Preparing for the Horrific Unintended Consequences of the Iran War

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Hello and welcome to DSR and David Rothkoff, your host. This is the second DSR of the week to talk about the Iran situation.

Some of you may have already heard the first that we did a day ago with Rosa Brooks and former secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth and former secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. Today we have three other of our best friends and advisors starting with Ed Lewis of the Financial Times. How are you doing Ed? Very good. Thank you David. You are up very early this morning. Good morning, Joe, but you still look well rested. It's remarkable. How have you been? It's net. You've been napping ever since. It's one of those creams that they advertise for aging man on Fox News.

That isn't actually, I wouldn't dream of buying such a product. Well, if anybody would dream of it, it would be just Serencia. Who is another of our friends who looks amazingly well-preserved given what we know about it. One of the countries.

I long usually have a big experience. I know it's amazing.

“And it's worked for you. And it's worked for you. I wish I could say the same for our other WMD expert here. John Wolfstall, who is a nuclear policy fellow at Fox Sapiens. And how are you doing today, John?”

I was better before the intro, but glad to be here. Well, let me try and up the game here with the intro because each one of you is written something that I think everybody should read this week. John, you had an article called Trump just made the world much more dangerous at the New Republic. John article, people should read it. Ed's latest column, Donald Trump's dangerous war of WM available right now at the financial times, and Joe wrote at his substeck and a legal unnecessary war of choice just a couple of days ago. And I'm going to avoid throwing Ed and Joe into a fight over whether this is a war of

“choice or a war of WM because I think Ed's right. So what it wise us a war of WM, Ed?”

Well, so I think with wars of choice, generally speaking, you know what the outcome is, or at least what it intended to be, even if the execution gets you to completely different place. And as we saw with Iraq, as we saw with Libya, etc. A war of WM is something that hasn't been prepped with the public hasn't gone through an interagency process certainly hasn't evolved any consultations on capital Hill has evolved none of the constitutional machinery that was set out. Well, 20 and 30 something years ago in the constitution, but exists in the mind the sort of brownie and motion inside Trump's head.

That is whimsical. And the fact that you know, our by our, he changes his rational, what I call a sort of kaleidoscopic world of Trump's rationales. And I think underlines the point that this is capricious. This isn't sort of coming from one deep strategic thought that Trump has. It comes from a whole sort of colliding range of impulses and that's that to me puts this war in a different category to a good old fashioned war of choice. Now in your defense, Joe, I noticed that you wrote yours on March 1st. And we've had a few more days to look at just how chaotic and has been since and how little planning has gone into it.

And then he added a layer to that, Trump did yesterday by saying, we were the ones that made Israel do it, which actually completed the circle, so that the imminent threat that we were defending against was coming from us.

So perhaps in reflection, you're going to sign on to Ed's war of whip, you Joe.

Yes. What do you call that snake that eats its own tail or a boroughs? It's a borough boroughs.

“Well, that's what we have here. I mean, it's actually just just an amazing.”

Well, it's a disgrace. I was on Dubai, an out Dubai Arab news channel yesterday and talking about this war and they asked, well, what's the strategy? And I actually felt embarrassed for our country that I had to explain that there was no strategy.

Can I have tactics? Can I just pause one second here? Wolfstall seems to be rearranging his office during this, during this podcast.

And which is fine, but if you would mute while you're rearranging your office, it would be better because we're hearing all of it. Okay. Anyway, sorry. Sorry. I'd say you're going to cut that out in the edit, but I know we are. We are going to cut it out in the edit. Our producer Joe Vitalik will charge us more, but we're going to do that. Okay. So just yesterday, I was on a Arab news channel based in Dubai, and they asked me to explain what our strategy was going forward with the US strategy was.

I don't know how you guys do this, but I'm very critical of our government often, but when I go abroad or talk abroad, I feel sort of a need to represent America.

And I was embarrassed to represent America, to explain to them that we had no strategy, just what you said, David, the Donald Trump only thinks for the current moment. How does he win the day? How does he win the room? What kind of display of dominance can he give? So he wins this 24 hour or four hour news cycle. And while we have brilliant tactics, the US military is executing its mission very well, very efficiently, very effectively. We have no plan for what comes next, which is why you see the peed headsets giving one estimate of what how long the war will take.

