The Daily Beast Podcast - What Generals Really Say About Trump and Hegseth

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

David Rothkopf, the Daily Beast's unmissable columnist, lifts the lid on what's really going on at Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth's "pep rally" this week for generals and admirals. Rothkopf, CEO of The Rothkopf Group and a Clinton administration veteran, tells executive editor Hugh Dougherty tells what his own sources are warning the meeting signifies. And he warns how a militarized response to phantom threats like “war-torn Portland” saps real military readiness. He also tells why Trump weaponizing the DOJ against enemies including James Comey means the U.S. is not just facing becoming an authoritarian police state; in fact it's already there. He also traces the next evolution of MAGA from grievance politics to white Christian nationalist revivalism and warns how it could outlast Trump himself thanks to people including Erika Kirk and JD Vance. Yet he offers a glimmer of hope in the power of numbers, new platforms, and a public that still wants sanity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The guy who is the least qualified Secretary of Defense in our history, and they're going to lecture the career leaders of our military at this particular moment. I can tell you, I've spoken to a bunch of generals and admirals and people close to them, and I can tell you, it is not going down well. So having a pep rally in Virginia, led by a couple of nitwits, is not what the United States government or the United States military needs right. Welcome to the Daily Beast podcast. I'm Hugh Docte.

I'm executive editor of The Daily Beast and I'm filling the seat for Joanna Coles. If you are a returning subscriber, thank you, thank you, thank you for being with us. Thank you for your comments. We love to see them and they help us shape our future interviews. If you're a member, a big thanks to you,

it couldn't be easier to join. Just go to join on our YouTube channel and you will see the amazing perks you get. one of those amazing perks, I will be in the comments later to translate for people who can't understand my Scottish accent. And if you are among those people, I do apologise. I've done my best and even Stephen Miller cannot make me change it. It is our absolute privilege to be joined this morning by David Rothkoff. David is the Daily Beast absolutely unmissable columnist.

He served in the Clinton administration. He edited Foreign Policy Magazine. and he is now in the Supremo of the Deep State Radio Network for podcasts, and he is the guru on everything that is happening in our political life in D.C. and beyond. David, good morning. I can see that you are neither slumped over your golf buggy or patrolling the streets of Chicago in Camel. It is our pleasure to have you. Well, it's a pleasure to be here. I don't understand anything you're saying, because I don't have translation to Scottish,

but I will try to make my way through this anyway. Tim Apple's new headphones are going to have that feature, I am told, which... No, no, no, I have the... I ordered them here, see, I have them. I just haven't set it up to translate. It's a very specific translation, and they are seeking... They will need to get, you know, my permission for it, obviously. I wanted to start with something that's happening very close to you, actually, in Quantico at the Marine Corps University.

That's where Pete Hegseth has summoned more than 800 generals. So every one, two, three, four-star general in the Marine Corps, in the Army, in the Air Force, every Navy Admiral, and all the top-enlisted members of each of those branches have all been summoned for what apparently is just a pep talk. And as we learned over the weekend, course, guess who wants to get in on the pep? one Donald J. Trump, because no event is incomplete without him. I'll just say that, David, you are, you know, one of the greatest, most informed, most knowledgeable people in national security. I'll just start with a really basic question. Is this a good idea?

That's a leading question. Of course, this is not a good idea. It's not a good idea on several levels, you know. On one level, you're putting all of your leading generals and admirals in the same place as a bad idea from the security perspective. On a more practical day-to-day level, since I don't think somebody's going to seize that security, you know, threat, the reality is we are distracting the leadership of our military for an exercise, which seems likely to be an empty exercise. This is part of a pattern, right? because what the administration is doing is saying, we want to have the strongest military in the world,

but we'd like to deploy a bunch to our borders, but we'd like to deploy a bunch to our cities. But we're going to alienate a bunch of people within the military because we're going to erase the history of people of color in the military. We're going to erase the history of women in the military. We're going to erase the history of the LGBT community in the military. military, and we're going to fire a bunch of people from those communities because we're going to say that they were hired for diversity reasons. So they're already doing things day after day after day that are reducing readiness in the United States military, even as they say they want to have this big, tough military force.

