The Bulwark Podcast - Ben Rhodes: Trump Is Getting a Terrible Deal

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

The U.S. and Israel started dropping bombs on Iran because the regime, amid mass street protests, appeared to be in a weakened state. But the regime has now ended up with a much stronger hand: It's proven its leverage over the global economy with the Strait of Hormuz, and under Trump's offer, Iran will get a huge infusion of cash to rebuild its ballistic missiles program and fund its proxy terror groups. At the same time, Trump has made the United States look like a rogue state—while spending billions for a deal he could have got without a war. Plus, Israelis are likely not happy, the Gulf states realize America can't protect them from Iran's drones, Cuba is readying to be next, Dems should make clear they are the anti-war party now, Trump is fighting his demons from his first term, and JD has a radical and un-American world view.Ben Rhodes joins Tim Miller for the holiday weekend pod.show notes Ben's podcast, "Pod Save the World" Ben's forthcoming book, "All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches" Tickets for our Bulwark Live shows in San Diego and LA in May: TheBulwark.com/Events Tim's playlist For 30% off your order, head to BloodFlow7.com/THEBULWARK and use code THEBULWARK. Post jobs for free at ziprecruiter.com/BULWARK

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hope to see you all there. Up next, Ben Rhodes. Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show, the former deputy national security advisor for Barack Obama, co-host of a show called Pod Save the World, an author of a forthcoming book, All We Say, The Battle for American Identity, released in May, pre-order it. Now it's Benjamin Rhodes. What's up, Ben? Tim, awesome to be here as always. Thank you so much for doing this. Obviously, the news this morning with the Art of the Deal from our president in Iran brings us to an area of expertise and experience for you. So I'm grateful for your presence. I just want to lay for folks, lay out for folks what we know at the time of the taping here. It's about 11 in the east.

Israel and Lebanon had a 10-day ceasefire that went into effect overnight. That led Iran to say that. they would open the straight. Trump said that's good, but we're still keeping the blockade until we had a final deal. We now have a proposed deal that's not finalized. The U.S. and Iranian negotiators are likely to meet Sunday in Islamabad, but Trump is already doing victory laps about it. Axios reports the outlines unfreezing $20 billion of Iran assets. And the U.S., in the last round of talks was demanding a 20-year moratorium on uranium enrichment, Iran counted to five years. Now, they're claiming that in exchange for the 20 million, we would actually get the uranium. So we'll see

if that's how that shakes out. That said, there's a second U.S. official talking to Axis. I wonder who that is. A second U.S. official. Feels kind of like Jared Kushner to me, because it's not an administration official. It's a U.S. official. Anyway, if it's Barack Ravid, it's Jared Kushner. Yeah, it seems like it's Jared Kushner. A little less bullish, then let's just say potentially their father-in-law, they're saying that Iran wants to $20 billion and a lot more. They want to sell oil at free market rates

without sanctions. They want to participate in the global financial system. They also want to still have their nuclear program. They want to fund terrorists, and they don't want to give that up enough to get the things we're offering. So, you know, maybe the victory laps of all early for Trump, TBD, we'll see. But that's kind of the outlines of the deal. He's tweeting

this morning, many thanks to Pakistan, all the Arab states, and he's dunking on NATO for not helping us. So what are your reactions to the current state of play? I mean, Tim, we are in the most absurd timeline here because essentially we have to just live with the truth, right? Not the true social post, but the actual truth, which is that Donald Trump launched a war thinking that there would be quick and easy regime change. None of that happened. He killed thousands of people with this war. He spent hundreds of billions of dollars. He probably wiped out, you know, trillions of

dollars in price increases. You know, you've got countries where people can't even access fuel. He decimated what was left of our international relationship. The rest of the world kind of looks at us warily like a rogue state that could knock anything over at any time. And now he's trumpeting the fact that he has reopened the very straight that was open before he launched the war. And perhaps he will get Iran to ship out its highly enriched uranium stockpile. And we can talk more about how that's not necessarily at all getting rid of their nuclear program. And yet the regime is in place. They have demonstrated their capacity to close the straight-of-form moves, which gives them extraordinary deterrence and leverage going forward over the global economy. And no suggestion

that they're going to change their approach to supporting proxy groups across the region, no indication that they're going to abandon a ballistic missile program. I guess we sunk a bunch of Iranian ships and destroyed a bunch of ballistic missiles, but they can manufacture those. So on the scale of what we accomplished versus the destruction we wrought, I'm glad this is happening. It's better than destroying a civilization and, you know, perpetuating the war. But we must keep the perspective here

because there's going to be a tremendous amount of propaganda that suggests that somehow this was a great deal when, in fact, this was a deal you could have had easily without fighting the war. But other than that, pretty good. So, I mean, I'm just, you know, like, I'm glad it's happening. I mean, but I can feel what's coming from Trump in his, you know, echo chamber to use a phrase. And I think we just have to look at reality.

So I want to break this down a little bit more detail, but I thought it would be useful given that you're the guest on the podcast that you were there for the JCPOA. For people who either tuned into politics in 2015 because of Trump who were listening to this and weren't really around for that or, you know, for those of us who've. had a lot of drinks since the JCPOA, and so our memories are a little bit fuzzy, just for a basis of comparison, if you could do just a little bit of a 101. Like, what was the deal when you guys were in charge between Obama and Iran, and then how does that compare to kind of what they're talking about now? So in terms of what the deal was, in terms of what the U.S. got out of the deal, Iran agreed to strict limitations on the nuclear program.

So just to go through a few of them, they shipped their stockpile of enriched uranium out of the country. So this thing that Trump is going to be touting was routine under the JCPUA. Like whatever stockpile they accumulated, they had to ship out 98% of their enriched uranium at any given time. And then they submitted to- It would go. It would go to Russia and kind of, it would be blended down and then we could go to Russia. And essentially, they would get end use of things like medical isotopes, but they couldn't

accumulate the stockpile in their country. They destroyed the core of their plutonium reactor, so they kind of wiped out their capacity to pursue a nuclear weapon with plutonium. They accepted limitations on the number of centrifuges that they could be operating. All of their facilities were under strict monitoring from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA. Not only were their kind of centrifuge facilities at Natanz and Fordo, these two facilities where they operated centrifuges. Not only did they have those limitations and have IEA presence there,

including like cameras, and it wasn't just like people showing up every few weeks. It was kind of constant monitoring. But there was also monitoring, and this is important because I'm counting me as skeptical that this is going to be part

of anything Trump negotiates. There was monitoring of uranium mines. Where do they mine the uranium? There was monitoring of uranium mills. So how do they convert it into something that can be put in a centrifuge? So essentially the entire supply chain of the Iranian nuclear

nuclear program from when you take uranium out of the ground to when you ship that stockpile out of the country was under monitoring and verification. And this is what's really important, is that, you know, having people on the ground, having cameras, having, you know, the centrifuges that they put in storage were under lock and seal. So if they opened the crate, you know, people could see that. So it was an effort to essentially put a blanket over the nuclear program limitations on it. In response, they got sanctions relief. They got basically their assets unfrozen. So the oil that they were selling in the national market, they couldn't access the resources they were getting for that. So people were buying oil, but then it was getting tied up in

