Tangle - PREVIEW - The Sunday Podcast: Isaac and "White Smoke" Weitzman discuss the new Pope, reader criticism, and Joe Biden.

Episode Date: May 11, 2025

On today's Sunday podcast, Isaac and Ari discuss the recent election of a new Pope, and find a new nickname for Ari. They also talk about the criticism surrounding their review of Trump's presidency, addressing concerns about the adequacy of their analysis in light of the current political climate. The conversation highlights the challenges of providing objective political commentary while acknowledging the emotional stakes involved for listeners. They discuss the challenges of uniting a divided nation, critique the coverage of political events, and reflect on Biden's comments regarding Kamala Harris's campaign. Then they play a game about recent UN members. And, last but not least, a shared gripe for the Airing of Grievances. 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 hosted by Ari Weitzman and 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, Hunter Casperson, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, it's Christy from Canadian True Crime here to tell you about Gemini, the built-in AI assistant on Google Pixel. It's a huge help, especially on busy days. I just hold the power button on my Google Pixel 9 phone kindly sent to me by Google and talk or type. Gemini, check my Gmail. Where's the recording studio? What time do I have to be there?

The address for the studio was 100 Queen Street, Toronto, and you start at 8 a.m. Okay, I'm going to need coffee. What's nearby? Here are some coffee shops near the record. Learn more about Google Pixel 9 at store.google.com. Coming up, white smoke in Rome, white smoke, whites men. We address some criticism about Trump's presidency. Biden goes on the view. I think more people should be talking about that. And Ari and I share a grievance today, a very special moment in the history of the grievances. All right. It's a good one.

You're going to enjoy it. Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. And welcome to the Tangle podcast, the 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 here with tangle managing editor Ari Weitzman Ari White smoke white smoke in Rome, baby. Wait smoke whites. That's what they call me Yes, sir. To quote Isaac Saul. Let's jump right in with Yeah with the Pope dude. I mean Is there are the flag colors just coursing through your veins right now?

The first American pope? This is huge for us. I mean, the thing I'm thinking about is two things. One, like in the newsletter a couple of days ago when you were so desperate to put the USA chant somewhere in there, just looking for a home for it. I'm glad you found the home for it, which is on the podcast, talking about the pope. Perfect. And my other response is, yeah, honestly, about time. In terms of population distribution, we should have had a couple of Western hemisphere popes by now, should have had an American pope by now. The future of the Catholic Church is going to be more and more

Latin American, African. So, we are a little behind the curve with representation for North American popes and soon we're gonna get more African popes because that's just where Catholics are. Seems pretty straightforward to me. Kind of a DEI selection you're saying? I think it's more of a proportionality selection. It's like, who are the Catholics? The Catholics are demographically,

by and large, more Latin American and African. It's more like if we keep selecting European popes, that's more DEI. Yeah. It's pretty wild. I don't think I've – I mean, we haven't really, we, you know, we did our coverage, our coverage of the papacy, but, um, this has been like an unbelievable cultural phenomenon. Like my friends are texting in the group chat about, you know, who the Pope is, um, and like what his background is and what people think of him, like this whatever, this stuff he said about Trump and Vance. And I mean, there was this game, the game going around that like everybody on the Tangle team took, which was like to figure out which Pope you were based on answering 15 questions or something,

which I thought was totally hilarious. It just feels like, yeah, there is like a real, this has really captivated the world in a way that maybe the last one didn't because it wasn't like quite the internet era that this, I mean, we were in the internet era, but this feels like a little bit different to you. Like are people in your life talking about this who are not Catholics and shouldn't care that much? It's, a lot of people in my life who work for Tango are talking about it a lot. I think my family member is not at all.

I remember more the last pope selection because the last pope retired, which was unusual. And our last pope before the most recent one, Pope Benedict, the Nazi youth pope with the Gucci shoes, he was kind of controversial in the other way. So I always think about him and John Paul when I think of the path to see. And I also kind of think about how I just I'm I'm the guy on the team that cares the least I think about organized religion and about the Catholic Church in general I recognize its influence and of course it might not go without saying but just in case it does not

respect everybody's like decisions for their own faith and highly tolerant of that. I just don't really, it does not matter to me. And since I'm such a contrarian, as you know, the more I hear people talk about it, the more I'm like, next channel. I'm gonna wait. I'll catch the next story. I'm not in on this one. Yeah. Sorry. Well, no, I'll catch the next story. I'm not in on this one. Yeah, I... Sorry. Well, no, I respect that. Because it is interesting. It's interesting to follow.