But then, you know, add to that, why are we bringing them together? We're bringing them together to hear the views of America's most famous draft dodger, Donald Trump, and this frat boy who's spent a few years in the military, but whose life subsequent to that in veterans organizations and everything else was marred by scandal and mismanagement, who is completely unqualified. the guy who is the least qualified Secretary of Defense in our history, and they're going to lecture the career leaders of our military at this particular moment. It is not going down well. I can tell you, I've spoken to a bunch of generals and admirals and people close to them, and I can tell you, it is not going down well. This is seen as a waste of time, and it's it offends.

them at a pretty fundamental level. There might be people who are, you know, thinking, oh, well, you know, getting together your generals, well, companies have all hands meeting all the time. You know, we were talking about Apple. Apple has all hands meetings and everybody turns up. What's the difference here? Why is it so important that we have independent thinking or, you know, what are the things that we should be looking for?

Well, look, I mean, the Secretary of Defense runs one of the, largest, most complex organizations on earth and organization that is supposed to be devoting itself in real time all the time to the protection of the United States, to raising our readiness, to be able to fight any foe that might seek to attack us and to enable us to be able to use the military as a tool, diplomatic tool, to help us achieve our goals as a nation. this meeting helps achieve none of those things, you know, getting them all together in a room to listen to this frat boy and this draft dodger lecture them about a warrior ethos is, you know, it's ridiculous, it's low comedy to talk about lethality, which the Hegs talks about all the time,

to the leaders of the most powerful fighting force that has ever been assembled in the history of the world. Nobody doubts the lethality of the United States Department of Defense or the people within the Department of Defense. The only thing they know is we are weaker today than we were nine months ago. Why are we weaker? Because we've weakened our alliances. Why are we weaker? Because we've strengthened our enemies. Why are we weaker?

because, as I said earlier, we've reduced the readiness of our forces, and we've gotten rid of a lot of qualified leaders who are super helpful in leading those forces. And so what Hegseth is doing here, consistent, by the way, with what he's done since he arrived in the office, is actually damaging the Department of Defense and actually weakening us. And, you know, you can see this and everything else. He couldn't keep his staff together. There were scandals within his office. Nobody wants to work with him. It's ridiculous. And it's what you would get if you got a Fox TV news host to cosplay as the Secretary of Defense,

which is what we've got going on now. You know, we've got this guy. And he's like flexing like he probably did at 100 bars over the course of his life, saying, look at me. I'm a tough soul. and not stop and say, as a Secretary of Defense is supposed to do, how do I make America stronger? How do I make America safer? What do those generals and admirals that you speak to and those around them?

What is their fear? What do they think is coming next? Or what is going to happen as a result of this sort of meetings that could have been emails and cosplay and performative very? of governing? Well, it's, you know, essentially, as one guy said to me, we're essentially letting the air out of the tires, right? We are slowly making ourselves less capable, and we're doing it at a time when it's very clear that the civilian leadership upon which the military defense, the president of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, people who are holding senior positions within the defense,

community, people holding senior positions within the intelligence community are among the least competent that we've ever had. I would add to that, by the way, that, you know, one of the critical factors in maintaining our national security is, not surprisingly, the National Security Council. And, you know, I've written two books on the National Security Council. I'm kind of a historian of the National Security Council. And I only say that to make this have a little more impact. We effectively don't have a national security council right now. It has been weakened to the weakest point since its creation in 1947 by the National Security Act of 1947. There is no national security advisor, the interim advisor of Marco Rubio, who obviously has three other jobs.

and the president doesn't take advice. He doesn't read intelligence. He doesn't get briefed by experts prior to his meetings. He doesn't take experts with him on his way to his meetings. So we've already lobotomized the U.S. government. We've decapitated our own armed forces and we are weakening them simultaneously. And this is a problem because the world is a dangerous. place. Russia's being more aggressive along the borders of NATO. Israel is destabilizing significant

parts of the Middle East. The Iranians are responding to an attack that we made that hurt them, but has not stopped them in the development of their nuclear program. There are conflicts elsewhere in the world. China is eyeballing Taiwan as we speak, and people in the military consider that to be the most likely next major conflict. So, you know, it's not like there's nothing to be focused on here, and that doesn't even to begin to address, you know, the fact that we're at a technological transformation point where AI and cyber and other kinds of new forms of war fighting unmanned vehicles and so forth,

autonomous unmanned vehicles, are on the horizon and need to be developed, and need to be developed with real seriousness of purpose. So having a pep rally in Virginia, led by a couple of nitwits, is not what the United States government or the United States military needs right now. It's worth asking or what's saying. Of course, there was actually some sort of military deployment over the weekend, and it wasn't one that was abroad or about protecting NATO against Russia. it was 16 National Guard in Oregon were federalized to go and stand outside federal buildings in Portland.

