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Transcript

Just Ken · Politix

0:00
SPEAKER_01: I suspect that if a deal were on the table that was like,
0:04
SPEAKER_01: we're going to do aggressive-
0:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but it's not.
0:07
SPEAKER_01: And in exchange, we'll move to the center.
0:09
SPEAKER_01: But it requires people in the center to get on board with confiscatory levels
0:15
SPEAKER_01: of taxation,
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SPEAKER_01: way above where we are for the super rich and aggressive deployment
0:20
SPEAKER_01: of antitrust powers.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: I would completely reject that deal, to be clear.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly, right?
0:26
SPEAKER_00: No, but not exactly.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: But like-
0:33
SPEAKER_01: Hey everyone, you're listening to a free preview of the Politics Podcast.
0:36
SPEAKER_01: We've got a potpourri pot of an episode for you this week.
0:39
SPEAKER_01: We'll discuss the failure of the memorandum of understanding and resumption
0:42
SPEAKER_01: of Donald Trump's war against Iran,
0:45
SPEAKER_01: Trump's return to the well of tariffs just in time for the election,
0:49
SPEAKER_01: the mess Ken Martin has apparently made at the DNC,
0:54
SPEAKER_01: And the Ellison suddenly wobbly hostile takeover attempt at Warner Brothers.
0:59
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1:20
SPEAKER_01: Hello, and welcome to the Politics Podcast.
1:22
SPEAKER_01: I'm Brian Boyler.
1:23
SPEAKER_01: I'm Matthew Iglesias.
1:24
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1:30
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1:48
SPEAKER_01: on all the platforms in the not too distant future.
1:51
SPEAKER_01: That's the only housekeeping I got.
1:54
SPEAKER_01: But Matt,
1:55
SPEAKER_01: this is the first time that you being like a summer is
1:59
SPEAKER_01: a verb person has really fucked with the podcast.
2:02
SPEAKER_01: Because I wanted to talk about the Odyssey and various Odyssey-related discourse this week.
2:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:08
SPEAKER_01: But I guess they don't have movie theaters in rural Maine anymore or whatever.
2:12
SPEAKER_01: So we can't talk about it and we have to talk about the news.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: There used to be a movie theater in Ellsworth about 25 minutes from me.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: But it closed many years ago.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: And now you got to go 70 minutes drive to Bangor.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: And by the time I was going to go on Friday...
2:30
SPEAKER_00: But they're taking it out of the theater there.
2:33
SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to go on Saturday, like an even further drive to this town, Belfast.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, I don't know what's happening.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: Are you
2:41
SPEAKER_01: going to do,
2:42
SPEAKER_01: are you doing like an afternoon show and like waking up early and driving back?
2:45
SPEAKER_01: I don't know what's happening.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I need to get in on the discourse.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: Now I have read the Odyssey.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: I'm familiar with Odysseus.
2:53
SPEAKER_01: Real quick, real quick.
2:54
SPEAKER_01: You can't just say that a movie theater is pulling The Odyssey,
2:57
SPEAKER_01: the most successful movie in a long,
2:59
SPEAKER_01: long time, after a two-week run without more details.
3:03
SPEAKER_01: Is this because everyone's mad about the trans actor and the black actor?
3:08
SPEAKER_01: Or is it just not a hit there for some reason?
3:12
SPEAKER_00: No, it's because there's only one fucking movie theater for a million miles around
3:16
SPEAKER_00: and Spider-Man is coming out.
3:19
SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
3:19
SPEAKER_01: And so like they want a book.
3:21
SPEAKER_01: So I think they're keeping Toy Story 5
3:24
SPEAKER_00: showing like for the kids
3:25
SPEAKER_00: and they're swapping out Odyssey for Spider-Man.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, you know, this is a, I don't know, like small town life, man.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: It's weird.
3:34
SPEAKER_01: There's just not a lot of movie theaters.
3:37
SPEAKER_01: I've also read the Odyssey.
3:38
SPEAKER_01: What were you going to say about it?
3:40
SPEAKER_00: That I'm just familiar with the tale of Odysseus,
3:44
SPEAKER_00: a man skilled in all ways of contending, a man of many twists and turns.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: You know,
3:50
SPEAKER_00: I picked up the Iliad at the small town bookstore because they were all sold out
3:54
SPEAKER_00: of copies of the Odyssey.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: And I've been reading that in the woke Emily Wilson translation because I've read
4:02
SPEAKER_00: the unwoke Fagel's Odyssey.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I feel like I'm on top of Western civilization.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: It's thriving, despite Elon Musk's complaining.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: You know, we've got a diverse Greek pantheon.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: Like, why not?
4:22
SPEAKER_01: I'm for it.
4:23
SPEAKER_01: I wrote about it.
4:23
SPEAKER_01: I think you wrote about it, too,
4:25
SPEAKER_01: even though you haven't seen it,
4:27
SPEAKER_01: which... Well,
4:28
SPEAKER_00: I wrote about the history of ahistorical depictions of classical Greece in
4:33
SPEAKER_00: the Trojan War.
4:36
SPEAKER_01: Which is itself, yeah.
4:37
SPEAKER_00: But I mean, I was at the Victorian Album Museum in London.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: They have this, it's like a famous medieval tapestry of the Trojan War.
