1/22/25: Trump Hypes H1b, ICE Raids Begin, $500 Billion AI Project, Israel Invades West Bank & MORE!
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All right. Good morning. Welcome to CounterPoints. I'm Ryan Graham. I'm here in the studio by myself here. Emily Jashinsky out on the road, a working journalist, but joining us for the show nonetheless. Deeply appreciated. Emily, how you doing? Great. I'm here at scenic LaGuardia. And now I actually mean that because they did a nice job with LaGuardia when they did their COVID renovations. America was made great again. So what we learned over the last two days is that

The next four years is going to be nothing if not exciting. That's for sure. From the left, it might be utterly terrifying. Some parts of it might be invigorating. But I don't know when this guy is going to slow down. Maybe he's going to plow right through his first 100 days. When is Trump going to get a round of golfing?

The guy must be shaking at this point. You just had to go for the golf, Ryan. If anything, you should be wanting him to golf. It relaxes him. Absolutely. The guy is on an absolute roll. We're going to talk about more of the executive orders that he's been rolling in. He had a kind of wild press conference last night. Not wild. It was a Trump press conference. That's what it was. It's not wild. We have to stop calling them wild. It's not wild at this point. There's a ton of news on the immigration front.

you know, announcement that raids are starting, a kind of backdoor Muslim ban getting kicked in, fights about H-1B visas kicking up inside the White House. And then we've got a $500 billion deal

investment announced in Texas towards AI, which has an interesting through line with the immigration conversation. We can talk more about that. The South is blanketed with snow. Wild. The scenes out of New Orleans are pretty incredible. Probably a decent number of the people watching this show are experiencing snow.

just an extraordinary weather event right now. I know down here in D.C. it feels like it's getting close to zero. Awfully, awfully chilly down here. We're going to talk more about the fallout from Elon Musk's, what do they call it, awkward hand gesture. You know, whenever somebody is out there supporting the far right wing in Germany and puts his hand straight up in the air, everybody thinks it's a sea kale. It's quite outrageous. We're going to talk about some of the response

to that. And also, we're going to give an update on the Israeli raid on Jenin, as well as the kind of ongoing attempts to keep the ceasefire in Gaza together, as well as the possibility of an actual...

future deal with Iran, that we may go from Trump ripping up the Obama nuclear deal to Trump having his own Trump nuclear deal. So, Emily, let's start with Donald Trump's press conference.

yesterday. And we can pick up, let's pick up with this question where he gets asked about the brewing debate within the MAGA coalition about H-1B visas. And H-B-1, I know the program very well. I use the program. Matri-Ds, wine experts, even waiters, high quality waiters,

You got to get the best people. Now, then you go into people like Larry and he needs engineers and Masa needs and this gentleman needs engineers like nobody's ever needed engineers. Right. So so this puts Trump in a situation where I don't think he's quite comfortable, Emily, basically being.

the defender of migrant labor and siding with the big tech barons who were literally in the room with him there saying that they need this cheaper labor from overseas. On the kind of the MAGA side, the argument is, show us, you know, show us who these maitre d's are that are so good at maitre d-ing that you have to bring them over

And you have to replace somebody who's here in the United States. You have to take the job away from them and give it to somebody who you used this process to bring in from overseas. And what they say is, no, actually, what you like is that you can pay that maitre d'.

one-third to a half less than you pay the American worker and the maitre d' is not going to complain about sexual harassment by the manager, not going to make demands about wages, not going to organize with other people in the workplace, not going to file any complaints because the second you do, Mar-a-Lago owns that visa and

and can just yank it, and the maitre d' is back to where the maitre d' came from. That is the reason that employers like these programs, not because they can't find the skilled workers. That's the counterargument. So what I'm hearing is that this is really erupting inside the White House now, but you have the kind of big tech companies

I heard Steve Bannon calling them broligarchs, which is pretty funny, that the broligarchs seem to be winning this argument so far. What are you hearing? Well, you know, it's funny you say the broligarchs line and that Steve Bannon says it because I had a source who was at the Bitcoin ball last Friday and said Snoop Dogg's line of the night was, quote, where my lady's at.

because there just weren't many ladies at the Bitcoin ball. But I'm sure someone will dispute it and say I was a woman who was there, and I'm sure there weren't many lovely ladies there. But it was so funny that Snoop Dogg at least picked up on it. And the way that Donald Trump just described his personal use of H-1B visas, at least to the extent he remembers it, is exactly why people like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon are deeply, deeply

against H-1B visas. Sager explains this over and over again. Bernie Sanders has explained this over and over again. And Ryan, you just explained it over and over again. - And can we pause on that? He probably uses H-2B, which is-- - He said HB1. - Yeah, but he probably uses two, which is a category for service workers, which sometimes you actually do need. You're in a town that has a resort and there just literally aren't the people in this rural area

in order to work in this, like this giant resort that you've got in the middle of nowhere. And then, okay, then you bring in people. Anyway, go, go ahead. Well, no, I mean, one of the things I heard that was interesting is he's saying, I've heard from X, Y, and Z, and this is the danger of sort of surrounding yourself with a literal circle of oligarchs as we're seeing right now is that they're the ones who have your,

ear over Bannon and Stephen Miller. Maybe you don't like Bannon and Stephen Miller, but their sort of populist sensibilities and their mission is actually not to mine as much money from the U.S. government as is humanly possible. They have real ideological ends. And so

The way that Donald Trump just laid that out is going to, maybe Steve Bannon would see it this way, his optimistic take would be that it heightens the contradictions, right? That it gets the oligarchs out faster because the sort of rupture happens earlier in the administration. But who's going to win out in the battle over Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller?

I genuinely don't know how those guys are going to deal with these deep, deep ideological disruptions when Steve Bannon has been calling Elon Musk literally evil. He has been calling him evil for a matter of days now.

It feels weird to be rooting for Steve Bannon in a fight, but these are the teams that are on the field, so I'm going to pull for Bannon in this one. I'm going to give you a jersey that says Bannon on the back. He made a comment on his podcast last night that I found stunning because of how much it resonated with me, and I didn't know that this particular sentiment that I'll describe actually existed on the field.

On the right, but tell me if I'm just ignorant of kind of, you know, the broader kind of intellectual universe there. He said, and it was almost an aside, but he said it and he made a point of it. He said, another reason I'm against this kind of H-1B program is because it creates a brain drain in these other countries. He called it intellectual imperialism.

that, you know, we, as he said, we as nationalists want all nations to have sovereignty and all nations to thrive like we thrive. And I had not heard

nationalists act as sort of internationalists before. The way that I've always conceptualized a right-wing nationalism is that it's a zero-sum competition against these other countries and that if we drain the best and the brightest from India, from Mexico, from Canada, wherever we pull them from, too bad for them. We have a better country and we're doing better. But his phrase, intellectual imperialism,

I find to be completely accurate and I respect it from the perspective of somebody who has covered a bunch of these other countries that have experienced legitimate brain drains. And from somebody who is from a rural area that experiences brain drain. You pull out all the people after they graduate high school because there just aren't any jobs for them. It does actually change the culture

of that place. And to hear somebody say that that matters was, to me, kind of surprising. Should I be surprised by that? Or is that kind of a

Is he out on a ledge there? No, I mean, I think he's out on a ledge, but it's not a particularly surprising ledge for him, as you know, and for my fellow red-blooded Americans, when Ryan says internationalist, it's sort of in the Marxist, or maybe you would say... Yes, in a good way. The working people of the world should unite. We're all humans around the world. We should all value each other. Well, we've seen the...

that can crop up with those domestic disparities, as you just mentioned, like rural brain drain, the tensions that they can create culturally, the disparities they can create. But on an international scale, there's a serious question to be asked as to whether the United States is safer and more stable. If it is plucking the highest or the most ambitious people from different parts of the world, does that destabilize other regions? And that's probably... I mean, I don't know. Bannon is really deep into...

marxist leninism whether or not he agrees with it in full he actually is like he's very familiar with hegel uh so it wouldn't be entirely surprising to me if he is starting to see this through that lens he's mostly alone um in that respect is a small slice but i don't think it's entirely uh surprising i don't hear that argument a lot but i think it's a serious one

Well, speaking of Steve Bannon, let's talk about the January 6th pardons that he announced, I guess, what, two nights ago and then has been responding to questions throughout the day. He was asked about it at his press conference. Let's roll some of that.

-You would agree that it's never acceptable to assault a police officer. -Sure. -So then, if I can, among those you pardoned, D.J. Rodriguez. He drove a stun gun into the neck of a D.C. police officer who was abducted by the mob that day. He later confessed on video to the FBI and pleaded guilty for his crimes. Why does he deserve a pardon? -Well, I don't know. Was it a pardon because we're looking at commutes and we're looking at pardons? Okay, well, we'll take a look at everything, but I can say this. Murderers today are not even charged.

