Trump’s Unrequited Love for Kim Jong Un

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highlights from your favorite crooked pods packing as much analysis funny moments in 100% correct opinions into 40 minutes as humanly possible. Crooked on MS now airs every Saturday at nine p.m. Eastern 6 p.m. Pacific. Welcome to Patsay the world on Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, before we came in here, I just read this piece in the elin. It's called the wrong kind of American. It's the headline by a woman named

Julia Curley, the former CIA officer, rose to the rank of PDB, briefed Vice President Mike Pence for a year. Worked for the Trump administration not because of sharing their politics but because

“she's a patriot and then was driven out because I think Laura Lumer figured out that she was a trans person.”

I got Lumer, and it is in raging. Yeah, people should read it. She has a tremendous reputation, she served in the Biden administration too, but you know, a political civil servant, served in multiple administrations. I will say, in addition to being utterly reprehensible to target someone because of their identity like this, do we think that the non-woke national security apparatus filled with the likes of Pete Heggsett is performing better than

she would have? No, absolutely. Seems like maybe diversity is good. Yes. You get smarter people than, yes. I can Pete Heggsett. Yeah, real meritocracy over there. Yeah, Pete Heggsett. He was like, yeah, I'm doing a DIY hire. Doing a bang-up job running the Iran War. I mean, things are going so badly and it's all sort of stuck in the same place that we don't even have a big Iran section for you today, and because Pete is an idiot, but it's a, it's a, it's such an

raging piece. I mean, there's all these great people. This is just one story of a great person driven out of the US government because of politics. And I'm sure there's hundreds or thousands of these. It also is reminder that it's easy to like, you know, for some people at least to demonize trends people in the abstract, but whenever the camera settles on a person like this, who's like a human being, who's very capable, you remind of how grotesque that is trying to do her job,

surfer country, and be herself. I highly recommend reading it. We got a great show for you guys today. We are going to talk about why President Trump randomly lashed out over the weekend, started posting photos of himself with Kim Jong-un, and then started screaming as one does. I mean, you and I should do that before this publishes people will wonder. Then he tried to cancel joint military exercise with the South Koreans. We'll explain what the exercises are, why didn't matter, and why we think

he did this now and kind of the global security implications of it all. Then we're going to talk to you about Jared Kushner's trip to the Middle East, but he was re-upping that venture capital fund. You know, some meetings with the Saudis or other articles. We'll talk about what it meant for Gaza,

Then secret plane rides in subterfuge by President's very hot right now because of Trump and Natalie. Because of Trump basically hiding out in the catering garden turkey with Natalie. So we're going to tell you about the links that Russian President Vladimir Putin goes to to avoid being monitored by foreign intelligence services, the media. Really, anyone,

the amazing story in the New York Times, or kind of based in the south of.

Finally, we're going to just quickly highlight how Trump talks about parts of Africa, and then why British Prime Minister Andy Burnham should probably just stop using his own cell phone. I mean, that's a good message for any political leader in the world. Yeah, probably. Run it through your office, I'm going to say. Yeah. We'll explain why. Then you're going to hear my interview with an independent journalist named

Natalie Oliveario. She broke the story about the horrible conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

“That's the aircraft carrier that's been at sea. I think she's said like 265 days,”

under an interview like nearly nine months, thanks to the war with Iran. She talks about the toll on the sailors, their families, the fleet itself. It's unbelievably stark. Yeah, and it's a story that one thing I just want to say about Tommy is it kind of brings everything together in a strange way, because the reason they're in such horrible conditions is because they were sent there with no clear mission or endpoint to their mission.

The mission itself changed and competent people like Pete Hicks at the run the Pentagon. So they didn't kind of plan for resupply. Our base in Bahrain got obliterated by the Iranians. They had no plan B. They didn't tell us that. So no transparency led to no spotlight on this. And then they called it fake news and showed no empathy. So like all the incompetence and the cruelty and the stupidity and the rashness. And like oddly, this is one of the stories. It is even

bigger than like people being in such small conditions. Some people are trying to jump off an aircraft carrier because it kind of gets it everything about this war that is just wrong.

“The lack of strategy in planning is headspinning. Yeah, like like you said, I think the Iranians”

on day one bombed this US base in Bahrain that is absolutely critical to resupplying any mission

and the Gulf. And instead, the resupply ships are having to do like 10 day round trip missions to get food to dig a Garcia. Yeah, that's in a mile away to get provision. So that's one piece. Second, you know, I thought President will play the clip for you later. President Trump basically belittles these concerns or complaints from these sailors. He's saying he talked to some admiral who was like, when I was their age, I was on ships for a long array, like we'll explain

why that's bullshit. But also, you know, I saw this prick on Fox news sort of like shouting down these sailors. Some of these, the crazy, the younger sailors, they're not allowed on the deck. They are in a steel boxes in this aircraft carrier going on 250, 260 days. Like, you imagine the nightmare. People are so fucked up by this that they're trying to throw themselves off the deck of the aircraft carrier. One guy did. Yeah. And, you know, these Fox news people who cheerlead these

wars and would never fight them themselves. Like at some point, there needs to be a reckoning

with these people. I will, I will just say that when you have no, because the other piece of this that came out in some of the reporting from the families and I don't know if you get in this and interview Tommy, but like the morale when you don't know why the fuck you're fighting a war, there's no reason to be fighting the war. Nobody's articulated why the country's not behind you, Congresson vote for it. Like, that's, if you were like fighting the Nazis,

you probably put up with being in the steel box. You know, when you're there to open the effing straight, there was open before the war. Like, that's not exactly the most inspiring mission. Yeah, when you feel like, you know, maybe in it in Yahoo is the reason where at this war, you know, maybe, yeah, right, where they're the current mission is to reopen this trade of our moves, which was open before we started the stupid war. Yeah, the whole thing is just a mess.

And it's just like, it's, it's just a piece of the cost of the war that is under discussed, which is the toll on the U.S. service members themselves and their families, because a lot of times these guys can't communicate home for operational security reasons. So imagine, you know, your loved one is in this floating prison in the Gulf for 200 days and you're just sitting there wondering, like, okay, is one of these Iranian missiles going to

“get through. Yeah. Yeah. If it re-escalates, what could happen? Yeah. So it's a very important story worth”

worth seeing on top of because, you know, things aren't going to be a better for these sailors anytime soon. You know, if they get home, it's going to be in a couple of months. It's like by like Halloween. So we're going to start with a different sort of military challenge for President Trump, which is this this dust up with South Korea. So on Sunday, President Trump posted the following message on truth social. I'm going to read the whole things. It's just so weird.

Based on a very good relationship with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, I'm not happy with the fact

Korea. These exercises are not only costly with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America as usual, but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile to a country that as long as Donald J. Trump has been president has been unthreatening and respectful. Therefore, based on the fact that it's too late to cancel, I've instructed Secretary of War, Pete Heggseth, to substantially reduce the joint military exercises while somewhat related

perenn's question mark. I don't even understand that. I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said no thanks. Thank you for attention this meant better President Donald J. Trump.

A lot to unpack there. We'll get to that in a second. So Ben, it's not the first time

Trump is wind about these joint military exercises of the South Korea. It's not really clear either how much the exercises were scaled down because he basically fired off this post when the exercises were already underway, like all the assets were prepositioned. But it's still a huge deal in South Korea, both politically and for their national security. So for context, these are called the, the Ulti Freedom Shield exercises. They're one of two major annual military

joint military exercises connected by the U.S. and South Korea. There are 11 days long, 18,000 South Korean troops are involved along with thousands of U.S. troops. And Trump complains about these things being agreed to a long ago. Like they are agreed to in the 1950s, like 1953, when the Korean Army's agreement was signed and established the ceasefire that's still in place. I caught up with our buddy Danny Russell earlier today to talk about all of this

Danny was assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs, work with us on Asia issues in the White House.

