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Good bye for watching, on Shoppaputik.com/goodbye. Hello and welcome to the DSR Daily. I'm David Rothkopf, joined by Riley Festler, Minestime, we're here to talk about what's happened this past week because we made it to Friday. Maybe a little bit about what we think we're going to see next week.
I'm wearing a very sporty summer shirt. I mean, does this look very like, you know, it's like a summary, no? It's very seasonal. Perfect for the, perfect for the 95 degree weather here in DC today. Yeah.
Well, that's what I was thinking. I was thinking farther through the hat or like a safari. All right, somebody's got a story, then I'll say something about it. I know how this works. Well, President Trump has nominated Jay Clayton, a former SEC chairman and federal prosecutor
to serve as the next director of national intelligence. This selection follows the highly controversial appointment of political ally Bill Polty is acting director, which we talked about yesterday, who's a lack of national security experience spark intense backlash from lawmakers. The resulting political turmoil has it just derailed congressional negotiations and sharing
with Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Survey on Act will officially expire today. Yeah.
Well, first of all, there are plenty of people who are glad that Section 702 will expire
today because many people see it as a threat to people's privacy, the ability of the government to go in and eavesdrop with any sort of remote excuse of the national security reason. Of course, people in the intelligence community say that they can't do their job. Without Section 702, but they're going to have to learn out, I guess, or they're going
to have to break the law, not that anybody in the Trump administration would ever do that.
“As for Clayton, well, he's better than Polty, right?”
You know, he's better than the bed bath and beyond man of questionable judgment who had absolutely zero experience in national security or intelligence, except as far as we know, Clayton doesn't really have any. I guess as a prosecutor, I'm sure he ran into it periodically, but does he meet the criteria for the job that are defined in the job description for the director of national intelligence?
No, I don't think he does. Uh, now will the Congress approve him because he's not Polty and because he's an establishment figure who had responsible jobs, probably. So why would picks, we're Trump picks somebody who is a respectable figure, well, because this guy is already demonstrated, he will be loyal to Trump.
And when he was running the Southern District of New York, he did a number of things that were uncharacteristic for that traditionally, extremely independent, legally, um, uh, high-minded, um, uh, prosecutor's office. And so, uh, he has proven several times that he will do political bidding for Trump.
“Uh, and that's what Trump is looking for because Trump, day, night, morning, noon, around”
the clock is thinking, how can I put my thumb on the scale of the election? How can I steal the election and how can I hurt my enemies? And everything he does is tied to those goals, and you can rest assured that he believes that disappointment will get him closer to, uh, those goals. So if you're breathing a sigh of relief, uh, make it a small one.
Great goals, not feeling too confident about that. Yes.
Exactly.
All right.
Well, well, that for us is something that the Trump administration is not feeling so confident
about one of the decisions that they made. The IRS has quietly secured emergency authority to hire 8,000 employees on an expedited basis after its top human resources official warned, um, actually back in February. That massive staffing shortages put the 2026 tax filing season at serious risk. The friend of recruitment drive directly contradicts public testimonies from Treasury Secretary
Scott Besson and IRS leadership who both repeatedly dismissed warnings of an agency collapse as a quote unquote complete fallacy. And just as a reminder, the severe backlog comes after the Trump administration purged 28,000 experienced workers, that's 27% of the agency's workforce, leaving an overwhelmed staff to struggle with delayed refunds and more than 100 chaotic code changes mandated by the one
big, beautiful bill. Their priority is not a high functioning IRS. Their priority and job number one is, of course, getting Trump out of his audit. And they think they've struck some deal that, you know, we'll give them that opportunity I'll go on not sure about the legality of that deal.
And we certainly haven't resolved that issue of the Trump bogus settlement with the IRS. But beyond that, you know, in the big beautiful bill, they were trying to carve away tax burdens for our poor suffering billionaire class who don't have enough money. Sometimes have to have 450 foot yachts instead of 500 foot yachts, which is just unfair because these people have worked real damn hard to have a 500 foot yacht.
And if you only have a 450 foot yacht, you can't land your helicopter on the yacht.
“And what if somebody comes up to you and they've got a 501 foot yacht?”
How do you feel, you don't feel like a man? You feel embarrassed, you don't feel like you've accomplished anything. And clearly, these people deserve all the rest of us in the United States to be working around the clock, to be earning money so that we can pay taxes so that we can provide subsidies to the companies of these billionaires who are getting from corporate welfare
programs, exactly what they deserve, which is our support, our love. They are better than us. They have achieved great things, they are smarter than us, they are handsome or than us. They send their friends into space. When was the last time you sent your friends or a pop singer into outer space?
You haven't done that?