The president say maybe a few days, maybe you know, and a kegset claiming that this war will be over.

“He said this this morning, this war will be over when we say it is. Oh, really, that's what you think.”

I'm afraid that this is a both a war of choice. We didn't have to go to war. There was no imminent threat. There was nothing. No danger. We had to prevent from happening. And it's also a whim. It appears that the president decided. And a week before a day before the one baby net and yeah, who hung up the phone and said, you know, we have an opportunity to go. He decided he decided that we were going to go to war. No consultation. No explanation to the American people. He treated the rest of the country with contempt with, but we just ignored any effort to actually get the American people or the American Congress behind him.

Even politically let alone legally as the Constitution requires.

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I'm saying, you can say that you're a hero.

You're a master-writer, right? But you don't understand. You don't understand. Yeah, well, and also, you know, as the NSC historian president, after point out, we don't actually have an NSC. We don't have a planning process in the US government, which most presidents refer to. And let me loop back before I sort of open this out to John because I thought your article is very good. And this point is sort of still not resonating with people that what we are doing here may be making the world more dangerous.

“And I was wondering if you could sort of hit the key points of that.”

Sure. Well, the article that I put together for the new republic was focused on one particular issue, which is, you now have the most extreme example, where a country that was interested in nuclear weapons many years ago had some latent capability to build a bomb. And before midnight hammer, maybe a couple of months, after midnight hammer, maybe a year or two, is the subject of a joint attack between Israel and the United States, two countries with nuclear weapons. That comes after us supporting the destruction and death of more markadofi who gave up his weapons of mass destruction program to George W. Bush, our attack on Iraq in 2003 under the false pretenses of them having a nuclear weapons program.

But not going after North Korea, not going after Pakistan. And so this completes the narrative that if you have a nuclear weapon, you're safe.

And when you add to it, Ukraine, which cooperated with the US in returning Soviet nuclear warheads to the Soviet Union, puts a fine point on if you don't have nuclear weapons, you're vulnerable. And now you're particularly vulnerable, potentially, to the United States. And so to US adversaries, and to US friends and allies, it says, a nuke is good for you and not having a nuke leaves you out in the cold. And I think that's just a strategic implication that we will live with forever. The other issue here, though, that I think gets to the point of both Ed and Joe, and I had actually thought about thinking back to George W. Bush and drive by diplomacy.

“You guys remember that, Ed, you may have even come up with that. I think we've got hit and run conflict, right?”

I mean, you look at Venezuela, and you look at Ecuador, you look at Nigeria. You know, President just sort of drops a couple of bombs and goes on. He doesn't own anything that he breaks. He just walks away. But we just found out yesterday that the key sites where Iran has enriched its uranium and their remaining 400 kilograms, 900 pounds of inner-tramers likely still sitting haven't been attacked. Which means that material is either intact and exploitable by the Iranians, or if I were a smart Iranian engineer, I would have called in sick today,

because that's a likely target. That means that stuff is vulnerable. And so both in a strategic sense, the world become more dangerous, but in a tactical sense, the field is wide open for an Iranian faction to seize that material, or for a non-aronian actor to go in and get that and have the building blocks for a nuclear weapons program. By the way, on our earlier podcasts that we did, Christine Wormuth brought up another possibility, which is you don't need, you know, 90 plus percent enriched uranium to make a dirty bomb.

And that they could use this kind of uranium in smaller, crude, or dirty weapons, terrorism delivered such weapons, if they wanted to.

But let's come to that in a second.

There's one other development here that I want to talk about. I was just listening, I don't know why I do this to myself, but I was just listening to Caroline Levitt doing her press conference where she yells at the press for asking questions. And she would not rule out boots on the ground. And this is sort of the theme of today.

“Could the United States get to boots on the ground?”