US sanctions. That got unfrozen. Now, the criticisms, I'm going to be fair to the criticisms of the deal, it did not deal with the ballistic missile program, did not deal with support for proxies. The Iranians were not negotiating that with us. We were negotiating on the nuclear program. And then there were these kind of different durations for aspects of the deal. Some of the more strict limitations of the deal lasted 10 years, some of them lasted 15 years. People freaked out about this, but Tim, like, to me, that always was, you know, the most, I don't know, absurd critique in some ways because that's how most nuclear arms treaties are, right? The U.S.-Russia New START treaty that we negotiated with the Russians during the Obama years had a 10-year duration. Nobody freaked out about that because that you renegotiate after 10 years, right?

You see how things are there. And I should say that the sanctions on Iran, this is important, remained in place. The United States did not lift sanctions on Iran. They got sanctions relief. They didn't get sanctions removed under the deal. So, again, there's so many more dimensions to this argument. Just a couple follow-ups. So, like, the relief was to the tune of about a half a billion.

Is that right? Like four or five hundred million? No, this is a different piece of the deal. But essentially, when we tallied up how much we thought Iran was getting from the deal, it went up to about 50 billion. They had something like 100. $150 billion. And again, I'm literally going off of my memory from 10 years ago.

Yeah, sure. But somewhere in the neighbor to $150 billion in frozen revenues, right? So they've been shipping oil out to places like China and India and just not able to access their own money. Yeah. Right. So it was cast as like payments from us, but in fact, their capacity to access revenue for stuff they've already sold in a way. Now, very importantly, the famous $450 million pallets of cash. was a separate part of the implementation of the deal where Iran released a number of Americans

who were detained in Iran, including Jason Resign. We both know the Washington Post journalist. In response to that, Iran had purchased some weapons from the United States before the Shah was ousted, and we never delivered those weapons, unsurprisingly. And various international courts had found that the United States owed Iran. this amount of money. Right. And so essentially, we were closing different accounts of Iran.

And so Iran was paid for the weapons that they never received. And this became like, you know, one of the most insane freakouts from the Republican Party and the FDverse to those who are nerds when, in fact, it's a drop in the bucket compared to what Trump has already unfrozen in this war to Sweden the pod for the Iranians. I want to get back to the freakout from the FD crowd. in a second, but just a few, just on the fact. So it was set to expire, like, when would that deal, the JCPOA have completely expired? Like, when would they have been allowed to start to advance the nuclear program again? Yeah, so, so first of all, Iran also said, because Trump always makes

this comment that, you know, they've never said they won't develop a nuclear weapon. Like, the preamble to the JCPOA was a permanent promise, a pledge, a commitment from the Iranians to never develop a nuclear weapon. So, so they, they, there was a permanent prohibition on Iran ever developing nuclear weapon or weaponizing their nuclear program. And people think about this as if they get enough fuel and suddenly they magically have a nuclear weapon. Now, they have to figure out how to put that on a warhead, right? They have to weaponize their nuclear program.

That was permanent. And there were a number of things in the deal that were permanent, including, like, you know, having to submit to IAEA inspections. You know, after about 10 years, you know, there were certain, some of the restrictions on the numbers of centrifuges that Iran could operate, that ceiling started to go up, right? And the kinds of research and development that they could do on more advanced centrifuges so that they can rich uranium quicker, those started to lift. And now this became another source of general freak out to the FD crowd. I do have to say, Tim, here, because Donald Trump pulled out of this deal in 2018,

long before the end of the sunset periods, So pulling out of the deal, they started, they put the centrifuges back in. They started using the advanced centrifuges. They started to acquire a stockpile of enriched uranium. So the geniuses in not just the Trump administration, but at the FD and these other hawkish places, got what they wanted, which is a much faster acceleration of the uranium nuclear program than would have been the case under the JCPOA. And this is one of the reasons why I try not to think about it too much.

And this is important context because in a lot of ways Trump two is negotiating against Trump one as we come to this deal, right? Because like, you know, not everything about the Iranian nuclear program or everything about the Worcestered missiles or the other stuff they've been trying to get out of this war, you know, changed when they got out of the deal. But Iran advanced the program that we are now like negotiating again to get them to stop. You know, if you kind of think of a deal as like, you know, we're American. So it's like the football field. Like they were able to move the ball further down than it would have been like had it been status quo. The point is that before this war, because Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, Iran's nuclear program was more advanced than it was before the JCPOA, never mind with the JCPOA restrictions. They had more of a stockpile of highly enriched uranium. We're using more advanced interviews. All the things that the critics of the JCPOA warned about, they were doing because Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA in 2018.

So we ostensibly went to war against Donald Trump's own policy of pulling out of the the JCPOA, which is something that these people will never acknowledge for the rest of my lifetime, but is the truth. I can feel your anger building. I want to keep it building a little bit more before we start talking about how the right-wing hawks are going to react to this. Just kind of to put a button on it then, you know, based on the contours what we're seeing now, we don't know exactly what will come out of Islamabad, give us a little compare and contrast

with where we will end up versus where we were at the end of when they pulled out of the JCPOA. I assume that if in the good scenario, right, in the best case scenario in which Iran, you know, makes a deal and this war ends, you know, comprehensively, they'll ship that stockpile out. Think of it this way. Iran is more than willing to concede things that they can reaccumulate, right? And this is something that, you know, we went through in negotiations with them. So if they ship the stock pile out, they can, you know, at some point reaccumulate a stock pile obviously. I assume that what you'll get is they'll ship that stuff. stockpile out, they'll commit to not enrich uranium or to a very limited amount of enrichment for some duration of time. I think that the Iranians, by the way, think that these years are totally fungible because they've seen that the United States doesn't keep deals. So fine, they can promise five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. They know that these timelines are fairly artificial. And so I think they'll commit to some limited limitations on enrichment

and shipping the stockpile out and having the straight of Hormuz open. And what they will want in return is as much money as they can get from unfrozen assets. And ideally, what they want is sanctions relief, like the ability to actually normalize their economy, sell oil on the open market, or to tax the straight-of-form moves and get a fee from those shipping. They want revenue, essentially. So they'll want revenue exchange for limitation. The other thing I'd say is that the JCPOA had the permanent five members of the United Nations Security Council, right?

