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And meet Harapol Mary thanks so much for joining us as we break down the news of the day in some of my latest reporting about Pete Hicksett and the Pentagon.
Everything seems to be revolving around him anyway since we are in our third week in a war by now.
But I wanted to have Steve on the show because last time we had a really great chat and he offered a lot of perspective on this war compared to Iraq, Afghanistan. And of course, please leave your questions. We're going to try to get to them throughout the show and Steve, thanks for coming on. Of course, good to see you, Harapol Mary.
I'm good, I'm good, I'm happy to be back with you a week later. I feel like we have to do these regularly, these chickens. Absolutely any time to get to be with you. Thanks. So yeah, I had some reporting exclusive reporting.
I was calling around to my sources on Capitol Hill and the administration, and K-Street, and just trying to find out what Republicans are really saying about this war, especially since
President Trump is asking for $200 billion supplemental bill to pay for the war.
“So it's a bit of a put your money where your mouth is moment, right?”
And what I kept hearing over and over again is that there are zero confidence in Pete Hagsat. They don't like his defensive, fognacious style. One sentence source sets me, everyone regrets voting for him. There's more regret than their vote for RFK, and that is saying something.
So there are a lot of feelings on the hill that he is not leading the country in the right direction as Secretary of War. And, you know, I find it a bit rich. Like we obviously remember when he was being confirmed about this time, well, no, a few months earlier than that, but, you know, last year. And, and Joni Ernst had a lot of reservations about confirming him.
He was saying he wanted women out of the military.
She was the first combat that on the ground, a sexual assault survivor, obviously.
He's got his long list of women who have accused him of sexual assault. And, you know, they spent a millions of dollars in her backyard threatening primary challengers trying to take her down so that she would vote to confirm him. But, so many other senators just went along with it and voted for him. And now they're having regrets when we are in the middle of a war.
“We've got a frapp boy running the whole show. So, I don't know, I don't know Steve, what do you think?”
He's the singularly most unfit cabinet secretary of my entire lifetime in the chain of command for the release of thermonuclear weapons and is preposterous. Every time he opens his mouth, he demonstrates that cartoons can come to life. And, so you have this cartoon figure, but literant, disrespectful, pugnacious to say nothing of the religious notary, who is a principle architect of erasing standards in the Pentagon. And, you have now a debacle unfolding in the Middle East
where the straight-of-war moves is closed. Gas prices are soaring and the two chief beneficiary of all the instability caused by this or China. And Russia, which gets rich off of the oil, which is now spike to ludicrously high prices. And, of course, there's reporting that we're in essence doing the bidding of the Saudis who are asking Trump from behind the scenes to finish a ran off while Jared Kushner is getting billions of dollars from the Saudis.
The entirety of the corruption, the lack of planning, all of it, is appalling, but nobody gets to say that the Pete Hagset they voted for is somehow a different Pete Hagset at the Pentagon. Every one of these people who voted for Pete Hagset knew what they were voting for, knew the danger to the country by voting for them. It did show anyway because they are obedient to Donald Trump.
That is one of the reasons we're in this crisis that we're in.
Yeah, I think it is interesting to hear that they have regrets when they had a chance, right? And I thought it was interesting. You said that he is the worst cabinet secretary and yet Kristi Knome has already lost her position. So, that is saying something. And really, the way that he is
pushing the narrative with the press, I mean, first of all, he tried to keep the press out of the
Pentagon. He just lost that a judge ruled against it. And now he's keeping them cordoned off. And then this is combative tone. It's not reassuring in a time of war. You're supposed to have composure, strength, you're a leader. And he is so defensive. He is so on his back heel. But it makes people feel unsettled. It's just not strong communication. Also in time of war,
“you can't just force the people one narrative. And like you mentioned, actually, I think this”
was last week. You mentioned too, and something that I really hadn't thought about, um, that
we haven't allowed any troops. We haven't allowed any journalists to follow our troops to cover this
war properly. It's almost like it's real. And how they blocked everyone from going to Gaza. We have no journalists embedded with US forces. And that is completely unacceptable in a republic in a democracy within all volunteer force. The military is not Donald Trump's toy. The military belongs to the nation. It's made up of the nation's sons and daughters. And the journalist who cover the Pentagon can cover what's going on in the military without being in a room in the Pentagon.