Once Trump realizes or somebody around him realizes, you can't actually achieve what he wants to achieve simply within air war. I don't think everybody knew before this, except him, but now he's going to come and realize this. And, you know, the duration for this has gone from a few days to three, you know, to couple of weeks to four to five weeks. Today in headset conference, they talking maybe it's going to be eight weeks, maybe it's going to have boots on the ground.

a much weaker institutions, locked the United States in a stalemate in Afghanistan for 20 years.

“That was, we just left there recently. Don't, doesn't anybody remember that? I mean, you talk about, you know, the sort of unintended consequences.”

You know, the, the one that's most familiar from our history is that when you put boots on the grounded situations like this, you don't get to leave on your own time scale. Yeah, and, you know, were there to be a boots on the ground scenario, not predicting the will, but were there to be unlike in Iraq and unlike in Afghanistan. There aren't going to be any of America's allies alongside going in on the ground into Iran. I mean, it's not just Spain.

Pedro Sanchez is being the most critical of this war. None of them. Kirsta, I'm a Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron, even the polls. None of them will go into Iran.

So it would be America alone or America with proxies, like the cards, maybe some as Erie group or some Arab Iranian group who knows.

“But I think, you know, to get to get to John's point, if, if the logic here,”

is to kill the regime and that's certainly Israel's logic. There's not been any sort of kaleidoscopic confusion from Israel. Israel's been very clear. We want to not just get rid of nuclear and missile making capabilities and cyber making capabilities in Iran. We want to get rid of the regime.

And what comes after would civil war, whatever doesn't matter, this is going to be a final one and done. And Israel's been very clear about that.

Then if you are much tougher, I'll say, come any or whoever else, heads this new hard-aligned regime. That's the sun. That's the sun or some other hard-aligned. But it's clearly moving in a hard-aligned direction as you would expect. Then the temptation to go for absolute broke on nuclear is overwhelming that you want to get to Kim Jong-un as quick as possible. And so therefore, if that, if that, in this war of choice, whimsical war of choice, if that is, if that penny drops in Trump's mind,

“then a ground invasion becomes, I think, pretty much shelfful filling.”

Because you cannot do it from the air. And therefore, I agree strongly with what all three of you have been saying. We are in an extremely dangerous situation. Yeah, and excuse me, and Joe, it's one in which we haven't really thought through the consequences. One of the things that's been stunning has been statements of surprise from Trump and from Rubio, regarding things that, if the three or four of us were sitting here talking, we would have predicted at any time. Like, Trump was surprised that they attacked countries where we have bases in the region, the countries that were allies.

Rubio was surprised it was hard to get our personnel out of the Middle East, and that there was no plan for getting our personnel out of the Middle East. Even though we've had this experience before, and it just goes back to this point of whim, no planning, I've said for a long time that the U.S. would really benefit from having a department of consequences, where we thought through these things. Well, we do sometimes, we do talk about these things sometimes. But right here, it seems like the consequences, which we're talking about here, which include a global nuclear arms race, a region wide war, a prolonged boots on the ground,

conflict in Iran, and the resurgence of Iranian bacteriom, if that's the best means they have to go and express themselves on the global stage. All those things have gone in the course of what is today, Wednesday, in the course of five days, from much less likely to very likely, or things that we have to seriously consider. Anyway, I thought you might want to comment on that.

Apparently, this, the CIA wants to give arms and support that would be the boots, American advisors, to the Kurds, to start waging war against what they believe will now be a weakened Turkey.

Turkey, Turkey, Turks are going to love that. Well, the Kurdish leadership in Iraq has already commented on that. They're dead set against this. That's the last thing they want is Kurds throughout the whole region to be targeted and tagged as U.S. support, as allied with the United States.

“Nobody wants that, but those especially, especially since what are the biggest betrayals of Trump's last term was of the Kurds?”

Yes, yes, yes, when when George H.W. Bush encouraged the Kurds to rise up against a dom who's saying they did, and they got slaughtered, and we didn't lift a finger.

There's a long history here that people old enough will remember. Regional war will of course, the regionalizing the war. People were surprised at this, because I thought, why are you bringing other countries into the war? That is the point, understanding that they can't win militarily. There's no way Iran is going to win militarily.