So the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany and the EU were all part of the deal with Iran, with the IEA. So you had this kind of international legitimacy around the deal. You had the inspections mechanism. You had the people that were serving as essentially guarantors. You had UN Security Council resolutions. this is like a handshake agreement in Pakistan, right? And so it just doesn't have the same like legitimacy, legal basis. Someone could walk away from this in six months or a year without the kind of same, you know,

drama and consequence of walking away from the JCPOA. And since the regime is still in place, if Iran gets this degree of sanctions relief and has a huge influx of cash from their oil sales, like do we expect they're going to be spending that money on, you know, health care for their people, or do we think that they're just going to be able to rebuild ballistic missiles that they had lost during the war? So they will rebuild their ballistic missile capability. The nuclear program, by the way, they may very well say, like, we're not going to enrich uranium for a period of time, because part of what they've learned, Tim, is that as long as they have

a nuclear program, right, that's an option available to them. And by the way, we don't know what they might try to do covertly, right? because if the inspections regime, you're counting on intelligence. And clearly the U.S. and Israel have pretty good intelligence, but they could just take that nuclear program underground. But they'll restart their ballistic missile program. What they've also learned, though, what this war has demonstrated is that a bunch of drones that they can build in the garage were actually, in some ways, more damaging than even

their ballistic missiles because they were able to shut down the Gulf. They were able to disrupt the entire global economy by hitting the largest natural gas field in the world in Qatar, right? They were able to end the Dubai model. We'll see how long it takes for tourism to crank back up there, right? So just with drones in some ballistic missiles, they've demonstrated a deterrent capability and ability to shut down the strait. And so the regime will take that revenue and they will reinvest in all those different

military capabilities. Yes, I think they will also rebuild. And be stronger probably. One of the original reasons, I think this keeps getting lost. And so I like to restate it. One of the actual reasons that we did what we did was because Iran seemed so weak. And B.B. convinced Trump that we could be able to go in with the help of MBS and his business partners in the Arab states. They convinced him that we can go in because Iran's regime was so weak in that moment.

They'd been weakened economically. They'd been weakened by the attacks a year ago. The Itollo is 86 or protesters in the streets. And so now, like, you come out of this on the other side with same regime, essentially, and an influx of cash and an awareness of their power of control. controlling the strait, and, you know, who knows, like potentially being able to invest in more modern drones and other weapon systems, if you don't like the mullahs, like, we've strengthened them throughout this process. I think that's exactly right. And look, they could use that money to buy more effective missiles from China, right?

Which they began to do. The Chinese and Russians saw that, wow, look, the Iranians can really bloody the American's nose, not by, like, directly hitting the United States, but just by kind of humiliating the United States by shutting down this whole Gulf infrastructure that the U.S. depends upon for the supply of the global energy markets. And by the way, we don't even know the damage assessments to our bases and facilities across the region. The Pentagon has not been at all transparent about that. So you're right. They're strengthened in the sense that they've demonstrated that the Strait of Hormuz is like a nuclear weapon in some ways, right? It's not

as obviously devastating, but it is a deterrence capability. Look, the weakness of the regime, to me is it's this odious regime hated by most of its people. And what needs to change a regime is the Iranian people. And I actually think that this war made that less likely. What it also did is it made the military option look less scary as it was before in the sense that the United States and Israel have demonstrated that they cannot change the regime from the air. Right. And so now everybody knows it would take a ground invasion to get these guys out or it would take the Iranian people just doing it themselves. But it's hard for them to do it, Tim, when their country is being bombed. So I think it does change the dynamic in the favor of the Iranians vis-a-vis where things were

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my promo code, the bulwark, so they know I sent you. Back to the right wing hawks. Because of the JCPOA and the supposed pallets of cash, you were docks. That I personally delivered based on the... You brought them. You were docs. You were called a traitor, a terrorist. I was scrolling through some of the old tweets that John Potterets is sent about you. Catamite, I mean, the types of language. Capo. Yeah. All of that. Hamas. And now, fast forward. to Trump doing something in the ballpark of essentially the same deal, likely, in Islamabad. What do you think? Do you think that we're going to hear the same type of rhetoric from that

crowd? What are you expecting? Are you thinking about calling some of your right-wing hawk buddies to see if they have any thoughts about Steve Wickham or Jared Kushner? This whole thing is it's a pretty extraordinary life experience, Tim. Setting aside, by the way, that the next target is Cuba, who I also negotiated normalization to do it. Oh, yeah, we're coming to that. There was something at the time that I found genuinely kind of insane and irrational, right? Yeah, for a while you assume that maybe these people have a sincere, good faith disagreement about how to reach like a nuclear agreement.

But I think part of what happened is there was such a mania about the fact that Obama did this deal and it went through Congress. And it was kind of the first chink in, I'm going to be, just be blunt, the kind of sense that APEC had to sign off on things that went through Congress. So we had this whole fight. And I think they were genuinely surprised that, like most Democrats, you know, over 40 Democrats in the Senate, which was enough to have the deal survive, supported the deal. It went through.

Public opinion was kind of supportive of it. And they needed to delegitimize, not just the deal. they needed to delegitimize the people who'd been the face of the deal. And so it wasn't enough to say that, hey, we don't like this deal because the sunset provisions aren't long enough or what have you.

It said, I have to become evil and Hamas and a liar and a horrible human being. And obviously, Barack Obama is part of the shady, you know, brown people that are, you know, hate America and love the Ayatollahs. And there was like a nastiness.

Valerie has dual loyalty. Valerie Jared. Valerie Jared. Tim, if you want to go back, this got so insane that they had a congressional hearing where I was supposed to be a witness, but they didn't actually try to get me to come. They had an empty chair. And I think Trey Gowdy and Tom Cotton took turns like yelling at the empty chair where I was supposed to be sitting. I mean, this is how weird things got in 2015 and 16.

A little Clint Eastwood moment. Cash Patel, when I had to testify in front of the House Intelligence Committee during the Russia investigation, confronted me about some conspiracy theory that I had been denied a security clearance before the Obama administration because I was an Iranian asset when in fact I had been temporarily denied a security clearance because I had been honest about my drug use. But the point is that this got nuts. Was it MDMA or? No, it's just, you know, it's all in the SF-86.

Okay. Some of it took place in New Orleans. But I'll just say that today it would be an interesting test of who actually cares about this ideology of ending the Iranian nuclear program versus who just sold their soul to Donald Trump and the Republican Party of MAGA. And I'm not holding my breath. Most of these people that gave us no fucking room for error are going to give Donald Trump a ocean's worth of room for era. Suddenly they'll be defending unfreezing assets for the Iranians, giving the Iranians tens of billions of billions of dollars, right? Suddenly they'll be saying, you know, oh, he destroyed some of the Iranian Navy.

