it fine whatever

he wants to have events outside he's a long history of thinking the white house needs a ballroom and he doesn't like tense on the south lawn he called axelrod about this and whatever 2012 or 2011 whatever it was the arch makes no sense i hope it never happens i agree with you that it does you know you feel like you're in like uh napi d'ar like you know miyanmar or something where it's exactly napi da is a good example yeah a military capital or like piangang or something i just It's not what we need in Washington, D.C. It's nuts. No.

I'm a tear-down the arch guy. Like the other ballroom will have to manage in some probably other way, but this one should not stand the light of day. Arches are for McDonald's. Okay, that's it for Ben and I. We are going to take a quick break, and then you're going to hear Ben's conversation with Mahar Bitar about some really, really interesting, exclusive new polling about voter sentiment and national security ahead of the midterm election.

So stick around for that. Pots Save the World is brought to you by Quince. We all have those essentials in our closet that never fail, the ones we can't stop wearing. The sweater that goes with everything, the perfect pair of pants, or the tea that somehow always gets pulled out of the rotation above all the others. Those are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince focuses on high-quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and marino wool.

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Quince.com slash world. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash world. 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. Okay, I'm very pleased to be joined today by Maher Batar, who is the executive director of

National Security Action, a progressive foreign policy advocacy organization that I co-founded. I'm still on the board, no longer chair of that board. Maher's also played many roles over the years in the Obama administration and the Biden administration, a stint in between as the counterpart to Cash Patel on the House Intelligence Committee. Maher was on the Democratic side in case you're wondering. So that was an experience. But Maher, we're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about some interesting polling that National Security Action did ahead of the midterms that we wanted to lift up.

So thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks, Ben. Thanks for having you. All right, just just kind of set the stage a little bit. Before you get into the finding, just tell us a little bit about who you guys polled in what states, like what you were looking for in this poll. Sure. So we designed this poll to really meet the moment before the midterms.

So it's focused on seven battleground states where we have competitive primaries, including in the Senate. So that includes everywhere from Texas to Michigan to Iowa and a few other states. and it has a sample size that actually leans conservative, just given the states, including voters who, by a slight majority, voted for President Trump in 2024. And we wanted to cover the waterfront of issues, both kind of across national security and foreign policy issues, including kind of overall favorability, but really to dive deeper on some of the top issues. Okay, so let's jump into these findings, which I think are very relevant both to the campaigns

that are ongoing, and then also, frankly, in framing the presidential campaign that will start shortly after the midterms. You and I have gone back and forth a bit on this polling. Why don't you just start by talking a bit about how front and center national security concerns are and foreign policy concerns are for voters? Usually that's kind of a secondary issue after economic issues. What did you find about the salience of what Trump and the United States is doing around the world in the poll? Yeah, I mean, my key take. takeaway is that as we approach November, foreign policy is on the ballot. And the reason is that the decisions that have been made here in Washington by the Trump administration are boomeranging back at

home in ways that are having a pronounced impact for Democrats, independents, and even Republicans. So the numbers are pretty remarkable across the states that we polled. On, for example, on gas prices and the war in Iran, people are tying the war and the, the, the, the, the, ramifications that were directly to the crisis that they're feeling at the pump. Same thing on tariffs. So the numbers are sky high. Over 90% of respondents that we had in across the battleground states tied the Iran more directly to the pain that they're feeling at the pump.