4:48
SPEAKER_00: And they just like, it looks like medieval England.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: Like everybody,
4:51
SPEAKER_00: it's all like dudes on horses with huge plate armor and they're carrying lances.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: And I don't, I'm not an expert in this.
4:58
SPEAKER_00: Like I don't a hundred percent know what they were thinking when they came up with that.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: But that's like the normal tradition is to make things contemporary.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: And there's like a newer idea that you should try
5:11
SPEAKER_00: to make things like how they actually were,
5:14
SPEAKER_00: which is problematic in the case of Like an old myth.
5:19
SPEAKER_01: I don't think this is a newer idea.
5:21
SPEAKER_01: I think this is a pretext for smuggling in everything from the bigoted complaint
5:27
SPEAKER_01: about Elliot Page and Lupita Nyong'o and also the like,
5:32
SPEAKER_01: why can't we depict violence against lessers as awesome It's just,
5:37
SPEAKER_01: you know, just typical reactionary fascist bullshit.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, clearly just like Elon Musk is mad about black people, right?
5:45
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there were all these people who were like really upset about the decision in
5:50
SPEAKER_00: the HBO Game of Thrones spinoff,
5:52
SPEAKER_00: Fire and Blood, where they decided that the House Valerian...
6:01
SPEAKER_00: The characters from that family are played by African-American and Black English actors.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: And everyone is like mad that that's not realistic.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: It's like, you know, it's a fictional universe.
6:15
SPEAKER_00: Like, who's to say?
6:16
SPEAKER_00: No, I mean, I do remember, you know, when I was a kid, I was a huge Star Trek fan.
6:22
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I watched Star Trek The Next Generation and I watched...
6:26
SPEAKER_00: You know, reruns of the old classic track.
6:29
SPEAKER_00: And then when, um, what was it called?
6:32
SPEAKER_00: Uh, Not Deep Space Nine.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: Deep Space Nine had like Black human characters.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: But in Next One came out and there was like a Black Vulcan.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: And the first time I saw it, I was a kid, I was like, that's not right.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: Like Vulcans don't have American racial diversity.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: But then, I don't know, I just got over it.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: Like this is all made up, right?
6:50
SPEAKER_00: And we're incredibly accustomed to the Star Trek convention or in Dune, you also see it, right?
6:55
SPEAKER_00: Which is like science fictional depictions of the future normally are diverse.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: But they're diverse in proportion to the demographics of the United States of America.
7:07
SPEAKER_01: Because we do all the cultural production.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: Right.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: So it's like in space, right, there's like most people are white.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: And then there's some black people and a smaller number of Asian people.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: But we're all aware that that's not what the population of the planet Earth is like.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: But we're just Americans making American TV shows.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: So we make everything look like America.
7:27
SPEAKER_00: And it's fine.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: It's the beauty of the American project.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: It's like, grow your own film industry.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: If somebody wants to pay another good director a huge amount of money to make
7:41
SPEAKER_01: a multi-hour,
7:42
SPEAKER_01: multi-episode Odyssey serial that is faithful to the text or whatever, I'm Fine.
7:53
SPEAKER_01: Like it would probably be pretty good.
7:56
SPEAKER_01: But like, it's,
7:57
SPEAKER_01: it's the,
7:58
SPEAKER_01: it's the getting mad selectively at the Americanization of anything classic
8:06
SPEAKER_01: that people imagine their heads were just filled with beautiful white people.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: That's like the real tell.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: And then when it's like, everyone's like, Hey, you're being really weird about this.
8:14
SPEAKER_01: They retreat to, to something more like, Oh no, no, no.
8:17
SPEAKER_01: I just, I really just care about the verisimilitude.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you also got this, um,
8:24
SPEAKER_00: A lot of people talking up the old 2004 Troy movie and being like,
8:30
SPEAKER_00: that was like a proper Helen.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: You know, Wolfgang Peterson, a good German director, he just like cast a German lady.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: To play Helen of Troy, Diane Kruger.
8:43
SPEAKER_00: And she's beautiful and she's great in the movie.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: But like, that doesn't make any more sense.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: I also just recall that movie being kind of mid, but- Right.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: I mean, but they're just like very specifically, you know, it's like, I don't know.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: Brad Pitt and Diane Kruger do not look like residents of
9:01
SPEAKER_00: the historical Eastern Mediterranean any more than anybody else does.
9:06
SPEAKER_00: Like it would just be- And, like, it would be weird.
9:09
SPEAKER_00: Like, if you made a movie,
9:10
SPEAKER_00: a big-budget movie,
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SPEAKER_00: with a cast entirely of, like,
9:13
SPEAKER_00: ethnically Greek people, like,
9:16
SPEAKER_00: I can see why you might do that,
9:18
SPEAKER_00: but that just would mean you wouldn't have any famous movie stars.
9:21
SPEAKER_01: Well, there are a few.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is not enough to populate.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: Like, why is Matt Damon in the movie?
9:27
SPEAKER_00: It's like, because he's fucking famous.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: Like, what do you want?
9:30
SPEAKER_01: Honestly, like, he's really good in it, but it is...
9:36
SPEAKER_01: There are just some actors that are so culturally present that it's like,
9:42
SPEAKER_01: you don't want Will Hunting showing up in the Odyssey because it pulls you out of
9:45
SPEAKER_01: the suspension of disbelief more than like,
9:49
SPEAKER_01: you know,
9:50
SPEAKER_01: he's not a very good actor,
9:51
SPEAKER_01: but like Gerard Butler is like not somebody who I associate with anything other
9:55
SPEAKER_01: than like battle films.