And so this whole war was worth it, never mind that they didn't need a Navy to shut down the street of Hormuz. So what's the point of destroying the Rainy Navy, right? They will rationalize this. I don't know who they're talking to anymore except each other and a very small, like Lindsay Graham types on the hill. Like it's a, they're on a shrinking island, you know. The weekly life liberty and live in watchers. I think that that is right about the domestic hawks or critics of you who were happy with what Trump has been doing. I think that they'll rationalize that.

I'm not sure if that's going to be true in Israel, though, because, something I continue to say, like, I'm flabbergasted and just outraged that that BB was like in our situation room convincing us to get into this war that was not an acute interest for us at all. It's insane. It's not irrational, though, from the Israel perspective to believe that this is a real security interest for you, given, you know, the way that Iran has funded proxies. And I think that in Israel, there was a view that like with Trump, this is the moment, maybe the last, moment that they had have an American ally that they could use to eviscerate all of their opponents in the region.

That's right. And so my guess is that Israel is going to be unhappy about this. And, you know, maybe not in the very short term. But I think that that is another element of the instability of this deal. In addition to what you were talking about, about how China and Russia and the, you know, international community isn't involved. Like, Israel is involved. But like, I don't know.

We saw a number of ceasefires in Gaza, you know, and I think that Israel's interests from the start were misaligned from ours. And so we'll see how that reflects in their actions. I'm just kind of wondering what you think about the Israel interplay of this. No, I think that's right. Look, the presentation in this situation which is completely absurd and dangerous for Israel's own interest, it's not a good look if part of what you're fighting against is a perception on the left and the right that you have too much influence over American foreign policy. The details leaked out. And the thing that I always thought was absurd is that the Israelis were suggesting that, you know, Reza Palavi, the son of the Shah, could move in. And I do think that the Israelis believe that they could collapse the regime, you know.

And that by the way, there might be violent chaos. There might be civil conflict in Iran, but that that's better than having this regime in place. And that means that they're not going to be able to do things like develop a nuclear weapon and have, like, an effective ballistic missile program. And that objective has not been achieved. So they have, like, weaken Iran's certain capabilities. but for all the reasons we talked about, they've not achieved their military objectives vis-à-vis Iran. And so that's a super can be a source of, I think, discomfort.

They'll spin it. They'll do the Pete Hegsef, Vietnam body count thing, except it's about the number of missiles that we destroyed and the number of ships we destroyed. But at core, their interest is not dealt with. That regime is still in place, and in some ways it's more dangerous. I think in Lebanon, they have, I think,

come closer to accomplishing what they want. They say they want to destroy his blood. That's about as likely as the objective of destroying Hamas and Gaza was. What they have done is they've occupied southern Lebanon, and I don't think they're going to leave anytime soon. And so I think what you have is like a very tenuous cold peace, if this actually becomes a lasting ceasefire, where Israel is probably going to violate the terms in Lebanon periodically if they feel like they need to take a shot. And then the big question is, will they show restraint or will they occasionally take shots at Iran? Let's take a full step back here post-October 7th, Tim, and it's like,

Was this worth it? They have decimated a lot of Hamas, but Hamas is still there. Hamas still has a tunnel network. They have decimated a lot of Hezbo, but Hezbo is still there. And they have set back Iranian capabilities, but the regime is still there. That proxy network, that access of resistance is weaker. Significantly so. But was it worth what has been done to Israel's position in this country and around the world? Was it worth the blowback? Because I can guess that people in Gaza and Lebanon and Iran are not going to forget what happened and are going to be seeking revenge for a very long time. Was this all worth it? I would argue it wasn't. And alienating, I mean, obviously, speaking about this and kind of blunt geopolitical terms, you know, obviously there's the

human face of this and the cost and the loss of life and all the tragedy. But just as a blunt geopolitical strategic matter, like probably alienated both American parties, like kind of decided to go in with one and make a bet on Trump. And they, I think, more likely than not, not guaranteed, you know, end up in 2028 with both parties having a candidate that wants to at some, in some fashion, reimagine our relationship with Israel and make it less tight than it has been. And potentially having both party nominees wanting to decouple altogether. Yeah, I mean, you have 40 Democratic senators voting to cut off all arms sales to Israel the other day.

Sales, not just assistance, not just financing. And that includes, importantly, every single Democratic senator who's considering rhyming for president. Like, I'm not sure Mark Kelly and Alyssa Slokin. I don't know. But, you know, the point is that the incentive structure is clear in the Democratic Party. Yeah. And it's only moving in one direction.

Like, there's not some world in which people go back to thinking, like, no, no, let's start giving them all this military assistance. And the same thing is happening, obviously, on the right. And, you know, never mind Europe, by the way. I mean, a million European citizens signed a petition to try to terminate trade agreement with Israel. You have different European governments calling for that. You've got Italy under Georgia Maloney, a right-wing populace who was at Trump's inauguration, canceling certain agreements with Israel on defense and trade. So, I mean, this. This is a sea change. Well, in this case, I mean, obviously there's anti-Semitism in Europe, we should say. So that's a play and that has deep roots. But in addition to that, like the cost of this war was like Europe bore the brunt of it. Like, it's not irrational. Again, like just like I think it's not irrational for Israel to be concerned about their national security interests vis-à-vis Iran and its proxies, it's not irrational for the countries in Europe to look at this and say, what is happening? Like, we have gas shortages.

because Israel and Trump wanted to, you know, try to decapitate the Ayatollah, and it didn't work. And like, we are now suffering all these, like, real consequences. And you didn't even ask us. You didn't even involve us in the conversation. And then after it all happened, you shit on us and rubbed our face in it. It's like, okay, good luck. Well, this is the other thing that's happened, though, in this war is I think that this is the thing that finally broke the floor underneath Donald Trump internationally. right, you know, in the sense that nobody outside of this country in Israel believes that this war

was necessary. Nobody buys this stuff about, you know, there are two weeks away from a nuclear weapon or whatever, you know, whatever. They live in the real world. And as you said, it's harder for them. Some of these countries are hugely dependent on Qatari natural gas that is offline, for instance. So they're not just dealing with high prices. They're dealing with meaningful shortages. Right. And meanwhile, Trump comes along and says, you know, you have to open the straight. And then he insults them. And what you're increasingly seeing is when you have Pedro Sanchez, the socialist, and I'd say the leader of the European left, and Georgia Maloney, the leader of the European right,

the most successful right-wing politician, both in the same place, fighting Donald Trump, unafraid of Donald Trump. I thought the most important thing the Pope said was I'm not afraid of him. That's what you keep hearing. The fear factor is, other than Kier Starmor, who's always kind of hiding in the corner. Yeah. Like, world leaders are not afraid of this man anymore.