You have murderers that aren't charged all over. You take a look at what's gone on in Philadelphia. You take a look at what's gone off in L.A., where people murder people and they don't get charged. These people have already served years in prison, and they've served them viciously. It's a disgusting prison. It's been horrible. It's inhumane. It's been a terrible, terrible thing. I also say this. You go to Portland, where they did...

where they wrapped police officers, shot police officers, nothing happened to anybody. You go to Seattle where they took over a big chunk of the city and people died. Portland, a lot of people died. Wait a minute. And you go also take a look at Minneapolis because I was there and I watched it. And if I didn't bring in the National Guard, that city wouldn't even exist today.

People were killed and nobody went to jail. So these people have already served a long period of time and I made a decision to give a pardon. Joe Biden gave a pardon yesterday to a lot of criminals. So it's kind of wild to watch the Trump's ability to just be two things at once. Like, you know, he's this he's this tough on crime guy.

who's gonna talk about Philadelphia and talk about Portland every chance he gets. And then we're gonna talk about Ross Aldrich in a second. He's happy to talk about how drug dealers ought to be executed and praise Chairman Xi for the way that he cracks down on drug dealers. And then he frees Ross in the next second. Or to be the greatest champion of the police and then to free somebody who stuck a stun gun in a cop's eye.

How does he get away with this? Like, what is the trick that he's able to pull off here? Well, the obvious answer, I think, is, you know, the level of corruption at the FBI, what has created the permission structure for him to feel like there's a real political license, if not, you know, demand for him to do what he did. And Washington really hates it. But the FBI, in the cases of some January Sixers, I mean, I...

I was one of the first people, because I was covering January 6th, as I said many times, live on the west side of the Capitol. And I was one of the first conservatives to come out and say this was not, you know, a lot of people were acting of their own volition, whether or not there were feds in the crowd. This was a serious, you know, riot by people who were really pissed off.

and, you know, conservatives, Trump supporters who were really pissed off. And then the FBI wildly mistreated and abused the justice system in these just prosecutions of people who were beating cops. And so it created this ridiculous...

politicization of the situation. And the same thing, I mean, I don't want to do a one-to-one with Ross Ulbricht and the J6ers, but the FBI also wildly over-prosecuted Ross Ulbricht, who Trump obviously just pardoned. And so it makes it easier. And Biden, obviously, his pardons make it a lot easier for Donald Trump to feel like he can at least

suppress or undermine the left's criticism of what he just did. So with a lot of voters, it just doesn't pick the punch that it did anymore because they don't necessarily buy the narrative that they're being fed by the media. It doesn't make it right. Just makes it easier for Trump to do.

And see, and so when and when people say when the people in rights say that the Justice Department abused the system and the prosecutions were abusive and their conditions that were like gulag conditions, you know, they talk about the horrifying conditions that the people were kept under. I think what this shows is that they just weren't familiar with our justice system before this.

There's definitely truth to that. And I like when conservatives go to prison because they come out as criminal justice reformers, like almost universally. They go in and they go through this horrifically dehumanizing system that is designed. I swear if you send me to prison for anything. Just six months or so. Don't you even know.

Just a short stint in the medium security. But going through that dehumanizing process and experiencing that, I think changes the way that you understand our quote unquote justice system. And you no longer laugh at people who don't like using the term justice system. You no longer consider them to be like woke lunatics, but actually people who understand what's going on here. So

I think that they are correct that the system was abusive and the conditions were horrible. What I don't think they're correct about is that they were treated any differently than anybody else that gets put through that system, except for the 0.1%. When they wind up in there, they get the kid glove treatment. But everyone else gets abused by our system. And I wish that they had come out of it with more of a universalist. And I suspect some of them will. The fact that so many were segregated...

just among other J6ers, I think will limit that capacity. But I wish that people would come out of it with more of a universalist kind of reform approach to the system than saying we were actually abused. Now, there could be cases where there were indeed actually like particular abuses. Is there anything you want to add on that? Any particular kind of abuses that gave the permission structure for the blanket pardon?

Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of examples and they're hard to parse because some of them actually are kind of BS. And when you're getting into these like cop beating stories, it's easy that they end up getting conflated with the stories of people who were like, you know, not fed their vegetarian meals or like Jacob Chansley is the really famous one. He wasn't fed his vegetarian meals.

vegetarian meals. They tried to hide the evidence of him being walked through the Capitol. Doesn't make any of it right. But there was this big conflation and there were big sentences that were just ridiculous. And there was...

Like Enrique Tarrio is an interesting case. He was working as an FBI informant. So all of that gets brought into the mix. And there are literally hundreds of these cases. There were raids on people's homes that seem insane. I mean, just crazy levels of intense violence

prosecution and sometimes just, sometimes very dubious. But I think to the point that you were making, Ryan, it's not entirely out of the sort of realm of plausibility for our justice system. But I think there was, I think we can all understand that there was a particular zeal for both just reasons, like the Capitol was sacked, and politicized reasons. But to your point, you know, it doesn't mean that it's something other people don't experience. Yeah, which I think you couldn't separate because it really was

a political crime. It just by definition was. So it was always going to be politicized. But let's, control room, if you don't mind jumping to A5 since we were just talking about Ross. So Donald Trump announced that he's giving a pardon, full pardon to Ross Ulbricht, which was the top demand

of the Libertarian Party. And my old colleague, Ken Klipstein, made an interesting point. He's like, can you imagine the Democrats ever agreeing to any kind of demand made by the Green Party? Can you imagine Democrats actually trying to get the votes of anybody other than the Cheney family and their supporters? If you were going to try to get the votes of the Green Party, you might say, look,

We know that you have been trying to free Leonard Peltier from federal prison for decades now, like many decades. He's going to die in prison probably at this point because Biden did not pardon him. And just say, we know this is important to the Green Party. It was important to a lot of Native American groups. We win. We're going to we're going to pardon Leonard Peltier. It's like.

You cannot even like your brain breaks just trying to conceptualize the Democrats ever doing that. Didn't Biden pardon Leonard Pelletier? No. I mean, unless I did, unless I missed it. Did it if that came through in the last minute, that would be absolutely amazing. Amazing. That's so that's amazing. But so.

Can you imagine Biden doing that on day one? Promising to do it and then doing it on day one. Yeah, he commuted the sentence. Well, great. So good. Commute. Wonderful. So if he's going to do it anyway, like think about the way that Trump did it, which is so different than the way Democrats would ever do it. So Trump comes in and says, by the way, that's such amazing news. Like in the 1990s, I was making phone calls to the Clinton White House asking them to commute his sentence or pardon him.

Well, I was gonna say for the purviews like Ryan has a ton going on right now So I feel like it was kind of cool to see you watch that news in real time. It matters a lot It's absolutely delightful. I like in 2000 I went with a Green Party like Caravan to the prison that he's in in Kansas and was part of like a candlelight vigil outside like I'm so I'm so happy to hear that he's out so

Setting that aside, think about the way that Trump did it. Trump goes to the libertarians transactionally and says, aren't you tired of being losers? Support a winner. And in exchange, I know you like Ross Ulbricht and I will pardon him. Let's make a deal here. And the Libertarian Party, there was an internal fight within the Libertarian Party. The faction that took it over wanted to make this the big thing that they asked for from Trump. They asked for it. They got it.

And he does it. Now, a side note, come on, Libertarian Party, like, good for Ross, I'm happy for him and his mother. The whole thing about him trying to kill people is kind of, we can talk about that in a second. The fact that they went for him rather than Edward Snowden is curious. Do you have any insight into why they did that? Because one of them is such a stronger kind of ideological case for democracy.

for libertarianism and for exposing government secrets whereas Ross is kind of an anarcho-capitalist like he's a hardcore libertarian identifies as one he acted as a libertarian but anyway why him over Snowden?

Yeah, because I think Snowden is too much of a popular figure. It would rankle way too many establishment Republicans. It would just be harder for Trump to get done without creating a firestorm that ends up with massive negotiations over other things. Right, like I just don't think most establishment Republicans care that much. He's been in jail since, what, his arrest in 2013? He was charged, or I think he was finally sentenced in 2015. So he's been in prison for a really long time and the internet has changed dramatically.

during that time. And a lot of people would argue dramatically for the worse. It doesn't mean that Silk Road is great. I feel a lot like Sagar who posted on X basically, like, "I'm not a big fan of Silk Road." But if you read about what happened to Ross Ulbricht, it's one of the craziest things. It's not entirely surprising, again, but it's an insane story. I think it was just less of a sort of explosive decision. Like, you know, if you pardon Snowden, that just goes off like a bomb.

Like a bomb. He's trying to get Tulsi through. Makes sense. So Peltier is pardoned. He's 80 and he will... He's pardoned to home confinement. Not pardoned. He's commuted to home confinement. He's an old man. He's been held in very difficult federal prison conditions for many decades, which is going to take a toll on you. So at least I guess he'll get to die at home. Anyway...