9:57
SPEAKER_01: And so you can kind of slot him in.
10:00
SPEAKER_01: To any movie along those lines.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: I was going to say,
10:03
SPEAKER_00: I would have made it Damon,
10:06
SPEAKER_00: get Ben Affleck, get Mark Wahlberg, get them just all doing their Boston accents.
10:13
SPEAKER_01: All right, we did it.
10:14
SPEAKER_01: We Odysseus discourse, even though Matt hasn't seen the movie.
10:18
SPEAKER_00: We're participating.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: On our official list of things that we're supposed to talk about this week,
10:22
SPEAKER_01: I have the Iran war,
10:24
SPEAKER_01: which without telling you,
10:26
SPEAKER_01: I just kind of yoked it together with Trump's new and improved tariffs.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: Speaking of the Eastern Mediterranean.
10:31
SPEAKER_01: Since apparently the only thing people care about is prices.
10:34
SPEAKER_01: Like they don't care about the war per se or like the justification for the tariffs,
10:38
SPEAKER_01: but they will get upset as things get more expensive.
10:42
SPEAKER_01: I have the DNC meltdown, and then I have the fight,
10:46
SPEAKER_01: like the seemingly successful fight,
10:49
SPEAKER_01: at least for now, to stop the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger.
10:53
SPEAKER_01: So where do you want to start?
10:55
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think, you know, continuing with the war theme.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: All right.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: We should go to Iran.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump,
11:03
SPEAKER_00: a man of many twists and turns, a complicated man, as Emily Wilson would render it.
11:10
SPEAKER_00: Has decided to resume the war with Iran.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: You know,
11:14
SPEAKER_00: it's interesting because this war was obviously a political fiasco for him
11:18
SPEAKER_00: the first time around.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: When the MOU was signed,
11:23
SPEAKER_00: you know,
11:23
SPEAKER_00: a lot of people dunked on him because it was like such an incredibly weak agreement.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: But he...
11:30
SPEAKER_01: Do you mean weak in the sense of like no details filled in or weak in the sense
11:34
SPEAKER_01: of it was tantamount to surrender?
11:36
SPEAKER_01: Because it's both.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: Well, I...
11:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, it was very vague because they were trying to obscure what a surrender
11:48
SPEAKER_01: it was.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
11:50
SPEAKER_00: Like, if you'd written out clearly what Trump was agreeing to,
11:53
SPEAKER_00: he was just giving up on all of his goals.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: But, you know,
11:57
SPEAKER_00: Trump was showing,
11:58
SPEAKER_00: I think,
11:58
SPEAKER_00: his biggest source of political strength,
12:01
SPEAKER_00: which was that liberals were sort of like mocking him for surrendering.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
12:08
SPEAKER_00: But liberals weren't genuinely first order angry at him that he had surrendered.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: Like we wanted the war to end and Trump was not getting,
12:18
SPEAKER_00: like if Joe Biden or even Barack Obama like did something that was progressive
12:23
SPEAKER_00: and also unpopular and then back down from it,
12:27
SPEAKER_00: like progressives would be like genuinely angry at Joe Biden over that.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: And Trump was not getting slammed by the right.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: You know, like the whole thing seemed like it was very embarrassing to him.
12:42
SPEAKER_00: I mean, deserved to be embarrassing, deserved to be humiliating.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: But like he was getting away with it.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: His poll numbers started ticking back up.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: You know,
12:51
SPEAKER_00: the free press was not like going nuclear on him the way they would
12:55
SPEAKER_00: if Joe Biden had done this.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: He just continued to have his dominance over the conservative movement.
13:01
SPEAKER_00: But something...
13:04
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to say something snapped within him,
13:07
SPEAKER_00: but somehow the dynamics were that it was becoming clear that he wasn't going
13:13
SPEAKER_00: to be able to implement this in a fake way,
13:17
SPEAKER_00: that he was going to have to make meaningful concessions to Iran
13:21
SPEAKER_00: to get things opened up,
13:22
SPEAKER_00: as he had agreed, and that he didn't want to make those concessions.
13:27
SPEAKER_00: So Iran wasn't going to resume the flow.
13:30
SPEAKER_00: And so we're back to war and we're back to energy prices going up and we're back
13:35
SPEAKER_00: to energy prices maybe actually not going up as much as you might have thought
13:40
SPEAKER_00: before the war, but still up when he's promised to make them down.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: And it just, it seems like the greatest possible news for Democrats running in the midterms.
13:49
SPEAKER_01: Quick aside,
13:50
SPEAKER_01: because I remember at the very outset when Iran first closed the Strait of Hormuz,
13:56
SPEAKER_01: But I feel like the modal analysis was like,
14:01
SPEAKER_01: prices are going to go up right away,
14:02
SPEAKER_01: but they're really going to go up like summer,
14:06
SPEAKER_01: like big spike in order to crush demand so that the economy
14:13
SPEAKER_01: in its weakened state can run on the amount of oil that there is.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: And we never really got there.
14:17
SPEAKER_01: I remember thinking, how well do we really know how well-equipped the world is To,
14:25
SPEAKER_01: if not permanently, then at least temporarily, like de-oil itself.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: And I kind of feel like the, I mean,
14:36
SPEAKER_01: all of the reporting suggests like,
14:38
SPEAKER_01: we started drawing down stockpiles, those are nearly gone.
