Tangle - PREVIEW - The Friday Edition: Five things I got *right* about Trump.

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about five things I had gotten wrong about Trump in his first six months in office. In all honesty, I’m not a huge fan of political prognostication, and I often try to avoid making predictions to focus more on my analysis and reporting. Still, predictions inevitably slip into that analysis; and my last retrospective, like many others I had written before it, was an exercise in the kind of accountable and analytical journalism we do here at Tangle. I’m a big fan of writing about when I’m wrong, or have changed my mind, or have valuable criticisms to share — I think it helps me evolve and our readers reflect on their own viewpoints, too.But, shortly after publishing that piece, I realized that I spend a lot of time writing about all the things I get wrong, and maybe not enough time writing about when I get things right. After all, if I’m simply wrong over and over, should readers really trust me for reliable analysis? It struck me that in trying to be transparent with criticisms I may be undermining my own credibility. So today, I figured I’d flip the script, give myself some grace, and do something I had never done before: Pen an entire piece on things I’ve gotten right. Since my newsletter a few weeks ago focused exclusively on Trump, I thought I’d turn the focus to the same subject and share five things I’ve gotten right about Trump’s second term so far. By the way: If you are not yet a podcast member, and you want to upgrade your newsletter subscription plan to include a podcast membership (which gets you ad-free podcasts, Friday editions, The Sunday podcast, bonus content), you can do that here. That page is a good resource for managing your Tangle subscription (just make sure you are logged in on the website!)Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to ReadTangle.com to sign up! You can also give the gift of a Tangle podcast subscription by clicking here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and Jon Lall. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong.

But there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the Summer Pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers. Say hello savings and goodbye worries with Freedom Mobile. Get 60 gigs to use in Canada, the US, and Mexico for just 39 bucks a month. Plus get a one-time use of five gigs of Roam Beyond data. Conditions apply, details at freedommobile.ca.

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on What's better than a well marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for,

Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees,acart app and enjoy zero dollar delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Soll, and today you're going to get a lot of me, all me.

It's just me here today with you on the show, and we're doing something a little bit special. So a couple of weeks ago, I wrote, and we published a podcast here, about five things I had gotten wrong about Donald Trump in his first six months in office. In all honesty, I'm not a huge fan of political prognostication. I often try to avoid making predictions about the future because I think there's just something kind of gimmicky about that and instead focus on my analysis and reporting and talking about what we know and what's in front of us. Obviously, predictions inevitably slip into that analysis or into my take in the newsletter and I've written explicit articles where

I made 19 predictions about the future of politics because I understand they're interesting and they're good ways to test my theses about the world. In my last retrospective, like many others I'd written before it, it was an exercise in the kind of accountability and analytical journalism that we do here at Tangle. I am a big fan of writing about when I'm wrong or when I've changed my mind or when I have valuable criticisms to share. I think it helps me evolve and it helps our readers reflect on their viewpoints too. But shortly after publishing that piece, I kind of realized that I spend a lot of time writing about all the things I get wrong, and maybe not enough time writing about when I get things right.

After all, if I am simply wrong over and over and over, should listeners really trust me for reliable analysis? It struck me that in trying to be transparent with criticisms I may be undermining my own credibility. Indeed, a lot of readers and my own editors insisted that I could be doing this too much. So today, I figured I'd flip the script. I'll give myself some grace and I'll do something I've never done before. I'm going to pen an entire piece. I'm going to write this whole show that's just about the things that I've gotten right.

Since my newsletter and the podcast a few weeks ago focused exclusively on Trump, I thought I'd turn the focus to the same subject and share five things that I've gotten right about Trump's second term so far. Before I jump in, a quick reminder that this podcast is a members only podcast, so somewhere when I'm talking in here, John's going to fade out the music and then he's going to tell you that you have to go become a member to subscribe. So if you want to hear the whole thing, you have to go to readtangle.com forward slash membership. When you buy a membership, it'll take you through this process. That should be relatively easy where you add the paid members only feed to your podcast feed. You

click a couple buttons, get one email, and then the feed will show up wherever you listen to podcasts. And you won't just get all our members-only content, you will also get ad-free podcasts from The Daily, which a lot of people really like. So go do that. It's readtangle.com forward slash membership. There should be a link in the episode description, and that is the quickest way to unlock the whole show.