I think it's interesting to follow. I had a lot of fun. Again, it feels weird because I know this is a really serious endeavor and super meaningful for a lot of Americans, have people globally. Obviously, the Catholic Church is gigantic. And it's like, Pope Francis died. So it's weird to talk about how it's a lot of fun to find his replacement. That's a good point. Yeah. Conclave helped too. That's also important. Pour gasoline on all this. Yeah. It's like, but- What kind of smoke does gasoline make. Oh, I think white actually. No, no, no, it doesn't. No, it burns dark. Gasoline burns dark. I've seen that.

Um, that's not, that's a, that's way tangential. Um, I took, I think the most on brand thing that's ever happened to me is I took one of those quizzes to see which cardinal I was and I matched with Angelo de Donatis, which is a centrist cardinal, the quiz told me, which I really appreciate. Everybody on the team was taking the quiz to see which cardinal they were most like. our ideological diversity as a group came out in a really hilarious way. Some people were progressive Pope, some people were conservative Pope, I was the centrist Pope. Will got Cthulhu, that was interesting. Yeah.

It was some light photoshopping, but it was a very good post by our friend Will. Yeah, it was really funny. I will say, I'm just looking at the immediate reaction, and at least here in the States, it's very interesting to see the way everybody is just sort of grasping on to our kind of Western American political lens to talk about this. Like I saw Will Chamberlain, who is a big conservative activist, who tweeted something like, were there really no pope candidates who had not publicly attacked both the president and vice president of the United States. He was sub-tweeting a Robert Prevost post from 2015 about why Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric is so problematic.

Then Charlie Kirk is tweeting out the fact that he's a registered Republican who's voted in Republican primaries when not living abroad and that he's pro-life. And then I'm seeing these progressive lawyers like the new pope has posted five times in the last two years on Twitter and they were like him criticizing JD Vance's take on Jesus, posting an article critiquing Vance's statements on deportation policies, retweeted the pope's health and retweeted criticism of Trump and Bukele laughing at Abrego Garcia. This content is so weird to me. The idea that the Pope has a Twitter history.

The idea that the Pope has a Twitter history, the fact that people are looking through it, these conservative activists and liberal activists are looking through it, these conservative activists and liberal activists are looking through it, looking for hints about how his ideology fits into American politics. Then they're framing him solely based on that. And then it's like, there's this air of, I've uncovered something, Charlie Kirk is like like scoop. The Pope is a Republican voter. I'm like, well, that's a scoop. Like he obviously, you know, like, duh. I don't think that's surprising at all.

An American Pope who's a representative of the Catholic church is a registered Republican. Like, um, Eric Erickson, yeah, Eric Erickson, increasingly one of the like most rational voices on the right. He said, so we have a pope who is aggressively pro-life, critical of Trump's immigration policy, supportive of gun control, critical of same-sex relationships and same-sex child adoptions, and critical of transgenderism. This should not surprise or shock anyone. Yeah, that is basically- Very representative of that demographic.

Yeah, of course. And I was really, I was like, I'm very confused. People are upset that the popes are these like humanitarians who look kindly on refugees and immigrants and the poor. Is that like, this is, if you were expressing surprise at this, you're kind of telling on yourself about perhaps

your misunderstanding of some of the Christian, Judaic faiths and the kinds of things that they preach. So, I don't know, a very weird sub-script commentary. I get that. Yeah, that is interesting. The way that it tells us, the reaction tells us something about the way different people see the blocks culturally and politically in the states right now. I'll also add my, the point that I'm always making now anytime we talk about the Pope, which goes back weeks, veritable days of me making this point, which is that we should

care. He's an influential head of state. He is the leader of a country and that's a position that has legitimate political power. So it's an important thing to keep tabs on and reasonable to ask questions about his past given that. Totally. Important too. I mean, I think there's just some, yeah, I can't quite put my finger on it. There's just something bizarre about watching people reduce him to like, was he critical of JD Vance's comments he made on Twitter? I'm just like, this is the Pope. Nobody cares.