They want to raise the consequences, the cost of this war. And they're doing it. They have shut down the, both the airport and the seaport in Dubai, which is the fourth largest seaport in the world.

The most, the most active seaport in the world. They're bringing this down. They're causing economic pain. They're breaking the illusion that these beautiful states, and we've all been to them, and there are gorgeous. We're, they're breaking the illusion that these are somehow an oasis of peace in a turbulent region. They're showing these, these countries, if you back a US war against us, we're going to bring it to you. And the economic consequences could be severe. I don't know. The US is saying right now they're going to provide

destroyers and and frigates to escort tankers through the streets of Ramos. I don't know, man. That's that really seems like a suicide mission. And it doesn't take much to continue to shut down the streets of Ramos. So that's regional war boots on the ground terrorism. It seems that, pretty soon, we will a trip you Iranian forces. We will take out their missile capabilities, you know, and we will, you know, delay and push back any, they're over nuclear capabilities. But that just means Iran can go back to what the weapons they used to use before they developed missiles.

“And I think within our living memory, we can be member of the Babu Marine barracks attack of 1983, which isn't some way where this all began when suicide bombers kill 240”

American Marines and blew up the barracks. Why were the Marines there, by the way? Because Israel had invaded southern Lebanon in '82, and Ronald Reagan wanted to bring in the Marines to support that mission. What's this really Israel doing today? Invading southern Lebanon. And this time, I think they want to keep it. They do not want to leave. This is part of the greater Israel vision that many of the far-right ministers in the Israeli army have. So you can see how this thing could quickly, not just continue, but accelerate and bringing all kinds of dangers that people haven't considered yet.

And we haven't even talked about Iranian cyber capability. We haven't even talked about the global region that could force and how they could target soft US targets around the world. This is not going to end well. It seems unlike that end soon. The last time we talked John, we were talking about, well, Trump's using this as leverage, and he wants to get a deal, and probably it'll be a sort of inferior deal to the 2015 deal of that, that the Obama administration was involved in putting into place.

“And the question is, is that off the table at this point? Is a deal with the Iranians, which was his whole point in doing this, I think, building up the military, is that something seems unlikely?”

Yeah, David, I keep coming back to the godfather, and this is Michael taking care of all family business, but really it's BB, right? It was BB all along. So BB is now talking the United States into the Iraq war, and getting with us in the same, and he saw the ability to manipulate Trump into getting rid of the JCPOA and now to going to war and Iran, where the ones that will pay the price, the cost, it's our allies that are going to be vulnerable, is really good.

And now we'll have a free hand in Lebanon and in the West Bank, which they've, they've already leveled Gaza and they're now allowing settlers to seize more and more West Bank territory.

You know, these are world white guys, but these are, you know, the old white guys are in charge, and they are trying to settle their vision for the world. So BB's been at this for 40 years. Trump has been arguing since the 1980s. Ah, you know, dealing with Iranians is easy. I'll show you how.

“But the missing piece of this is that, okay, they're not old white guys, but she and Putin are also on the same mission, right?”

And this, in addition to turning the Middle East into complete chaos, basically in power, she and Putin to undertake the same sort of action that the United States and Israel have just taken.

Taiwan is theirs for the taking, everybody knows the United States is not going, Donald Trump is not going to go to war to protect Taiwan from China. And it turns out now assassinations totally kosher, part of the pun, right? But I mean, this, this is a war of assassination. It started with the illegal extermination, the assassination of the leadership in Iran. So by the way, I thought that was one of the best comments I saw in social media, was yours because you said at one point, note to journalists, the term you're looking for here is assassination, because nobody was using that.

“And you know, it, it, it was twisted legal logic. You could make the argument that while going after, you know, Soleimani was fair game because he was engaged in a non-traditional terrorist back campaign through proxies, right?”

They tried to hold the committee was the head of state. You just killed the leader of another country, which the United States, by the way, has a policy against. What's interesting, Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, you said, oh, well, we're not at war. No, this is really, you know, war powers act wise. That in fact, you know, we just had a U.S. submarine torpedo and Iranian ship off a Sri Lanka. So if we're not at war, that's an act of piracy. If we are at war, then there are a lot of things that need to come into play, but of course, this administration doesn't really care so much about little things like international law, domestic law, you know, just can't be bothered.