I mean, how does that go down at the top of the military and people who are concerned about national security? Well, I mean, it doesn't. It's idiotic, right? The president put out a social media post on truth social in which he said, he referred to war-torn Portland. Of course, you know, immediately people. and social media started posting pictures of like birds singing and flowers popping up and peaceful Portland, you know, Portlandia, you know. Nightmare lines for brunch.

Right, right. And, you know, it's very difficult to, you know, get a donut because there's so many people out there getting a donut. But there's no war going on in Portland, right? But he said it was war-torn. And he said he had to send the troops into fight Antifa. I point out now as every time that I get an opportunity to, Antifa is not a thing. There is no Antifa, okay? It's not a real organization.

It is kind of sort of an ideology, kind of sort of the ideology that we embraced when we fought the Nazis and the fascists in Italy. You know, we were the leading anti-fascist. The leading anti-fascist of all time in America is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, right? But that aside, they're making up this imaginary enemy that is fighting us in an imaginary war, but he's deploying real troops to go fight it. And, you know, he walked it back a little bit. But is this a distraction? Yes.

Does it alienate people in Portland? Yes. Does it alienate the National Guard who doesn't want to be, you know, because what they end doing is picking up garbage as they're doing in Washington, D.C. They do a daily update of how. how much garbage they have picked up and how many fences they have painted. Right. And is this what people want to do?

And by the way, the people in the National Guard, you know, they have real jobs. They are called into National Guard service. They do not get paid a ton of money. They are sacrificing their time and energy to do ridiculous stuff because it makes the president feel like a real man. And, you know, I understand it. He's an old guy and he wants to fly. what used to be muscles, and he wants people to treat him in a certain way. But this is not the way to do it.

And one by one, he is alienating leaders in cities and states across America, people in his National Guard. And I hope citizens who realize that this kind of, you know, playing at conflict helps nobody. But there is a real conflict that, is not being played at that is real that's one of political violence. We saw yet again over the weekend violence, there was an attack on a church in Grand Blank Township

in Michigan and it's very clear that the main suspect, I think, pretty much confirmed now by the police as a man called Thomas Sanford 40. He had a Trump sign outside his house. He was wearing a, he pictured on social media wearing a 2020 crime war liberals

t-shirt with a picture of Donald Trump smoking a cigar. There has been this wave of political violence and I just want to talk a bit about that for a minute. There is not a wave of political violence as it is being

portrayed by the media, okay? Because there is very, very little to speak of left-wing violence. There is a wave of right-wing extremist violence in the United States. And there are plenty of studies that show it, the former head of the FBI cited right-wing political extremism as the primary threat we face, terror threat in the United States. We know that other studies that have shown this have been

quashed by this administration. And, you know, it's a very real issue. But a bunch of what we've seen, And we don't know what the motives were of this guy in Michigan, just like we're not 100% sure of what the motives were of the guy who shot Charlie Kirk. You know, a lot of these things get blurred together by political opportunists to serve their purposes. Here's the reality. We have 400 million guns in the United States of America. We have more guns than people in the United States of America. We're the only major country in the world that has this kind of a gun problem. of, but I'd say it's beyond a problem.

It's a pathology because we have perverted the words of the Second Amendment, which doesn't give everybody the right to own a gun. It says very specifically that if, you know, in order to support well-regulated militias, people may hold a gun. But, of course, there aren't no militias. They're the militias that call themselves that are certainly not well-regulated. And, you know, the kinds of weaponry envisioned when the Second Amendment was written is not the kind that we've got right now, these weapons of war that can kill hundreds of people, fire hundreds of rounds in a minute. And so we have this pathology in the United States. We don't take care of it. Why?