All right, with that, I'm gonna just jump in. All right, so first up on the five things that I got right about Donald Trump was that Pete Hegseth was a dangerous and poor choice for defense secretary. When I reviewed Trump's cabinet appointees, Hegseth was probably the person I was most concerned about. Hegseth got a lot of heat during his confirmation process because he was the quote-unquote Fox News guy who got

tapped to lead the armed forces. This characterization was true, but it was also insufficient. Hegseth rose to the rank of major as an Army National Guard officer. He served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was awarded two Bronze Stars. He earned a Master of Public Policy from Harvard after his second deployment. He led two nonprofit veterans advocacy groups. Then he worked as a Fox News host for more than a decade. Which is all to say he had plenty more on his resume than just being a television host. A better criticism of Hegseth,

and the primary one that I leveled against him, is that dysfunction had followed him everywhere he went. I was not overtly concerned that he was underqualified compared to his predecessors or that he was unfaithful to his wife, something that Democrats spent a lot of time on during his confirmation hearing. I was concerned that he had a terrible reputation as a leader of relatively small organizations and was now being tasked with leading almost three million service members and DOD civilians. Here's an excerpt of my take after Hegseth's confirmation hearing. As I've said in the past, we as Americans have been remarkably safe in the post-9-11 era from foreign threats and we are totally unaware of how good we have it here in the U.S.

Our soldiers are in about as little danger as they've ever been in my lifetime. We're pulling back from many major conflicts and the vast majority of the issues facing our Department of Defense involve wasteful spending, inventory issues, shaky leadership, and the fact we are falling behind on advanced military technology. I don't see any reason to believe that Hegseth, who has a leader of several smaller, less complicated organizations, has been followed by allegations of poor leadership, disorganization, sexual misconduct, poor financial management, and drunkenness, is the right person to solve these issues." I also noted that Hegseth had a genuinely bad hearing. He couldn't name any international security agreements he would lead as defense secretary, incorrectly guessed several members of the Association of the

Southeast Asian Nations, was non-committal about using the U.S. military against U.S. civilians, and seemed to think the military has quotas for demographic groups, which it doesn't, though diversity in the military has been a point of emphasis for the DOD during the Biden administration. Hegseth's track record followed him into leadership at the DOD. Hegseth was the central figure in one of the largest scandals of the administration so far, in which a journalist was inadvertently added to a Signal group chat where attack plans for a strike in Yemen were discussed in extensive detail. Just this week, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon's independent watchdog

has evidence that the information Hegseth shared in the signal chat was indeed classified, contradicting his and the White House's claims. We then learned that Hegseth and others in his orbit were in more signal chats sharing privileged information. Hegseth refused to take any accountability for this and instead tried to throw several team members under the bus. Since then, Hegseth's department has been in complete disarray. Justin Folcher, a top advisor, just left the Pentagon, marking the sixth major recent departure following a series of scandals and leaks. In January, former Chief Pentagon spokesman John Olyot argued unequivocally that Hegseth was the best man for the job.

By late April, he was penning an op-ed for Politico arguing unequivocally that Hegseth should step down or be fired. Olyot saw Hegseth's leadership up close and in person as a top aide, and he came away feeling deeply concerned about the risk it posed to the country. So, why hasn't Hegseth been fired? Well, I predicted that too, writing in April that Trump would refuse to fire him for his incompetence because that'd be giving a scalp to his critics and the media, which he is always loath to do. On all this, my views about Hegseth were basically right on, and his term as defense secretary has gone just as I expected. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you when you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong. But there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll.

Shop the Summer Pre-Roll and Infuse Pre-Roll Sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers. What's better than a well-marbledbled rib eye sizzling on the barbecue? A well marbled rib eye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well marbled rib eye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Number two, I was right about Trump and Israel. One of the more bizarre things that happened during the 2024 election was the way the pro-Palestine

movement rallied around Trump and against the Biden-Harris administration. The uncommitted vote in Michigan was the center of this story, with groups of pro-Palestine Arab Americans pledging either to vote for Trump or not vote for Harris. While praising the uncommitted vote for smart politics in our coverage, I also warned supporters of the Palestine Liberation Movement that their support for Trump was nonsensical. Harris has been tough to pin down on this issue, but Trump is not, I wrote. As president, Trump moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli control of the Golan Heights, and was called by Benjamin Netanyahu the greatest friend

Israel has ever had in the White House. As a candidate, Trump has consistently voiced his support of Israel's right to defend itself and said he'd deport anti-Israel protesters. There is no way that voters concerned with the safety of Gazans will be able to exert more pressure on a President Trump than a President Harris. I understand why they feel hopeless with the current administration, but I also don't see a world where they get anything they want with Trump." Then, in January, after the Trump and Biden administration collectively negotiated a ceasefire deal, this was before Trump got into office, I said that I was skeptical that the deal would last, but also reflected on this segment of my take and the protest movement more broadly.