They think he's incompetent. And they've seen him back down a bunch. Yes. When people stand up to him. Like, there's a period of time where the madman theory, which isn't, which is stupid. You can see the, you know, the end of the madman theory and what the limits are of it. Like, but it did work for a little while. It's, it's okay to just acknowledge that, right?

And there are people who are like, this guy's so fucking crazy. We'll suck up to him. We'll give him fake trophies, like whatever it takes. But he backs down, you know, it backed down on tariffs. He backed down on this war. He backed down on Jimmy Kimmel. Back down on Sukkot? Like he just keeps back down and eventually they're not scared of him anymore.

Back down on Iran. Back down on Iran. Yeah. I mean, I had to say it here. This is Trump this morning. Now that the Hormuz straight situation is over, we'll see about that. I received a call from NATO asking if we need some help.

I told them to stay away, all caps, unless they just want to load up their ships with oil. They were useless when needed a paper tiger. So it's like, okay. We'll see how that goes. Fine. But that's the point is they don't care. Like NATO doesn't want to be at the straight. Hormuz. The other thing people in Europe know is that Putin benefited from high energy prices.

Putin got sanctions relief. We were literally waiving sanctions on Russian oil sales because we were so afraid of the price of gas, right? Putin is much stronger before this war. And the Europeans know that too. So they despair them the lectures about like, you know, the talking points from 2015. Tim, I just think that this schick is old. It's 10 years old. Donald Trump is a lame duck. He's pulling the 30s, like these leaders are starting to look past them and realizing, yeah, the madman thing, maybe we had to give him some tariff deals in the first six months of his presidency, but no more. Did you know that the average employer has to sort through roughly 250 resumes per job opening?

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meet your match on zippercooter. Before we get to the Pope, just while in the Middle East, any other thoughts on MBS. It's interesting that's kind of slight changes we've seen from the Arab States and obviously MBS wanted this war too. There's a lot of reporting around that. But, you know, some talks about them reassessing

their, you know, financial support for various things. Seems like they're backing out of the live golf, you know, some of their other investments that's trying to back out of. I'm not sure what to make of that. Do you have any thoughts? I think that this might be the largest geopolitical shift of the whole war, because the whole premise of this decade of the Gulf being at the center of this kind of megaverse, right, and all their investments in Jared Kushner,

the whole premise of the Abraham Accords, right, is that we're going to stand up to Iran together and we're going to give you all these defense capabilities. Look, what did they get for all this? They got left out in the cold. We launched this war on the Iranians. We couldn't defend them against, you know, drones and missile attacks. While they were spending down their missile defense that they bought for us at an exorbitant price, we were giving the Israelis missile defense for free.

Like, they saw that the United States could not protect them, could not keep the straight open, could not guarantee that the Dubai model is not going to be shattered by drones coming in. And so if you're them, you're thinking, well, why did I spend all this money, you know, on American weapons and paying off Jared Kushner,

you know, having these crazy, conferences with Eric Trump and Whitkoff's kid getting billions of dollars investments in crypto scams. They bought all this American AI. Guess what the Iranians hit. They hit data centers in the Emirates, right? And so they suffered huge losses. So I think what you're going to see is they're not going to like pull the plug on us,

but they're going to hedge. They're going to start making deals with the Chinese. They're going to start making deals with the Russians. They're not going to invest the trillion dollars that they, you know, told, they lied and told Trump that they invest in the American economy. And so I think that's going to be a big shift. All right. So with the Pope, with the Pope and Trump in a fight, we have JD, you know, who became a Catholic two minutes ago, telling the Pope to know his roll and shut his mouth. I'm wondering what you think about all of that. And does that matter? And obviously, there's the domestic political side. But, I mean, you guys worked with the Pope on normalizing with Cuba, the then Pope was involved with that. So I'm just wondering kind of how you think about, like, whether that matters, is there an impact to the feud beyond just. like them looking stupid and JD looking phony.

Yeah. Anything that makes JD Vance look even more ridiculous is good. I think here's where it matters. Like I was really struck him by when the Pope gave this speech yesterday, it basically gave a midterm message for Democrats, right? Like the Masters of War spent all this money on bombs and, you know, weapons and get death and destruction and they should be investing in health and education, right? And he did it more articulate than that.

That's not a direct quote. He was speaking in Cameroon, and then he was in a sea of people in the global south. And what I was struck by is at a time of absolute kind of amorality and immorality in the world, when you've got Putin invading Ukraine, you've got Trump like a bull in the China shop of the world, you've got Xi Jinping this kind of, you know, obviously bloodless Chinese Communist Party leader. All these guys, and they're all guys, he's a moral leader, and he is establishing himself as someone who's actually willing to stand up to power. He talked about all these tyrants yesterday in Cameroon.

That message is going to go down very well among billions of people around the world, not just Catholics. And I think what he's showing us is that the world still has a conscience. and it makes people like Trump look small by comparison. And that's what pisses Trump and J.D. off is that they can't knock this guy off his pedestal. He will be there after them. Trump will be gone. Pope Leo will still be there.

The Catholic Church will be there. You know why? Because it's been there for a couple thousand fucking years. And I can curse because I'm not Catholic. Catholic's curse. And I think it's reminding people. We're good. Okay, good.

I think it's reminding people of like the absurdity of and the impermanence of people. like Trump. And I can tell you when we negotiated the deal, the normalization deal with Cuba, I went to the Vatican. Vatican was kind of the guarantor of the deal. We had to present it there. Pretty good story. I walked in and we had to meet sequentially with the Secretary of State of the Vatican who's kind of the number two over there, the Cardinal. And the Cubans go in first and they go through this whole deal and then I go in. And the Cardinal says, so you guys are normalizing relations and you were reopening embassies and he kind of goes through the deal and I was like, yeah, yeah. And he looks at me and he goes, who are you? Does John Kerry know about this?

Like I was like, I promise, I promise it's true. But anyway. The Secretary of the State of the Vatican wasn't watching a lot of the Chris Hayes show. He wasn't. He was not seeing the Chris Hayes show. But what those people brought was like they could have credibility in Cuba and in the United States. They could have credibility across these divides between left and right, between power and, you know, those are that power, between global north, global south. And so I just think that this is served to make Trump look smaller and he will continue to shrink relative to people like Leo.