So what's been the reaction on the right to the Ross pardon? You know, libertarians are obviously really pleased, but I think it just goes to what we were talking about a moment ago, which is Republicans don't really care that much. You know, I've seen, I think the Free Press published like dueling pieces on why it was good and why it was bad. The why it was bad is from Charles Van Leeman at the Manhattan Institute. But they're just, it didn't ruffle many feathers. Again, I think it's a,

A lot of people just see it as sort of old news and the internet has kind of moved on during that time period. So it's not a scalp that people feel they need to cling to. So probably a very successful decision for Trump, sort of vindicating for McArdle and those folks in that wing of the Libertarian Party.

And for people who don't know, we should have mentioned off the top. He was the founder of or CEO of Silk Silk Road, which was a place where you could buy and sell stuff. And, you know, the main thing that people were buying and selling on there was or a main thing was drugs.

And they basically got him for that, some complicity in that, accused him of basically being a kingpin. Later, after he was convicted of that, they put forward some evidence that he had tried to take out contracts to kill people.

that apparently did not exist. Like somebody was like-- - It seemed like an entrapment. He claims that, or his supporters claim the FBI doctored emails to make it look like-- - Right, so his supporters say none of this happened. - A murder for hire plot. - Right, right. - His supporters say this is fake. - He was never charged. - It never happened. - He wasn't charged. - Which suggests it probably didn't happen. - Yeah, now they argue on the other side,

well, we didn't charge him because he already had a life sentence, so what was the point? Also, there was so much corruption, like extra levels of corruption in his prosecution. Like several of the lead investigators were caught like,

stealing Bitcoin and drugs. And like it was an absolute gigantic mess. So they probably didn't want to kind of go back into that and kind of, you know, peel back the layers of that onion and find it. Well, the judge said this life sentence, which again, he was not convicted of any violent crime. It was all nonviolent. He wasn't convicted of selling any of the drugs himself. It was just facilitating their sale. A life sentence for that is sort of mind

So that excuse for them not charging him with the alleged murder for hire plot doesn't really pass the smell test. Yeah, and there were no people. So even if you take...

the allegations completely at face value. They say that somebody was making up people that didn't exist that were harassing him and then extorting him to go and kill those people, which is kind of bizarre and lends some credence to the claim that that whole thing was made up. But yeah, there are a lot of illegal substances and illegal things bought and sold on eBay and Amazon and using lots of other platforms and we haven't yet

arrested Jeff Bezos. So you can see why people feel like this was treated differently, although Silk Road is not exactly Amazon. Although Amazon has become like this absolute cesspool of scams. It's rough. It's rough. When we were doing the push to get people to buy Ray Fatt O'Leary's book, If I Must Die,

We ended up selling, I think, pushing 20,000 copies in a matter of a week. And the internet or somebody picked up on that and started making fake versions of it. So within days, Amazon was selling fake copies of this book of poems and prose. And I heard from some people who accidentally bought it. And it just shows up. It's like nothing. Just totally. And Bezos said,

And Lena Kahn has looked very closely at this. They could do something about this that they're not doing. But it works for them. They're making money both ways. Lately on the NPR Politics Podcast, we're talking about a big question.

How much can one guy change? They want change. What will change look like for energy? Drill, baby, drill. Schools. Take the Department of Education, close it. Health care. Better and less expensive. Follow coverage of a changing country. Promises made, promises kept. We're going to keep our promises. On the NPR Politics Podcast. Listen on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Listen to the one you feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And speaking of scams, if we can go jump to A4, let's roll this from, maybe you can explain some of this to me, but here's Trump and his meme coin. Benefited, I don't know where it is. I don't know much about it other than I launched it. I heard it was very successful. I haven't checked it. Where is it today? How much?

several billion dollars it seems like in the last several days. Several billion? That's peanuts for these guys. So Trump made a meme coin and wound up making several billion dollars since getting elected president? Is that what I'm supposed to...

- Yes. That is exactly what you're supposed to understand here, that he's sort of joking behind the podium that that's peanuts for these guys as he's surrounded by Larry Allison and Sam Altman at this one, like we said, we tried to say it was wild at the top, but it was very much like vintage.

First Trump administration, very similar. He was really going back and forth with these journalists, like mixing it up with them for a long time, letting everybody ask as many questions as they wanted to, essentially, which has not happened over the course of the last several years. Biden, Kamala Harris rarely ever mixed up with the press, let alone for this long. So it was a winding press conference. And yep, the meme coin came up and it looks like that's exactly what happened, Ryan. And Trump is enjoying that.

And for context, Ryan and I are both on the crypto is a Ponzi scheme boat. So you can kind of see where we're coming from. I find it all to be rather gross. Yes, the incoming president or the president is going to run a run a pyramid scheme. Anyway, what what on earth? I mean, where do we where do you even go with that? I think we go to Ukraine.

This is the next time. Yeah, so this was a quite poignant moment of the press conference where he's talking about Ukraine. Let's roll him talking here about the extraordinary human toll. Vladimir Putin doesn't come to the table to negotiate with you. Will you put additional sanctions on Russia? Sounds likely.

Do you think that the war should be frozen currently along the war should have never started if you had a competent president, which you did in the war wouldn't have happened. The war in Ukraine would have never happened if I were president. But that couldn't happen because the election was rigged. Yeah, go ahead. Could be very soon. And you talked a bit about Ukraine and Russia, but how long do you think it would take to end that conflict? And

I have to speak to President Putin. We're going to have to find out. He can't be thrilled. He's not doing so well. I mean, he's grinding it out, but most people thought that war would have been over in about one week. And now you're into three years, right? So he can't be thrilled. It's not making him look very good. Now, eventually, you know, I mean, it's a big machine, so things will happen. But I think he'd be very well off to end that war.

We have numbers that almost a million Russian soldiers have been killed. About 700,000 Ukrainian soldiers are killed. Russia's bigger. They have more soldiers to lose. But that's no way to run a country. Presumably, Trump is speaking there from the briefings that he's getting from our military because those are bigger numbers than we're used to hearing from public officials. Nearly a million people

Russians, what's six, seven hundred thousand Ukrainians is an absolutely mind-boggling and staggering death toll. Like since 2022, thinking of nearly two million families who had a son or a father or brother in 2022 and do not today because of this war. And you ask yourself for what? Like what has been accomplished in the three years since then that would remotely justify the sacrifice of

nearly nearly two million lives. Emily, what did you make of that claim from Trump?

Yeah, it's, we've seen, you know, those hundreds and hundreds of thousands of numbers sneak into some press reports. I think the Wall Street Journal had something like that. And it just, we just gloss right over it in the political news cycle of we don't do that here. But most people just gloss right over it as though this isn't happening. This isn't something that we have funded over and over again and seem to have no legitimate plan to end. And that's what

Trump, that's where Trump seemed to rankle some people who have previously been hopeful about his anti-interventionist streak. They heard him speaking in a way that felt hawkish about Putin last night. But I also wanted to say, Ryan, I think people read a little bit too much into all of Trump's different like point A, B, C, D in his negotiations, because he'll say one thing, the next minute say something totally different. And it's

it's him trying to like set the terms of the debate. And so obviously right now, behind closed doors, he feels like he needs to talk tough to Vladimir Putin. I don't know that that necessarily means he's all of a sudden, you know, on Zelensky's side, 110%, like going full Lindsey Graham. Hopefully, Ryan, what it means is that we're getting closer to an end of the conflict, because when you hear those numbers, apparently from his security briefings, it's

It's no wonder they're having to yank men in their 40s off the streets in Ukraine to fight this war because it's a death trap and it's miserable. And there's been no end in sight. Absolutely no end in sight. Yeah, and this is very Trump. Like he says the most belligerent thing he can. Yeah, I'm going to sanction Putin, whatever you can come up with. And then he talks later.

about it, you know, being positioning for his negotiation. We'll talk about John Bolton later. But even when it came to John Bolton, you know, the way he describes his hiring of John Bolton is, yes, he was an idiot and a warmonger, but I used him very well. And what Trump claims, now, whether this is retconning or actual strategy from the beginning, he claims that he brings in people like Bolton

to be his his his yap dogs who are going to make a whole lot of noise um and then he's like you know you don't want me to let this guy off the leash do you and then hopefully then he gets a better deal um from iran like that's that's his claim uh whether it's particularly true in the bolton case or not that is generally kind of how he operates and the the with the and the problem with being so transparent about it is you know you and i aren't the only ones that see it like it stops working

I would assume if everybody can see it. And then in order for it to keep working, you have to ratchet it up higher and higher and higher. And every time you do that, you're playing with a little bit of fire. But we'll see.

Yeah, I mean, that's sort of the thing. It's just very, very unpredictable. And I genuinely don't know how Trump behind closed doors is talking to both Zelensky and Putin, how he's talking to other NATO countries. We'll hear more in the days ahead. Obviously, we're literally like 48 hours into this administration, less than that at this point. Marco Rubio has been sworn in as Secretary of State. So I think we're going to start seeing a lot more that will tell us directionally what's to come in the days and weeks ahead, like in the next 48 hours, probably. Yeah.

Yeah. And was it interesting that Trump had to issue an executive order telling Marco Rubio not to be a crazy warmonger? Like there's an actual executive order that says instructions to the secretary of state to make sure that you have an America first foreign policy agenda. Like that's kind of a.