A lot of people do care though. I mean, nobody cares or nobody should care. They should care about the degree to which he is instituting the doctrine or living up to what the- Reforms of the church. Yeah. Not like whether he once tweeted that the Trump administration... It would be news if he was like, oh, I totally agree. We should ship all those refugees out to El Salvador. That would be news if he was like, oh, I totally agree. We should ship all those refugees out to El Salvador. That would be news that he's critical of the draconian and strongman immigration policies, whether you think those policies are right or wrong. It's just like, of course he is. It's the Pope. I don't know, whatever. But anyway, we got the white smoke from Rome right before. I love saying that white smoke. We

got the white smoke from Rome right before we logged on. So that would have been a really great nickname for me if I ever played like pickup basketball, white smoke, white smoke. Come on. Yeah, that is good. I'm going to just start calling myself that maybe. No, I got that hypothetically. You gotta wait for me to pick it up. All right. Yeah, fair enough. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

Hey, it's Kristy from Canadian True Crime here to tell you about Gemini, the built-in AI assistant on Google Pixel. It's a huge help, especially on busy days. I just hold the power button on my Google Pixel 9 phone kindly sent to me by Google and talk or type. Gemini, check my Gmail. Where's the recording studio? What time do I have to be there? Alright, well listen, we have a couple of things on our agenda that I feel like we must get to. And so I don't want to dilly dally on the Pope stuff. Plus we got a lot

more to learn about this American Pope. USA. USA. USA. USA. Out of your system. Out of my system, yeah. We got a lot of criticism last week, at the end of last week for our review of Trump's presidency that I felt like was worth diving into and talking about. Increasingly, I think the podcast is

like such a great venue to do some of that because it allows us to have a longer form conversation about some of the stuff that's obviously bothering our readers or listeners. Before we get started, I want to put a posture for myself here because it is a good form to have a longer form conversation. But the conversation is very one-sided. It's us trying to represent the criticisms and then respond to it with our opinions. So what I'm going to try to do as you go through this and set the table is try to respond as if I'm channeling the criticisms from the readers that I've been hearing as I understand

them. So that way we can try to sort of emulate what a conversation here would be. So how's that sound? Yeah, that sounds good to me. Cool. So what's up? Okay. So I think maybe I'll just start by, you're going to do the channeling. I'll just do the summarizing of some of the criticism. One, the first thing I want to talk about is there was this sense that the promise meter,

the looking at what Trump's promise he was going to do and then talking about the degree to which he fulfilled that promise was a really poor way to handle an administration that is, quote unquote, threatening to undermine democracy and sending the country into a constitutional crisis. First of all, let me just be really clear. We have used that format. We used that format to cover the Trump administration the first time. We used it to cover the Biden administration at various intervals through his presidency. And we're going to keep using it to cover the Trump administration.

Why? Because it's actually a really good, like objective, neutral way to talk about a presidential administration. And it's really hard to say, this is why I hate the presidential rankings. It's really hard to say whether a president is good or not, because the degree to which you think a presidency was successful is typically based on what your definition of success looks like. For some people, a successful presidency might mean totally overhauling our energy systems and reducing the use of oil and coal. For other people, it might be the complete opposite. Trump ran on something,

he had a campaign and he promised a bunch of stuff and it's our job to hold him accountable for the things that he promised since he got elected on those promises. And so I think in a vacuum, it's not the best. You can't just do that, but I think as one tool, which is how we use it to measure a presidency, it's actually really good. It's just saying like, this person said

he was gonna do things, he got elected on the promises he made, did he do them? And that to me is like a totally fair, reasonable thing. On top of the fact that it's like a consistent way to do it, since we did it for past presidents and we'll do it for future presidents, we're not going to break the protocol, um, for any specific person on top of that, I think it's just like, that's it feels to me like a totally reasonable, smart metric for

measuring somebody's success as a, as a leader. I think the feedback as I best understand it, is that it is not Tangle who would be breaking protocol, but Trump who has already broken it. And thus, it is incumbent upon us to recognize this president is doing more by executive order, working with Congress less, violating due process concerns in a way