“And he was explaining to me why these exercises are actually so important.”

First of all, South Korea has a conscription and mandatory military service for men aged, the evil body man of a certain age of like 29. So you serve for 18 to 21 months. So that means like these South Korean troops are constantly rotating out and you actually do need like real training for them or otherwise you're just, it's the first time you're going to be you know, serving. The exercises, that like a war game at a think tank where it's like,

you know, laptops and a simulation. It's like essential basic training and coordination between

these two big militaries. And then second, you just talking to me about the way the pace of growth in North Korea's military capabilities over the last five years has just grown like exponentially. So they've gotten real battlefield experience in Ukraine. They got a crash course in drone warfare. Their cyber capabilities have drastically ramped up and they got all this new hardware and money from the Russians, right? And US capabilities obviously evolved too. So you really do need to

“like drill this stuff. And so I think the question is why kind of like given those clear security”

equities would Trump decide to flip out about this and hang them out to dry? Lucky for us, he kind of elaborated on his fit of peak in the Oval Office on Monday. Let's watch. South Korea has been protected by us for many, many years. When I called recently President of South Korea who I like, I think he's very nice actually. But I called him and I said, would you like to give us a little hand? We don't need help with a rent. But if you'd like, give us a hand with a rent,

he said no thanks. And I said, what do we have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong-un, your next to a neighbor? And you're not going to help us on a very easy military operation in a rent. Let's strange. We can't go around and protect all of these countries, especially when they're not there to help us. So just for what it's worth been, the US has closer to 26,500 troops in South Korea, not 39,000 as he said there. It's also a lie to claim that South Korea paid nothing,

that Trump got them to pay $3 billion and then Biden kind of killed the deal. But whatever,

“I digress. What do you think happened here? What do you think made Trump pop off about this?”

And what do you think about him tying it to Iran? Divine Trump's decision to true social

geopolitics on any given days is always difficult. I mean, I think there's a few things that

I might point to as possibilities. The first is that he's being utterly humiliated by the Iranians. He's losing. He's being emasculated in front of the whole world. So like a bully on the school yard, who's just got punched really hard in the stomach. He's just looking for someone else to swap. That's the most likely reason. Second is he's done this to some European countries too. He demands that they help him with the war that he started by himself for no reason without

it and telling them that he's hurting their economies more than ours. It's screwing the Korean economy. Yeah, a lot of these Asian economies. Yeah, we talked about how dependent they are. You've been very good on this time. They get far more than energy through the streets of our moves than we do. And then he's upset that they don't do what, too, by the way, what are the South Koreans going to do? Tip the balance in the Iran War? Because one more ship, you know,

like next hardships, like that makes a lot of sense. And then the other thing though that I think

kind of weirdly consistent over the decade that we've unfortunately had to get to know them very well.

“And it's like he's not going to get through this second term, his last term,”

without kind of coming back around all of them. You know, in the same way they had to kind of come back around like James Komi. Yeah, I'm close. I'm John Brennan and, you know, he'll come guarantee mark my word. It'll come back around like Greenland again and the Panama Canal and like he's been banging this drum on the Koreans like, well, we're going to come back around of this one. And you know, like there's a disturbing sense of like the declining man in the high castle

who's, you know, powers, because the other thing about that tweet, that truth is, you know,

when he would do this like, sure the after he came into office for the second time, it was crazy,

but it was also kind of like, thank you for attention as matter was a little scary. Now it's like, fuck you dude, like the South Koreans aren't going to like change and join your war on. Like there's a pathetic nature to it. There's actually a little alarming because you get this feeling he's just going to be like lashing out at all these targeted frequencies had throughout his whole miserable life, you know. And if the cost is, are basically like the permanent destruction of American alliances

in our standing in the world, because I do want to say just one thing, because there's so many things you could say about what he said is wrong. The cost that we pay like this note that he hits it, Obama also hit by the way that like we bear to many burdens. It's not the fucking basis in South Korea. It's the dumb wars in the Middle East, you know, like if Trump was serious about not having trillions of dollars in debt on wars, that's not the kind of baked in, you know, presence of

US troops and bases that have been there for decades that we get a ton out of because basically

the entire global economy's tilted in our direction. Because of South Korea and Japan and Europe and now work of bases and alliances and the dollars of predominant currency, like that's not all this extra post 9/11 cost of these wars. He's focused on the wrong fucking problem. Yeah, just on the why he did this now. It's like, the Navi Heyerman Jonathan Swan book gets at the fact that the Oval Office is just like this kind of like undisciplined free for all.

Yeah, someone described it to me as a gray-hound bus station. We're just like Rando's coming through, they just pop off about whatever, maybe someone walked into his office, tried to repaint brief him on these exercises, someone in there who got this. Sure, you're still getting screwed on this, right? So he's in a pissy mood about Iran. So he pops off at South Korea and also threatened

“to bomb Oman. I think that's right. Well, yeah. And the question of Kirstri, you think this time”

because the question that drew the kind of misogynist rant in the Oval Office was from a CNN reporter about Dick Kim Jong-un asked you to do this. And he didn't answer it. I mean, I don't think he did. It's see, I think your center is more likely that like buried in his briefings because I've been in the briefings where it's like, and by the way, the Jordan exercise is right. That sets off the guy. Yeah, but I mean, it does make you wonder like, because the Kim Jong-un piece of this could come

back to life too. He may want to go back to life. Yeah. So I think the combination of being that about losing the war, this old hobby horse, like you said about South Korea spending, and then I bet he's hoping he can get the media to chase the kind of like North Korea diplomacy kind of like bright object over here to get them off of the Iran stuff, which sucks for him. Which isn't on me to get it failure. Well, it was a total failure. And also, it is ridiculously

in that North Korea is not threatening. They were literally firing off ballistic missiles

earlier this week. And it's just worth saying that like, Trump said in that briefing, like he basically

said that Kim, he was asked if Kim had responded to his overtures. And he kind of like let the question hang in the air. And he was like, yeah, which is probably a lie. Because Kim has no reason to re-engage. Like he has money and new weapons from the Russians. He has his new big partnership with them. He doesn't want to deal with the United States in South Korea, brow-beating him. It's a reform of the Chinese and the Russians. Zee nuclearization, right? He basically

is said like that the pre-conditioned to talking with us again is you guys stop talking about

“denuclearization. And I think he said like end your hostile policy towards North Korea, which basically”

means like, don't do anything I don't like. And that could be, you know, a band in South Korea, a band in Japan, get your bombers at a quam and all sanctions. And meanwhile, this guy's sitting on 60 nukes. He can make 20 more years. He's got ICBMs that can reach the US. He's developing a nuclear submarine. Like, it's an enormous threat to the US and South Korea and the whole region. Yeah, what's so crazy, but what he said is the threat that people surmised,

North Korea posed the United States through successive administrations was not the personal relationship between the leader of North Korea and the United States. It was just the fact that they were developing nuclear weapons that could hit our troops in South Korea or Japan or reach the United States or suddenly reach Hawaii and quam. Like, that's the threat. So he did to much media fanfare