Okay. Let's basically do the same thing with the JCPOA that we did now with Cuba and just give us a little bit of like, what was the deal, what's happened since, and now what do we think it's next? The terms of the deal where the Cubans released, you know, Alan Gross, who is, you in prison in Cuba, they released a CIA asset down there too. So it was kind of a spy swap in exchange for a few Cubans that had been imprisoned in the United States. But beyond that prisoner exchange, the Cubans also released, I think, 53 political prisoners that we had on our list. But beyond that,

we agreed to reopen embassies, reestablished diplomatic relations. We couldn't promise to lift the embargo on Cuba because that's legislative. But we agreed to kind of reopen commerce and travel to Cuba as much as we could from the U.S. side. And they in turn agreed to increase internet access for Cubans and to reciprocate in changes in their economy by growing their private sector, where they were letting Cubans own, you know, small businesses, restaurants, taxis, things like this. Now, those are the terms of the deal. The bigger point was we were just betting, hey, look, this policy is crazy. We've had it for 60 years. It hurts Cubans. They suffer in extreme poverty. It's entrenched and this is important, the Communist Party in power, because they deal well in hermetically sealed

economy where there's no foreign investment. Our bet was you open this up, you let Americans travel down there, you let Americans invest there. This place that's 90 miles from Florida is going to change. Cuban's lives look up better. And then ultimately, we're not going to be the ones to determine we're not going to be the ones to pick the next leader of Cuba. But we think that will work better than what we've been doing for 60 years. Trump came in. He over time, with the urging of Marco Rubio in the first term basically rolled back all of the opening in terms of like travel and, you know, investment and things like that. Trade.

They kept the embassies open, so the diplomatic relations piece remained. And then over time, they squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. Biden was a chicken shit and was afraid to go back to the Obama policy because he was afraid of Bob Menendez. So we somehow got the Trump policy through Joe Biden's administration. In the same way that Biden was afraid to come back into the JCPOA because he was afraid of Bob Menendez and FD for criticizing him. Well, that's great.

Good thing we knew that Bob Menendez was a great moral arbiter, as we saw, and it was important to kind of let him. Literally, that's what happened. But the point is that now Cubans are suffering more than they ever have, I think, in their history, because in addition to the sanctions, there's now a fuel blockade on Cuba from the Trump administration. You have people dying because of those sanctions. I think Americans don't like to think about that.

But the reality is when power goes off, babies and the NICU and people, on ventilators, die in hospitals. You've got extreme malnourishment in Cuba. So it's a real dire humanitarian circumstance in Cuba right now. And look, I would argue that morally and from the perspective of U.S. interests, our approach was better. I mean, there's much more to say about it. But like, I'd argue that on the moral basis, but I also argue it on the human rights basis of, I actually think, like, if you ask Cubans, and I don't mean Cuban Americans in Miami, I mean Cubans in Cuba, they remember those two years under Obama as like the time they were hopeful for the future. And now, you know, they're in hell. And so now we have Rolito.

Yeah. Relito going around, Marco, apparently, trying to get to Trump directly. And I think that they see that there's going to be a squeeze put in and Trump's going to try to redo Venezuela. And he's trying to identify, you know, who the hand-picked successor is, just like he did in Venezuela, right? Is that basically how we see things going? Yeah. So I negotiated with Al Jandro Castro, who's Raul's son, and now we're on to the third generation here. Riley does the grandson. What's interesting to me about this, Tim, and I talk to people in Cuba and Miami's, nobody quite knows what Trump wants because it's kind of like the JCPO.

He wants to have his guy in. That's it. He wants a deli and to call it a win. That's what he wants, right? So in 2016, when I was still talking to Cubans, obviously we're in government, they said, oh, we're not worried about Trump because we know his people well. They've been down here trying to build golf courses and home. hotels. While Trump was a Republican nominee, the Trump organization was in Cuba trying to build

hotels and golf courses. So they thought they could make that deal with him. Ultimately, Trump decided, you know, and you worked in Florida politics. Like, he ultimately decided, you know, these Bay, pigs, veterans down in Miami, like in Marco Rubio, I'm going to listen to those guys instead because they delivered some votes for me. Now, if he wants a deal where it's basically what we were trying to do, they open up the economy. Like, but particularly the oil in Cuba, is real estate, right? Right. The northern coast, the keys, the undeveloped beachfront properties, people at Miami

have been salivating over that for years. The Cubans, I'm sure, would be willing to say, like, fine, we'll let the Miami Cubans come down here and develop this real estate. Trump Tower, put a Trump tower there. There'll be a Trump, you know, PGA tour event here, you know, in three years. They'll give that away, I'm sure. The question is politically, what do they have to give? Now, the funny thing about that is Diaz Canal is the president of Cuba, but he's,

he's not really in charge of Cuba. Like, it's not even like Maduro, right? Like, Diazcanal is kind of frontman for the Communist Party, but you still got the Castro family, got the military. So what's even more bizarre about this is, like, they could, you know, Diazcanal could be on the chopping block and, you know, but nothing would change. Right. He's already the Delci, kind of.

There already is a Delci. He is the Delci, right? Yeah, right. And what's funny about this is, and again, it's kind of like the Iran thing, like, and you know some of these Florida people, like, is that going to be enough for Marco and Jorge Moss and all the right-wing Miami Cubans, maybe. But the thing is, if it is, then the whole pretense of this was about human rights was bullshit. It was about who gets to develop the land in Cuba, you know.

I would do some big picture stuff that I want to get to the book at the end. Last time you were on, I think we were discussing the ways in which you were moving my direction. I was saying that your last book after the fall was kind of Christolian. It was kind of like like Ben Rhodes as Bill Crystal. type book talking about all of the terrible authoritarian regimes overseas and and how we the US needs to be a leader so freedom can flourish around the world and you know maybe we won't do regime change wars but like the other parts you know the softer parts of the kind of neocon rhetoric you were kind of warming up too i felt like and after the fall now fast forward to this one and many of

my you know neocon sympathetic listeners are emailing me about how i'm sounding like roads of Israel, too interested in wanting to kind of homer in the bushes from the Middle East altogether. And so I'm just, I'm kind of wondering if you have any thoughts on moving forward, like where we can find a delicate balance between being a leader and supporting freedom around the world without some of the recklessness and without, you know, being involved in ways that are, are hampering folks. I guess my question is, how would you talk to a Democrat 2028? about unifying those instincts. I think what unites you and me and can be confusing to people is I don't like autocrats.

And so I don't like Victor Orban. I don't like Nicholas Maduro. I don't like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump. I don't like Bibi Nanyahu, who's a fucking autocrat. And so I sometimes get frustrated by the kind of confusion at this, not from you, because you're, I think, very consistent on this. Why is this so complicated? If you only dislike the autocrats who are geopolitical adversaries of the United States

or ideological opponents of, you know, they're on the left or the right, that to me is what's confusing. Like, I just don't like autocrats. Or if you're a leftist and you only dislike the American autocrats and don't mind the foreign ones. Or if you're on that, yeah, or the flip side, of course, yeah. I just don't get why it's so complicated. But anyway, I do think that. I would advise Democrats, and this is where, you know, I'm probably not bulwurkey in.