14:41
SPEAKER_01: So the day of reckoning that was advertised at the outset is fast upon us.
14:48
SPEAKER_01: But at the same time,
14:48
SPEAKER_01: it really does feel like that in the 50 years since the last big oil shock,
14:53
SPEAKER_01: that we've just gotten...
14:57
SPEAKER_01: We have more diverse ways to do commerce and move about the world
15:02
SPEAKER_01: and substitute things such that those estimates seemed off now, in hindsight.
15:09
SPEAKER_01: They were offered in good faith, I think, but just...
15:12
SPEAKER_01: It seems like...
15:15
SPEAKER_01: It's just a very complicated question now.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: Whereas when oil is like one of the main things you use for everything,
15:21
SPEAKER_01: then when there's a supply shock,
15:24
SPEAKER_01: you can pretty easily predict what's going to happen to the price.
15:28
SPEAKER_01: Is that how you read why?
15:31
SPEAKER_00: Maybe.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: So part of it is that the elasticity seems up.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: So there was not in the US, but in the third world, electric car sales really accelerated.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: That being said, I mean,
15:51
SPEAKER_00: what's always been true about fuel efficiency continues to be true,
15:55
SPEAKER_00: which is just like in any given month, not that many people are buying a new car.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: And if you have a car and it's a gasoline car,
16:06
SPEAKER_00: It's just still cheaper to pay through the nose for gasoline than to buy a new car.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you need a new car, then you switch to a more fuel-efficient one.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: From what I've read from Rory Johnson,
16:23
SPEAKER_00: it seems like the Chinese government has done a lot of rationing And use
16:31
SPEAKER_00: of their stockpile and things like that to sort of cushion this.
16:35
SPEAKER_00: But I don't think we totally,
16:39
SPEAKER_00: I feel like the experts are not totally owning up
16:43
SPEAKER_00: to how little they understand this.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: Because it's still true that at their peak, prices have been lower than they were in 2022.
16:56
SPEAKER_00: And that the physical disruption to global oil supplies has been bigger.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but also like geopolitically, like why...
17:32
SPEAKER_00: Were they more interested in helping out in this case than in the other?
17:40
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: It seems like they were doing Trump a solid in a way that they didn't want to do previously.
17:50
SPEAKER_01: You don't think it's more like they want to crack the US hegemony over oil markets?
17:58
SPEAKER_01: Maybe.
17:58
SPEAKER_00: I mean-
18:00
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
18:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, anyway.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that could be it,
18:03
SPEAKER_00: that there's some,
18:06
SPEAKER_00: you know,
18:07
SPEAKER_00: third degree, third dimension to this that I'm not totally, totally seeing.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: It's a little bit weird.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: And it's been obscured by the fact that, like,
18:19
SPEAKER_00: you know,
18:20
SPEAKER_00: just in a pure take sense,
18:22
SPEAKER_00: when this first started,
18:23
SPEAKER_00: I was saying,
18:24
SPEAKER_00: because this is what people were telling me,
18:25
SPEAKER_00: that, like, oil's going to have to go well over $100 a barrel.
18:30
SPEAKER_00: In order for like supply and demand to balance.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: And the actual results have been like much more mild
18:38
SPEAKER_01: than that.
18:39
SPEAKER_00: So Trump and the Hawks, you know, could claim victory on that score.
18:44
SPEAKER_00: Except the fact is prices are up and prices are up when Trump promised
18:48
SPEAKER_00: to make prices go down and prices are up when everyone says that affordability and
18:53
SPEAKER_00: the cost of living is the number one issue.
18:55
SPEAKER_00: So, you know,
18:58
SPEAKER_00: He's fucked himself with this,
19:00
SPEAKER_00: even though it hasn't actually been as bad as a lot of people
19:04
SPEAKER_01: thought it would be.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: And as he drags his feet,
19:12
SPEAKER_01: the reemergence of hostilities means the risk of spreading,
19:17
SPEAKER_01: which could be catastrophic.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: But even already,
19:19
SPEAKER_01: in Iran War Part 1, the Houthis were not trying to make the Red Sea impassable to...
19:29
SPEAKER_01: To oil.
19:29
SPEAKER_01: And now they are.
19:31
SPEAKER_01: So that's like another bottleneck that wasn't relevant or didn't present itself
19:37
SPEAKER_01: when this started six months ago or whatever, five months ago.
19:41
SPEAKER_01: But the consequences could snowball such that
19:50
SPEAKER_01: the price spike
19:51
SPEAKER_01: that we were anticipating for August or July or whatever
19:54
SPEAKER_01: when this all began could hit in October or When Trump actually wants it to go away.
20:02
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I, I like, I,
20:05
SPEAKER_01: I'm not like exactly perplexed by this because I think I understand Trump's, um,
20:11
SPEAKER_01: psyche pretty well,
20:13
SPEAKER_01: but like, it seems, he talks a lot about like, I don't want to be Herbert Hoover.
20:19
SPEAKER_01: And I think that that part of that is like genuine legacy stuff.
20:23
SPEAKER_01: And part of it is like, I don't want to get creamed in the midterm stuff.
20:27
SPEAKER_01: Um, But he is unwilling to concede humiliating defeat.
20:36
SPEAKER_01: He has to be basically dragged off the stage on January 6th.