Abraham Accords of East Asia. You know, like, I've already touched this foot in the DMZ and everything. Oh, look at Trump. Amazing. And meanwhile, like, everything has gotten worse. Like, North Korea has developed its nuclear weapons. It's developed its ballistic missiles. They sent all these troops to the front and Ukraine. They've gotten this hit. The balance for Russia in a lot of ways with the shells, too. Feel like it did the time, right? And meanwhile, let's also point out the fact that

our aging president who's often described as the most powerful man in the world, I'm beginning to ask some questions about that is clearly in some kind of unrequited love affair with a 41-year-old

dictator of the country. Because Kim Jong-un has never once, like, evidenced any of the same affinity

for Trump that he consistently you don't read the letters. I mean, this is a guy that, like, his long-term future and survival is tied to the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party, which will be the after-down Trump to the Russian government and Vladimir Putin who, unless nature intervenes, will be the after-down Trump. He makes no indication that he gives a shit about how good-down Trump feels about him. Think of how pathetic it is. It's not just, I know there's

a kind of resistancey thing to say, like, oh, my God, he's, you know, he's powerling up a dictator. He's actually not. He's, like, chasing this dictator of, like, at the Hermit Kingdom. And Kim Jong-un isn't even really doing anything responsible. You know, that you're sending the occasional, like, spicy selfie, like, kind of a thing, like the mirror, the bathroom, as soon as he does even,

“that's what's so amazing. It doesn't have to. Like, in the first term he did,”

we don't even, I mean, because I guarantee you, if he had sent a love letter to Trump, he'd probably treat posts that much. Oh, that's a right away show. It's kind of, it's actually pathetic that this guy can't even, like, get Kim Jong-un to pay attention to. It is quite pathetic.

And also, just, like, two other big picture pieces of context. The first is that this flare-up

from Trump about these joint military exercises happened as we're learning that the USS George Washington, which is one of America's 11 total aircraft carriers, is getting taken out of Japan and sent to the Middle East to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln. We get it's all the reasons why in the interview. But that means that the United States is going to have exactly zero of its 11 aircraft carriers and the Western Pacific. And so that means we just have, like, a reduced capacity

to respond if the Chinese do something on Taiwan or the North Koreans do something stupid. And it comes after the U.S. pulled, it was the fabulous defense systems out of South Korea.

“I think that was last year. It might have happened this year. No, it's something that was for the”

war in Iran. Yeah, so it was the war in Iran. And in second, a couple of weeks back, we talked about

that nuclear deal that Trump had offered to the Saudis. Danny pointed out to me today that, you know, that initial deal allowed the Saudis to enrich nuclear material. And that South Korea has been trying to get that kind of deal offered to them for about 25 years. So now they're dealing with a stronger, richer, emboldened North Korea, a weakened, distracted United States and Trump ranting about the U.S. troop presence in South Korea once again. And so you got to be sitting

there, like, if you're some general in South Korea, you got to be sitting there thinking, okay, by the end of this guy's term, we might have no U.S. troops in the Korean Peninsula or a bunch less. What is our security guarantee? We should maybe be talking about getting a new car cells before it's too late. Yeah. And to connect some of these threats, because South Korea has choices, and they could just decide, you know what? We don't like the Chinese that much, but we're right next

to them. They're going to be here. The Americans are totally unreliable. And we better just start cutting some deals with the Chinese, like right quick or else it could be kaput for us. And look, you may like, broil your eyes and say, yeah, I don't care. I mean, let's connect some of these dots. He is destroying the relationship of South Korea potentially. He's threatening to bond the shout out of Oman at the same time that he's demonstrated to each of these countries that having

U.S. military presence may be more dangerous than not having one, right? He's threatened to invade NATO territory. If all the sudden countries feel like it's more dangerous to be friends with the United States, it's not just that the United States can be kind of ignoring or like the crazy person and now then it's literally dangerous to have your security tied to the United States. It is going to set like in that's kind of already happening. It's part of what's sending the world into this

tailspin of instability. And as we've also been pointing out, if it starts to look like, because that

“is why the dollars are reserve currency. Like the reason the dollars reserve currency, that's why we”

get to have billions of dollars in debt. That's why even as expensive as shit is, our standards of living are way higher than they should be in they are in other countries because we can spend more than we take in, because of the debt that accrues from the dollars reserve currency. Well, if suddenly that the thing that undergirds at, which is the U.S. military and its global presence, is unraveling, like shit can get very real here for Americans. Like I'm all for like drawing down base

no money on stupid wars. But if you, if you're dismantling things like Japan, South Korea, and Europe,

“and you're not anywhere in the Middle East, like everything changed is pretty quick.”

What also JD Vance is out there saying, like, I don't know if it's good for the dollar to be the reserves currency, like what are you talking about? Good luck servicing that debt man. Yeah, which by the way, like keep it on the yield on the 30 year treasury right now, like bonds are going crazy right now. A lot of bad things happen in global economy. Yes. I mean, I know we raise this a few times because this is like the, this is, this is the thing underneath the, the,

the tip of the iceberg because, because again, you may wonder why we have trillions of dollars in debt that we can seemingly carry around. Well, it's because countries have to buy our treas, because they have to deal with us as a hedgehog on with the dollar, and this is the kind of stuff that is just chipping away that iceberg. Yep, and the system works until it doesn't. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed

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That's select quote.com/werelled. Select quote.com/werelled. They shop. You save. Lucky for all of us, Jared Kushner is back in the Middle East. He's the guy who solved the worn Ukraine and did that one. Negotiated it into the worn around. Got that one done. So now he's back in the Middle East. Check it on causally. He's just sort of a global emissary for peace. Jared met with officials from Hamas and Sunday and Egypt, which by the way, I'm glad he's doing that and I hope

“that Democrats just remember that going forward and meet with anyone they want. I don't care if”

they're labeled a terrorist group or whatever. Trump did it. Jared Kushner did it. I don't give a shit. Jared Kushner to commit with a text. Hamas, but if a Democrat goes on his son, Piker. Hey, symmetry. Yep. There you go. Jared also met was really Prime Minister beeping in Yahoo for about four hours on Monday in the Netanyahu meeting. We're a Nicolae. I'm glad to know of the high representative for Trump's Gaza Board of Peace and then Tony Blair

for some reason. Jared said he met with Netanyahu to clarify like misconceptions and correct

misinformation about Trump's 15 point Gaza peace plan. They're never Trump announced and then

Netanyahu immediately rejected. So Jared says you sure Netanyahu that quote, the US doesn't expect Israel to refrain from taking action against imminent threats by Hamas. A Board of Peace official later said that quote, there will be no idea for redeployment from Gaza until Hamas is fully disarmed in all of Gaza is demilitarized. So we don't know what's going to happen here. Hamas seems to have agreed to kind of like a phase disarmament approach, but now the times of Israel is reporting

the Board of Peace might mix that approach. So like, it's just not at all clear what this is going to happen going forward. Regardless, Jared did a rare TV interview while in Israel which gave us a window into his thinking and some of what he talked about. Here's a bit of what he said on Fox News in this interview on Monday. Let's watch.

and the tunnels, you know, willingly over the next 60 to 90 days, that obviously would be the elimination

“of a huge security threat for Israel, almost an unthinkable achievement. And if they don't fall”

through now in their commitment, everyone will see that they're not genuine about peace and then Israel will have a lot more support from the U.S. and others to go and finish the job in the appropriate

way. So Ben, I found those comments incredibly ominous because it's like, okay, basically Israel

gets a pass on living up to its end of the original ceasefire bargain. But if Hamas doesn't immediately capitulate and hand over all to weapons, which obviously we want it to do, but I can understand sort of they're thinking here, Israel gets to finish the job whatever that means. It sounds like kind of greenlighting them restarting the conflict in a major way. Yeah, and I want to say like if you're going to be like a NEPO baby Kushner, like

better to just buy the lakers than try to insert yourself in Middle East peace. What a sweet game. Seems like his brother had a better way to plan here.