Because political leaders on the left and the right are afraid of the gun lobby. They're paid off by the gun lobby. Our system has been corrupted by the gun lobby. And so we've got that as a problem. At the same time, we don't put enough money into mental health care. We don't put enough money into enabling people who have problems to seek answers for those problems. There is a stigma associated with getting mental health care in the United States. And, you know, that's a pretty dangerous combination.

right? You've got a bunch of alienated, angry people who have an inability to deal constructively with the feelings that they've got, but what they do have are weapons of war. And they can go and do what this guy did in Michigan and do what happens in the United States every day or two, which is they can take it out on their neighbors, they can take it out on innocence, they can take it out on schools. And so, you know, more people have died from, gun deaths in the United States that in the course of the past, you know, in this century, then have died in all the wars that we've fought in. So it's not political violence. It's, it's something worse than that. It's societal dysfunction. It's a breakdown of our ability to govern ourselves rationally. It's a breakdown of our ability to take care of ourselves. But it relates to the prior story in one very important way, which is that the principle, job of a government is to protect its citizens. And we are not protecting our citizens when we divert the attentions of the military to nonsense. We are not protecting our citizens when we

make it possible for everybody with any kind of a problem, to have a weapon that allows them to lay waste to the neighborhoods, to the communities in which they live. David, hold that thought, and we will be right back after these messages. And we are back with the Daily Beast, unmissable David Rothkopf. You also talked about, you also said, diverting a government.

And at the very top of it right now, we have a pretty big diversion going on that the Department of Justice at its most senior levels is being used to go after Trump's enemies. That's, I mean, we saw the prosecution of James, at the beginning of a prosecution of James Comey,

with him being in. indicted. And you mentioned Christopher Ray, Trump's hand-picked FBI director from his first term, who absolutely told Congress that far right-wing violence was the most pressing domestic terror threat. Trump threatened him with prosecution, or at least investigation over the weekend. Adam Schiff, he tweeted about or posted on truth social about over the weekend, saying he should be in jail. how do you get past this? How do you get, you know, how do you not, or when you talk to people in the, particularly the national security world,

what sort of message is that to the outside world? And what's the end game? Well, I mean, there are multiple messages here. First of all, just picking up on the security theme that we were talking about, when you do what they've done inside the Department of Justice, you're essentially unilaterally disarming the United States and its ability to protect itself from right-wing extremism or any kind of extremism in this country. And in fact, parts of the Department of Justice and the FBI that focused on such sources of potential violence in the United States have been shut down, defunded. we've also, by the way, shut down and defunded parts of the FBI and other parts of the government that protect us from foreign cyber attacks, that protect us from Russian meddling in our elections.

Because all of these things are things that Trump and Stephen Miller and the people around them, Cash Patel, Pam Bondi, all have viewed through a political lens. you know, you don't make America safer by taking the people who led the largest violent attack against the United States government in modern history, which is the January 6th coup attempt, and pardoning them and then putting some of them in the United States government. So, you know, from a point of view of dealing with terror threats, dealing with domestic threats, dealing with the kind of things that we've been talking about here, the government has been gutted and weakened. But, you know, you're talking also about something else, which is, well, if they're not using the FBI and the Department of Justice for what they should be using it for, and they've also, by the way, not, you know, it's just a sidebar. You know, they've stopped the investigations of prosecution of white collar crime and other kinds of things that, you know, Trump takes personally and his friends take personally because they're in. involved at, right? Yes.

We've personally been taking, and now they've taken it personally. Right. Well, they're just saying, you know, okay, everybody, you know, you've got a free run at this. But, you know, there's something even more pernicious going on, which is manifest in this Comey thing and the threats of doing it to others, which is, you know, Trump has gone full authoritarian. He's saying this is not the Department of Justice. This is the Department of Donald Trump's retribution, and we are going to use it to harass, to penalize, perhaps to jail, perhaps to bankrupt, to destroy the reputations of the people that have gotten under Trump's skin.