“So why do you think you deserve a break in your taxes?”
You haven't made America great by, as our first trillion air did, running does and cutting
government programs, including the IRS, but also the programs that provided aid that will keep, that would have kept millions alive or the programs that kept us safe from disease or the programs that kept the sick people from dying. That's what Elon did. He did, Joe's, would you have done, Joe's, I don't think you would have made the sacrifices
to spend hours for a few months without ever learning anything about government, destroying government agencies, because you would have probably said, no, I'm going to learn about these agencies. I'm going to see if ordinary people are protected by that. But if you're a billionaire, you think none of this touches me.
The whole country can go to hell and I can fly around in my corporate jet above the whole thing and uncle and friends.
“So this is the thing, we don't know how to think like billionaires, and that's why we”
don't deserve the breaks they get, and you know, so I just want to put these changes at the IRS into perspective, and if Scott Besson says everything's fine, of course we should believe Scott Besson, why would he lie to us?
I mean, yes, he's a billionaire, and yes, he always lies to us.
But he's got a good reason. They've got good reasons for what they do for taking everything that's good out of our societies, suck in a dry and leave in the rest of us down here in the mud.
They know what they're doing, just shut up, you'll be dead soon.
Well, stop me if you've heard this one before David, because the US and Iran are finalizing
“a memorandum to halt the war out of kidding, which could be signed as early as Sunday in”
Geneva by Vice President J.D. Vance and the Iranian Parliament speaker, while the proposed terms offer significant concessions to Tehran, including oil sanctions relief on frozen funds and a cessation of hostilities and Lebanon, the proposed terms are a complete capitulation. It is the unconditional surrender of the United States, to the Japanese, on the battleship, Iowa, off the coast of Japan.
I mean, it is a remarkable document, but go on, don't let me spoil your story. Well, it has already achieved its intended purpose because it has caused global stock markets to rally and oil prices to drop.
Well, that's what's important.
That's all that matters. And Trump just wants this thing done, but according to the terms that I saw floating around online, the Iranians are going to get a lot of money, hey, way, way more money than they got back during the Obama deal, which actually just released their money back to them. And they're going to come out with a lot more control over things like the straight-of-form
moves, and they're going to get the U.S. to get off their back about a number of their threatening weapon systems and relationships around the region. And they're going to get a commitment to stop the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which frankly should stop. But in terms of the objectives, Trump saw it, nothing.
Now, Trump will say it includes a promise not to develop nuclear weapons, but as we have said here, and as all of you can repeat with me because you've been watching us here, talk about this for a long time now, those terms were agreed to in the JCPOA in 2015. Those terms, Iran's commitment, not to pursue nuclear weapons, has been Iran's position for as long as anybody can remember.
That's not a concession. It's not progress. And as for the other elements of the deal, they'll say, well, we'll deal with that in the future. And they won't get there, but this is just a big, friggin' fiasco, and this is a little bit like one of those settlements that you sometimes read about in legal deals, where
somebody does something awful, and somebody else sues them for it. And the person who did the awful thing settles silently, and believe me, if Trump could have used a non-disclosed recruitment to cover up the terms of this deal, and just say, oh, yeah,
“we've settled that, of course, everything's fine, that's what he would have done.”
This is the equivalent of that, but he can't get away with that. So will there be criticism? Yes, will Trump lie about the quality of the outcome? Yes, will the situation remain unstable? Yes, it's Trump going to head the heck out of there, and by the way, one of the provisions
is the U.S. moves its military out of the region. It's Trump going to get the heck out of there. Oh, yeah. Now, is that good for Cuba or Greenland or wherever the heck he wants to take his strange neo-imperial fantasies next?
Oh, no. He'll change the subject to something else, but every idea comes up with these days. It's a freaking fiasco, so you can count on those to go bad too. So this is clean up an aisle from in a big way, and we'll see if it actually happens, because there've been a lot of near misses on this front.
But if it does, it's a huge loss, a humiliating defeat for the president of the United States, for the United States, for our allies, and for the region. Well, speaking of fiascos, the Trump administration has authorized a staggering $750,000 to charter a private yacht to evacuate a single asymptomatic American woman from an ultra-remote island following her potential exposure to a deadly haunt of virus outbreak aboard a cruise ship.
This complex maritime operation was launched after French Polynesian authorities refused to let her back into Tahiti, forcing the State Department to coordinate a week's long,
1,400 mile sea voyage to Chile's Easter Island, so she can finally catch a commercial
flight back to the U.S.
“And if you're thinking to yourself, that really sucks for this lady, but why do I care?”
Imagine that. I was, I have to say that's what I was thinking.
Right.