“It's extraordinary to me that the last two weeks we've, you know, talked about this”

utter humiliation where they announced the huge breakthrough in the implementation of the so-called

ceasefire terms leading to the demilitarization. Hamas, very particularly, and very publicly, Netanyahu's like, nope, we're not going to do this. And Jared, instead of going over there and saying, yes, you are, because we've fucking provided you with every weapon that you dropped on Gaza, we're going to cut you out. You dragged us in this dumb war in Iran. He goes over there and it's like, thank you, sir. May I have another? We're now accepting your frame of this exactly. And if Hamas

doesn't do everything that you direct them to do with Israel doing nothing, then we what could go back to full-scale bombardment of Gaza. I mean, that's kind of what he suggested. And listen, again, as we said a million times in the show, not a fan of Hamas think they've done more damage to the Palestinian people than all of us any other organization. You know, at terrorist groups, October 7th is unjustifiable, attacks on innocent people are unjustifiable.

But that should also apply to these really side, because as Jared is giving this interview, the National Security Minister, at tomorrow Ben Gavier, said, quote, "I think targeted assassination should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night, not just those who pose an immediate threat. There are people who are not worthy of life. They shouldn't live. They're not even people." I mean, that's the quote. That's the context when saying, "Go finish the job."

You've got people like who don't like it when you say that Israel is committing genocide, and then you have the National Security Minister of the current government of Israel making genocide the most genocidal statement imaginable. They're not even people, right?

“That's what's happening like before our eyes here. And again, just on this Hamas point,”

would I like if Hamas just disarmed out of the blue shore, but that's not how this works. Like even the United States and all these other parties understood that you were going to have like any diplomatic agreement, like a phase approach where each side takes steps together. So Israel has to withdraw as Hamas verifiably demilitarizes. And then a peacekeeping force goes in to take this filled a security vacuum. That's not what's happening anymore. What's happening

anymore is that they tried to do that plan. Israel is the only one that vetoed it. And now they said, "Okay, if Hamas doesn't do something that they're clearly not going to do, which is unilaterally disarmed, while Israel is occupying more of the Gaza Strip and not letting assistance in, then Israel can just kill as many people as they want." Like that is not diplomacy. That is just like Jared taking dictation from Netanyahu and repeating it on Israeli television nonetheless.

Jared just is fully on board with the Israeli side. We're not doing it in a wrong section today because again, like I said, nothing's really changed. But Kushner did tell Fox that, quote, "We are having very positive and active conversations, probably more robust than it's ever been with Iran." And then on Tuesday, Trump posted on truth social, quote, "There are no talks or conversations with Iran." So I don't know if he was just slapping down Jared at Jared was lying

or what the hell was happening there, but just notable. The one guess I'll make on this and RIP, the MOU that was supposed to end the war in Iran, that achieved processing nothing.

My guess is whatever talks are still going on, are basically Qataris or Omanis, or I don't

maybe even these Pakistanis that have been involved talking to the Iranians and then talking to Americans. And Jared is so like the center of his own world, but even if he's just getting right out on those talks by like, I'm guessing here, I don't know this to be, but like it feels like if he's getting a readout from like the Gulf, he's like, "Yeah, we're in really active talks," you know, like when meanwhile Trump is threatening to bomb the shit out Oman, this trouble shooter in the

region, like the Omanis, you'll recall, and this is Bear saying like, "There are the ones that

hike into Iran, got detained. Oman got them out. There are the ones who hosted the initial talks of led to the Iran nuclear deal. Like they are notoriously kind of this, I don't know, say Switzerland 'cause it's even more active. They're this kind of, you know, the try to facilitate it. They try to facilitate peace talks and they try to get along with everything we're in a bomb them. And that's good for us that we can do, if it wasn't for Oman, we wouldn't have had a venue

to have talks. And by the way, Trump has taken advantage of that, too. And now we're threatening to bomb them. Do you think that's going to make it more less likely that they'll go along with Iran's scheme to told the straightaway moves while giving Oman a cut. It's crazy. Pretty sure it's a lot of. And so while Gaza is stuck in this kind of nightmarish limbo, things in the West Bank are steadily getting worse. So the UN counted a minimum of 1,380 attacks by extremist settlers

in 250 Palestinian communities in the first seven months of this year. Also according to the UN

over 1100 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7th, most of these incidents get no media coverage. But what's happening in the village of Kusra actually broke through, and it's worth just sort of talking about why for a minute. So if you haven't followed the story, the gist is that earlier this month, these terrorist is really settlers decided to hold a bunch of Palestinians hostage in their own homes. They cut off water and power to several Palestinian

own homes on the edge of Kusra. They set up roblox, they camped out outside of the home, just as menacing as humanly possible. And during this siege, settlers actually blocked an ambulance from getting to the home to rescue a sick two-year-old. Now they block ambulances all the time

“but doing it to a sick two-year-old disgusting. I think another ambulance got in and got the”

kid out. But to me, give me a break. They also blocked activists from getting to these houses to provide food and water even after the residents had run out of food and water. So they're trying to starve and kill kids. IDF soldiers were called in to disperse to settlers. They were instead

spotted hanging out with them, praying with them. And they basically only evicted activists who

were trying to help the Palestinians. But what's different in this case is that one of the homes is owned by a Palestinian American in the list in Ohio. He had cameras kind of like live streaming and filming everything. That footage got pushed out to international press. It got international attention. So after a couple of days, the IDF got sent in again. They finally dispersed the settlers. But as soon as the IDF left the settlers came back, that led to the IDF starting a

larger kind of messier operation, which cleared out some of the settlers but not all of them. But it's almost kind of like beside the point because this is just temporary and these settlers are helpent on this kind of like messianic mission to ethnically cleanse the West Bank. The US ambassador is real. Mike Huckabee actually waited on the Kusra siege on Twitter and he referred to the settlers as terrorists, which was surprising from him. But then he also tweeted the following

then. Settlers are not the problem in Judea, Somaria. That's the West Bank. Uncettlers are. A very small minority who do great damage to Palestinian families in Israel. Real settlers like Israel, guns, governor of Judea, Somario, condemn the actions of the few. Let's hope the media

“gives attention to this and balances their stories. So I think it's worth kind of highlighting that tweet”

as a jumping off point because of how unbelievably wrong it is. This is not an issue of like a few bad apples in the settler community. As friend of the pod, Jasper Nathaniel wrote, "The violent settlers are the tip of the spear of the state-backed annexation process." So the settlers have backing from senior members of the Israeli military, some of whom are settlers themselves, from top political aids or top political officials like National Security Minister, to Marbet and Gavir,

who is the most kind of openly genocidal political leader. It's also a settler himself. Smotris is a settler. Yeah. And then on Friday, Ben, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced it, quote, "All responsibility for enforcing civilian matters in maintaining law and order in the West Bank will be transferred to the police, which is actually a huge deal because it would constitute a big step towards Israel annexing the West Bank." I think that might sound counter-intuitive

to listeners, but under international law, the occupying powers military is responsible for security and an occupied territory because that occupation is supposed to be temporary. When you transition to like civilian police, that's the fact of applying Israeli law to occupy territories and it goes against the Oslo courts, which say that has to be Palestinian security forces or the idea of. So Ben, it's pause there because the question I have is, do you think this is

exploding in advance of the election, this October, or whenever one is kind of trying to outright wing each other, or is the story worse and is this kind of like the settler movement trying to

“complete annexation in the next two years while Trump is so president? I mean, I think it's actually”

both. The first thing I want to say is that I saw the Huckabee tweet. I also saw a lot of people

online who are usually kind of rabid defenders of Israel like condemning this one instance. I fucking hate that man. Like, you're going to virtual signal, you're going to act like you're concerned about settler violence by taking the most high-profile incident that is most obviously

involves American. The 1100 people have been killed. The systematic repression of Palestinians, the systematic demolition of Palestinian homes, the systematic abuse of Palestinians. You get to pop up online and see, like, see, I'm even handed. Like, I just, I've very little patience for that. We have to see that this is a systematic effort. Netanyahu has spent years saying what Huckabee said

in his tweet, which is it, oh, there's some juvenile delinquents. He always uses language like that.