Many of those people, by the way, have gotten under Trump's skin because they actually followed their or honored their oath to the United States Constitution, followed the facts where the facts led, which is what? the FBI and investigators supposed to do, and found out that Donald Trump was a corrupt guy doing corrupt things, and they wanted to prosecute him for it. And he wants to go after all of those. But this is, you know, a breakdown in our constitutional order. Now, there are going to be some tests real quick, because the Comey case is going to come up in a few days in front of a judge, and the question is going to be, is the judge going to look at it and say, this is nonsense and throw it out. But Trump's already, you know, kind of prepared the ground, if you like, for that

by saying, oh, this was a Biden appointee. The system's rigged against me, even though it's his system. Well, of course. And, you know, they've been doing that from the beginning, too, where they're trying to discredit the court system. And you have the ridiculous spectacle of Chief Justice John Roberts going out and saying, well, I don't like these attacks on our courts. And it's like, dude, you made it possible.

You gave the guy immunity. You gave the guy, you know, the ability to exert his exit powers as president in a way that no president has ever had before. They did it last week again with regard to cutting foreign funds that were allocated by the Congress. They've essentially given the president the power of the purse, even though that's the opposite. or it's not the intention of the Constitution, which gives it explicitly to the Congress. But this is the post-constitutional era of law enforcement in the United States. This is an era in which norms, laws, traditions, standards, and the word of law are all being set aside. And the only thing that matters is the whim of the mad president who thinks there's a war going on in Portland.

You know, and this is, this should scare everybody because, as many people have said, if they can go after a guy like Comey, who was the former deputy, you know, it was former head of the FBI, the former deputy at DOJ, a very, very, distinguished guy. And a Republican. Yeah, and a Republican who probably bid more to get a Trump elected over Hillary Clinton than any other single individual. But if he's going after them and senators and prosecutors and so forth, how far is he from going against you? And I got to tell you something. You're sitting there. You're listening to this at home. And you think, oh, he would never come against me. Well, they passed an executive order last week in which they described things. threats against the United States that they could then go after and that they were targeting

as subversive as being anybody who spoke out against capitalism, anybody who spoke out in an anti-Christian way, anybody who was part of this Antifa that doesn't really exist. They're planning now to, and there was a story about. about this over the weekend, shift the allocation of federal funding for universities to universities that share Trump's views. So we are rewarding people who share Trump's views and celebrate Trump. And we are putting in the crosshairs of our legal system everybody else. And if you've tweeted at any point, something critical of Trump, something critical of a system that creates oligarch and billionaires and leaves ordinary people left behind, something critical of, I don't know,

right-wing evangelicals, something critical of Israel, by the way, which is another thing that they're trying to make illegal. Then you're on the list. There's data out there that points to you, and you don't know how you're going to be penalized. You know, you may not be the target of a legal investigation, but what will you be the target of? Will you become a target within your own organization as they start looking at the names of people who might alienate the government? I was talking to somebody who's on one of his lists yesterday or last week. I had lunch with them.

And they'd just, they'd almost gotten a job. And then the people at the job said, no, we can't hire you. Because if we hire you, it sends a message to the administration that we, you know, don't care about what they're saying. It's a thumb in the eye to the administration. And I know lots of people who are not getting jobs because they've been critical of the administration. And this is part of the plan. It's not just the high-profile prosecutions.

It's stigmatizing everybody who doesn't support the administration and relying on the support of weak institutions, corporations, and media organizations and academic institutions and not-for-profit. institutions, to give into that and say, and I know, I was talking to, sorry, I'll stop after this, but I was talking to a guy who's a professor at a leading university. And the faculty of the university was being subjected to detailed investigation by the administration of the university to see where they were running afoul of this administration is. this like McCarthyism? Yeah, but it's much worse. It's much more, it's much bigger, it's much more organized, it uses big data. It's much, it's much broader. You're right about big data.