I think what we've seen in Minneapolis and Iran is like the final spasms of a war on terror framework filtered through the stupidest, fascist kind of government that we could possibly have under Donald Trump. In other words, yes, Trump was necessary for Iran and Minneapolis to happen, but so it. was the war on terror. All of that ice infrastructure has been built for 20 years under Republican and Democratic administrations, including ourselves. All of the infrastructure in the Middle East, why do we have like a million bases there? Why are we so concerned about the Iranian Navy, you know, like that we are going to war over it? Like there's an absurdity to this, that we can control events. And so I do think Democrats should be like, this is over. Like,

we are an anti-war party right now. Like, we are not going to get into these wars in the East, we're going to dismantle some of this infrastructure, not all of it, but some of it. We are going to dismantle parts of the Department of Homeland Security infrastructure in the United States. We're ending the war, like at home and abroad, you know, essentially. The single most important thing the United States can do for the sake of freedom and human rights and human dignity around the world right now is get our own shit together in our country. Like, the example that we've set has been corrosive around the world. under Trump. Now, if we went after corruption, if we actually went after, not just, you know,

like the crimes that Trump has committed, but this infrastructure of the corruption of our foreign policy, the crypto, the way in which big tech has corrupted American foreign policy, that's a playbook that the rest of the world is desperately needs. Like, how do we uproot the kind of oligarchs that have gotten their claws into, you know, the global commons on technology and, on crypto and all these spaces. So I actually think that if we do a detox and a cleanse at home, that that will actually do far more for freedom in the world than having military bases, you know, encircling Iran

or, you know, arming, you know, the Israeli government, to be blunt. I don't think any of that was anti-volarchy. And I'm with you. At some ways, I feel like I'm outflanking the existing Democratic Party establishment on the left and some of the war stuff. I don't understand why there hasn't been. more radical opposition to the war. I think, frankly, if this deal does come through on Sunday, I think it was a huge opportunity missed for some Democratic 2028ers to make abundantly clear that

they're not, that they're anti-stupid Middle East wars and that they're passionate about it. So, I mean, that's my opinion. I could not agree more, Tim, like you were speaking. Like, I have a piece coming out where I talked to Graham Platner, and he was making this point that it is not hard to stand up in front of a crowd and say it is absolutely insane to spend billions of dollars on bombs to drop on girls in Iran instead of schools and hospitals in the United States.

And there was just none of that energy, maybe from like... There's a handful of Rubin. Like, we can name the people. There are a handful of people that we could name them, though. The fact that we can name them, like, is crazy. The fact that it's not in the hundreds is insane.

Like, this is a huge crisis for the Democratic Party that they didn't take advantage. And here's what... This is going to be the 22 midterms over again because the Democrats will win overwhelmingly because Trump is such catastrophe. And Chuck Schumer will be like, well, what a validation of my strategy. Yeah, right. The one area where I think it might not be bulking and maybe we could have a full podcast this later

because we're running out of time. But I do wonder where I then start to run up against concerns from the anti-war left and where I start to feel like, okay, we're singing the same language on Iran. But now it's like, well, what if Putin invades Estonia in 2029? What if she invades Taiwan? Now I'm starting to flip back to Nikki Haleyism. Taiwan's a tricky one. Those are the areas, I think, that are to be worked out.

I want to get to Vance. Oh, wait, really quick, you tweeted, we're in the worst case of authoritarianism. Do you actually believe that, or was that a rhetorical flourish? I actually do believe it because I always worried about war. What I was kind of referencing there is when the autocrat gets the war bug, like to me that's the worst case. Now it may not lead to, you know, the darkest place that that can lead.

But I don't know. It'll be interesting whether this war in Iran chastises Trump or whether he's like, I got to try again because this one didn't end up. You know, I'm one for one. Venezuela looked good and Iran was bad. And so now I'm going to go do Greenland. And there's a kind of, you know, like an addictive quality to the war. And that's why there have to be guard rolls put around his ability to wage war. right the book is always say the battle for american identity it's about there's 15 speeches that

you go through and talk about what it is to be an american and in the prologue you reference like the speech that gets my blood boiling the most from the past five years probably like the clip that gets me the most enraged and radicalized and that's how you start the book so once again we're aligned on something um i want to play it's a little long but But I want to play an excerpt of this speech. It's J.D. Vance at the Claremont Institute. And then we can talk about it and how it informs the book. If you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, I hate to say it, very few of our leaders actually have a good answer.

Is it purely agreement with the creedal principles of America? I know the Claremont Institute is dedicated to the founding vision of the United States of America. It's a beautiful and wonderful founding vision. but it's not enough by itself. If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let's say, of the Declaration of Independence, that's a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens

who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? if you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists. Even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it's absurd and the modern left,

dedicated to doing this to saying, you don't belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong. So this fucking cunt, J.D. Vance, was trying to use that speech to reposition America

away from being a nation that welcomes everyone that is willing to come come here and be part of a great experimented as this country and position it more as, you know, like a blood and soil type country. He slightly distances from that, trying to position it more of a place. It's like, well, I mean, kind of, like, sure, like in the moment, like, we're of a place and like we should care about the people that live in this place. But like, America has always been about something greater than that. And if it isn't, then there's really no point in what we're doing.

Yeah. I mean, I wrote this book, spent the last four years on it, Tim, because after I finished my last one, I wanted to write about this country, and I wanted to write about the argument we've been having. Because I kind of thought to myself, this is crazy, this timeline we're living in,

because in some ways Obama and Trump kind of represent two opposing sides of an argument we've been having since, like, the beginning of this country, you know? And so I picked 15 speeches in essentially a history of the United States, a history of the argument we've been having since the founding through those speeches, but not just the speeches, the political movements that led in and out of them, the events, the extraordinary people, you know, from Benjamin Franklin to

Abraham Lincoln to Obama and Trump, but also people we haven't heard of like Maria Stewart, a black woman abolitionist, or Mary Lisa, Kansas populist. And then when I was done, I saw that J.D. Vance speech. And I made that the beginning of the book, because it's such a pure distillation of the argument that I hate the most, right? Because he's essentially saying, it's pretty extraordinary. He says, America's not an idea. It's not a creed.

It's not the Declaration of Independence. And if there's always been one argument that says, we are this kind of blood and soil nationalist entity, or we are this kind of more progressive, and I don't mean in the left-wing sense, but I mean, we expand rights to more people, we want to live up to the meaning of equality in the Declaration of Independence.