Did everybody get one of those or just Marco Rubio? That was a little... He should give them to everybody. That would actually be just like his... It's almost like a Valentine. Yeah. Yeah, to everyone. I don't know. I've never seen any people like that before. But I think they're more similar than they are different.

to be honest, and I know that's not great for the non-interventionists, but it's almost like Rubio's met Trump in the middle. He has had some people who dismiss the sincerity of his changes ideologically are missing out on the real picture. That doesn't mean that he's suddenly like Rand Paul, but it means that he is genuinely like meeting Trump kind of in the middle on a lot of this stuff. Lately on the NPR Politics Podcast, we're talking about a big question.

How much can one guy change? They want change. What will change look like for energy? Drill, baby, drill. Schools. Take the Department of Education closer. Health care. Better and less expensive. Follow coverage of a changing country. Promises made, promises kept. We're going to keep our promises. On the NPR Politics Podcast. Listen on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

John Stewart is back at The Daily Show, and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition Podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else.

Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Can you hear it? It's the whisper of two wolves inside you. One says, you're not enough. The other says, keep going. You can do this. They're always talking. The one you listen to shapes your life. I'm Eric Zimmer, host of The One You Feed.

On my podcast, we explore how to hear the voice that matters, the one that leads you to courage, wisdom, and love. It's not about perfection. It's about direction. Millions of listeners have fed their good wolf. Now it's your turn. Listen to The One You Feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, well, let's move on to the looming immigration raids around the country. Trump border czar Tom Homan was on Fox News talking about some of this last night. Let's roll some of this. Based on your initial schedule, that today roundups of criminal illegal aliens in the process of deporting them would begin. That seems to have been put on hold for a little while. When can we expect that to happen? Where will it begin? No, it started. It started. All these teams are out there as of today.

We gave them the direction to prioritize public safety threats that we're looking for. So we've been working on the target list. There was some discussion about Chicago because a specific operational plan was released. So we had to look at and reevaluate, does this raise off-track safety concerns? And it does. But we've addressed that, and teams are all effective today. Yeah, and so at Dropsite, we had some people in Chicago, and there were some people in Chicago

They spoke to some undocumented folks who did actually said they had some encounters with ICE agents and they told them they were undocumented and the ICE agents let them go. They were kind of going around parking lots, basically, looking for people who look like day laborers and just asking them for papers. There's a lot of confusion going around. We can actually put up B2. This is a good example. This is in Chicago. Like every city has a

you know, a news outlet focused on the restaurants and the reporting there said a lot of people are not showing up for work. There's a lot of skittishness. There's a lot of concern that the raids are gonna hit, say, kitchens and drag everybody out. What Homan is saying there is that announcing it as Trump did, that he's gonna hit Chicago on Tuesday,

you know, created that kind of panic and may have then caused some officer safety issues. So I suppose what he's, but on the one hand, I'm curious your take on this. On the one hand, they want, I believe they want

spectacular images of confrontations between, not just confrontations, but they want images of booted up ICE agents dragging migrants into the back of paddy wagons. They want those images on Fox News. In order to get those images, they've got to get the media out there and they've got to announce ahead of time where they're going to do these raids. Announcing where they're going to do these raids ahead of time

causes the problems that Holman laid out there. So what, so the question for you is, am I right? Does he just want spectacular images or is there a deeper kind of policy being rolled out here?

I think there's something deeper because they, again, we were talking earlier in the show about Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, who we use kind of as representatives of this broader anti-immigration coalition that is now in the administration and is powerful. They feel like they have a mandate to do a generational immigration crackdown. So I don't think it's just about the optics. And I

I don't think that you're necessarily saying that, Ryan, but I think they also genuinely know they need those numbers in order to achieve their goal. And they feel right now, I mean, if you're talking to people in conservative circles, there's, you know, like a absolute appetite for images that the media would have previously sort of weaponized, genuinely like heart-wrenching stuff.

But like they're saying, we don't feel like, I mean, the New York Times ran that story on Sunday that said public support for Trump's policies exceeds support for Trump. And one of those things was deportations. And it's possible that people overreach, sorry, there's an announcement, people overreach and take that as a mandate when it was just a mandate to like make significant changes. But I don't know, Ryan, like I,

I think they're pretty serious about actually expelling a wide group of people. I don't think it'll have a huge effect on public opinion in the same way that it did back in like 2017, 2018 during the false kids in cages narrative that said, you know, this was implied at least that this was a new Donald Trump policy and that it had

but happening under Obama and blah, blah, blah. I think conservatives just now feel bullish because they feel like they have disrupted that kind of legacy media narrative setting ability. And they're kind of ready for what they would see as like a generational crackdown. So I think it's totally serious.

Well, the difference in defense of the hysterics around the kids in cages, and I covered Obama's kids in cages in 2014-15, those were unaccompanied minors who were being held in bad conditions. And that was exposed. And it was good that that was exposed and it was wrong what Obama was doing.

And when he was doing it for the reasons of doing an immigration crackdown, what the Trump administration did was a deliberate zero tolerance policy directed at families who were with children. And they said, if the family member is charged with illegal entry or something else along those lines, they will separate the children from the parents and they will

and they will detain the children separately. And so that was an actual new policy. And when it was rolled out, it was rolled out specifically with the intent of creating images that would dissuade people from coming across the border. That's one of Miller's big ideas, that you need these images to scare people

uh from coming in so it was true that there had been kids in cages yeah but it was a it was also a new policy related to child separation well and and yes child separation yeah and tom tom homan though actually comes out of the obama administration like the obama deporter in chief line um tom homan was a part of that policy although the reporter in chief line didn't get much play outside of places like a huff post

than Huffington Post at the time. And so I think there was a lot of really dishonest coverage from places like CBS, NBC, CNN, who had not seen the previous policies as deterrence or anything like that. So we don't have to get back into that debate necessarily. But I think to your point earlier about whether or not there will be a public outcry, I don't think

There's going to be a kind of resistance liberal kind of outcry over the principle of it. But how he rolls it out may have an effect.

I totally agree with that. If restaurants are shutting down, for instance, like as that article in Chicago suggested, there's some nervousness around what's going to happen there. And sorry, control room, to jump around, but if we could do B4 here about the farm workers, because this is relevant to this, whether or not this survey is accurate or not, directionally it seems powerfully in

in one direction, which is, you know, 75 percent of immigrant farm workers didn't show up yesterday in Bakersfield because of fears of ice raids. America's rural and agricultural regions will be the hardest hit from Trump's immigration policies. Food prices are going to skyrocket. So that's the kind of claim that you're going to get from Democrats.

from critics of this policy that you actually need these people showing up for work to do the jobs that they're doing at work. And if they don't, you know, the food rots in the vine, restaurants don't open, you know, all the obvious knock-on effects that you'd have from, you know, what they would call a labor shock, a shock to the labor supply. All of a sudden, if people aren't showing up because they're nervous. Now,

People aren't going to stay home forever because they can't. They need to work. So it really depends on, to me, how this filters down to people and what the actual scale of it is. Is there any nervousness in Republican circles today?

that they might create something that they can't control? No, I've never actually, I mean, I shouldn't say I've never seen anything like this, but it's a totally, they feel like, again, it's a new age. Like Trump has been saying the golden era, golden age line, but that is more than just like this sort of this,

attempt at aesthetic optimism. It's actually because they feel like it is totally a new day, meaning they can be aggressive about policies they feel like they have a mandate on and not cower and do sort of Gang of Eight-style immigration politics like they were forced to in 2014. So I think they're actually eager for the crackdowns because it'll create, and I don't mean this callously, I think this is, you know,

there's a substantive conversation about this, but it creates on the lib moments, right? Where people like that before tweet that we had up on the screen about farm workers. I just think they realize that lands differently with the public now. It doesn't mean that's a substantive debate to be had about that. But I think

they're like eager for this fight because they feel like immigration is a winning one in the same way that Democrats are eager to talk about abortion because they know that Republicans are on their back feet and it's a losing, the more Republicans are talking about abortion, the worse off they are. And I think Republicans say the more Democrats talk about abortion, the more the public is going to agree with Republicans because

Democrats haven't moderated enough on it. So I think they're eager for the fight, to be honest. And I, you know, as I was saying earlier, I think that could create a real overreach. I don't know if it will, but I definitely think it could.

You mean immigration or abortion? No, immigration. It could end up with some really bad overreaches. I see what you mean. Let's talk briefly about Trump announcing that he's in an executive order, that he's ending birthright citizenship, which...

I think as a news broadcaster, and correct me if you think I'm wrong, I should add immediately, you can't actually amend the Constitution with an executive order. It's just like Joe Biden declaring the Equal Rights Amendment, like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy. Right, yeah. So, right, Biden on his way out the door posted on Twitter that the 25th Amendment was now ratified.