20:42
SPEAKER_01: He couldn't concede the defeat, so he attempted an insurrection.
20:45
SPEAKER_01: And when that failed,
20:46
SPEAKER_01: he only then reluctantly went into hiding for the next 14 days and then didn't...
20:53
SPEAKER_01: That's how he processes...
20:56
SPEAKER_01: But at the same time,
20:59
SPEAKER_01: he seems to believe that he can kind of slow boil the public when
21:04
SPEAKER_01: the public rejects something that he's doing,
21:07
SPEAKER_01: that he can back away and then proceed again.
21:13
SPEAKER_01: And on the second or third go, people will just have kind of acclimated to it.
21:17
SPEAKER_01: Like this is what he's doing with ICE.
21:20
SPEAKER_01: It's what he's doing with tariffs too.
21:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
21:24
SPEAKER_01: And I think at some level he's right about it in that the way the news covers it and
21:31
SPEAKER_01: the way people who do discourse for a living talk about it gets a little bit bored.
21:37
SPEAKER_01: The coverage of the Iran war today is not as frenetic and
21:45
SPEAKER_01: doomsaying as it was back in March.
21:49
SPEAKER_01: And the fact that Trump's trying the tariffs all over again is not...
21:54
SPEAKER_01: We're not treating it the same way we reacted around Liberation Day last year.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: And like the resurging of ICE into cities to do murders and stuff like
22:05
SPEAKER_01: that isn't having the same kind of national,
22:11
SPEAKER_01: like sending out the same kind of national shockwaves that happened
22:15
SPEAKER_01: when ICE raided Minneapolis.
22:18
SPEAKER_01: And so I think that part of him thinks that he can just Kind of muddle through
22:26
SPEAKER_01: by trying and trying and trying again,
22:27
SPEAKER_01: except like when ICE does something that people hate,
22:32
SPEAKER_01: but also over time people are kind of growing accustomed to it,
22:37
SPEAKER_01: then it's just kind of a new normal.
22:38
SPEAKER_01: But like,
22:39
SPEAKER_01: as you were saying,
22:40
SPEAKER_01: like the,
22:42
SPEAKER_01: you can't hide from the sticker shock of oil prices and you can't hide from some of
22:47
SPEAKER_01: the other ancillary consequences.
22:49
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, service members are dying.
22:52
SPEAKER_01: That's creating different kinds of news stories.
22:54
SPEAKER_01: Then we can talk about this maybe separately,
22:58
SPEAKER_01: but Trump is trying to conceal the nature of casualties in this war,
23:05
SPEAKER_01: both by undercounting the number of troops that have been injured and trying
23:11
SPEAKER_01: to reclassify troops that were killed in During hostilities as if they were killed
23:18
SPEAKER_01: in peacetime because he's claiming that there was no war while the MOU was
23:22
SPEAKER_01: in effect.
23:23
SPEAKER_01: And that is creating like an outrage that has sort of nothing to do with prices or,
23:30
SPEAKER_01: you know, the question of like how he gets out of the war.
23:35
SPEAKER_01: It's its own kind of scandal.
23:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, that's true.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: I guess I have like a slightly different...
23:43
SPEAKER_00: Interpretation of the coverage and stuff,
23:45
SPEAKER_00: which is just that we,
23:47
SPEAKER_00: you know, this is a real summer of Democrats in disarray, you know, kind of stuff.
23:54
SPEAKER_00: And people are just not going to hit pause one week
24:01
SPEAKER_00: before this Michigan Senate primary to be like,
24:06
SPEAKER_00: actually, we all agree that what Donald Trump is doing is really bad.
24:12
SPEAKER_00: You know, like,
24:14
SPEAKER_00: I think everyone can agree that that would be the smart play for,
24:19
SPEAKER_00: like, the Democrats.
24:20
SPEAKER_00: But, like, also you understand why nobody is going to do that.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: Like, the primary is happening imminently.
24:26
SPEAKER_00: The contending factions have both put a lot of chips into this pot.
24:33
SPEAKER_00: And, like, they need to try to win the hand now.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: So...
24:38
SPEAKER_00: We're going to continue to have an exaggerated sense,
24:42
SPEAKER_00: not an exaggerated sense of disagreement among Democrats,
24:45
SPEAKER_00: but a kind of like a minimizing of what the disagreement with Trump is, right?
24:52
SPEAKER_00: Because it would be sort of,
24:57
SPEAKER_00: it would be just like objectively,
24:59
SPEAKER_00: I think like in Haley Stevens's interest for like all Democrats
25:04
SPEAKER_00: to just start talking about how Donald Trump's war in Iran is bad.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: Cause that would like flatten out the distinction
25:11
SPEAKER_00: when not just like Abdul Al-Sayed personally,
25:14
SPEAKER_00: but like all these other people who've come to campaign for him are like heightening
25:19
SPEAKER_00: the distinctions.
25:20
SPEAKER_00: And it's like really important to like get rid of this like AIPAC ghoul
25:24
SPEAKER_00: and all this other kind of stuff.
25:26
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, this is just on one level, like I think it's fine.
25:31
SPEAKER_00: Like that's why you hold the primaries like in the summer and then you do
25:35
SPEAKER_00: the general election in the fall.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: But there's just not a lot of focus right now among highly geared up Democrats
25:45
SPEAKER_00: on Trump, which is bad.