Yeah, because it does suck for her, but this is why it's important.
“The experiment in rescue has severely drained the State Department's K fund for unforeseen”
emergencies already heavily drained by ongoing diplomatic evacuations from the Iran war and global Ebola preparations, pushing the emergency fund's balance to its lowest level in seven years. Well, congratulations, Marco. You're doing a great job.
You're the normal one. You're the one who's going to be the next president, everybody loves Marco, because he's not as crazy as, say, Steven Miller, right? But, you know, he's not a Nazi like Greg Dubovino, but he does Nazi things. He's Nazi enough for Trump.
You know, he's the one who shut down USAID and which will lead to the death of 14 million
people if you believe independent experts. And he's the one who hasn't appointed any ambassadors who needs a K fund. They don't have ambassadors. The majority of the Bessadorial positions that we depend on for our diplomacy, they're vacant.
Well, that's okay, because we've got the diplomatic core. They can go and step in.
“The career diplomats who occupy other jobs can step in, right?”
Well, yeah, they're trying to do that. But they fired thousands upon thousands of them. They got rid of anybody that they thought might not agree with them.
The State Department is a Hulk and empty husk of what it used to be.
It is a mess. And yet, what is Marco doing? You know, Marco talked about this week. You probably were really into it, Riley. He's entered into an agreement for UFC diplomacy.
He's entered into an agreement with the people who are going to be hosting the Gladiatorial Contest on the south lawn of the White House in our temporary Coliseum, which has been put up, so that our emperor can watch underlings beat the crap out of each other, which will make him feel more like a man, which is why we have a country, after all, to make Donald Trump feel more like a man.
But Marco Rubio made a speech yesterday, I guess. And what she said, the UFC embodies the fundamental ideals of the United States. The ideals that were once expressed by he's sitting by the space program. Nothing says space travel, like beating the shit out of somebody. Yeah.
It doesn't support. Right. Right.
“And that's why, you know, they're going to make the Oval Office available to these UFC fighters”
to use as their locker room before the fight on Sunday night, provided they're not all struck by lightning, which would be terrible, oh my God, you know, that would be awful. But let's not fantasize about that. It probably won't happen, but what will happen, apparently, according to this state department, which is doing great things as minute just said, is that we will enter into a program using
the UFC for a new kind of kind of sports diplomacy with the rest of the world to say, this is who we are. This is the best of us. And you know something, I wrote a column for the Daily Beast, which is out there now. If you want to read it, I'm not going to read it to you here.
I mean, you're grown up, go read it yourself. But the column, you know, makes a point that may be having a big UFC fight on the south lawn of the White House, which is a vulgar spectacle sponsored by monster energy, which is a little bit on the nose isn't it, and is televised by the Ellison family television network.
So, it's all MAGA all the time, MAGA from top to bottom, MAGA vertical integration. You've got MAGA fighters appearing on a MAGA stage for a MAGA company that's partially owned by the MAGA president of the US in order to entertain the MAGA president of the United States will be surrounded by MAGA supporters, and then the MAGA content will be broadcast out on the MAGA network to MAGA America.
And if you think that's gross, which it is, it's probably a pretty good encapsulation of where we are as a country right now. And so if it discuss you, which it should, perhaps it will motivate you to take even more action to ensure that this horrible chapter in the precipitous decline of what used to be a not so bad country can be stopped, maybe you will take it as a wake-up call, and I know
Riley will be out there because he's huge UFC fan. And I have human weakness, yeah, I mean, do you practice mixed martial arts, Riley?
I mean, I was, no, no, well, you know, now that you've gotten yourself to be ...
tuned athletic machine running marifons, that might be a good next step for you.
You know, it may be, yeah, that's, you guys can chronicle my journey into being a good, that would be a good documentary, men of that could be, you could make that into a mainstream documentary. And also, wouldn't you feel safer when we're at our periodic staff meeting? Knowing that Riley could protect us, knowing that I've given myself horrible CT and
I've given myself lots of steroids, I don't know after killing this switch at any moment. Yeah, it's just freak out, yeah, but that's our other producer, friend Joe Vitali is of hockey player, he's, I'm sure he's got CT, in fact, men out, why don't you have CT?
“I shouldn't be the one, you should think that you should, I thought it was a prerequisite”
to work here, but yeah, well, so it's so, so many of our listeners, all right, we're just joking folks, it's a Friday, we're a little punchy, okay, I'm sure there's one more story and then we can all go home. Well, you've already had your oligarch rant, so I feel like this is maybe redundant, but SpaceX is set to go public today.