AI makes this a little bit more, you know, everybody is traceable all the time. Yeah. And, you know, this is, you know, people say, well, you know, if we go too far down this road, this is an authoritarian country, or we go too far down this road, we're at police state. Boys and girls, we are too far down the road. We are an authoritarian country with an autocratic leader who is acting in the ways that the heads of police states act. That's where we are. And to suggest, you know, it's around the corner is to be as divorce from reality as a president who thinks there's a war going on in Portland. That president, I just want to shout back to an absolutely brilliant column you did last week,

which was about what happens to MAGA and the succession. And you pointed out that the MAGA movement is changing and taking these authoritarian trends have focused so far on Donald Trump, but that what we saw with the memorials service to Charlie Kirk, and with a lot of the discussion around that, was a very explicit Christian nationalistic version of it that is coming afterwards. Is that part of the plan? Is this opportunistic? I mean, plan, who's planned? There are a lot of different plans out there. But I think there's a recognition in, you know, the leadership of MAGA and the Republican Party that Donald Trump is going to be 80 on his next birthday, and he is clearly false.

and weakening as a man, and he probably is not going to be able to stay in office past 2028. I mean, we can't rule anything out, but he probably won't. And so there's going to be a need for a succession. I have to say, watching the Charlie Kirk Memorial, you could see the shape of what that would look like, because it was the first event that I have seen in the past 10 years that could be considered a MAGA event where Donald Trump was an afterthought. He was not the center of attention.

The center of attention was Erica Kirk, Charlie Kirk's widow, and J.D. Vance. And the message that they had was a very unified message that, you know, this movement, in the words of Erica Kirk, it's a religious revival movement. And that the terminology they used was not the terminology of Trump about immigration or the grievance-driven, been terminology, although that was there. But it was the terminology of televangelists, of, you know, of using the language of Jesus instead of the language of Trump. And what I said in the column was that, you know, this strange thing is happening where the future of MAGA is going to have as its front man, not probably the most, you know, corrupt and, you know, you know, human that we've ever had in high office in the United States, Donald Trump. But Jesus Christ himself.

Now, the problem with that is this is not a movement that also embraces the ideas of Jesus Christ about welcoming the stranger, about, you know, being kind to your neighbors, about, you know, following a golden rule, about tolerance and understanding and compassion. It is one of exclusion. And if you listen to Charlie Kirk's messages or you listen to the, you know, Stephen Miller rant in the middle of this thing, what you've got is white Christian nationalism. David, let me just pause you there to hear from our sponsors. And we are back with more insights from David Rothkoff. And just worth pointing out that the most famous Christian on earth right now is, in fact, fact, an American, it's the Pope, and he is not somebody that aligns with much of this movement

at all. They certainly have commonalities, I'd imagine, on the issues, you know, on pro-life issues. But he is condemned to their views on immigration. He is condemned. And I think, you know, one of the things that they've done, while they're sort of appropriating the image of Jesus and appropriating the words of Jesus, is that they've stripped away the meaning of Jesus. And Jesus out of all of this. And look, I'm Jewish. So, you know, you don't want to take my theological analysis of all of this. I'll just say that Jesus was as well. So, yeah, well, thank you very much for that. We, we always like it when that's pointed out. But, but, but, but, you know, I think that, you know, this is about exclusion. And it's about turning back the clock to a world in

which white people were in charge, men were in charge. Women played a role of, you know, trad wives, you know, and, you know, handmaid's tale kind of thinking. And, you know, that's, that seems to me to have been a core of MAGA for a long time. But post-Trump, it's the one that's most organized because you've got all of these sort of networks of right-wing churches and others and groups like Turning Point, Charlie Kirk's group, which want to and are able to drive this forward. And, and, you know, why is that important? Well, I think a lot of us wake up in the morning and think, look at our watches and say,

you know, what Trump time is it? How many more minutes than hours of Trump do we have, right? And the reality is his days are numbered. His time is limited, whether it's by the Constitution or it's by father time, right? And so, you know, but that doesn't mean the end of this. It doesn't mean the Trumpian tactics or the takeover by the executive branch of the rest of the government or the ability to ignore the law is just going to be used by Donald Trump badly for the next couple of years. It could be used by these people badly. And, you know, since I brought it up before, you know, as somebody.

My father grew up in, you know, Hitler's Austria, you know, and they used much of this same language. And they define themselves as a Christian group to the expense of all the other groups that don't share their beliefs. And we've seen where that can lead in the world. And we see it now, right? We see Donald Trump using essentially a giant military or militarized, police force to round up people who are brown, who don't speak English, who may have been great contributors to our society for decades, but they're throwing them into prisons without due process. They're throwing them out of the country without due process.