25:46
SPEAKER_01: I want to challenge your instinct there.
25:52
SPEAKER_01: Because on the one level, I was talking about literally the coverage of the war, right?
25:58
SPEAKER_01: And you're saying it's having a harder time breaking through because there's this other...
26:03
SPEAKER_01: Sort of salacious stuff happening in democratic politics.
26:07
SPEAKER_01: And I take that point.
26:08
SPEAKER_01: But I just mean like in the text of the coverage of the Iran war, it's...
26:16
SPEAKER_01: The way that the news read...
26:18
SPEAKER_01: Back in February and March.
26:20
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
26:20
SPEAKER_01: Versus how it reads now is I think different or like conveys the kind of exhaustion.
26:26
SPEAKER_01: It's like, oh, here we go again.
26:27
SPEAKER_01: Trump's gonna like, you say we got a deal afoot and blah, blah.
26:30
SPEAKER_00: You know, like you can tell that people are- That's true.
26:33
SPEAKER_00: But then on the other hand,
26:34
SPEAKER_00: like secondarily,
26:36
SPEAKER_01: I think that if you're an,
26:39
SPEAKER_01: I'll say Ed supporter,
26:42
SPEAKER_01: you would see the- The like recrudescence of the war as a good opportunity
26:50
SPEAKER_01: because you can say, who do you trust more to try to force an end to this war?
26:53
SPEAKER_01: Me or the candidate who's backed by AIPAC?
26:56
SPEAKER_01: And like, they're not seemingly trying to do that.
27:01
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're attacking her ties to AIPAC,
27:04
SPEAKER_01: but they're not latching onto the war per se, which I guess is a little mystifying.
27:08
SPEAKER_01: But like, I don't think that it's...
27:10
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
27:10
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm just saying like everything becomes grist for the fight.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: You know,
27:14
SPEAKER_00: so like Hakeem Jeffries,
27:16
SPEAKER_00: two days ago, I think, it was like a hundred days from the midterms, right?
27:21
SPEAKER_00: So it's like, what's he going to fucking do, right?
27:25
SPEAKER_00: He's like- Here's our hundred days to the midterms, like roll out, like everything is fine.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: Like no beef with the left wing insurgents who just won these different things.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: There was a race in Arizona where the DCCC like had a favored candidate and she lost
27:41
SPEAKER_00: in the primary.
27:42
SPEAKER_00: And now the guy who won the primary was just like added to the official red to blue list.
27:47
SPEAKER_00: So he's just doing what party leaders do,
27:50
SPEAKER_00: which is trying to paper over all this furious fighting,
27:53
SPEAKER_00: even the fighting that he was personally involved with.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, Democrats, we're working together.
27:58
SPEAKER_00: We're 100% unified on affordability.
28:01
SPEAKER_00: And I saw Ben Wickler was on the Ezra Klein show.
28:04
SPEAKER_00: And Ezra keeps trying to ask him to opine on these various divisive things.
28:09
SPEAKER_00: And Ben is like, we've got a great unified message on affordability.
28:14
SPEAKER_00: And There's like, there is some truth to that.
28:17
SPEAKER_00: Like, I think there's truth to what Jeffries is trying to say about this.
28:20
SPEAKER_00: There's truth to what, what Wickler is trying to say about it.
28:22
SPEAKER_00: But also, you'd be like,
28:28
SPEAKER_00: Like a sap as a journalist to like really write that like that's the story
28:34
SPEAKER_00: of July 2026 is that Democrats are unified on their affordability message.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: Like there's clearly a great deal of infighting occurring and it's just like hard
28:43
SPEAKER_00: to deny that that's the case.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: So it's a good moment.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: It's a moment of opportunity for Trump, right?
28:51
SPEAKER_00: And so like on ICE,
28:52
SPEAKER_00: which you brought up, where like Trump has fairly well-defined Policy ideas.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: You know,
29:01
SPEAKER_00: it seems like he is effectively exploiting a moment of disunity in fighting
29:10
SPEAKER_00: among Democrats to like retable this idea
29:14
SPEAKER_00: of like very intrusive immigration enforcement in the interior of the United States.
29:19
SPEAKER_00: On Iran,
29:21
SPEAKER_00: I feel like it's almost the opposite,
29:22
SPEAKER_00: that it was like he had kind of successfully wriggled out of this.
29:26
SPEAKER_00: And now he's just wriggling his way back in, right?
29:30
SPEAKER_00: There was a good New York Times article today that's like,
29:33
SPEAKER_00: why Iran is in no hurry to come back to the negotiating table.
29:38
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things is that we have been doing these strategic petroleum reserve drawdowns.
29:44
SPEAKER_00: And those,
29:45
SPEAKER_00: not just the US,
29:46
SPEAKER_00: but other G7 countries,
29:48
SPEAKER_00: et cetera, those seem to have been somewhat effective at cushioning the blow.
29:53
SPEAKER_00: But with every week that we continue to draw down,
29:56
SPEAKER_00: Like the X date draws closer for the United States.
30:02
SPEAKER_00: Trump has like already shot his shot on Iran and they are like,
30:08
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they've been devastated, right?
30:09
SPEAKER_00: Like it's not untrue that the United States has inflicted a lot of pain on Iran,
30:14
SPEAKER_00: but it's not clear what our, what Trump's like escalation end game is there.