And over 90% similarly, including a large number of Republicans, tied to tariffs to the cost of living crisis that they're facing. So we're really at a point where every single day, and I think you're seeing in other polling that is emerging over the last few weeks, and really I think you're going to see it over the next few weeks, are really tying those two things together and demonstrating the amount to which Americans are tying what's happening abroad to what they're feeling at home. Yeah, and I mean, that's a credit, I guess, to people. And it's also, I think, a testament to the fact that even more so than other foreign policy failures or misadventures in the past, right? I mean,

tariffs correlate directly to prices going up. People feel that. The war in Iran, even more so than past wars that the United States have fought, has had this direct inflationary impact. So it's a good sign that people get that these foreign policies are fundamentally economic policies. I want to dig into a couple of other issues, which is that one of the issues that has emerged, as a growing source of concern to Americans in the midterm elections is artificial intelligence, AI. That has really taken off in the last couple of weeks as these kind of hyperbolic warnings have

come from some of the various companies. You worked a bit on AI in the Biden years, so you're familiar with that terrain. At the same time, that doesn't yet really bear out in this polling in the sense that the data center issues, the one that's kind of gotten a lot of attention here in the U.S. It's almost treated as a domestic issue, right, involving tech companies. And yet, you know, one of the justifications for plowing ahead with unregulated AI is that we're in some race to the death with China over it. Xi Jinping's going to be with Trump this week, presumably AI will be in the agenda. What do you see in the data about voter concerns about artificial intelligence

and how do you kind of unpack the discordance that people might feel? about wanting to compete with China, but wanting to slow down AI. Yeah, so we wanted to better understand exactly how people are starting to link or not link AI to some foreign policy arguments that are made here in Washington, including on China. In our findings, and I should caveat, the findings are we conducted this poll in late August, early September. So before a lot of what has surfaced in just recent weeks, that has really changed the debate in the conversation in Washington, which we can talk about.

So take that with a grain of salt. But in the polling that we did find, in terms of whether AI is viewed as a top national security concern, it does not rank anywhere close to the top. People are not connecting it right now to national security concerns. When you ask them about China and whether there's a race with China, we saw two things. One is in our focus groups that we did before the poll. For a lot of folks, they don't view it in those terms that there's a race with China on AI. That's just not the way that they think about it. And for a lot of them, it was actually, it didn't compute right.

It didn't make sense that we would view it in that way. At the same time, in this poll, similarly, it ranks towards the bottom in terms of priorities in terms of our engagement with China. And I think that points to a few things that we're seeing on the AI front. One is that for a lot of people, AI is becoming increasingly a concern that is linked really to concerns that they have closer to home, including their own families and their own livelihoods. So there's other polling out there that points to the fact that people are quite concerned about what it will mean for their own jobs, but also, I think, importantly, for their children and kind of the next generation coming up. I think there's also real concern around data centers and what it means for the quality of life in their own communities.

And then there are also, I think, bigger social concerns that are emerging where families are concerned about what AI is going to mean for their children and their teenagers. and very similar to the concerns that have arisen because of social media, right, over time. And because of all of that, I think making an argument that there is a race with China and AI where we need to beat China does not resonate with average Americans because the logical conclusion of that for many might be, wait a second, you want me to lose my job

or sacrifice my job for some sort of hypothetical race on AI with China? And those two things don't, don't, don't match. Now, there's a lot more that we, I think, need to better understand in terms of how the public is reacting to what's happening in AI. So we're going to build out more polling in the space to better understand this. But I think this is an important moment for candidates and others that they think through this and they look at the data that for Americans that say visceral, it's increasingly, I think, a visceral and a personal issue that they have to contend with. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to me that, look, the tariff issue and the war issue are pretty

straightforward for Democrats, right? Like, this war is dumb. We shouldn't have fought it. We should end it. These trade wars are dumb. They raise prices. AI is obviously a more complicated thing. It is striking to me, Maher, and I'm curious what you think, because, again, you worked on AI issues in the Biden administration when you guys were starting to put some guardrails around this stuff before Trump dismantled them. That in the conversations I'm in about AI and that I think you're in. You know, the national security concerns are actually quite acute. You know, like someone could build a biological weapon with AI. The cyber risks, you know, particularly with this chat GPT, hugging face incident where the AI agents like escaped human control and we're hacking into the

internet and stuff. The chance of a massive cyber disruption is, you know, enormous. There are these autonomous weapon that use AI for targeting. There's suggestions that that may have had something to do with the bombing of the girls' school in Iran. I mean, is one takeaway maybe that, like, frankly, people need to hear more about these risks on the security side? Because they seem like the public probably doesn't know those things that you and I spend a lot of time worrying about. Yeah, I mean, I think one takeaway from our polling,

but also other polling, is that this is a very fluid environment where the public is just starting to understand and grasp the consequences of AI, both positive ones, but also potentially extremely negative ones for broader society. but also for their own families. When I worked on this, Ben, we had conversations at the time. So this was at 2023 and 2024. I was the head of intelligence and defense at the White House.