“But certainly, the idea that there are no reporters embedded with forces at war, contrary to how”
this has been done in the modern areas, completely is completely unacceptable. And it's also the case
that there are very ambiguous circumstances to say the least about the reason the aircraft carrier travel forward has retreated from the fear of operation to a Greek port. And there are some articles suggesting that there was a fire deliberately set by the crew aboard an aircraft carrier with two nuclear reactors aboard it while engaged in combat operations. And if that was the case, that would be a monumental story. But there ought to be journalists waiting for that ship wherever
it gets to in Greece. And the American people have every right to know about what's happening in our
“name. And the truth is that Donald Trump has cornered himself with a lot of bad advice. And he”
is two options. He can either escalate or he can withdraw. He can go forward and escalate or he can go backwards and leave. Those are the options. And so when you see these marine deployments, the talk of the 82nd Airborne Division ready brigade being spun up, what it suggests is that Donald Trump is going to try to see some of these islands in the Gulf where there's a lot of Iranian oil production and refining capacity and what it requires
to protect the American troops that would land at those places is to seize the high ground and the coastal mountains along the length of the straight of Hormuz, where they would be vulnerable to artillery and to missile attacks. So it's a major escalation. These U.S. forces would be in significant harm's way. And Donald Trump right now has stumbled into this without any notion around how it ends. And so right now he's improvising. And in his improvisation, he's come to the
inflection point forward or backward and we're at that place three weeks into this and it is not looking good for a lot of different reasons. So Texas Chris, just chimed in, reports that part of 82nd Airborne has received orders to deploy to the Middle East. What could be accomplished with these paratroopers combined with the two marine M.E.U.s. What do you think, Stu? Well, the division ready brigade of the 82nd Airborne is one of the elite military forces in the country and it's designed
to be deployable within 24 hours to anywhere in the world. And so it's ready to go. It's on a
Constant war footing.
And it is designed to hold territory to take it, to take territory, to hold territory for a brief
time until it's relieved by more potent unit. These marine expeditionary units, about 2500 men, are about the same size or smaller than a division but their self-contained. They have their own air support, they have their own artillery, they are infantry units, they have amphibious capability, they have air lift capability. Again, those marine expeditionary units are not designed to advance onward without relief and they need to have supply. And so all of those things
factor into this and what it requires is more and more and more troops as this goes on and that's
“one consideration that for sure they are having to look at. Yeah, I think that was the follow-up”
question from Texas Chris, which is, are there enough troops to accomplish anything of significance?
No, there's not. And so the first instance of ground troops going in, you'll have an immediate
cry of that there's not enough ground troops we need more troops. Yeah, you know, Sarah Burr asked, how do you members of the military feel about what's going on? Do they understand what this excursion is about? She's worth excursion in quotes, she's on sub-stacks so we couldn't put it up on the screen. But what do you think Steve, do you get the feeling that they are on board? Well, military's going to follow their orders and they're in a complete their mission. And
there's a, there's a saying in the Marine Corps, the seven P is prior proper planning prevents his poor performance. So in the military they're going to recognize the lack of a plan, the improvisational political nature of this. They are living in real time the reality of the mission. They're not watching it unfold on the Fox News happy hour. And so if you're forward and you're watching this and you think it's a force, you're going to react to it the way you react to watching,
watching a force. So the military is going to do two things at once. They're going to see clearly what's being asked of them. And two, they're, they're going to do it. They're going to pay their, their lawful orders. And at the end of the day, Donald Trump needs to be restrained here,
“not by the military saying no, but by by the U.S. Congress saying no. That's how, that's how our”
system of government works. Yeah. Um, you know, this is the other thing to, I mean, is the military sold on it? I guess they don't really, they don't really have much of a statement. They don't get a vote. Yeah. But we all get a vote, right? We certainly do. Yeah. And that was another thing that a source brought up to me that there was a feeling that President Trump could be doing more to sell the American people on this. Obviously, we all woke up one
morning and found out that we were in bombing Iran. We were in the middle of another war. And, you know, a lot of people say, you know, it's been three weeks. And we still haven't even gotten an oval office address. You've been, you know, in the Bush administration, you know, how much they work to sell the war, to Congress. They went to the U.N. They really tried to sell the war. Do you think that this has been, just coming from the perspective as someone who worked in
“the comms department for, for Bush, like, do you think that President Trump should be doing that?”