that we have admitted we're concerned about. In that kind of situation, we should, as a news outlet, call out, hey, this is a president who ran on controlling the border and ran on deportations, both people who are accused of being in the country illegally and protesters on college campuses, which were both promises he made. Those weren't confusing or surprising. But it should require a little extra work for us to say, you know, there's feedback to this. There's reasons why this isn't great and why we don't like it and we have to try to centralize it or at least weight it differently. The fact that we had all the core promises in one big edition Thursday and then he had to wait a day

to see what else was coming didn't feel great. So that's what I think the first big concern was. Yeah, and that makes sense. I suppose that's fair. I'm just, yeah, whatever. We explained what we were going to do and then we did it. And I think there's a really clear defense for why you should do it this way and how it removes the degree of bias that you introduce. Again, to just use Trump as an example, he's promised to deport 20 million people and he ran on that promise and he got a majority of the vote. So for half the country, you know, him deporting 20 million people would be presumed to be a good thing. So like our judgment on his presidency, whether I think that thing is good or not, personally,

can't just be like, oh, I think this is good or bad. This is the best presidency ever because he's deporting 20 million people, or this is the worst presidency ever because he's deporting 20 million people. I think there should be some element of like, here's what he ran on and here's what he's doing. And that's a good way to kind of structure how we think or talk about it. So that's one criticism. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

We were gifted the new Google Pixel 9 and the built-in AI assistant, Gemini, has been so helpful with our weekly science podcast. Okay, listen to this. Hey Gemini, what is an interesting science story from the last couple of weeks? One particularly interesting science story involves a potential breakthrough in understanding

and treating Alzheimer's disease. It's ridiculously useful. Right, I don't have to stare at my phone being overwhelmed, trying to gather information in the same way anymore. Check out google pixel nine at store.google.com. You could set the table on the second criticism if you want. I've got more in the bag, so we aren't going to be looking for him. I have one more that I definitely want to talk about and maybe it'll be different from yours. The second criticism is just that we didn't meet the moment because we didn't truly capture the threat that Trump represents.

One commenter, Andy Francisco, he has the top comment, the most liked comment on part two of the review. He starts by just saying, I really love tangle and value all the work you do. And by the way, this is a great way to deliver feedback. It was constructive. It's thoughtful. He quotes our writing directly. He's not like miss miss. What's the word? He's presenting misrepresenting. Yeah, miss miss misrepresenting or misrepresenting what we wrote. He's not straw manning, he just like straight up addresses what we said and explains why he doesn't like it. I love this kind of criticism because it like gives me something to think and talk about.

So thank you, Andy. He said like, his quote says, what I think many of my fellow left leaning commentators find so frustrating from the independent minded voters at large is the reluctance to recognize the moment. And then he says, you admit, and he quotes my writing, of course, this is all without even touching the collision between the judiciary and the executive branches or the attacks on free speech or the open corruption of his crypto grift, or the many regulations he slashed

that make corruption easier, or the predictable poor performances of some of Trump's most high profile cabinet appointees. For many of us, this is now Andy talking, for many of us, these are not footnotes. They represent existential threats to the American experiment. Why the decision to not deal with them in this two-part analysis? Frankly, I don't care about the effect of economic policy on my 401k if we have slipped into some kind of kleptocratic nightmare state that focuses its resources on going after perceived enemies. To reach the end of today's newsletter, find that you ultimately land on merely feeling discouraged. It fuels my concern that we are

sleepwalking into becoming a country I no longer recognize. What is it going to take for those in the middle to admit that we have crossed the Rubicon and should start ringing the alarm bells? Your voice carries weight and the evidence is staring us in the face, please say something. Can I respond to this one? Can I maybe, we'll flip roles here for a second. Sure, yeah, go ahead. I know you're gearing up, I know you got something. So I wanna see if I can represent this a little bit

and start out by saying we have, I think directly said, ring, use the phrase ringing alarm bells before. Like that's something that you've said in your take, especially as it relates to the Abrego Garcia case of him being sent to a country where he had a court order saying that he could not be sent to and then the government saying nothing we could do about it. That is alarming. I think the big response that I would have, maybe yours is a little different, is that there is an amount where we want to say, this bothers us.

And then there's an amount where we want to kind of let the reader do the thinking for themselves. And to say, we've covered all of these issues individually about crypto, about free speech, the chilling effect, about the judiciary and executive just completely eclipsing the role of the legislative right now. We've talked about all that stuff. What we're really discussing now is a waiting issue. What I'm hearing is the concern of, you said this, but I wanted you to say it more.