And the 25th Amendment, this is the Equal Rights Amendment, and it needed to get, you know, had to get three quarters of the states. And Virginia ratified it after Democrats took over the state. And boom, that made three quarters of the states. But in the law that was passed to create the process to amend the Constitution and add the 25th Amendment, it said you had to do it within a certain number of years. It was very clear. It's the 28th Amendment, right? Yeah.

That's what I say. Oh, 25th is the one for crazy people like me who can't remember which the which amendments the 28th Amendment, the ERA. And they didn't reach the timeline. They missed it by, I think, several decades. And and Biden just announced, OK, no. So apparently what Biden should have done is just said by executive order.

I have added the 28th Amendment to the Constitution because that's basically what Trump is doing here. He's telling you, don't worry about what the Constitution says. Don't worry about what Congress says, even. Executive order. So the argument that he's making is that the 14th Amendment says that anybody born here and, quote, subject to the laws thereof is a citizen.

And his argument is that people who are here, whose parents are here without papers or without the right kind of papers, he's saying even if you're here on a student visa, that you are not subject to the laws of the United States.

That's just wrong. Like, that's not even an interesting kind of legal argument to hash out. Like, anybody who was watching this show who was here on a student visa, go ahead and try to rob a bank and find out whether or not you're subject to the laws of this country. Like,

People here on a student visa, people here completely illegally can be charged with crimes and in fact are charged with crimes when they're arrested for them. So the idea that you're not subject to laws only applies, and this is what they meant. It applies to diplomats. If you are an ambassador from Uruguay,

and you are here in Washington, D.C., you are not actually subject to the laws of the United States. And it's a controversial thing, because you'll, and sometimes you'll have some drunk ambassador will run somebody over and kill them and go home. And that's it. Like, they don't get charged with that because they have diplomatic immunity. Anybody who's seen Lethal Weapon knows how that works. Or Princess Diaries. Or Princess Diaries. And so therefore, their children are then

not American citizens. Like, that's the argument there. Yeah, I actually think the Biden parallel is a really good one in this case because what they were both saying is I'm using my executive authority to say this is now the official executive branch recognition of this legal interpretation of the Constitution. You know, I interpret the Constitution as President Joe Biden or President Donald Trump to say that birthright citizenship is...

you know, it wasn't actually intended to be interpreted the way it has been interpreted. And you can amend the Constitution even beyond the ratification deadline. It can be extended. It doesn't matter that the states have rescinded the ratification. So, I mean, this is becoming a theme of the early Trump administration, and it's not entirely surprising. But EOs like this are clearly overreach that would have infuriated the conservative movement and the Republican Party under Obama, because Obama did like

governing with his pen and his pad. And that was one of the biggest conservative arguments against Barack Obama. And in fairness, Trump is undoing some previous executive injections. But this is not one of them. And they are not all like that. And this to me is very extra constitutional. But Ryan, it is an attempt to move the goalposts

in a way that sets the terms and sets the tone for the administration. They do see this as a generational immigration opportunity. And if you can put up B3 here, so 22 blue states have already sued the federal government saying that, no, hey, actually, this is ridiculous. This is not how the Constitution is written. So we will see. The Constitution is

in our current system, what the Supreme Court says it is, not what it actually is. So this remains to be determined. And speaking of fighting out the constitutionality of executive orders, there's a new kind of attempt at a Muslim ban. And this was, we can put up B5 here. So the way that the Trump administration is kind of backdooring the Muslim ban is that they're saying, okay,

We're not going to do what we did the first time around, which is basically single out these Muslim countries. What we're going to do is give the bureaucrats 30 to 90 days to look at all of the countries around the world and then report back to us

about the countries that they believe are particularly dangerous based on this objective set of criteria, and then some or all of the travelers from those countries will be banned, and the assumption is

and it seemed to be the driving motivation, tell me if you agree, Emily, is that the bureaucrats are basically being instructed to come back with a list of Muslim countries, which they then believe will qualify as some sort of objective enough process that it won't look arbitrary and racist and will be,

be allowed to pass muster. Is that right, Emily? I mean, it's a clever workaround as far as they go. That's the difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is you have four years of, and I say this seriously, Project 2025. I don't think Donald Trump is like, he doesn't have the book in front of him. But that's a stand-in sort of for the broader plans that were made in the conservative movement. And that's what's happening. I mean, it's, you know, when you have four years to go back and say, if we come in with a mandate, here's what we're

we're going to do, it's almost like historically unusual that they said we have this guy in Donald Trump who's actually going to do what in some cases we didn't feel Ronald Reagan did, George W. Bush certainly didn't, but even though Donald Trump isn't of the conservative movement, he's someone who can be used to advance the cause of

the conservative movement because he's that like Nixonian madman. He's against the deep state. He wants to drain the swamp and he doesn't care. And he sort of broke in politics and the paradigm and he can be the vehicle for like radical change. And that's, you know, so far in the first couple of days, we're seeing all of this get tested. Lately on the NPR Politics Podcast, we're talking about a big question.

How much can one guy change? They want change. What will change look like for energy? Drill, baby, drill. Schools. Take the Department of Education, close it. Health care. Better and less expensive. Follow coverage of a changing country. Promises made, promises kept. We're going to keep our promises. On the NPR Politics Podcast. Listen on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Jon Stewart is back at The Daily Show, and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into Jon's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors.

And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else. Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Can you hear it? It's the whisper of two wolves inside you. One says, you're not enough. The other says, keep going. You can do this.

They're always talking. The one you listen to shapes your life. I'm Eric Zimmer, host of The One You Feed. On my podcast, we explore how to hear the voice that matters, the one that leads you to courage, wisdom, and love. It's not about perfection. It's about direction. Millions of listeners have fed their good wolf. Now it's your turn.

Listen to the one you feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Moving over to the artificial intelligence news yesterday at the White House. The main theme coming out of the first couple days of the Trump administration is this immigration crackdown.

But interestingly, he also held an event with some with some broligarcs announcing a $500 billion worth of investment into a Texas data center to power AI. Let's roll a little bit of Sam Altman from the White House. To create hundreds of thousands of jobs, to create a new industry centered here. We wouldn't be able to do this without you, Mr. President. And I'm thrilled that we get to.

I think it'll be an exciting project. I think we'll be able to do all of the wonderful things that these guys talked about. But the fact that we get to do this in the United States is, I think, wonderful. So thank you very much.

First, let me talk to you, Sam, about what this means for AI and the future for the U.S. investment here. This means we can create AI and AGI in the United States of America. It wouldn't have been obvious that this was possible. I think it's a different president. It might not have been possible, but we are thrilled to get to do this, and I think it'll be great for Americans, great for the whole world. So this has been in the works. We can put up A2 here. This has been in the works for almost a year or so at this point. But what you saw at the White House was...

these CEOs kind of slobbering over Trump and making sure that he felt like he was getting the credit

for this rolling out. And it is the case that the Trump administration is going to be extraordinarily friendly towards AI. I think that's not even in doubt. We can put up C3 here. One of the executive orders that Trump rolled out was called unleashing American energy. And he basically declared that the United States was in an energy crisis.

The previous energy crisis that you all remember from the 1970s was a crisis of supply. It was when the OPEC countries cracked down on supply of oil. People had to ration it. It created this American energy crisis. This one is described by Trump in his executive order as a crisis of demand. And the reason he says that it's a crisis of demand is, on the one hand,

All of the kind of electricity needs that have been produced by the Biden administration's mandates around climate change. So he nods to that. But importantly, he says that the AI data centers are going to need just absolutely explosive amounts.

of American energy. And so that has created a crisis. And so he's going to sweep away a lot of regulations in order to drive down the prices so that you can have these $500 billion data centers. What I found kind of interesting about the timing here is that on the one hand,

Trump is talking about an immigration crackdown, which from the populist right perspective is aimed at protecting American workers. With the other hand, he's doing everything he can to boost AI, which many American workers see as in direct competition with them, as aimed at creating a tech feudalism that is going to basically impoverish huge sectors of the American workforce.

Emily, what did you make of this rollout? What I was going to say, it's no wonder he's listening to what Larry Ellison tells him on H-1B visas when he's working, as we talked about earlier in the show, on this $500 billion investment. And Ryan, you know this, we often see public-private investments

partnerships like this touted at big ceremonies and then jobs don't materialize. One of the most notable recent examples of this actually comes from the first Trump administration in my home state of Wisconsin with Foxconn. That never panned out to be anywhere near what it was promised in southeastern Wisconsin. And you'll remember they were out there with the shovels, right? It's previous Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, Trump,

you know, they were shoveling the dirt to break ground. And so these things are not always done deals. You know, that can change pretty significantly and it can always underwhelm people. It could always end up underwhelming people. But I think the sentiment, I mean, if you went to, and you probably remember this too, CPAC in 2014,

All of these companies, Google and Facebook, had fancy events and they had, you know, sweets that were had the nicest champagne and, you know, amazing food. And conservatives in the first Trump administration looked back on that as a really gross thing, like the conservative movement felt bad.

badly about itself because all of those, they felt, all of those oligarchs turned on their cultural values and detested them and looked down on them. And this is, I'm curious, I think it's pretty clearly ushering in a new era and it's beckoning the conservative movement to open back

the doors. I mean, I remember I used to go to all these meetings with conservative news and Facebook, like Nick Clegg, and a Facebook conference room saying, you know, here's how, you know, we didn't suppress this, we didn't suppress that, tell me what your concerns are. And, you know, it seems like that's just...

like it never went away. And it isn't to say that some, like the religious skepticism towards AI in conservative spaces is so, generative AI, I should say, is so profound that I don't think it's clear yet how this is going to pan out. But if history, if past is prologue, and it usually is, it looks like that moment is just going to fade away like it never happened, basically.