Do you think he should be doing? Listen, any, any, any, and John McCain talked about this all, all the, all the time. And there's a, there's a great excerpt in the speech by Admiral Stockdale speaking to Marine officers about the fact when wars are started for fraudulent reasons that the
men who start them are often the first to run, turn, tail and a quit. And it's not so easy if you're
the person who is assigned to fight the war. He's a very famous prisoner of war on, you know, for instance on this. But, but what McCain talked about is that, you know, maggot doesn't lose a war. The United States loses a war. The Republican party doesn't go to war. The United States
Goes to war.
There's shifting reasons. There's shifting rationale. And there's an other lack of communication.
“It's just Donald Trump or some minion yelling at the country and demand for obedience”
around what we can see to not be through. And in the case of, in, in, in, in the case of this war, public opinion is Lincoln pointed out. It's everything. He said that with it, you can do anything in America without it nothing. And overwhelmingly, like 92% of the country has quams about what's going on here. And in a vast majority is outright opposed to it. And so Donald Trump cannot sustain
a war opposed by the American people. And it's one more in a long laundry list of things that
he's done. He's going to pay a big price for these elections coming up. I have to say I am shocked though when I see these polls that show that a lot of Republicans are behind him. The magma more libertarian end of the party. They're not the Meghan Kelly's the Tucker girl. But there, but, you know, a lot of Republicans are with him on this war. And when I wrote this piece, you know, I spoke to the White House Press Secretary who pointed to a political poll
that showed that 43% overall of all the respondents were in favor of the war in the strikes in Iran. Now, that was against 30% who disagreed with it. So they see that as, you know, indication that
“they're on the right track. I think 42% is below water and, but regardless, it is, it is surprising,”
do you think that that this that there's going to be war fatigue soon? Gas prices, what are you thinking? I mean, so one of them said that there was 100% support inside the Republican party for this. And so if that's true against what the numbers are, it means that he has 17% approval amongst everybody else. And so, so the independence, all the Democrats, the majority, making middle of the country is just simply not with him on any of this. And when you look at numbers and even if I say, okay, I think that
number is high, what's true about all of those numbers is that this early on in a war for them to be so low is in and of itself historic. Is that when wars begin, they usually begin with a lot of consensus around the wisdom of the war. That was certainly the case around the Iraq war, the country showers on it, the political union around it falls apart over time, but not three weeks into it. And that's where we are with this. He's taken the country to war without there being a consensus
for it, without there being a plan, and without there being any, any plan to end the war that makes any sense. Any achievable, noble definition of victory of how this ends beyond Trump's whim. Him simply saying, I'll let you know when it ends. It's my instinct that will tell us. That's where we are with this. Right. And already he's saying that he's having conversations with the
Iatola, which they deny, what did you make of that? Well, again, it's an incredible thing
that as you adjudicate those two sources for information, it's not a, it's not a calculation, excuse me, it's not a calculus equation, right? It's a, it's a very simple puzzle to unravel. You got, you got the Iranian government saying something. You got the American government
“and Trump saying something and you have to decide who's telling you the truth there. And in that”
instance, like a lot of Americans for the first time in my life, well, I'm going with the Iranian government. I believe they're telling the truth. I don't believe there's been any contact between Donald Trump and Iranian government. I think the Iranian government is telling the truth about that. Is that Trump is not talking to the Iatola. He is completely making it up, which again raises this question of his fitness at the most elementary level. Is that there are
Americans in harm's way in combat and Trump is making up conversations in his...