They are now using the Department of Justice to target people with who don't have the same political beliefs, and they're planning on expanding that. So what they're saying is we're going to use the government to punish the people who are not like us, who do not agree with us. And this has happened so fast. It has been breathtaking. It is, you know, Viktor Orban is probably sitting there starting to take notes on how did Trump do it. Vladimir Putin is probably doing the same thing because it is happening so fast in this country. And I would say, look every day at, you know, like, what if there's a government shutdown?

What if there's a government shutdown this week? What programs do they turn off with that? How do they redirect funds? How do they seize emergency powers in the context of all of that? Each time they have an opportunity to do it, they do it in a way that puts you at risk and that limits your fundamental rights. David, can you give us some hope? Is there some positive note we can finish on? Sure. Sure. There's lots of reasons to be helpful.

First of all, father time is undefeated. So, you know, that transition is going to come. Secondly, a lot of these people on the, you know, the Republican right, the J.D. Vance's of this world are obviously devoid of the skills or the abilities of Donald Trump to say, hey, I'm something different. They all start to look the same. Also, there are more people who disagree with them than agree with them. You know, if you look at polls in the United States and say,

how many people want gun reform or how many people want fairer taxes or how many people want a clean environment, how many people want education reformer, how many people, you know, want health care for everybody, it's always two-thirds or three-quarters of the American people who want those things. And those people can be mobilized in new ways now using new technologies, social media, things like this, where, you guys, with your podcast, yet audiences comparable to the audiences that once only went for network TV shows. And we are privileged for them to come to us and very aware that the responsibility that's on us as journalists is huge to be truthful, to be accurate. But also, you know, like Donald Trump wakes up in the morning because he's a creature of decades ago, right?

Yep. And turns on Morning Joe. He's fool boomer. And I've been, right, he is full. Me too. Sorry. I'm Jen Jones. I'm Jen Jones.

Okay. But he turns on morning Joe. I've been on Morning Joe. I like the people and so forth. But he turns on Morning Joe. Morning Joe averages 700,000 viewers per episode. And of those 700,000 viewers, 60 or 65,000 are 25 to 55. Okay.

This broadcast on your daily beast YouTube network will get maybe half as many total audience, but two or three or four times as many of the target audience, of the people that you want to reach the most. So that to me is a sign of hope, because what it means is there are many, many platforms that can't be bought up by Trump-leaning oligarchs or give opportunities for people with fairly limited resources. I mean, I have a little podcast network, Deep State Radio Network, where we do. 1517 podcasts a week, several dailies. We do the New Republic's daily. We do the amount of

variety of these subjects with experts. And we get two million downloads a month. You know, we're tiny. We're much smaller than what you guys are. But that makes an impact, right? And they're not hundreds. There are thousands of platforms like that out there. So the majority of people don't agree with these guys. There are mechanisms to mobilize those people. Every day the people in power are alienating those people more. And so I think ultimately, the wheels are turning in a way that can get us back on track as a country and look back at this dark period as a dark period. Do you feel better?

I feel almost uplifted. David, there's nobody I would rather have navigating me through this dark period than you. There was enough hope there that is the train. but it's not, is it the train coming towards us that's good? I don't think it is actually. No, no, it's the light of an ongoing train. I hope there's light at the end of this tunnel.

David, there's no better place to keep up with your insights than Deep State Radio Network, which we absolutely recommend to everybody. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for your amazing insights. And please come back. We always want to hear more from you. And look forward to your next appearance. David, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for helping us navigate a dark time and bring us some light. For more of David's brilliant insights, please check out the Deep State Radio Network, non-stop coverage of a pivotal time in American history. Now, we want to know, what did you think? Do you have hope? Is it dark? Are you worried about Trump censoring you? We want to know, send us your comments where there is no censorship.

And as Joanna would always say, please be Beast. Thank you to David Rothkoff for joining us. Thank you to our production team, Devin Rodgerino, Anna Von Usen, and our editor, Jesse Milford. I want to give a special shout out to our Be Beast level members, Karen White, Heidi Riley, and Connie Rutherford. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You are The Beast. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast,

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