Yeah, it does feel like we as a public have kind of lost control of this situation here in the United States and that the only thing that the oligarchs need to do is to kind of lavish, like you said, you know, money at the right places, but also then praise, and in this case on Trump, Larry Ellison of Oracle, who along with SoftBank, which is interesting from an America First perspective, like this is... From an Elon Musk perspective. Isn't Musk in an antitrust suit against OpenAI and Sam Altman?

Oh, yes. Big time. Yes. They're at war with each other. And also SoftBank Foreign. That's a foreign investment fund. But here's Larry Ellison of Oracle doing the same as Altman, kind of lavishing Trump with praise. This is C5. Once we gene sequence, once we gene sequence that cancer tumor, you can then vaccinate the person

design a vaccine for every individual person to vaccinate them against that cancer. And you can make that vaccine, that mRNA vaccine, you can make that robotically, again, using AI in about 48 hours. So imagine early cancer detection,

the development of a cancer vaccine for your particular cancer aimed at you, and have that vaccine available in 48 hours. This is the promise of AI and the promise of the future. Oops, sorry, that was a different clip than I expected, but that's fine, because that's actually kind of an even more important one, which is this is...

This is what the kind of AI gurus are using to sell the idea of AI as utterly virtuous and making the world a better place. And of course, if they prove to be correct and they could actually do that, wonderful. We'd all love to have a vaccine that prevents us from getting cancer. Cancer is the absolute worst.

I'm not sure he was reading the room right there by bringing up mRNA vaccines inside the Trump White House. What'd you make of that?

Or maybe he was, because this is the White House. This is the continuation of the first White House that spearheaded the pioneering mRNA vaccine, is vaccine through Operation Warp Speed, which was itself a public-private partnership, if you can really even call it that, to be honest. It was just all melded together. So if anything, like...

maybe Larry Ellison is singing from the exact right hymn book. No, I mean, obviously, I think it does highlight what would seem to be ideological barriers between, again, the Steve Bannons, the ideological populists and the libertarian, I should say the quote unquote America first populists and the libertarian populists, the tech populists and the liberal

the sort of middle American populists that now form Trump's coalition. It's a really uncomfortable marriage. And so far, it's sticking together. But when you put all of these billionaires so deeply into your own coalition, your own inner circle, just the feuding between Musk and Altman, I mean, they all have a lot on the line. Like their futures, their freedom, their businesses, that's all on the line in the relationship with Donald Trump. So they have intense scrutiny, or they have intense...

you know, incentives to get along with each other and to continue getting along with Donald Trump. But Ryan, it is so fragile among them and then among the broader public. Unbelievably fragile.

And this, of course, is a global competition which China is participating in. And not coincidentally, on Monday, on Inauguration Day, the Chinese company DeepSeek, which is a competitor of OpenAI, published a peer-reviewed paper that said,

announced that effectively they had been able to produce this AI application that uses much less energy and is much more efficient and is wide open and can be decentralized. And so for people that are just listening to this, this is just one tweet from a guy pointing out the irony. He says, quote, we are living in a timeline where a non-U.S. company is keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive, truly open,

frontier research that empowers all. It makes no sense. The most entertaining outcome is the most likely." In other words, OpenAI was started as a nonprofit, intended to be open, obviously, as open is right there in the name, and decentralized and aimed at making the world a better place.

It has since been legally and dubiously converted to a for-profit company. That's what Musk's fight with Altman is about. Musk wanted to keep it as a nonprofit. And they are going for a centralized approach where they are going to spend at least $500 billion on these data centers with the idea being

that they are going to just build so much computing power that nobody's going to be able to keep up with them. Whereas the Chinese are

are taking the original open AI version and saying that everything's going to be open, it's going to be as cheap as possible, it's going to use as little electricity as possible, and it's going to be available to basically anybody who wants to use it for a very nominal fee. And that decentralized approach is going to be what allows it to get everywhere. So we'll see who's able to win at that. But at least from the

from the Chinese perspective, they're not, it's interesting, they're not having their policy dictated by oligarchs. Like we are the democracy where we have elections, local elections, we have midterms, we got presidential elections. I have a voter registration card. I can go down to my elementary school and I can cast a ballot.

Yet our AI policy is not made by me as a voter. Our AI policy is made by Sam Altman and our oligarchs. In China, nobody there can vote. Yet the Chinese public seems to have much more say over what their AI policy is than we do here. How do we explain that? And how do we understand democracy if we're less democratic? I mean, I don't know that I...

I don't know that I agree with that, but I do think that we lose a lot of our credibility. I mean, I think there's just more of...

the marriage between, it's almost like you can't call Chinese business people oligarchs because the distinction between public and private just doesn't really exist. And I think things like this, especially when they're not successful and when they're cronyist, which is, you know, that's what Marc Andreessen is trying to say the Biden administration did with AI, by the way, is that they said it was so dangerous. We need to just let the

big guys do it and they need to listen to us. And I think Sam Altman seems to have said, all right, well, if that's the policy, then we can basically stamp out any competition. We can be the best big guy and we can try to mold the government to our preference. We'll give Donald Trump money for his inauguration. We will be there. We will say nice things. And I bet he'll give us what we want, especially if it makes it look like this is America first, bringing lots of investments in. So

You know, they're playing Donald Trump and they're playing the system. They're playing the game in the way that they have for a really long time. But the point about voter control over AI is really interesting because that is, I think, probably one of the clearest examples, that and probably some of our defense policy of like the actual definition of

of oligarchy, which I used to blanch at and criticize Bernie Sanders for using in the United States. But that's oligarchy. That's literally what it is. It's when people have so much money that they can circumvent democratic control and change people's daily lives with the flip of a switch. And that's what's happening in AI. So no doubt about that. I totally agree. Lately on the NPR Politics Podcast, we're talking about a big question.

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Let's move over to a weather update, and I feel like we're going to be increasingly covering the weather over here at counterpoints and breaking points as it gets more and more just extreme. If you live in the South right now, you're getting absolutely walloped. In Florida, they're seeing something they almost never see. Let's roll A1 here, which also covers some of the other. So, yeah, here's, like, when was the last time...

Anybody in Florida has experienced like this level of snowfall. You know, you'll sometimes get a few flakes here and there. All across the Gulf, Gulf of America, if Donald Trump prefers. That's right. You go across the Gulf of America over to New Orleans, you're seeing just absolutely extraordinary amounts of snow. I mean, I don't think that thing's designed to be doing that, but looks actually kind of fun. Yeah.

So I think I would love to hear from people who are down there. I think this would be one of the segments where, you know, if you're watching this from the South, go down in the comments section, like let us know what you're experiencing down there and how...

people are, how people are responding to it. That, you know, that amount of snow in a place that's, you know, familiar with snow and used to getting it isn't a problem at all. But we can put up this next element here. You can see how deep and vast this snowstorm is covering not, you know, New Orleans, all across the panhandle into Georgia. Just

Truly, truly like unusual amounts of snow and cold in places that just aren't aren't prepped for it now, obviously, because, you know, this is the timeline we live in. Everyone immediately starts moving.

making this political. The political link here, of course, you can put up D3 here. Trump, aside from announcing an energy emergency and saying that he's going to lift any restrictions he can find on drilling, maybe drilling in Alaska, drilling off the coastline, whatever you find, he announced, he put up D3 here, that the U.S. is going to pull out of the Paris Accords, which

On the one hand, it doesn't matter. The Paris Accords are voluntary commitments. And if it. Oh, D3 is a stop here. Let's let's roll Trump talking about withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords. Next item here is the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Treaty. Yes, sir.

We're going to save over a trillion dollars by withdrawing from that treaty. So they say there, we're going to, you heard the announcer at the end say, we're going to save over a trillion dollars withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords. That is just complete absurdity. The cost of dealing with the climate crisis, I think, is far less than the cost of not dealing with it. Ask anybody who's dealing with

any of the knock-on effects of the climate crisis. And like I was saying, it's a voluntary accord. So the costs are zero. Like it's just we sign, I would say we're going to try to do X. We're also getting to a place where it's very difficult for us to use the arguments that we used to use. We used to say it's just not fair that we're being asked to deal with the burden

of reducing our emissions when you've got countries like China over here who are just blasting away with their emissions.