or he is delusional enough that he doesn't know that he's not talking to the Iatola,
“but but either way he has these made up conversations that he's relating to the country and it's not,”
it's not real. So it's a, it's a, it's a big problem when the country's at war. And again, you can either go forward and escalate or get out and, and Trump is not getting out. It seems like he's escalating when we look at the truth movement. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, obviously some intermediaries like Egypt, Turkey, they're trying to create a line
between the U.S. and and and Iran right now. I saw that there was some reporting
sources saying that the U.S. would like to see the head of the parliament run the country, Iran, but do you think about it? Stepstown.de/oiljobs. Stepstown. Einfach die richtigen talentefinden für alle Jobs. Well, I don't think we're in a position to demand that the Iranian Parliament speaker
“become the new Iatola. I think the Iatolas of name their new Iatola and what we've achieved”
is we replace the Iatola community with the new Iatola community. And the new Iatola community, according to some reports, was viewed as on the fit for the business of being a good Iatola by his very own father, the dead Iatola. So maybe we have a version of Eric Trump as the new as the new Iranian as the new Iranian Iatola, but but the government seems likely to be more extreme. And if it remains in power, wouldn't one of the immediate priorities
be to develop as quickly as possible to demonstrate the ability to use a nuclear weapon. And so there are 460 kilograms of enriched uranium that nobody knows where it is. Trump said the program was obliterated, then he said it needed to be obliterated and obliterated again. So nobody really knows and Donald Trump and this can't be erased three weeks ago set out on this adventure saying we're going to remove this regime from power and the regime is not been
removed from power. The regime has absorbed the blows and it has stayed in power and it controls a vital waterway. And all of America's power can't seem to reopen that waterway
“by threat alone. And that's why we're at this point of either escalation or withdrawal and with”
draw will give a clear victory to Iran and so with Donald Trump who promised not to start, wars will have done is start a war and quickly lose a war to the Islamic Republic which will be quite a feat and he'll pay a very high price for that politically. So Rick G says it seems that Trump's actions are being dictated by Israel. What do you think about that? Well I think that it's I don't like it when it's talked about in terms that Israel is somehow dictating as in the Jews
or manipulating at all, but Marco Rubio said. Yeah, I mean, I was going to say that. The reason we're at war is because Israel had decided to attack Iran and therefore Iran would turn around in attack American targets and air go. If that were to be the case that we need to attack first and what that means is that Benjamin Netanyahu is the person who determines what name and threat is regarding American forces not the president of the United States and that should
never be the case. And too it is a clear statement about what our interests were and our interests
Have nothing to do with our security and that's for the record books.
instead of manipulated team Trump. It's the Saudis who have done it. It's the Emirates who have done
it. It's all the Gulf Arab states and they play a double game as well as any people on earth and it's constantly played against the United States and it is being played right now where the
Saudis out of one side of their mouth are saying we want this to stop, but on the other side
“are saying to Trump, you have to finish them off. Right, they haven't actually done it. They haven't”
launched any attackers. They haven't launched anything. You have you have data Americans and you have
American forces functioning as their Hessians, as their mercenaries, is completely unacceptable. So
I don't ever want to see America to force as used as mercenaries for these rallies and for the Netanyahu government, for MBS in the Saudi government, for whatever shake in the Emirates at all. And so these
“are all going to be very, I think, vibrant campaign issues in the in the 27, 28”
presidential season to say the least. Steve, thank you so much for joining the shadow. Thank you everyone who sent in questions. This was a great episode. You can support both of us an independent journalism by hitting that subscribe button and you know, by becoming paid subscribers to the warning and the red letter, you keep us going and we really appreciate all of you because we couldn't do this without you. And really appreciate all your questions. They were very smart and
there were some that I didn't get to. So hopefully we will reconvene next week and I hope with better news. It's almost over the street, this school of respect, just to be honest and then hopefully this is a step.
“Paul, no, garney, how much of a street is my safe space? You mean, you're all right?”
Yeah, exactly. How much of a street is so much of a street that is simply different. A garland studio, job or music. - A street? - Cross. I don't feel like a street anymore. - Stoyer is a leader. - Save. - With how much of a street?