By the way, I do command you for your hoods, but in trying to own the godfather with his Sicilian on the panel.

We'll proclate it. Yeah, okay, okay, okay. I don't think in modern history, there has been a war that is least popular than this one, looking at polling results. I mean, the polling results here are below where the Vietnam war was at the Nadir of its own popularity. And if all the things we're talking about are true, it seems highly likely that this is going to grow less popular. The price of gasoline has gone up 22 cents in two days. So, you know, people are going to feel pain that way. They're going to feel pain in their 401(k)s. They're going to feel pain in a variety of other ways.

And, you know, for the maga base, I mean, I've seen pictures of maga podcasters, you know, weeping. Oh, my God, he's betrayed us, you know.

“Well, can the president of the United States sustain a conflict that is so profoundly unpopular across the US?”

It's a really good question. I mean, I don't know whether where we come to historic polls and polls today, whether this is apples with apples. I mean, because you know, the Vietnam war was very unpopular for a very long time and went on for a very long time. And ditto for the Iraq war didn't go on for quite so long, but it's still went on for years and was very unpopular. So even in relatively normal democratic times with, you know, roughly sort of approximate to normal administrations following rough approximations, you know, of both domestic procedure and at least paying lip service to international law, as we saw with those wars, even even with those, they can go on for a very long time and be unpopular.

Of course, he's not a normal democratic president and he has paid absolutely no need to, what the constitution says about on what and the 60 days roll in it has to be imminent. So we get some bullshit on which you've done with your self-eating snake, some bullshit on on what imminent means absolutely zero attempt to get the United Nations.

Yeah, I mean, it's a sort of mixture of Dr. Strange love and vape and this is sort of it's not just the Godfather.

There are all sorts of weird narratives in my own kaleidoscopic head, as I try and make sense of this, but what concern with what Trump has committed to himself to, whether he knows it or not, is that the damage to Americans who are going to get more and more pissed off is really easy to do. You don't need cyber capabilities. You don't need a Navy if you're around. You don't need missiles. You just need a few drones to hit a couple of tankers. It doesn't even need to sink them or you know, get some Somali pirates in the vicinity or get some hooties to fire some RPGs, whatever.

“This stops, this has the capacity, any one of these incidents, as we've seen in recent years, to bring the straight of almost to a halt. So Iran can apply the tourniquet. I mean, apply the sort of Stranglehold on that.”

And on the Suez Canal to some degree, and it can target more to desalination plants in the Gulf, which is their stuff of life, as well as their refineries, endlessly. It can be completely degraded. It can even be breaking up into civil war, and you can still get all kinds of, all kinds of threats coming from Iran that will make this war more unpopular than it already is. And lead to bigger hits to the median Americans pocketbook. And will Trump care? I mean, I don't know. I really don't know because, you know, there are already massive, usually consequential debates before this will start it about whether the midterm elections will be free and fair.

Well, the temptation for them not to be free and fair, and the ability to interfere in elections is far greater in a time of war, and a time of gross disinformation.

I mean, really, all wellian stuff coming out at a rate of, you know, at the speed of light. I think this is a much, much more dangerous situation domestically as well. And I hate to sound like, you know, headless chicken, but we are in a period of danger.

“David, I like the final objection. It's usually my job to really like bring everybody down and depress them, and if Ed's going to do that, I'm not sure what my role here is on the DSR.”

In terms of our, by the way, I heard Joe's comic relief by the way, but I, you know, Ed has been doing this here on this podcast for 12 years. So he has seen the already in terms of bringing in terms of bringing this down. You know, Joe, Joe, one of the things about all of this that relates to Ed's point is that on top of being wrong headed. Some of it's gross and weird in the way that they are handling this. And I'm not even talking about the reports of military leaders saying that Trump, you know, motivating their troops by saying Trump has been touched by Jesus.

“And he's doing this to advance Armageddon, which are all over the place in social media. I don't, I don't even, I don't know whether those are true. I can set those aside for a minute.”