And we were crafting what was essentially the world's first national security strategy on AI. And we wanted to think about, you know, as we're writing this first draft, what are the guardrails that we have to build in, but also how could it be valuable for national security purposes? And that was a tricky balance at a moment where we could kind of foresee many of the consequences. some of which have come to past, but otherwise we were also trying to kind of understand what this means as a transformative technology at that moment in time. I think we're now at a point where we're starting to see the likely in the real risks of AI advancement in certain areas.

They're also huge promise in other areas. And as a result of that, this is a moment where there needs to be an all-hands-on tech effort on the Hill in the federal government, which unfortunately we're not seeing, and then also an effort for the public to better understand what this is going to mean for them as well.

And that sort of transparency is key. And I think that's an area where we as an organization, but I think, you know, in concert with a lot of others, it's going to be a crucial moment now over the next year or two as we get also closer to 2028,

where we've got to really understand what this means and help the public understand because I do think it's going to be also a very potent issue in the 2028 election. Yeah, no, I think this is like put a pin in that, and we'll come back to it on this show, too, because we want people to kind of understand these risks clearly, because this is going to define not just our politics, but our society.

Well, another issue that has obviously been front, center, Democratic debates is Israel-Palestine. We've noted the shifts in public opinion related to support for Israel relative to support for the Palestinians or related to questions like whether or not people believe Israel's committed war crimes. What did you find about how much things have shifted on Israel in the poll? Yeah, so we approached this asking essentially two sets of questions here because we wanted to understand also where the public is broadly on questions around whether or not to withhold military assistance and weapon sales or whether to continue those without conditions.

And so the findings, I think, are actually really interesting and demonstrate that there is a bipartisan consensus here on broader questions. And then I'll get to Israel and Palestine in second. But on the broader question, we found across the board, Democrats, independents, and Republicans broad support for conditioning military assistance, either to prevent the misuse of our own weapons or also to shape the behavior of the country. receiving potential military assistance or weapons from the United States. We had about 20% or so across the board, across Democrats, independents, and Republicans who actually want us to just end military assistance to other countries outright. And then a smaller proportion who want us to continue providing weapons to other countries with no conditions and no restrictions, which I think demonstrates the fact that there is actually broad support for ensuring that the United States

builds in accountability to the way in which it's supporting other countries or providing weapons to other countries. On Israel, Palestine, specifically, our findings are quite consistent with some of the recent polling that you've seen. And I would just remind you, in those listening, the polling we did was in battleground states

that leans conservative with voters that were more likely to vote for President Trump than who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. And they're very similarly. So about 60% of the respondents supported either withholding military assistance or conditioning it to prevent misuse of the weapons or to shape the Israeli government's behavior or to end it outright. And a smaller percentage was open to just continuing without conditions. And when you broke it up between Democrats, independents, and Republicans, actually, there is the numbers on the Democratic-independent side.

are much more supportive of conditioning with also a certain number who want to withhold or completely restrict or end in a much smaller percentage that want to continue without conditions. On the Republican side, you see a higher number who do want to continue without conditions,

but at the same time, you'd still see numbers that are open to conditioning aid or even ending military assistance in the process. I think it's reflective of the shift that I know you've discussed on your show and that we've seen since essentially the Gaza war in 2024 all the way to 2026. And that's also reflecting increasingly in the way members of Congress are speaking and the way members of Congress are voting on the issue.