We want to perform. affect our union over time. If that's the argument, Vance is taking the most retrograde version of it. And it's pretty extreme because he says we're a particular place, but he's standing in San Diego. This country was founded in fucking Philadelphia with 13 colonies along the East Coast. So, you know, Mr. High School debater winning the debate is proving the point that we are not a particular place or else we wouldn't be in San Diego, right? Or he says, we're a particular people. we're not a particular people. Like, just go outside and look around.

Even if people have been here for generations, they came here from everywhere. Or a particular way of life. Tim, do you have the same way of life as J.D. Vance? I hope not. No. I don't have the same way of life as people living an hour away in Terrebelle and Paris. Yeah, exactly.

Which is great, which is what I love about America. Yeah, no, awesome. That's the awesome thing about it. If they are all like us, didn't that be boring, right? And so I think what people need to get their minds around there is J.D. Vance, how extreme this is. If you told Ronald Reagan that the Republican Party would be led by some smarmy guy like J.D. Vance shitting on immigrants, Ronald Reagan's one of the beautiful speeches. And I have a Reagan chapter in the book, very bulwarky chapter. I noticed that.

His last speech was about if we had to build walls around this country, we don't have doors in them so the people could come through. Like literally, it's a beautiful speech. People should read it. And so this is radical what J.D. Vance is doing. And look, that's not to say we should have opened borders. say that we are an identity that is not defined by J.D. Vance. We all get to choose what being American is. And we can't tell people that they can't access that because their fucking ancestors didn't fight in the civil war. The ancestors fighting the civil war is the worst part of the speech, though. It's all horrible. The worldview is awful. But he specifically goes out of the way to say that you know who is an American? Like, you know who's not an American? Somebody who

believes that all men are created equal. In the Declaration of Independence. So when the believes in the Declaration of Independence, but lives in Guatemala and is trying to come here and have a better life for themselves. That person does not count as an American. They're not part of our nation. You know who is part of our nation? Somebody whose ancestors fought for the Confederates, who lost the Civil War, who does not believe that all men are created equal, who does not believe that our rights are granted to us by our creator, who, you know, does not connect at all with the American story or the American experiment, and they want to be bigoted and hateful towards their fellow citizens.

That person, the Civil War legacy that hates his fellow Americans, they count because, you know, their bloodline has been here. Yeah. It's the most un-American notion I could possibly imagine. And for him to give that example in particular was not fucking subtle. No. It was not subtle. And we must exalt them too, right?

He could have used the example that's like someone who came over on slave ships who doesn't believe in the Declaration of Independence. They're an American. He didn't use that example. It was a Confederate progeny. They're an American. What I find so offensive is one of the things I took away from this project and reading all these words and reviewing all these political movements, you know, part of what

you learn is that all this is more complicated than you think in the sense that, you know, just take one example, like the populace, birdie's centers' economics wedded to Donald Trump xenophobia. You know, it's a kind of interesting threads that come together and then go apart in American history. But what I take away from it all is that like what's so interesting and wonderful in some ways about America is that all these people are here. What is so radical and extreme about Trump and Vance is that they're saying, no, it's only

our version of America. Like, I do the Trump speech at the end, and he's taking custody. This is my story. Like, I won. It's over the debate. It's over. When, in fact, the debate is what's great, you know, like the fact that we disagree and have different views.

And that's what the Civil War piece is saying, I'm going to rub this in your face. It's not just saying, like, you have to accept those people. I accept those people. It's that those people are somehow more American than people who got here after them. And that is an insane thing to think, an insane thing to think. Profoundly un-American thing. If my values mean anything, I have to believe that it has no. bearing on how American you are, what your people came over. I mean, some of my people came

early, some came late, you know, within our own blood, we have people that came at different times. So give me a break with this stuff. The book is always say the battle for American identity. We're going to close with three rapid fire questions. Number one, give me a country in the world where something good is happening. This is my favorite part about Pod Save the World. No, that doesn't count. I want to give me something obscure. I like it, Pond Save the World at the end of the episode, where you're like, hey, guess what's happening in Peru? Because I don't know what's happening in Peru. So usually I kind of fall asleep during the middle

where you're talking about stuff in the news I know and then I kind of wake up from my nap and you guys are talking about Peru. And I'm like, oh, this is cool. So give me a fun fact. I would say, you know, if you look over like a fun place in the world right now, Jesus. I'd say Nepal, Nepal, where you had.

you know, Gen Z protests that ousted a corrupt establishment and augured in a new era of politics. All right, Nepal. How's that works? That's great. That was exactly what I was looking for it.

I'm going to do a good little deep dive after this. Okay, number two. Pope Leo was in Cameroon. I didn't realize that yesterday on the podcast. I wanted to issue a correction. Can you issue a single Cameroon fact? Can you tell me a single thing about the nation of Cameroon? I think that they have the...

I think they have the oldest and longest from the state, too. Like they have some, the oldest and longest what? Serving head of state. I think he's one of these guys who's been in power forever. I mean, I'm not certain of that.

It's okay. That's good guess. Paul Bia. Yeah, president of Cameroon since 1982. That is crazy. Yeah. That's a great camera,

in fact. Yeah, it's a good camera in fact. You're doing well. I asked Tommy for the third one and he said he won't support my trivia reign of terror. So we will close just with Nuggets and Nicks talk. Do we, is it possible?

Is there hope that we could mean? at the can or at Madison Square Garden for the NBA finals? I think so. I'm not at all hopeful about the Knicks. I'm hopeful about the Knicks because when they are healthy and kind of dialed in, they can beat anybody in the East. And the nuggets, man, like they close strong and they seem healthy. And I really, really, really would like to see it not be Oklahoma City.

I've come to hate Oklahoma City in a strange way. Same. The way that they try to get calls and stuff, like it just bugs me. horrible basketball to watch. I'm with you. We need Peyton Watson to get back healthy. I'm also hopeful for the next. That Celtic series is going to be tough. Tatum's looking good. But if it happens, baller in our MSG, all right, brother. All right, let's do it. All right. Everybody, thanks so much to Ben Rhodes. We went a little long today, but, you know, we had some news happening this morning. So we'll be back on Monday. It's great. It's a nice pairing.

As I mentioned, Ben Rhodes was getting Cristolian. I'm getting Rhodesish. And so on Monday you'll Closer. Yeah. Yeah, on Monday you'll get to hear from Woke Bill Crystal, and we can reflect back on our conversation today. Anti-Aron Moore Bill Crystal. Yeah, exactly. Thanks to Ben Rose. Everybody else, you have a wonderful weekend. We'll see you on Monday. Peace. The Borg podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, Associate producer Anzley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.