You know, you have Pete Heggseth this morning, say, talk, and when asked about six dead members of the military saying, well, you know, these things happen and all you guys are doing is trying to, you know, make Trump look bad. Not, you know, we, I mean, we shut down the country and put flags that have masks for Charlie Kirk, but, but the secretary of defense is treating US military as though they were disposable and bringing up their deaths was an act of political disloyalty on the part of the press.

It's kind of gross. Yeah. As is their attitude towards the 150 school girls that were killed in the first few hours of this war, when either the United States or Israel struck an elementary school.

Well, according to Caroline Levitt, that didn't happen. Pete Heggseth said they were going to investigate that. Now, this is the same press conference where he showed us live video of the US of the US submarine torpedoing and Iranian share frigate yesterday, but somehow we haven't figured out what happened four days ago. We don't have video, we don't have information, we don't even know, we don't have no comment on this. You know, we're used to Israel just regarding this and using that same line, we're going to look into that.

Cutting off the tentacles of the octopus. So Iran is sort of some animal, you know, that we have to, that we have to come to.

Repeating the lie that the reason we went to war was because Iran was getting ICBMs that could attack us.

“Let's be clear about this. There was no imminent threat. That's why war of choice or war of whim.”

There was no imminent nuclear threat. They weren't racing to a bomb. There was no ICBM threat. The defense intelligence agency says, at least 10 years away from that kind of capability, negotiations were going on. And Iranians had actually tabled a very good proposal that the Almighty Foreign Minister, the mediator in the talk flew to Washington to brief to the vice president to make, and then to to members of Congress to make sure that that message got through because he didn't trust Kushner and Whitcock to convey the actual recommendation, which in fact they did not do.

They lied about with the Iranians said the Iranians were willing to suspend all uranium enrichment for several years to give up any stockpile of uranium gas in which gas that they could feed into centrifuges that were allowed them to break out.

He would push all that away in some ways that was better than the JCPOA, the Iran deal that Trump had walked away from promising a bigger better deal back in 2018 and never delivered.

Well, there was the promise of that. So these lies that the president and the Secretary of State and Republican members of Congress are now promulgating are just flat out on true. They can get away with this for a while, but as things get worse and worse, as the stock market goes up and down and trembles, as the gas prices go up, as the Arab allies in the region realize that their peace and security is threatened, their bottom line is threatened, their source of income is threatened.

“I think the pressure is going to be on to end this fairly quickly and for Trump to pull the plug. I would guess a matter of weeks. I don't think he can sustain the economic dislocation.”

And to see the splits that this is engendering in his own MAGA coalition, you gave it a more aware of this than others, the number of MAGA stalwarts who are blasting this war. And part of that is a harsh criticism of Israel in their role in manipulating the U.S. president into an unnecessary illegal and poorly supported war. Yeah, we just have a few minutes left. So I will ask quick question here to John and to Ed. But as for Israel, I'm not going to be any of you want to comment on it. You can.

I've never seen the brand of a country or relationship undone as quickly as Israel has been in the past couple of years.

You know, you have the mainstream looking at all the polls candidate for the Democratic presidency yesterday, Gavin Newsom calling Israel in a partite state. And who it is is what there is almost universal. I was on a call with some people the other day and they were talking about the danger posed by apak Democrats. And by the way, bunch of these people were Jewish. This was not anti-Semitism. This is being associated with Israel's becoming toxic. But let me ask two quick questions here. John, when we look at what's happening next, the president of the United States has said when he was asked, you know, where do we go from here when it ends, you know, when Joe says whatever it ends in a few weeks.

“He says, well, we have the perfect model and I said, well, what's the model and he said, well, Venezuela. And I was like, what?”

What's what's happening in Venezuela? All we're doing is stealing their oil. What's the model? There's been no change there. The same people are in charge who were in charge before. Is there, I mean, what do you think he's getting at? I think that's his model. I think if he can find, you know, he didn't, you think Donald Trump understands anything about what happens inside Iran, how the government runs, does he care if there are militias of the IRGC, you know, has a, as a paramilitary run state, he is not.