If this deal holds, I wrote again, if, it will also reflect poorly on me. I wrote repeatedly that the Arab American voters in Michigan and across the U.S. who oppose terrorists or outright supported Trump in protest of Biden's handling of the war would be sorely disappointed. Perhaps my view there proves accurate in the long run, I said. I still believe Trump is a staunchly pro-Israel president whose interests are diametrically opposed to the Palestinian liberation. But if Trump begins his term by helping negotiate an end to this war, I'll be eating some

crow and those voters will have both increased their political power and gotten the result they wanted. Unfortunately, my initial view here has proven accurate in the long run. That January ceasefire I was writing about collapsed after its first phase. Rather than exerting more pressure on Israel, Trump has effectively greenlit whatever Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has drawn up, despite frustration emanating from the Trump camp. Since taking office, Trump has endorsed plans to relocate all the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which is an argument for ethnic cleansing. There is no other word for it, I'm sorry. And

while he's reportedly griped about Netanyahu privately in public, Trump has remained steadfast in his support, even taking the major step of helping Israel attack Iran's nuclear facilities. Many of the uncommitted voters have noticed. In February, one of the key groups to Trump's voter outreach for the uncommitted movement in Michigan, officially named Arab Americans for Trump, dropped Trump from their name and updated the organization to Arab Americans for Peace. That was just after Trump hosted Netanyahu at the White House and proposed developing Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East under U.S. ownership.

Meanwhile, Trump is detained and attempted to deport students who have supported Gaza as he promised while campaigning, and he has punished universities where pro-Palestine protests and, in his telling, anti-Semitism have proliferated, and the horrors of the war in Gaza have only gotten worse with no end in sight. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose.

Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect, the pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers. Say hello, savings, and goodbye worries with Freedom Mobile. Get 60 gigs to use in Canada, the US, and Mexico for just $39 a month. Plus get a one-time use of 5 gigs of Roam Beyond data. Condition supply details at freedommobile.ca. What's better than a well marbled ribeye sizzling

on the barbecue? A well marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy zero dollar delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over deliver. That brings me to number three.

Protester confrontations with federal agents during immigration raids have been commonplace. In November, after the Trump won the presidency, I shared 22 thoughts about his victory. Many of them, I actually think, have aged quite well. You can go listen to that podcast if you'd like. But one in particular stuck out to me as a theme I've been discussing in the month since. In item number six, I said, if he, Trump, attempts a mass deportation, I think we'll see civil disobedience and violence unlike anything we saw during his first term. His brand of politics invites people to relish in the misery of others, a kind of own the

libs and destroy the enemy mentality that I think is going to bring us four more years of increasingly awful divisions and then especially bad environment for trans people or immigrants who became the focus of his campaign's ire. I thought this one would be interesting to include in part because in the Five Things I Got Wrong About Trump podcast, I covered the same topic through the lens of what I got wrong. Basically, I caught to thinking that the Trump administration's deportation effort would be smaller and less horrific than it has been so far. I didn't think Trump would actually do the things he said he was going to do, but he has.

A few weeks after warning about what would happen, terms of the attempts at zero tolerance policy. or a premium podcast subscriber, and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com and sign up for a newsletter subscription, or you can sign up for a podcast subscription or a bundled subscription, which gets you both the podcast and the newsletter and unlocks the rest of this episode, as well as ad-free daily podcasts, more Friday editions, Sunday editions,

bonus content, interviews, and so much more. Most importantly, we just wanna interviews, and so much more. Most importantly, we just want to say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offerings, so stay tuned. I will join you for the daily podcast on Monday. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a fantastic weekend, y'all. Peace.

Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul and our executive producer is John Law. Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Law. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kback and associate editors Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saul, Lindsey Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75 and John Law. And to learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at reedtangle.com.