Yeah. No, I mean, it does suggest at a minimum the baseline of like, I don't know, following U.S. laws on the books about providing assistance to countries suspected of human rights abuses or war crimes, like that that can be a guide for politicians at a minimum. I mean, I'd go farther to an embargo. But it's notable. No, but I think the takeaway, Ben, I would just say, is I think there's a recognition that the U.S. has leverage. And the U.S. should use that leverage when it's necessary.

Yeah, there's a common sense. I mean, like, I'm actually hardened by these results because there's like a common sense through line to them that I think should be a wake-up call to people that work in national security. So the question I want to ask about that is I was struck by the fact that the things that, you know, national security people, elites, whatever you want to call them, tend to talk about as these like threats, right? Iran or China or, you know, Russia,

or actually not kind of top of mind for voters in the same way that they're top of mind for people. And people are worried about this stuff that is impacting their lives, you know, tariffs and the war driving up gas prices. And, you know, we just talk about AI is a growing concern. Now, one way to interpret that, is a kind of America first thing, which is that, you know what, we're done.

Like, we're exhausted with all this. Let's just kind of pull up the drawbridge and come home. And there's some of that that I think is true, like particularly as it relates to wars. At the same time, though, and, you know, you find support for alliances in this poll. You find support for NATO in this poll. I mean, what do you, if you take the two, and they're not really strong men, they're kind of the two recent approaches, right? that Trump, well, he says it's America first, but then he launches wars and stuff.

But if you take the America first argument, say Tucker Carlson argument, you know, as one poll of opinion. And then you take kind of, you know, I don't know, to be, I think kind of the Biden, you know, the American exceptionalism, and we have to do all these things because we're America. What's the third way that starts to appear in this public opinion?

Where do you think people are on that question? Yeah, so I was quite struck because you know, on the one hand, the poll is very clear that the foreign policy decisions that are happening now and in the last few months are having a direct impact on the lives of Americans, and they're perceiving it and interpreting it that way. And it's really driving the way in which they feel that, like, the crisis at home is in part spurred by decisions by this administration to go to war and to be reckless with tariffs. At the same time, what I was struck by when I looked at the data was that there is an emerging alignment that I'm seeing in the way the electorate is also

viewing foreign policy priorities. And I think that's something that candidates in 2028 should take heat of. And that's, for instance, you'll see that in the polling, voters do want their government to keep them safe. They do support a strong military. But they also want to keep us out of unnecessary wars. And we have a contained experiment now with a war of choice that is boomeranging at home and creating all of this pain at home and creating, you know, these geopolitical ripple effects around the world that are going to haunt us for a long time. That's an emerging alignment that you're seeing. You're seeing an emerging alignment that folks want a foreign policy and a trade policy that's going to protect American workers. But it's also not one that is used for self-enrichment,

self-enrichment and corruption, right? In those two things, you're seeing that playing out in the polling as well. I was actually quite struck in the polling that on corruption, it was actually in one of the top, top three concerns for Americans when you ask them what their concerns were about threats to American security and remarkable support for investigations in the next Congress of Trump administration corruption, including, I thought quite remarkable numbers around Republicans. I think it was something like 41 percent of Republican respondents supported investigations in the next Congress as either a high priority or a medium priority of Trump administration corruption. And then the last thing I think you're seeing is that there's a desire

to be engaged in the world, as you said, support for NATO, support for alliances, but also not to do in a way that's wasteful, spending wastefully, but also where there's accountability for the support we provide other countries, including with regard to weapon sales and military support. I think it's a common sense approach, but I think it also provides a roadmap as we look at what is going to resonate with the public and what ultimately is beneficial for them. I guess to wrap this up a bit,

like, okay, so the message, I take it that if you, well, two questions, like one on the midterms and then one on the presidential campaign. So like if you were advising Abdul Aesiyadh, you know, in the next few weeks, and maybe Abdul's listening to this while he works out or something, What do you think the What are the messages

You know You would advise him or another midterm Senate candidate to be hitting So one of them is don't miss the opportunity To really hammer home the costs of both the war and the terrorists And I've seen him do it and others have done it too For you know, Michiganders But also others around the country It's really hitting home