There's just a handful of bad apples among all these other virtuous settlers. As if it's not a systemic issue, the reality is, the two people, their most extreme in the Israeli government, Smotric and Bengabier, are the two people most focused on the West Bank. So Smotric is a, literally the leader of the settlers, and he's the finance minister, and he's very much in charge of making sure that the people in the West Bank, the Israeli settlers, get what they want. Ben Ghalir

is in charge of the police as a national scrutiny minister. So when this is shifted, if it shifted to the police, you're not good. That's not good, right? And I think what people have to reckon with, including Democrats, is no, it's not like we're going to get through one election and it's just election season. These are people who believe profoundly, I mean, just calling a Judean Samara, gives away the game. It's not the West Bank. There's not Palestinian land. It is ours.

And they want it as soon as possible. They see a win of opportunity with Trump. They see a win of opportunity with Netanyahu. This West Bank story is not going to go away. There's going to be more violence. And so you cannot cast this as some isolated extreme incident. This is just the one that popped up above the trance because it's an American and it was live streamed in all the rest of it. Yeah. I think we're going to return to this again soon coming weeks. I think it's an

“unbelievably important story. It's one that needs to get more focus because it is urgent. I think”

that there's a, there's a, there's a, a ticking clock here. Yeah. You know, we've talked about Jasper Nathaniel's coverage over infinite jazz is substack. It's really worth reading that if you want to learn more. But we'll, we'll definitely should put a button in this and come back to it soon. Last week, Ben, we talked about this Trump secret flight home from the NATO summit and Turkey, the decision to secretly use the press and his own staff as human shields and make them

unwitting decoys for Iranian missiles. I'd be thrilled to learn that happen to me. After that story

became public, the New York Times had this amazing story with the headline for Trump secret flight

with a stunning ruse for Putin a regular Tuesday. It dug into all the ways that Putin and his paranoia and the way he uses like lies and deception and subterfuge to avoid threats, you know, sort of hide where he's located. And it was just kind of fascinating and interesting and worth kind of digging into. So a couple of great anecdotes from this story. Putin just routinely lies about when meetings took place. And so reporters have had to resort to studying plants in the background

in his office to see when the leaves have wilted as kind of like rough time stamps for the meetings.

“I think that's fucking brilliant, by the way. They also look at the haircuts of the other”

officials in the meetings and then compare them to their other public events, like see if their hair is grown. Putin is also believed to have three identical offices at his various residences so that no one knows exactly where he is. Imagine, like Obama had an oval office in like Chicago. Right. I didn't, I don't know, I guess he does now. So journalists like they look for little discrepancies like the seams on a wall or like a door handle to try to like idea the room.

In 2023, a member of Putin's personal security service defected gave testimony to like another, you know, country security service and talked about what it was like to travel with Putin and set up comms for him. The AP kind of wrote up the transcripts of this and he said that since the the warn Ukraine Putin is almost exclusively traveled by train because he doesn't like the airplanes can be tracked. He said that Putin doesn't need internet access. What he goes to places. He doesn't

ever use a cell phone. He said the quote in all my service. I've never seen him with a mobile phone

and quote all the information he receives is only from people close to him. That is he lives in

“the kind of information vacuum. I think that kind of tracks with what we've heard about him getting”

bad information leading to bad information or bad decision making. And then finally, CNN just had a great story on Putin's personal train, which according to the government documents runs on secret tracks, their secret stops all over the country at secret stations that can't be found on an app. And the train includes a gym in a spa, which you know, looks pretty sick to be honest. So Ben, you know, a lot of this like got worse during COVID and the isolation there. I think

Putin made people quarantine for two weeks before meeting with him. But I can only imagine how paranoid he must be now with all these Ukrainian like deep strikes and to Russian territory and how much worse it will get. I do think there's an opportunity for the next U.S. President though to bring back the White House train. Yeah, I would be sick. I'd love to write on that. It's kind of funny, but it's also kind of terrifying because when a leader is this paranoid,

towards himself, right? He goes a lot less places. He's never very rarely in public.

“It's very stage when he is. But I mean, when a leader gets more and more out of touch like this”

and more and more isolated and is living in this kind of alternate reality that has been holy constructed, they do more rash things. You know, I mean, the most famous example of this right is Hitler in the bunker. You know, when he's still believes he's commanding all these armies and he's just sitting there taking drugs and watching everything burn above ground. And the reason I say that is because we already know from like some pretty good reporting, I'll never really know what was

in Putin said, that what contributed to his decision to do the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2020 was in part his isolation and people only telling what he wanted to hear and sideline and people

told him may think different. We've talked about the concern about escalation, like does Putin

try to do something in Europe, does he try to do something in politics and Moldova or God forbid him to, you know, and anywhere, but also in like Poland. This kind of isolation makes that more not less likely. Like if you're this cutoff from public opinion, if you're this cutoff from the consequences of your own decisions, there's no accountability loop, there's no real information getting to you. Like that's my concern. And also by the it points to why we're worried about Trump.

I mean, I'm not saying Trump's there, but this is why you don't even want to open the door to like catering cards to like once your leader can just disappear, like it opens the door to weird happening. I mean, you made the joke last week about like maybe he stopped by to see Putin. I don't think he did, but the point is is that the more like the present can just go off grid, like the weirder shit happens. No, it's not good. It's not like we can't normalize lying to the

way that's pressable for a few reasons. It's not acceptable. Also, you know, there's been a lot of coverage recently. We talked last week about these Ukrainian deep strikes on wildberries, the kind of Amazon.com. Russia, it's clear that like those are really having an impact. They're bringing the war home in a way that even the oil and gas strikes haven't done because I didn't realize that Putin had managed to kind of reroute oil and gas flows to major cities like Moscow

and St. Petersburg and kind of prevent like his inner circle or kind of the elites from feeling the pinch of like waiting in four hour lines for gas or something like that, but I don't think he's been able to do that with the wildberries strikes. And it's like, it just this feels very escalatory right now. And then we're about to go into another winter for the Ukrainians, where

“I remember last year, the whole conversation was about people basically freezing to death because”

Putin had blown up all the energy infrastructure and people couldn't heat their homes. So yeah, this is just, we're just heading in a very dark place over the next year, even if the kind of Ukrainian side feels like it has got some momentum right now. Yeah, just because they can hit, hit stuff deep and Russia drones doesn't mean that it can't get worse. I mean, it means it very well may get worse. Yeah, before we take a break, as you guys

probably know, in less than 80 days, voters are going to have a chance to stop at the Trump agenda and its tracks, at least in Congress. votes of America is on a mission to take back the House of Representatives, starting with the 12 most beatable Republicans who are up a reelection who are called the Krugid doesn't. votes of America is your guide to practical, no bullshit actions. You can take to help kick out these terrible members of Congress the Krugid doesn't

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packing as much analysis funny moments in 100% correct opinions into 40 minutes as humanly possible. Crooked on MSNow aired every Saturday at 9 p.m. Eastern 6 p.m. Pacific. [Music] Speaking of kind of paranoia, Russia's parliamentary elections coming up from September 18th to the 20th. On Monday the Supreme Court held this ruling barring this political party,

a yablico from participating. It's like the oldest liberal party they're openly against a warm Ukraine. They've no chance at winning. No one thinks this will be a free and fair election. But Putin apparently got so spooked by an online campaign encouraging people to support them. Vote for them as a way to like kind of legally voiced to send that he must have just engineered this bullshit legal takedown of this little last liberal political party. It doesn't

suggest a confident leader. When you can tolerate like the most miniscule descent, it tells you everything about how confident he is in the, I mean, I don't doubt that there's still some people who like Putin rush it. But when people point and this has been a hobby where it's a mine for a long time, it's like when people point to like public opinion polls in Russia, like somebody fucking called me on the phone in Russia. I was like, do you approve of

Vladimir Putin's job as president? Saying no feels like a not something I would do. Never ever.