And I think it's a little bit of a mismatch between what we believe is important for us to do and what some readers who are critical believe is important for us to do. What we think is important is going and digging out some of the larger things, like what are the larger promises, what are the accomplishments, achievements so far, and just try to talk about those as plainly as we can so that we aren't getting overly indexed upon those individual issues that are serious, that are concerning, but are kind of individual or not totally representative, I think, of forward trends that we could extrapolate forward.

This is a thing, a little soapbox of mine, I'll get on and write off, that annoys me about both sides of any political debate in the US, left or right, is assuming that the thing we're watching now is a trend that if you do not act now, will become a wave that overflows and destroys our society or culture. With the right, you hear it all the time about culture issues or the degradation of moral character. With the left, you hear it about norms, the attack on courts, free speech. Whereas I think it's probably more accurate to think of things right now as a high water mark rather than as an upward sloping trend that's going to keep extrapolating to infinity.

So that kind of informs our difference in tone, I think, as well as the difference that we have in the weighting of our coverage. How'd I do? I think that's all great. I mean, I agree with a lot of that and would certainly be part of like the defense or response or whatever you want to call it. Cause I'm not, I'm not trying to be defensive though. I have to be honest that I, despite this criticism being popular with some of our readers clearly, cause it's the top comment on this post that I don't find it. It doesn't like, it didn't move me to believe that we are somehow doing the wrong thing in the way we covered this. I would add something too about the writing,

which is just like the way the my take was structured, which is what this writer, this commenter is addressing, is that I went down through the promises and I made the case that on the things that Trump was saying that he was going to do, even among the biggest, most important promises he made, the centerpieces of his campaign so far, there were basically two things that felt like he could credibly claim his victories. And both of them had major caveats that sort of undermined them. So the structure of the piece of what I was writing was that was through the lens of even if you're supportive

of the president and you want him to succeed at the things that he's supposed to be succeeding at, then he's not doing very well, right? Like even if you are aligned with him on these five core campaign goals, like core campaign promises, core visions for the country that I think Trump has had and has had forever, then he's struggling, you know? Like, he's not fulfilling the promises at that level that he says that he's going to fulfill.

And that's resolving the conflicts, cutting spending in waste, the tariff rollout. As you look at those things specifically, basically the only of them that he's like, I think really credibly has made progress on is reducing the chaos at the Southern border, which he has done. progress on is reducing the chaos at the southern border, which he has done. And then I'm saying all of this is not even talking about these significant term defining issues. It's saying, I'm starting with the strongest case you could build. So tackling that first.

Which is just like a rhetorical, to to me, the takeaway from that is like that Trump's presidency is off to a really horrendous start because he's not succeeding at many of the things that I want him to succeed at. And he's also doing a bunch of really horrible stuff that I didn't imagine he would be doing. It's like a very, I don't know how you could read this without coming away like this is a really critical

piece. And I get that I say, I'm feeling discouraged, whatever. I don't think that's merely what I said. I don't think that's ultimately what I said. That wasn't like the core takeaway of my writing. I think the core takeaway of my writing was that if you're supportive of the president, he's off to a rough start fulfilling the promises he made to you, from my view. And on top of that, he's introduced tons and tons of uncertainty about the future. And he's been doing overtly corrupt things like the crypto grift. And so like all of this is just, I think,

a pretty unflattering portrait. And I read it as being a pretty critical piece and it's like, there's this element, there's this undertone of it that's like, if I'm not saying that Trump is threatening the future of the country or that- You're not going all the way to 10. Yeah, that democracy might collapse just fuels the concern

that we're sleepwalking into a country Andy no longer recognizes. Just for what it's worth, we are a very similar country to what we were a year ago right now. And in three years, we're gonna be a really similar country to what we were two years ago. I really believe that. I'm not saying that Trump won't challenge the reach of his executive authority.

I'm not saying that he won't do unlawful, unconstitutional stuff. We very well may have a crisis on our hands in the near future. I also think there's like a really, really big demand for it. Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer for Tangle. I hope you enjoyed this preview of our Sunday podcast with Ari and Isaac. 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 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 K. Back, and associate editors, Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saul, Lindsay 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. Thanks for watching!