And you know the spike in diesel prices for example Is having a deeply hurtful effects around the country So I've seen that And that's, you know, make sure to emphasize those points when they're campaigning would be one thing I would emphasize. I think, you know, someone like Abdul is also, I think, hitting a nerve when he says, you know, I don't want U.S. military support to go to other countries when we could be using it at home. Right. And he's tapping into the nerve that I mentioned based on the polling that we have, that in fact, there is a good number of people around the country who do feel that way. And they see kind of how our weapons are being used or massive. military sales that are being provided with U.S. taxpayer dollars, given the way the system works,

but they're not seeing their schools being funded properly or they're having trouble with their health care. And he's really tapping into that. And I think you're going to see that, you're seeing that already across the board, but I could see it as something that is also going to resonate in 2028. Yeah. And so the last thing I wanted to ask is, like we've identified a lot of opportunity for Democrats here, right? You know, running against the tariffs, running against the war and the cost of it, you know, running against kind of this unaccountable military assistance of the countries. What do you think are going to be challenges? You know, like what did you see in here that it's like, oh, you know, as Democrats begin to prepare presidential primary campaigns,

where do you see a need for Democrats to make up ground or to kind of meet the moment in a way they haven't? Like, you know, beyond the opportunity in the poll, where do you see places is where we have to move the needle. Yeah. So there's also some hard medicine in this, and these poll results that I think we should, we should take, take into account and really think through how we work through kind of now between now and the midterms, but also after that.

One is on corruption, and we've seen this another polling too, where ultimately there is strong distrust of both parties on corruption. And they view both parties as equally involved in corruption. I think, and we need to dig through the. data a bit more. But I think, you know, some folks might be honing in on kind of individual stock trades by certain members of Congress from both parties, whereas others might be looking at just the obscene wealth that has been accumulated by the current president and his family and those around him in this administration, including, you know, corrupt contracts with the Department

of Defense and others kind of where they're building this web of interconnectedness kind of between their wealth and the government. But ultimately, that distrust, applies to both parties, and I think it's going to be really important for Democrats. When they're speaking and legislating on this issue, that they are acknowledging that, and they're acknowledging that there is this system that has been kind of corrupt and rigged against ordinary Americans. The other area is there are discrepancies between the way, at least in our polling, folks see Trump and the disapproval that they have of Trump, but in certain areas, they are not as negative about the Republican Party versus the Democratic Party and where as a result, kind of the negatives and the positive

numbers are not as stark. And I think as a result, there's more work for Democrats to do to prove that they are able to actually be really effective champions of the people in this coming Congress where I think there's going to be a huge focus on making sure that there's both an affirmative agenda, but also an accountability agenda, an oversight agenda that's going to deliver for the population. Yeah, I think that's a good warning note. I was struck, too, that the concerns about corruption didn't tilt overwhelmingly against Republicans. It was kind of a shared feeling. And I recently talked to a pollster for a piece I wrote from New York Times in which he said the same thing.

That basically people think that the whole system is corrupt, you know, and both parties are in on it. And maybe Trump is enriching himself more. But there's just some, there's too much money in politics, there's too much special interests. I think we shouldn't take as a given and it requires specificity, frankly, and also how you're going to do anti-corruption beyond just kind of yelling about Trump. Well, look, Marr, it's a fascinating.

Honestly, it's like much more interesting than these things usually are. I appreciate it. Well, because they're, you know, it's both the snapshot of the mood of the country, but underneath it, it suggests shifting public attitudes. Like, I'm not sure this would have been

anywhere near the same results five years ago, 10 years ago. So it's an important roadmap for us to heed. So thanks so much for coming on to walk us through us and we'll keep in touch. Great. Thanks. Really appreciate it. Thanks again, for joining the show and we'll talk to you guys next week. Pots Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Alona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Bonnergy. Our team includes Matt DeGroote, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffitt, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. 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.