Oh, no, don't tell me, and the largest IPO in history, raising $75 billion in positioning
founder Elon Musk to become the world's first trillionaire, right? Yay, despite posting $8.7 billion in recent losses, the company has attracted massive investor backing for its highly ambitious goals, which included space, condensation, and artificial intelligence development, all the market is largely optimistic due to Musk passed financial success.
“Some pension funds have raised governance concerns regarding its concentrated power and”
super-voting asshairs. Wait, you know, maybe you're an investor, maybe you're thinking, I want to buy some
of this IPO, I want to own some of this stock.
Let me just throw a few things out there for you. One, this is the Elon Musk who bought X and destroyed it as a business. This is the Elon Musk who has destroyed Tesla as a business. The Chinese are cleaning their clocks. The only reason that you're not driving a Chinese EV, if you want it, an EV, is because
the US doesn't allow them to be sold here, partially as a way of protecting Elon. This is the Elon Musk who did doge, which was one of the great fiascoes, a huge
“disaster, almost everything doge touched turn to shit.”
I mean, the United States government is so full of waste, fraud, and abuse that almost anybody who could read and had to just the trifling sense of public service could have made some cuts that would have been a good thing. But in almost every case, the doge cuts were ill-considered, draconian, had high negative impacts, and didn't achieve the overall goal.
In fact, they didn't save money. The government, because of the doge cuts, encountered all sorts of new expenses. So he failed at that. Oh, yeah, it's also the Elon Musk who is a fucking racist, a Nazi who's been promoting pogroms in northern Ireland and promoting candidates across Europe who are anti-immigrant,
but not just anti-immigrant, they're pro-white Christian nationalists. He's the Elon Musk who said to Donald Trump, "You know, the only immigrants we should allow in are poor white South Africans like me and Peter Teele, who are being threatened by white genocide in South Africa, which is not a thing." He's a liar. Oh, he's a lunatic. He reportedly takes a lot of ketamine.
He's got a farm full of women that he's impregnating so that he can have, you know, heard of little Elon's out there in the world as part of his own eugenics experiment. Let's not talk about his father and his family. This is one of the worst people in the world. He's the last person you want to have a trillion dollars, but set the moral arguments aside.
Let's look at SpaceX as a business. This is a business that is based on big promises, many of which are unprovable, which is Elon's formula for touting stocks, making a bunch of bank and letting the investors
Hang and twist slowly in the wind.
But imagine what's going to happen to that stock.
“The next time a SpaceX test rocket blows up, imagine what would happen to that stock.”
If a SpaceX rocket carrying astronauts to the moon blew up, failed, you haven't seen a collapse of a stock that is equivalent to what would happen in those circumstances. Much less the consequences of companies like that being competed with by more and more companies from around the world that may do a better job.
And I haven't even started on the fact that in my view, there are some activities like
the space program, which would be better conducted by the government, so they advance
“US national interests and not by private enterprise, so they're bidding out parts of the”
program to the lowest bidder, which reduces safety and are advancing the interests of the oligarchs. Space is not for the oligarchs. It should be for everybody. And yet we've seen what happens when Elon Musk controls assets in space because we've seen what has happened with his satellite company and when he decided who was going to give access to and who was not going to give access to at the cost of Ukraine, at the cost of other
country. So there is probably no aspect of this SpaceX IPO that is a good thing. And it will be written about like it's normal, but it will take a terrible person and give them more power, more financial resources. It'll shift vital US assets into a program of dubious long-term prospects. It will create a big risk for investors. I don't know. I know I can see you there, Riley, getting out to the dollar bills, counting amount, planning
to walk down to your stock broker. And you know, join in on the gold rush that you think this is going to be a part of it. You've convinced me. But if you've got CT already, great investment. This is an investment for people who have been kicked in that a lot. And look, I'm not judging people. If you've been kicked in that a lot and you've got CT, I feel bad for you. I really did seek help. But that's all we have to say in this today. It's
the weekend. We have worked to do today. We're doing another podcast today with our friends
from the media critic world. And they're always fun. So join that. Or go listen to Norman
I yesterday. We were a little bit at a control, which could make for a music podcast. I think we may have used some colorful language. Or go listen to the podcast we did with Senator Van Hollen and Jeremy Benami, which was really weighty and important. Or go listen to the daily blast or go listen to any of the stuff that we're producing around the clock so that you don't have to. I don't know, watch Trump press conferences or spend your time alone
without us whispering into your ears. You want us there, right? Soothing voices, soothing
“world views gives you hope for the future. That's what we're here at the DSR network to”
give you hope for the future. Until the future comes, and I buy that, I mean Monday. Have a good weekend. Thank you, Riley. Thank you, Mena. Thanks, everybody. Bye bye.
