Tangle - PREVIEW - The Friday Edition: Yes, things are pretty bad right now.

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

The fundamental promise of this news publication is viewpoint diversity.I built Tangle because I wanted a place where conservatives, liberals, and everyone in between could gather under one roof and trust the news they were reading. In an era when media trust is at an all-time low, polarization is increasingly extreme and so few people seem capable of talking to each other across the partisan divide, this North Star has always served us well.In order to serve this mission, to earn the trust of the biggest Trump supporters and the most progressive leftists and all the people who land somewhere between them, we offer some simple promises: chief among them is viewpoint diversity in our content. Most days, this is “What the left is saying” and “What the right is saying,” though sometimes we’ll offer pieces that counter each other (for instance, a Tangle staff member is working on a piece responding to what I’m writing here today). We also lean into transparency in how we work by featuring corrections prominently and sharing (and explaining) our editorial policies. Finally, we try to show that we’re fallible humans who can make mistakes, learn and change their minds, rather than pretend we comprise a flawless high-minded institution (we regularly feature reader criticisms, and I encourage anyone who disagrees with today’s piece to write in or comment so we can consider your thoughts). Ad-free podcasts are here!To listen to this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!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 Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Jon Lall.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, I'm diving in to the fact that I think things are actually pretty bad right now. I want to start by saying this. The fundamental promise of this news publication is viewpoint diversity. I built Tangle because I wanted a place where conservatives, liberals, and everyone in between could gather under one roof and trust the news they were reading. In an era when the media trust is at an all-time low, polarization is increasingly extreme and so few people seem capable of talking to each other across the partisan divide,

this North Star has always served us well. In order to fulfill this promise to earn the trust of the biggest Trump supporters and the most progressive leftists and all the people who land somewhere between them, we offer some simple promises. Chief among them is viewpoint diversity in our content. Most days, this is what the left is saying and what the right is saying, though sometimes we'll offer pieces that counter each other. For instance, a tangled staff members working on a piece responding to what I'm writing here today. We also lean into transparency in how we work by featuring corrections prominently and sharing and explaining our editorial policies. Finally, we try to show that we're fallible human beings who can make

mistakes, learn, and change their minds rather than pretend we comprise a flawless, high-minded institution. We regularly feature reader criticisms, and I encourage anyone who disagrees with today's podcast to write in or comment so we can consider your thoughts. We're not perfect, obviously. Our system has flaws. The left-right dichotomy in which we sort arguments is not always clean or appropriate. Some people skip to my take without listening to the different perspectives we share. Listeners of various political persuasions unsubscribe every day upset that they don't find their views represented the way they'd prefer in our coverage. We recognize these flaws and we're always trying to improve. Yet, I promise that whenever I write my opinions, I will always be honest,

that I will share my view in the most fair and straightforward way I can. When I feel strongly about something, I will say so, regardless of which political tribe that view aligns with. When I don't know something or don't have a fully formed opinion, I'll admit that too. And my promise, when I'm sharing my view, is to do so regardless of the landmines I may step on or the people I may upset. So today, I want to share my perspective on the moment that we are living in. And the honest truth, as I see it, is that things are actually pretty bad right now. Nearly everything in the political arena, the candidates, the policies, the extremism, the AI slop, the punditory, the writing, the thinking, the principles, it all feels as if it's getting worse in basically every meaningful

way. And to me, one of the driving forces behind all of this is the Trump administration. Nine months into his presidency, I think the bad things that Trump is doing vastly outweigh the good. Rather than pretending that I don't feel that way, I'm going to step forward and flatly make my case. Again, I say all this as an independent-minded thinker with no loyalty to any political party. I say it as someone who has published countless pieces criticizing excesses and failures of the left, including in the media. I say it while holding a set of political views that I genuinely believe are decidedly middle of the road in some. and all over the place from issue to issue.

So here's the truth as I see it. If, on the day Trump was inaugurated, I had warned our readers and listeners that in a few months, law enforcement officers would be repelling from helicopters like soldiers into civilian apartment buildings in Chicago. The military would be extrajudicially killing Venezuelans for alleged drug dealing.

Americans would be getting arrested while being falsely accused of being here illegally. The Justice Department would be prosecuting the president's political foes at his direction, and legal U.S. residents would be getting arrested, detained, and deported for protected speech, I would have been accused of having a bad case of Trump derangement syndrome. Yet nine months into his presidency, all of those things are happening. This isn't hyperbolic fear-mongering. It isn't sensationalist or exaggerated. It's literally just the list of the things that the president has done, things I'm obligated to speak plainly about.