30:19
SPEAKER_00: Whereas Iran can just wait and play for time and keep saying,
30:23
SPEAKER_00: you know,
30:23
SPEAKER_00: this is going to get worse for Western consumers in three months compared
30:28
SPEAKER_00: to how it is today.
30:29
SPEAKER_00: Like your leverage,
30:31
SPEAKER_00: United States of America goes down with every passing week and Trump is going
30:36
SPEAKER_00: to lose the House in November.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: It's going to make it harder for him.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, maybe Trump will try to execute like an October surprise peace deal, right?
30:49
SPEAKER_00: And generate some like positive headlines for himself two months from now.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: But it's like...
30:55
SPEAKER_01: So that's what I was actually going to ask about is do you think like,
30:57
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to like act as though I think that there's something like
31:00
SPEAKER_01: the beating heart of the...
31:03
SPEAKER_01: Revolution in Iran or whatever,
31:05
SPEAKER_01: but like they know pretty well how to exploit U.S.
31:09
SPEAKER_01: election deadlines for geostrategic advantage, right?
31:14
SPEAKER_01: Like they've done it before.
31:16
SPEAKER_01: And like,
31:18
SPEAKER_01: I think it's like at this point,
31:23
SPEAKER_01: Trump would have to give Iran something beyond what he already promised but failed
31:29
SPEAKER_01: to deliver.
31:31
SPEAKER_01: In getting the MOU signed in order to get out of this before October.
31:37
SPEAKER_01: And like,
31:39
SPEAKER_01: as you were,
31:39
SPEAKER_01: I think,
31:40
SPEAKER_01: implying,
31:41
SPEAKER_01: a great deal turns on whether he's able to do that because he did get a lift out
31:46
SPEAKER_01: of pretending to end the war and then the price of oil kind of floated back down.
31:52
SPEAKER_01: And timing that for October could be, I mean,
32:00
SPEAKER_01: What are you going to do about it?
32:01
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to say all's fair in politics because this is just highly immoral, if not corrupt.
32:09
SPEAKER_01: But does the fact that he already revealed himself
32:15
SPEAKER_01: to be holding no cards vis-a-vis Iran make it harder?
32:21
SPEAKER_01: How could he pull off the October Surprise version of events
32:26
SPEAKER_01: that Given what's already happened, it almost seems like he foreclosed himself.
32:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I mean,
32:32
SPEAKER_00: you know,
32:32
SPEAKER_00: not to be too bombastic about any of this,
32:37
SPEAKER_00: but it reminds me a little bit of some of the great disasters
32:42
SPEAKER_00: in geopolitical history,
32:44
SPEAKER_00: like around World War I and other kinds of things where it's like,
32:49
SPEAKER_00: you know,
32:50
SPEAKER_00: I'm pretty well informed about American politics,
32:53
SPEAKER_00: but I don't really understand what Trump and his team I feel like
33:00
SPEAKER_00: the Iranian leadership has probably a worse understanding of American politics
33:06
SPEAKER_00: than ours.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: They live in Iran.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: A bunch of their most experienced people have been killed already.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: You got a new team.
33:18
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what their sources of information are.
33:20
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what they've Read about American public opinion or dynamics, things like that.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what their understanding of
33:30
SPEAKER_00: the post-midterm House Democrats incentives is going to be.
33:33
SPEAKER_00: I know for sure that Donald Trump doesn't understand Iranian politics
33:37
SPEAKER_00: or Iranian decision-making.
33:41
SPEAKER_00: And it's like someone is going to miscalculate something, push something too far.
33:50
SPEAKER_00: And nobody really I mean, you can see even like Democrats, right?
33:56
SPEAKER_00: Like all Democrats more or less like opposed this war.
33:59
SPEAKER_00: They were all against it.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: They've been like taking votes against it.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: But like in a concrete sense,
34:05
SPEAKER_00: if we come back,
34:07
SPEAKER_00: if it just continues, like what's going to happen after the midterms?
34:13
SPEAKER_00: You know, like what are the options?
34:15
SPEAKER_00: What can you do on any of this?
34:18
SPEAKER_00: Like it's all very...
34:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, it is like the fact that there's a midterm and not a presidential election kind
34:25
SPEAKER_01: of confounds things because like you could imagine almost like an inverse of
34:29
SPEAKER_01: the hostage crisis situation where if a Democrat were to defeat,
34:33
SPEAKER_01: you know,
34:33
SPEAKER_01: Vance or Trump or whoever happens to be on the Republican ticket,
34:37
SPEAKER_01: like
34:38
SPEAKER_01: the war ends the next day and like the actual troop withdrawal happens or like
34:43
SPEAKER_01: on the first day of the new administration and
34:45
SPEAKER_01: then it's like history repeating itself.
34:48
SPEAKER_01: Here, it's not quite like that because Trump will still be president next year.
34:54
SPEAKER_01: But if you're Iran,
34:58
SPEAKER_01: you know that in the US, because you know the history of your own country, right?
35:05
SPEAKER_01: You know that elections in the US are a pressure point for you.
35:10
SPEAKER_01: You know that Trump is somebody that you're rightfully quite angry at.
35:13
SPEAKER_01: You know that one way to punish him is by making him pay a price in the election.
35:18
SPEAKER_01: And you also know that perhaps with a good enough deal on the table,
35:24
SPEAKER_01: you might be willing to take cash and sanctions relief and a bunch of other stuff
35:28
SPEAKER_01: in exchange for withholding some of the pain on him.