And also like when you're an entire when you only consume state-run media, that's a highly effective.

“I think also suggests that maybe his personal popularity is higher than United Russia's,”

like his political party, right? He's not one of the ballots parliamentary lectures. Also, you would highlight this story about Russian interference and was it Belarus or not? Did you want to talk about that? Yeah, I mean, I thought that what was interesting about this is that in addition to like this was a pretty methodically reported story in the tracks of things that you know, I've heard sure that they were interfering in the election, you know, online and all these other ways.

But they also had like training camps set up in Serbia, right? In Serbia, where people were doing like military operations, like sabotage type operations, training with weapons. Like it's suggested like an ominous risk of the kind of typical Russian interference tipping into violence and really trying to kind of destabilize countries. And it's the playbook that you fear. It's the playbook that they used in Eastern Ukraine before the invasion that people have long thought

if they did that in the Baltics or in Moldova, like things could really escalate quickly. And so

“that's what caught my attention is like this wasn't just like another troll farm operation.”

This is like their guns involved in this operation. Yeah, it also it just gets out of shift in tactics. You've seen which is like, you know, Russian sabotage operations don't necessarily mean sending some grizzled GRU veteran to another country to stage a thing. It's like them offering tons and tons of people in a country like Moldova money on telegram if they'll do some sort of thing, which they, you know, they disguise what it is what the goal is, who's behind it.

And all of a sudden, you know, some 70-to-80-year-old kid is like buying a quadcopter drone at Walmart and flying it at some target or taking surveillance. Yeah. It was getting arrested or implicated or dust, you know, in worse, does something really bad. Well, and they also hit like some of the power generation that goes into Moldova, like causing blackouts like they're clear trying to destabilize the government, made the government unpopular. They can't keep the lights on. But that

that just speaks to this like slippery slope or on where sure, first you were just had troll farms, but now at the point where we're like, you know, you're bombing the electricity generation for a country. And if Russia decided to do that in other parts of Europe, like this gray space we're in between kind of asymmetric and information war and cyber war and real war, like starts, that spectrum starts to get a little hazy, you know. Yeah. By the way, do you see any stories in photos

about how all the rivers in Germany and other parts of Europe are at such low levels that they can't even fill like barges to transport goods? Yeah. That's pretty much the financial times estimated

that it could, this drought, this climate change, driven drought, could cost like 150 billion euros.

It's like staggering. It's hot. It's really hot. People don't want to talk about climate change. Yeah. I get it. We keep hearing how people don't talk about it, but it's fucking hot. And when things get really hot, like things like this happen. Can cause irreversible damage, like nuclear power plants, not being able to operate. So the other day Ben, two more things. So the other day Trump made some comments about

Somalia that were not necessarily surprising coming from him, but were just like shockingly racist from a president of the United States. I think the worst part was they got almost no attention or

how vile and frequent this shit is from Trump. Let's watch it. Come from, let's say as an example,

Somalia, they're not smart. They have no aptitude. They have nothing going in the telling us how to run our country. I don't want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. The country thinks it's devastated, it's crime-ridged, it's a mess, it's a disgrace, a backward country. Probably the worst country. Somalia is a third world, maybe a fourth world nation. It's not even a nation, it's just a people walking around killing each other.

It's filthy dirty, disgusting dirty. They come to our country, low IQs, and they rob us blind. 19 billion dollars in fraud that was stolen by Somalia bandits, can you believe that Somalia, they tend to have to be higher IQ than we thought?

Why is it? We only take people from shithole countries. We always take people from

“Somalia places that are a disaster, filthy dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing”

they're good at is going after ships. They come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don't want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it. She's like the evolution of it is just amazing. Remember like the the quote about quote of what shithole country is was like a report in the Washington Post that the White House denied, and now it's just the thing he says it rallies. The racism is so open.

When people look back on the Trump era, one of the things that is going to be most baffling and repugnant to people from history is the fact that we even had some kind of debate about whether Trump is a racist. It's crazy. And whether racism is central, central to the magam movement. You're scolded in 2017, if you call them a racist. Yeah, you did not understand

“the grievances of White House people. This man has one kind of language that he uses to describe”

people that are black and brown. That is different from the language that he uses to describe anybody else. And he, you know, Somalia is the kind of most acute example of it, but it's how he talks about Haiti. It's how he talks about most of Africa. It's how he talks about neighborhoods in American cities that are predominantly black or brown. It's how he talks about immigrants in this country. It is fundamental to his political identity. And the fact that it is so normalized that

we've gone this far backwards over the course of this decade. I mean, this is a man who has banned all refugee admissions in the United States except white South Africans who are the legacy apartheid people. You get like a white nationalist welcome kid. I mean, it's like a white washed literally like history of our founding. Yeah. And what does he know about Somalia? Like does he know any Somalia? Somalia people? And what it is an odd fixation, actually. And bear in mind that

we're committing violence there. Trump has ramped up drone strikes there. Nobody talks about that. It's just normalized that we just kill people occasionally there and and then Trump knew runs down their country. Is this because he doesn't like Ilano? It feels like that's the most of it. Which is bizarre. Like there's a single member of Congress who happens to have origins. And by the way, the people he's talking about her refugees have been through so much

more than he's ever been through in his life. And most of them are just people that want to be safe somewhere. Yeah. Well, look, she's black. She wears a head scarf. She's Muslim. So he views her. It's like an easy political target. You know, he's just like the most. I just give it. Yeah. I do just hate how like the backlash to woken him has kind of smoke screen some of

this stuff. And I think now we're living with the discomfort of like wait a second. It's like we're

saying at the very beginning they show about the trans woman like I don't like can we talk about this again? Like we don't make the culture wars the leading political argument we make. But it's going to be look a little strange that like this man just says he sings on the regular.

“And it's like we all decided we, you know, I think it's important in good to like call him out”

when he's racist. Just like call out the lack of human decency. Yeah. Treatment of individuals. Yeah. And that's why like the story we talked about at the top of the Atlantic piece by Julia Carly are so important because like it should. It's a human being. It's like she puts an identity in a human face in a human story on the impact of these bigoted policies. Yeah. And there's a way to do it. I mean, I kind of very quick detour because I know you like Rob Sand

Governor Kennedy and Iowa looks peculiarly like you. Yeah. I've been so grateful. But uh, I was I went to a few town halls wrote about it within your times. And it was funny. Somebody raised this in a question. They said, "Can we just get back to being a state where we

It's like a very powerful, simple Iowa statement. And I thought what one of the things that Rob

Sand did that was so interesting was he did, you know, validate this woman's concern. People are here playing by the rules. You know, we should give him a chance. But he cited Bob Ray who was a Republican governor of Iowa who was very conservative on some things, but very per refugee. And they're these refugee communities in Iowa that have done incredibly well.

“And he's like remember Bob Ray. Remember we didn't have to like use these issues to divide”

each other. You've shot a Republican governor who's like a decent guy. I like you got to find ways to appeal to people like do you want this? Like you can have a lot of things that I disagree with and not do this. You know, there's a way to kind of avoid the culture war while still making that fundamental appeal to decency. And I thought Rob Sand did that pretty well.

That's good. Finally Ben, every new world leader makes a couple of rookie mistakes.