Trump has, thankfully, largely obeyed court orders so far, but that may not be the case going forward. He's gotten a lot of what he wanted from the court so far, and he's resisted or delayed obeying the major rulings that have gone against him. The quote-unquote resistance libs, whom I've derided for hyperventilating about the hypotheticals and living in a constant state of terror, they've gotten a lot of things right so far about the contours of Trump's second term. And for conservative readers who may be sympathetic to Trump's more extreme actions, I think it's important to put into terms that I hope will clarify the issue for you. Hypothetical analogies are never perfect, but some of the following frightening possibilities are legitimately much more plausible

if we accept what Trump has done. Imagine President Biden had won his election on a fundamental promise to end gun violence in America. So, in turn, he claims that he has a mandate to send the national government, guard into the three states with the highest rates of gun violence, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. The troops converge on small rural towns to round up gun owners suspected of violating a range of firearm laws. Gun shops are raided and trashed by federal agents. Tables are flipped over, deaths are emptied, customers inside are zipped tied and dragged onto the street in front of onlookers

without any reasonable suspicion of having committed a crime. Helicopters buzz overhead as backup. The agents don't flash warrants or ID themselves. In fact, they're all mask, and it's not always clear what agency they are with. They demand identification and proof of firearm licenses from everyone present. All the customers are detained without due process until the agents are sure they haven't committed a crime.

Local police and politicians try to intervene, but they are ignored and forced out of the way. Federal courts stacked with Democratic-appointed judges green light the troops' actions. Then, imagine a handful of the customers inside one of these shops ends up being guilty of something, and those people are pointed to as justification for the entire raid. Even if you knew some of those people broke the law,

would you trust this kind of power in the government's hands? What would you do if that was your store, your community, or your due process rights being run over? Here's another. Every year, millions of pro-life activists descend on Washington, D.C. for the March for Life. Imagine President Barack Obama responding to the March for Life rallygoers by framing them all as anti-abortion radical extremists and terrorist lunatics, and then deploying the National Guard to protect federally funded facilities

offering abortion services in Republican-led states. Imagine that when this move draws blowback from the protesters and Republicans and conservative media, Obama responds by having the troops tear-gas crowds, incite violence, and then arrest anyone who fights back for assaulting police. Or remove any living president from the picture and imagine a president yet to be, perhaps a very progressive anti-Zionist

like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Zoran Mamdani. Imagine this president decides that pro-Israel activists are a threat to the security of Muslims in America. So, exercising power the same way Trump has, they deploy ICE agents to snatch up Israeli immigrants in the country

on green cards for opinion pieces they wrote defending Israel from claims of genocide in their university newspapers. While trying to deport them, this hypothetical president ships them off to a prison thousands of miles away from where they were arrested on the grounds that they support a racist, colonial terrorist state called Israel. These are not identical to the things Trump is doing, but they are all similar to what Trump is doing

now, just with the script flipped. As hypotheticals, they are all now far more possible with the precedent that Trump is setting. The central difference, of course, is that Trump is targeting the people many of his supporters want targeted, but Trump won't be president forever. And what we can deem acceptable now will, as it always does, come back to haunt us in the future. We'll be right back after this quick break. As I write this piece, Trump is deploying National Guard troops to American cities against the wishes of those cities and states elected officials. It was good to see Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt,

a Republican, take a principled stance against this obscene overreach, saying, rightly, that Oklahomans would lose their mind if Governor J.B. Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration. Last week, after one of the president's extrajudicial strikes on a boat off the coast of Venezuela, two survivors were found. This was a pretty interesting development, because these strikes have killed dozens of alleged drug smugglers about whom we know next to nothing.

And then something odd happened. Instead of charging the recovered survivors with the alleged crime, the Trump administration tried to kill them for, narco-terrorism, they allowed the men to be repatriated to their own countries. This is in some way standard procedure. People who are arrested in international waters are often sent back to their countries to face charges. One of the most alarming aspects of this situation was that, in the case of at least one of the men who was killed, killed in the strike, some evidence emerged that he was a fisherman. One of the survivors of the recent strike did have a prior record of drug trafficking charges,

but the other man from Ecuador was released by his country and won't be charged because they said there was no evidence of a crime to charge him with. In other words, it is possible that the Trump administration just killed at least one innocent person. At the very least, they declined to detain and charge someone on U.S. soil. They just got done trying to kill extrajudicially. That this administration had not been fighting narco-terrorists, but actually killing innocent fishermen off the coast of Venezuela, was already something a few journalists had theorized.

When Colombia's president condemned the strikes, Trump pulled U.S. aid to the country rather than admit a potential mistake. The president is now entertaining strikes on Venezuela's mainland, just as he has approved a $40 billion bailout for Argentina's economy funded by U.S. taxpayers. The price tag on that bailout, as we discussed, this week is far greater than the combined savings from Doge's ham-handed operations earlier this year and the cuts to the budget of USAID. By the way, new reporting from the Associated Press is showing how children in Myanmar are starving

due to those USAID cuts. Other actions are less likely to spark a constitutional crisis or a new foreign entanglement, but are still indignities against the office that we now just accept. For example, here are a few lowlights from the Trump administration in just a few. the last few weeks. Hey, everybody. This is John, executive producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest episode. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber 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 want to say, thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offering, so stay tuned. I will join you again for the daily podcast. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'all.

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