That was always a specious argument because China was blasting away, creating emissions to produce junk that they would put on barges and send over here for us to use. So really, the one responsible for the emissions is, to me, the one that's enjoying the kind of product of it rather than the one that's making it. But setting that aside, China has either...

peaked already or is set to peak very soon when it comes to its emissions and is on the way down and is also producing virtually all of, say, the components for the solar industry, wind turbines, etc. So we are going to be complaining about bearing the sole burden of addressing the climate crisis

for an eternity while China actually goes and addresses the climate crisis. - Today's show is sponsored by ByteDance. - That's right. So anyway, first of all, are you hearing from anybody down in the South dealing with this?

you know i've heard from people enjoying it if you're not in an emergency situation um you can see how kids are just loving this they're calling this a once in a generation storm across these gulf states there are emergencies there have been emergencies issued across i believe alabama georgia louisiana florida and mississippi they're getting snow in texas significant snow in texas actually the other thing i just want to mention ryan is that as evacuations are happening

down in San Diego now from another wildfire. And there have been lots of deaths in the state of California just in the last couple of weeks. The death toll we shouldn't forget from Hurricane Helene was I think about 230 as of what we know right now.

There's already, there are already, people are waking up this morning to, I think, news that 10 people have passed away. This is Axios. Historic snow and icy conditions have been linked to at least 10 deaths as it disrupts travel across the southern United States. So this is, you know, it's, depending on how you're experiencing it, obviously affecting people differently, but this stuff is no joke, no joke at all.

Yeah, so be safe out there and yeah, enjoy yourself. See if you can find a sled. I doubt many people have them. You can use cardboard. By the way, that's a tip. If you don't have a sled and they don't sell it at a Winn-Dixie, just get some cardboard. Everybody's got cardboard and yeah, it'll last for a half hour, 45 minutes, then go get another piece of cardboard.

You have a lot of it because of Jeff Bezos. Yes, you absolutely do. Well, obviously, it's Donald Trump's first week in office, and the media is reacting about as you would expect. Now, there's raging debate over Elon Musk's alleged Nazi salute, and I know Crystal and Sagar covered that yesterday, but we wanted to bring this clip of Rachel Maddow reacting to the moment that Elon Musk...

He says you gave his heart out to the audience. That was the line he followed up the salute with. But here's what Rachel Maddow had to say, and then we'll bring you a fun clip from The View. So stay tuned for that. My heart goes out to you. He does it twice. And again, maybe that's not what he meant. Maybe he doesn't know what that is. That happened today. What we're seeing here with the January 6th pardons, this kind of thing does have the benefit of novelty, right? We've never quite seen something like this before. But

Like with the corruption, the boring thing about it is that we know exactly what this leads to. Authoritarian rulers all over the world have always liked to have paramilitary, loyal but unofficial perpetrators of violence and menace to work on their behalf, to intimidate and hurt anyone in opposition, to make it too scary for normal people to participate in politics or civic life, to make everybody who might oppose Trump in any way worried about the thugs that might turn up at their door.

Trump pardoning and releasing from prison the January 6th defendants, including the paramilitaries, means he is effectively immunizing his followers from committing violence in his name. He's making clear, you know, if you support me, the law doesn't apply to you. We've had political violence before. We've had civil war. But before, each of those things has been treated as a calamity and a scandal. This time, it's a platform.

Okay, Ryan, so what she did there was make this case that Elon Musk, and if people were listening to this, they didn't see on the screen what her chyron, well, it wasn't the chyron, it was a picture box on the screen said was all caps, this is not a drill.

And so she's making the case that Elon Musk's, what she seemed to believe was a suggestion or a gesture towards, metaphorically and literally, that kind of fascist right wing and maybe even Nazi history, what she's saying is that ties into the J6 pardons because it's this nudging of paramilitary groups that support Trump to kind of mobilize and rally

behind him. So what did you make of that? That's an argument that actually, I can see it being sort of ascendant. What do you make of it? I mean, in general, yeah. And I think a guy like Elon Musk, who is currently out supporting the far right in Germany, doesn't get a whole lot of benefit of the doubt when he does this

this gesture twice. You know, one time, okay, whoops. Then he does it another time. I mean, I also think, and Musk has said many times that he is at heart a troll. And the, like the troll kind of meme world that he comes out of loves to flirt with this kind of stuff. Like that's their, that's one of their main trolls. Like they love to get the libs upset about something like this.

And so I could see him having done it deliberately with some type of deniability just to create this spectacle because the far-right people

absolutely saw it for what they believe it was. They loved it. They thought it was directed right at them. Like, look what he's doing. And it's not as if he was like, oh, wow, sorry about that. I can't believe I did that. He's just kind of laughing along with it, which is what you would do if you were deliberately doing it

as a troll. Although it's also what you would do if you were, like, if you see everybody just totally overthinking your attempt. And I'm just taking his charitable explanation. I'm taking his explanation here charitably. He was, he says that he was, you know, giving his heart to the audience. So when he patted his chest, he was patting his heart. And then when he extended his arm, he was extending it out to the audience. So the charitable... So you did it like this, right? That's how you would do that. Well, I also smacked my computer. But that's how you would do that. He did...

Was he sprinkling his heart on people? How do you go that way unless you're deliberately... Like, come on. You're giving him way more credit for being a well-adjusted sort of adult human being, I think. It's more work to do that than the normal, like...

but i was just saying like it's also like going along with it and joking about it and is i think also how you would react to it if you're like oh my gosh people are overthinking this stupid gesture that i made with my arms so i don't know if the reaction itself is any like um vindication of the point that this was a nazi salute and i also i mean afd is that's what you're referencing support for in germany i mean elon musk

says that he supports AFD for similar reasons that he supports Donald Trump, meaning the borders, immigration, refugees, asylum, that sort of thing. And AFD is just so wild. German politics are wild. But I mean, I don't think there's... There's certainly one way of putting it.

I don't think there are, at least not yet, shades of early Hitler in Elon Musk. So to that extent, I just feel like I'll freak out when he says something that makes him sound like a Nazi. And gestures like this, to me, it just looks like Elon Musk being a weirdo.

- Anyway, The View responded to it. Let's hear some of-- - The View has been having a week. They've been talking in general about Trump reacting to his inauguration speech and they had an interesting take. Let's take a listen. - The speech itself, I remember when it was done, my first reaction was,

you know, what is this country he speaks of? Because I immediately couldn't reconcile the way I see the country and the people and how it is right now and where he saw it. He didn't say carnage, but he said carnage pretty much in everything else. Do you remember the reference from his first inauguration when he said carnage? I just kind of felt this dark feeling. And then he had this kind of martyr-like...

you guys are downtrodden and almost irreparable. You can't save this place, but I can. And it had this godlike complex without any Jesus qualities. It was kind of like a juxtaposition. But I was really disappointed, not surprised, just to be clear, but disappointed that there wasn't one kind thing to say about the outgoing administration. My posture is this. You guys know my criticisms of Donald Trump. They remain. I'm going to pray for the president. I'm going to

Thank him when he does things that are good, like the hostage deal. I commend him. I am grateful for that. And I'm going to call it out when he does things that are reckless and dangerous. Getting the Israeli hostages and American hostages. And I'm going to call it out when he does things that are... Wait, wait, wait. You're talking about Trump now? Yes. I thought it was Biden who's been negotiating. Love to see our old rising host over at The View now.

Big star. Everyone's having fun. I mean, the other thing I wanted to say... Yeah, for people who don't know, she was briefly a rising co-host before she got snatched up

by the ladies of The View. - It's snatched up by the ladies of The View, a memoir, it's a great memoir title. But yeah, I mean, they, it's interesting because just one more point on the Elon Musk thing. I just remember when I was at the Federalist,

I think the right is kind of sensitive to this and hopefully it doesn't lead to something that gets taken advantage of by genuine bad people who have awful, like, racist, bigoted intentions. But when I worked at The Federalist, there was like a mini news cycle, you might remember this, Ryan, about the Federalist Eagle being a crypto, a cryptic Nazi symbol. And

Just like, to me, this feels like it was plucked from that era of like 2017 and 2018 of like finding Nazi stuff in everything. But maybe it's also just sort of a Rorschach test. I don't know. But I think the view also, that clip, the reason I wanted to include it here is just that

These differing reactions to Trump 2.0, there's some people who, and I think this is the views example. I mean, when Trump 1.0 started, Alyssa was working for Donald Trump and now it's 2025, enthusiastically working for Donald Trump and now it's 2025. And I feel like the view is sort of stuck in 2017, 2018, whereas we're starting to hear, I guess, smarter criticisms now.

of Trump from different corners of the media. I don't know if you've noticed that or like evolved criticisms of Trump that don't feel quite as hysterical as I would say that the Matto clip did just now or the view. I don't know. Do you agree with that? That there's been some evolution? - The entire resistance liberal architecture is gone. Like it has not reappeared at all.