You usually just chuck it up to inexperience. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham had his own little welcome to the NFL moment after political reported that he had been exchanging text messages with someone that he thought was a way to achieve a staff Susie Wiles. It's boyly alert. It was not. Burnham says he figured out that someone was off pretty quickly and that it was equal to minimal

“exchange of information of zero consequence. And then he like reported it up the chain immediately.”

But it seems like this it's at its spooks number 10. And it was also not the first time someone had gotten Susie Wiles's phone book and it had been impersonating her to people. The Guardian then reported that at least three UK cabinet ministers have had their mobile numbers published

online. And it's also just worth noting that this is hardly the first time we've seen a politician

can trick like this into having a conversation with someone that said they were someone else. In 2024, then Foreign Secretary David Cameron did a video call with someone pretending to be former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. It was not. In 2018, Boris Johnson, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke over the phone for 18 minutes with someone pretending to be the Armenian Prime Minister. And then in 2022, these two rush in like they call themselves professional

prank collars, but they seem to have some ties to the government. They got their British defense secretary Ben Wallace on a video call and they tried to bait him into saying some very damaging things. Here's part of a clip that they released. We would like to continue the nuclear program in order to protect ourselves from Russia. It's a difficult question, but we think to start

“it. But do you think, I mean, I think more than being neutral, Russia would really hate that.”

For sure, we are, we are know this. We know this. Of course, but it's one of the question that we're interested in. It's really trying to get him baited him into music. I get a new kind of big deal for what it's worth. You know, the British government said at the time that the video had been doctored when it was released. I'm sure it was. So Ben, the easy fix here is for Andy Burnham, just not to do any more official business on his personal phone. Have that for family,

have that friends only. If that route, everything else through the number 10 switchboard, even though sometimes they get got, at least then you can blame someone else. But you can imagine how much worse the shit is going to get with AI, making it easy to generate, like realistic video and just clone all of our voices, like we're screwed. Andy Burnham getting calls from some scammers saying, like, you know, we have your friend or something. I will say, by the way, just first of all,

Andy Burnham has delivered as a much better political communicator than Kierstarmer. I'm just kind of watching it. Like, Jerry's still out. We'll see how he does policy wise. But like, he's raised the bar. Like, just get rid of the personal self on there. We went through this Obama didn't want to get rid of his blackberry famously. He's allowed to keep one, but they went to these extraordinary lengths where he had a fake name and only a certain list of people were allowed to be in communication

with them. Like, you can, you can allow a political leader to have some capacity to be in personal communication with both staff and friends without just like keeping yourself on, you know, like your WhatsApp number that is easily taken from you. I will say my favorite, ex British Prime Minister's story of the week, Tommy was the video of Boris Johnson's singing, Pink Pony Club. I don't know if you saw this. No. Big brother, Joe. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. What is that, bro? This is an Instagram, there was posted by,

Boris Johnson's wife. I will say it. Is it doing cameo? Yeah. Well, someone who was, had a lot of Chopper wrote in my house, because I've got two girls. You know, you know, you watch an artist grow through that cycle where they're the

So, Chopper-Rones is going to have to like come up with some new, you know, more countercultural material. That's a good one to dance, Chopper-Rones. You can, you can talk shit about Boris Johnson. He doesn't even know the word. Yeah, he doesn't really know the words at all. It does. He just knows pink part of it. Yeah. And what's Hollywood? It's right here. We're right here. Yeah, we're here. Shout out to Count Binface for giving it the old college track. Yeah, it's not enough for us. Like,

10,000 votes. I'm a little sad. I DMed Count Binface a long time ago to say, like,

"Are you doing any intergalactic media outside of the UK?" And I never got a response.

“How do you feel about in your, you know, 40s DMing a man who trash can trash can on his head?”

Surprisingly good about it. I would do the same thing. So, I'm in the exact same boat. Just let's come to your new and more commentary on how politics has changed. That's true. Because if someone told you, like, hey, like newer politics in the world, they're going to be in 2020, 26. We're all going to really want to talk to a guy who has a garbage can on his head, because he's running against Nigel Farage. We'll no longer be a marginal figure.

He'll be, like, a likely future Prime Minister of the UK. Yeah. That's where we're at. Good stuff, everybody. In Boris Johnson's singing Pink Pony Club. You know, we got Donald Trump's president. Yeah. Well, I think the biggest glass out in the world. We know rates. Yeah. All right. We are going to take a quick break. But when we come back, you're going to hear my interview about the horrible conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is this aircraft carrier

that's been deployed at C's for like, 26 to five days. Because of the war with Iran, us a stick around for that positive world is brought to you by Quowe. Mist calls and slow follow-ups

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My guest today is an independent journalist entrepreneur and navy veteran who covers the military defense policy and veterans affairs. A Natalie Oliveria, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. You wrote an article for the Military Times last week where you revealed some very disturbing details about conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is the aircraft carrier that's been stationed in the Middle East for a very long time.

Can you walk listeners through maybe didn't read the story like what the conditions were, what these families were concerned about? So the biggest concern were mental health concerns. We have heard reports of several family members telling us about their service member, struggling to the point beyond their breaking point. One sailor was reported to have jumped off the flight deck with a life vest on and about an hour later was recovered and it was

designated by the navy as a cry for help, a mental health issue, right, not a suicide attempt. There are other reporting, first hand from service members who won had a spouse attempt to go over board and two had a spouse that was one of the people on watch who stopped to pull the individual back towards the deck. I mean, can you survive a fall off that an aircraft carrier like how tall are these things? You can. I would say the flight deck's probably like 60 feet off the

water if they were climbing to the top of the mast, it may be like 200 feet, but I mean, I've only been on a guided missile destroyer personally and I have jumped off on swim call

middle of the ocean, potentially in the dark and all the dangers that exist with that.

“Yeah, what happens when an aircraft carrier can't get support? I believe it was 200 days”

as the latest stat with the Lincoln. What maintenance is not happening? What does he impact on military readiness and just quality of life for the individuals on that ship? Yeah, it's actually close to 260 days. It's getting further and further and so that's the biggest supply of food, right? So the photos that have been all over the internet and social media of the food, like the mystery grain meat, this is not new news. This has been reported

the USA today broke it in April and they were showing, you know, strange mystery-meat,

boiled carrots, strange food items that you would not expect to see. We saw reports of sailors saying they had that milk in three months. They were eating dry cereal for breakfast and to the naked ear, maybe that doesn't sound like that big of a deal. But we're not talking about one bad day at sea. We're talking about extensive strain and overextension and pressure under load over time, day after day after day. And a lot of people don't know that junior-and-listed sailors

cannot even go top-side on their craft carrier. So there is a large population on that ship

“who had not even seen the sky. They literally have not gone outside in months?”