If he can find somebody who's willing to be nice to him and flatter him. Thank you for changing our leadership. And we'll play ball and we'll sell our oil and we'll put it into a fund and you can control 20% and we'll let you, you know, have exclusive mining rights in, you know, esfahan for 10 years, he doesn't, that's fine with him.

But Donald Trump, he doesn't care about the details. His whole life is a free of consequence.

So you know, okay, a system model, he's hit. Yeah, well, I mean, so far, it's, I mean, it's amazing how free Donald Trump's life has been of consequence, somebody's going to write the many books will be written down. This is what is so worrying. He's not wrong. He has gotten away with it.

“At every turn, he has been able to get away with it. And so why should we expect him to change now?”

No, it's true. Although God has started to give him hideous skin diseases, which, you know, you got to, got to be grateful for that. Anyway, add these two guys have got to get back to betting on polymarkets nuclear destruction. Did you see that polymarket is, you know, was giving people the chance to bet on, you know, when there would be a nuclear weapon use. I don't know, but for you, John, what are you betting on? I don't trust anything they're saying. They're betting. They're taking the under and we're going to all be in the, in the dust and the over, but

Trump, you know, there are some people who have said, this is wag the dog. This is Trump trying to distract from his problems at home from Epstein, from the economy. From, you know, the brown blotches on his skin. What is that going to work? I mean, those things also don't seem to have gone away.

“To me, I look at to 2026, and I think every single week something has blown up in Donald Trump's face.”

There has just been a terribly old where he had magic before everything is going wrong right now, but you may have a different view, and I would like to end with your view of that. Look, I mean, if if if Joe and John sort of going long on nuclear, our nuclear weapons use, you know, pays off and they become rich amidst a nuclear winter, all that will be left will be cockroaches and the unreleased portion of the Epstein files. And Joe and Joe and John in a cave with gold coins going were rich, we're rich and.

Yeah, there are fingers and nothing else in the plant. Yeah, yeah. Those Epstein files will still be there, and people will still want them to be released. And it is quite extraordinary the degree, whether there's a white, the dog sort of subconscious theme to Trump's impulses. I don't know. But it is remarkable that no matter how outlandish the event and how many of these outlandish events happen before breakfast every day.

At the end of the day, the Epstein theme is still there. Everybody knows. Only half have been released and of the half have been released. There's been a ton of really improper and.

At best sloppy, but more likely improper reductions to protect the rich and the powerful and that we live in a case shape economy, but we also live in a case shape justice system.

And this is sort of caught popular imagination in a way few issues do and so whatever Trump thinks. I'm deliberately, or otherwise, might distract people. I don't think the Epstein files are going to go away.

“Conquer, I concur. You guys are all great. That's why you're back here so often because it's good for our audience and it's therapeutic for me.”

And I'm going to go take the long on, you know, nuclear winter as well. And John and Joe, you guys can set up a website. I've been a polymarket's going to do this or I mean, I saw it, and by the way, the calcium looks like they're cutting a deal with AP did you see this.

That the calcium, what betting site is like, so news organizations are going to go, here's what's happening. And if you believe us, bet here.

It's kind of weird planet, yeah. And it's particularly weird, it would be the AP. I mean, you know, I can believe it. Other other news organizations, but the APs generally got quite high standards. Yeah, well, I don't know. Anyway, we will talk about these and all these other things on all of our podcasts. If you didn't hear the earlier podcast with Rose at Christine and Frank, please go and listen to that one. We also did a very interesting podcast in a story that may actually be bigger than all of this, and that's hard to believe.

And as we have this, we have the daily we're doing with TNR, we have our own daily, and tomorrow for those of you interested in getting into the psychological roots of all of this.

“Norm Ornstein and I are going to be joined by Mary Trump, and so we're going to talk a little bit about this psychological roots that she has unique perspective.”

So, please join us for all of this. If you haven't watched it, go watch it on YouTube, subscribe there, or support us by subscribing at the DSR network.com, under membership, or for a few bucks a month, you can help give us the money we need to follow our betting impulses on polymarket and calcium. And any event.

“Thank you very much, everybody. Ed, Joe, and John, and we'll be back soon. Bye-bye.”

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