35:32
SPEAKER_01: Except he already reneged on the first version of this.
35:36
SPEAKER_01: So why would you trust even more outlandish promises from him?
35:39
SPEAKER_01: Like, this is what I'm trying to say.
35:40
SPEAKER_01: It's like, I don't see...
35:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no,
35:42
SPEAKER_00: neither do I. I mean,
35:43
SPEAKER_00: it could be also like Trump as of today seems to have like kind
35:49
SPEAKER_00: of called off strikes on Iran.
35:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, again, like.
35:56
SPEAKER_00: He hasn't like agreed to anything, but he's just stopped doing it.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: And it's like what like.
36:04
SPEAKER_01: I mean, if he, it's Mike, well, like,
36:06
SPEAKER_01: part of it is that he's revealed he does not want to,
36:11
SPEAKER_01: like, do the civilizational destruction thing.
36:14
SPEAKER_01: And I mean, like, the U.S. is a nuclear-armed power.
36:17
SPEAKER_01: We could do that.
36:19
SPEAKER_01: It would be really terrible.
36:20
SPEAKER_01: And I think that, like,
36:21
SPEAKER_01: as crazy as Trump is,
36:23
SPEAKER_01: he is not, like, he doesn't want to do that for a number of reasons.
36:29
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, like, he is also...
36:33
SPEAKER_01: Severely eroded our stockpile of missiles and interceptors.
36:37
SPEAKER_01: And like Mike Waltz is like going on TV, A,
36:41
SPEAKER_01: denying it,
36:42
SPEAKER_01: and then B,
36:42
SPEAKER_01: saying that the people who are leaking those stories to the press should be
36:46
SPEAKER_01: in prison, which means it's true, you know, right?
36:48
SPEAKER_01: Like if it was a lie, then there's no leak of classified intelligence and no crime.
36:55
SPEAKER_01: So like, I think, you know, Trump has been reluctant
37:03
SPEAKER_01: to, Just internally to escalate.
37:07
SPEAKER_01: And now there are physical practicalities that prevent him from making good on these threats.
37:15
SPEAKER_01: And so everyone just kind of knows everything he says is a bluff.
37:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, that seems right.
37:21
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I hope the Iranian government,
37:25
SPEAKER_00: their top negotiators,
37:27
SPEAKER_00: listens to Politics with an X podcast for insights
37:30
SPEAKER_00: on how they should handle this situation.
37:33
SPEAKER_00: But it's like, you just don't, you don't know, you know?
37:37
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there've been so many different moments.
37:39
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
37:39
SPEAKER_00: I think this has been a kind of a signature thing since Trump first took office with
37:44
SPEAKER_00: that initial flurry of tariff threats at Canada and Mexico,
37:48
SPEAKER_00: where it's like,
37:51
SPEAKER_00: as an American Democrat, like,
37:53
SPEAKER_00: I really do,
37:54
SPEAKER_00: like, want all foreign leaders to stand strong and, you know, see that, like,
38:04
SPEAKER_00: Whether you're Mark Carney or whoever is running Iran or Claudia Scheinbaum or
38:10
SPEAKER_00: the Prime Minister of Denmark,
38:12
SPEAKER_00: it's like Trump is kind of,
38:15
SPEAKER_00: he's a bully,
38:16
SPEAKER_00: but he's like one of those bullies you read about in a feel-good story where
38:23
SPEAKER_00: when you stand up to him,
38:25
SPEAKER_00: he doesn't have a ton of stick-to-itiveness about any of this stuff.
38:32
SPEAKER_00: Which isn't to say like, I don't know.
38:35
SPEAKER_00: You know,
38:35
SPEAKER_00: it's like all this stuff has costs and he's been,
38:43
SPEAKER_00: his only good moment since the Iran war started was when he signed the MOU.
38:49
SPEAKER_00: You know,
38:49
SPEAKER_00: he like took a lot of shit from like the smart people for surrendering,
38:54
SPEAKER_00: but he was brushing it off, right?
38:56
SPEAKER_00: Like he just, he has this incredible strength inside conservative politics, right?
39:01
SPEAKER_00: And like he just,
39:02
SPEAKER_00: he was not getting He slammed by AIPAC,
39:05
SPEAKER_00: slammed by the, at the time, not dead yet, Lindsey Graham.
39:09
SPEAKER_00: You know, there wasn't like a revolt against him for just surrendering to Iran.
39:13
SPEAKER_00: And his polling approved because oil got cheaper and people care about that a lot.
39:18
SPEAKER_00: And that's what he should do.
39:19
SPEAKER_00: He should surrender.
39:19
SPEAKER_00: Should we take a break, talk about the DNC, where Ken Martin should surrender to his critics?
39:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
39:26
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we could tie it back to what you were saying about Ben Wickler
39:32
SPEAKER_01: and Hakeem Jeffries trying to-
39:34
SPEAKER_00: Ben Wickler?
39:35
SPEAKER_00: Who's that?
39:37
SPEAKER_01: Hold the party together.
39:39
SPEAKER_01: What might have been?
39:39
SPEAKER_01: All right.
39:40
SPEAKER_01: If you want to hear about the DNC,
39:42
SPEAKER_01: and then maybe if we have time about Paramount and Warner Brothers,
39:46
SPEAKER_01: you can go to politics.fm and upgrade your subscription.