Months. Months. I mean, the mental toll on the healthiest, most fit for duty,

always ready shipmate. It doesn't matter who you are on a human level. You need food. You need

rest. You need your basic needs met in order to be fit for duty. No matter who you are. And I've heard, you know, people who have served on aircraft carriers talk about hearing loss associated with, you know, if you're on the runway and, you know, planes are taking off around you all the time. It's obviously incredibly loud and intimate you're hearing. There's real concern about exhaustion and lack of sleep and what that does to your sort of mental awareness and the

capacity to react to events. You're talking about the risk in the dangers involved in these jobs on a good day and the way they are magnified with the deployment of this length. If you can imagine an air traffic controller who hadn't slept more than six to eight hours between drills, between your workday, between any watches that you're standing, any other ancillary responsibilities or collateral duties, there are only so many hours in the

day. So you're stretched and the last thing you're going to get is sleep. Let alone peaceful sleep. You don't just knock off to your rack and let the, you know, the water hit against the ship and go to sweet dreams situations. You're worried about what's happening when you close your eyes. This is a combat zone. This is an active deployment. And so that fear of uncertainty is already hard enough. Add on mental load, brain fog, lack of nourishment. I mean, it is hard to put yourself

in those shoes. And we tend to look away from what's difficult and we don't understand. We don't know how to console military families. We don't know how to offer them anything right now. And so the pain is still there and the suffering is still there. Regardless of how resilient our sailors and our military are, there's real suffering on the other side. The Navy's ability to re-supply the Lincoln and other ships in the region has been greatly impacted

by Iranian attacks on the US base in Manama, Bahrain. Can you talk to listeners about what it means when you lose a logistics hub like the Navy lost in Bahrain and just sort of the impact on the ability to conduct the mission? Absolutely. Losing that supply hub in Bahrain was essentially

“losing the most important resource for that strike group. So now they have to travel five days each way”

out of their way to get some of the same supplies. That's a 10-day round trip effort. Now, because our headquarters of fifth fleet is not that supply hub anymore. Secretary Hexf and the secretary of the Navy, they denied your reporting and then President Trump had this to say. Let's watch a clip. The Lincoln has been out there for a period of time, good periods of time, but over the years

the weekend and it was at a big group and he happened to be an admiral retired. He said I've been on

“ships there out there much longer than that sir and I know people on the Lincoln they say it's”

beautifully maintained and beautifully taken care of and other people went out and they found out that because it was fake news reporting from CNN. So I'm just wondering what your response is to those comments just on a factual basis and whether you've heard from any military families about how they feel about hearing your reports denied or President Trump suggests like actually everything's great. Yeah, it's unfortunate and really sad for a lot of these military families, they're sad when they

hear this because this is not just the President Donald Trump, this is our commander and chief,

the man in charge of these beloved service members and when you're a family member,

you don't get a handbook on how to deal with this. You don't get a class, a master class on how to survive deployment at home and how to mitigate all the things you feel when you hear things in the media and you see things you know are true from your service member or someone you know or your trusted resource, it is scary. One military spouse told me that it is inaugurating to hear the commander and chief speak this way when her husband is literally suffering on a floating metal prison.

That is how one spouse feels. So for that spouse to hear, they're fine, they've been out much

“longer, it's a beautiful ship and it is a beautiful ship. Here's the thing, if he's talking about”

ships that have been out there much longer, pretty sure you can only be referring to the USS

Gerald R. Ford, which just completed an actual historic deployment, breaking a record that was Vietnam era. So between Vietnam and May 2026, the longest carrier deployment record was broken by 326 days on the USS Gerald R. Ford. So I'm confused by that statement. I know that our families are too. And to have that kind of brush off that, well, I talked to so-and-so, who knows more than these families know. And to be said that these families should be told that they're not really

suffering. They're not concerned. It's really, it's really hurtful to them. And we already ask a great deal of our military families here at home. And it's sad to see leadership not supporting them.

“Yeah, and the Ford, I believe, famously had some real issues, including the toilets not working,”

and some nasty stuff going on. And also if Trump is talking to a retired admiral, I'm guessing that individual is more likely to have contacts in the upper echelon and the higher ranks of the navy, and not talking to the grunts who, as you mentioned earlier, are trapped below deck for months and months at a time in sort of nightmarish conditions with moldy toilets and showers and disgusting food, and all the worst things that you've been reporting out. You referenced earlier these reports

that the Navy is sending a carrier from Japan to the Middle East. This is the USS George Washington with the sort of stipulation that maybe that could be wrong. That carrier is normally positioned in Asia. In case that the bad happens, let's say China makes a move on Taiwan or the North Koreans do some stupid. What's the impact on military capacity and readiness when you move that carrier from Japan to the Middle East? So number one, the South China Sea is unattended to right now.

Our Western Pacific command has literally set off for the Middle East. With that command, there is a whole battle group in tow. One of those ships is the USS Ben Fold, which at the end of July, just a couple of weeks ago, was left powerless for four days in the water, and they are directly supported by the George Washington carrier. So without the carrier there, they have lost their biggest resource, right? If case that happens again, they were towed into a cubic bay and

Philippines, and they also went to Yakuza, Japan, and now they're back out. So the problem has been remedy, but we're talking about four days. Just a drift? A drift in the water, right? So just that alone. I mean imagine we're talking about a guided missile destroyer, maybe 330 to 350 people. You've got like two female birthings, maybe three or four male birthings, and that's below decks, because the wardworms are on the higher parts of the ship. So I really can't imagine just those conditions alone.

And not that's not even mission-oriented to the consequences that we could potentially be facing by making this kind of rerout. Yeah, that is terrible. The United States is 11 aircraft carriers total, but they require serious maintenance. It can put some out of commission for a very long time,

nuclear energy. What is the status of the fleet right now? And what are these long,

“kind of grueling missions due to the Navy's capacity to deploy these aircraft carriers in places”

where we need them? That's a really good question, and it goes along with a part of what we were talking about earlier. So the Navy's own optimized fleet response plan lays out a life cycle of 36 months. That includes maintenance, workups, training, and it allows for eight months, a lot of time for deployment. That's one deployment every 36 months. Okay, so you can already see immediately where the gaps are in that plan. So I'm not seeing anything pointing to some kind of an

update or newer guidance. I'm seeing our own processes not followed. Trump reportedly ordered the

Navy to go back to steam catapults to launch these aircraft instead of the magnet-based systems that will cost billions of dollars to change. He's also reportedly wants to change the design

“of the aircraft carriers to the command centers move to the center of the ship. I think that's purely”

for aesthetic reasons. He wants it to look like older models. What is the impact of this kind of metling? And I was like, I'm old enough to remember when Barack Obama was criticized for kind of micro-managing the Pentagon. This feels like micro-managing on a scale that would not go over very

well within the Navy, but correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think you're wrong at all. I question

is this the best use of our funds because we're having trouble paying for our current veterans, our current surface members who are about to become veterans and the future surface members who will be our future veterans. We're not balancing that checkbook, right? So this kind of a past, I'm not sure what the end goal is. I haven't done enough research or seen enough reporting on the value of steam versus our current fleet plan. So it's interesting, but I don't think that

from what I know in the Navy. I don't think that they're very supportive of that idea. I'm guessing you've done more research into the actual value of steam over magnets than the

“president has in the sentence. Natalie, where can folks find your work follow you get more of your reporting?”

Absolutely. I am a Pentagon correspondent at military times, so they can find my work there. I'm also independent journalists for the warhorse news. And so we stand by the stories that we tell the reporting that we do. It means a lot to the readers and the viewers and we take that very seriously. Well, thank you very much for telling these stories. I know it's probably very hard and scary for these family members to come forward and talk about what their loved ones are experiencing.

I mean, I worry that they could be afraid of their retaliation or punishment in some sense, but it takes a lot of courage and I think it does really suggest how dire the situation is that they would even do this to begin with. So thank you for your work. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Thanks and Natalie all of our area for joining the show. And thanks you all for listening. And you know, if you're still listening, subscribe, download, write, follow up.

Five stars, all that shows. All that stuff. We love you. Thank you. Potsay the world is a cooking media production. Our show is produced by Elona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, Indonesia Bonnergy. Our team includes Matt DeGrope, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Muffett, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Her staff has proud the unionized with the writer's guild of America East.

If you miss some of your favorite crooked pods this week, don't worry. You can now catch up on the week's best moments on MSNow on Saturday Night. MSNow is streaming an episode of highlights from your favorite crooked pods, packing as much analysis, funny moments in 100% correct opinions into 40 minutes as humanly possible. Crooked on MSNow airs every Saturday at 9 p.m. Eastern 6 p.m. Pacific.