The last time, eight years ago, on January 21st, there were five, roughly five million people in the streets. It was the largest single day demonstration in American history. Hundreds of thousands, maybe half a million in Washington, D.C., and then another some four plus million in cities all across the country, Alaska, like you name it. Everybody. Everybody.

who had been kind of just passively involved in politics on the Democratic side, and did not think that Donald Trump was going to win, was kind of shocked into action. A lot of them ended up running for office. They came out and protested the Muslim ban shortly after that. And that kind of changed things.

What Trump was able to get done it it it did create a political counterbalance It's not it's not even it's not even remotely there this time like nobody's even trying to pull that together The protests happened unless you were on the National Mall over the course of the inauguration weekend And that was so different from the Women's March where you know, you could it was it bled into everywhere. Yeah. Yeah, exactly So yeah, it's it's just a completely different

which then creates space for some different kind of criticism and reaction, which is still taking form and shape. And we'll see what that ends up looking like. Lately on the NPR Politics Podcast, we're talking about a big question.

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like in-depth interviews and a roundup of the week's top headlines. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Can you hear it? It's the whisper of two wolves inside you. One says, you're not enough. The other says, keep going. You can do this. They're always talking. The one you listen to shapes your life. I'm Eric Zimmer, host of The One You Feed.

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Following the ceasefire in Gaza, Israel launched a massive raid into Jenin, which is a resistance foot stronghold in the West Bank. We can put up this article here by Sharif Abdel-Kadous and Mariam Barghouti in Dropsite News.

I just want to read from a little bit about this. They write, Israel launched a major military operation in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, raiding the city with troops, military vehicles and bulldozers backed by airstrikes, drones and Apache helicopters. At least nine Palestinians have been killed and more than 40 wounded in the ongoing operation, according to the Ramallah-based Palestinian Health Ministry.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the goal of the, quote, large scale and significant military operation was to eradicate terrorism in Jenin. Netanyahu wrote on Twitter, we are acting systematically and decisively against the Iranian access wherever it extends its reach. Now, this is coming at the same time.

that there have been riots in Jerusalem. We can put up some of this footage over there because after some of the Palestinian captives were released by Israel as part of the ceasefire deal, settlers

Israeli settlers then kind of stormed into a refugee camp to try to take revenge over that. The IDF or the Israeli police showed up and saw masked men with guns and believed them to be Palestinians, shot at them.

not realizing that they were Israeli extremist settlers, and critically wounded two of them. And the result of that shooting has been these riots from the Israeli public condemning the Israeli government for accidentally mistaking Israelis for Palestinians.

and shooting at them. And so while so far roughly 90 Palestinians were released as part of the hostage deal, already Israel has detained more than 90 Palestinians in the West Bank, giving a real kind of spinning-the-wheels feel to the attempts to reach some type of peace agreement here. At the same time,

And the Trump's Middle East envoy, the man, you know, Witkoff, who was able to kind of browbeat Netanyahu into agreeing to this ceasefire deal, said a couple of days ago that he was considering.

trip to Gaza to see for himself what the destruction has been like there. That was followed yesterday with, and we can put up F4 here, with an explicit invitation from Hamas to say that Witkoff is welcome to come back.

engage in direct talks with Hamas to see for himself what the situation is and to hear directly from Palestinians and from Palestinian leadership where they are on the unfolding ceasefire. Emily, Witkoff's intervention into this

at Trump's behest into this conflict has seemed to change the tenor of it. But what Netanyahu is showing here, it seems, is that he is intent on ratcheting up violence, you know, wherever and whenever he can. Now, Vesel Smotrich was quoted as saying,

that this raid in Jenin was authorized by the war cabinet as a new kind of war aim in exchange for Smotrich and his party agreeing to the ceasefire in Gaza. So in other words, if we're going to sign on to this ceasefire, you have to launch this incursion into Jenin and make this not just a police action,

as sometimes happens in Jenin, but a full-scale invasion. So Netanyahu agreed to that and is also saying that he...

holds open the possibility of, not just possibility, but almost the certainty of resuming the war in Gaza, but then enter Witkoff. Do you think that Witkoff or Trump kind of have the will to intervene here? Because it seems like they'd have to just constantly be fending this off. Like this isn't the kind of thing you can do once and then it's done. They have to be there with their

foot in the door, keeping it from closing at all times. And basically no Republican president other than Donald Trump would have agreed to this particular ceasefire deal. This is another way in which he totally confuses the boundaries, where he totally sort of explodes the boundaries of acceptable

policy maneuvering on the right. And so I don't know that people in Trump's orbit expected what you just laid out, Ryan, which I think is totally correct, because we know one thing Donald Trump is more sensitive about than just about anything else is looking a fool, being made to look a

He doesn't seem to particularly like Benjamin Netanyahu, we've mentioned before, but he reposted that Jeffrey Sachs video about a month ago, and he's had plenty of criticism for Netanyahu in the past. So I don't think he wants to put up with Netanyahu's or what he sees as Netanyahu's bullshit. He doesn't want to look like he's being steered by Benjamin Netanyahu and that he is not fully in control as Donald Trump. And that's the dynamic I think that's going to unfold with Netanyahu.

alongside this new ideological component to the point about no Republican president agreeing to this deal other than Donald Trump. I don't think most Republicans in Congress would have agreed to this deal and maybe not even in his own cabinet. And so at least Stefanik, as she was going through- - Before we get to her, one other piece that people have probably seen, Trump was asked about whether he thought the ceasefire in Gaza would hold.

at one of his Oval Office press conferences, and he said, I doubt it. He said it's their war, which I'm sure was cause for celebration in Tel Aviv among that Yahoo circle. Right, but what does that mean in terms of U.S. support? So is that what's on the table with Donald Trump? Exactly, that's a very good question. Is he saying this is your war?

Right. Is it our weapons in their war? Because that right. Exactly. And what makes it their war rather than our war? So that seems to be his his wish. Like, I think that's what Donald Trump wishes that it was their war and not ours. But it it is ours.

Well, and a big reason for that is because the sort of ideological convictions of the sort of coalition that's been part of the Republican Party for a long time that we'll see on display here is E5. This is Elise Stefanik getting asked. And remember, Trump's ambassador to Israel is Mike Huckabee as well. So when you hear Elise Stefanik's answer to this question, just bear in mind that this is, you know, obviously we all know this. You don't even need to be reminded of this. A fairly consensus position among

among the sort of intellectual class of the Republican Party, maybe not the median Republican voter, although I'm sure many would say yes. But here's how at least Stefanik handled the question about the kind of ideological underpinnings of her position here. Answers in my office. But I did ask you whether you subscribe to the views of

Finance Minister Smotrich. Of who? I'm sorry. Smotrich. This is the Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich and the former National Security Minister Ben-Gadir, who believe that Israel has a biblical right to the entire West Bank. And in that conversation, you told me that, yes, you shared that view. Is that your view today? Yes.

Okay. I think when it comes to this very difficult issue, if the president is going to succeed at bringing peace and stability to the Middle East, we're going to have to look at the UN Security Council resolutions, not just the ones on Lebanon, which we should enforce, but other UN Security Council resolutions. And it's going to be very difficult to achieve that if you continue to hold

the view that you just expressed, which is a view that was not held by the founders of the State of Israel, who were secular Zionists, not religious Zionists.

- Okay, so she's being confirmed for ambassador to the United Nations and you could parse that in a bunch of different ways. I'm sure she could, or a defender of hers could argue that when she says she believes that there's a biblical claim to those lands, they just mean it in terms of like the Bible laying out the history of the Jewish people having a claim to being the indigenous people. - Well, the claim is different than right, right?

- Oh yeah, I mean, so I think the obvious and that, you know, an evangelical Christian like a Mike Huckabee would say that biblical Israel and the way that it's sort of described, not just in the Old Testament, but the New Testament is referring to the modern political state of Israel. And that's not an uncommon belief in evangelical circles. It's not an uncommon belief in many religious circles. So I think that's likely the interpretation that's correct in this case.

in her case, to explain why Elise Stefanik answered the question that way. Yeah, the word Israel is in the Bible. Like, okay, that's true.

But what that has to do with UN security resolutions is like nothing. It definitely makes any two-state solution, which is like the point that US politicians push on Israel when Netanyahu says he doesn't believe in a two-state solution. That's the ideological position of even secular Zionists, even somebody like Netanyahu. And that's a pretty hard square to circle if you're trying to deal with the West Bank.

And so it's such a convoluted mess because of that out of control ideology, ideological, like a relationship to Zionism that you're describing there, coupled with some other developments that we're seeing, not just the ceasefire that we have so far, but also we can put up this next element up on the screen here. Trump, in one of his first actions,

stripped John Bolton of the security detail. - That's a great tweet though, by the way, you should read it on the screen if people aren't looking at this tweet. - Matthew Petty tweeted, "The Iran deal 2.0 will be offering John Bolton as a blood sacrifice in exchange for building Trump Tower Tehran." Which is, like everything in this era, a joke, but also not a joke.

these are the, these are the times we're living in. Like Trump, um, just yesterday was talking about how, uh, North Korea has incredible, uh, condo opportunities because of the seafront, you know, so much, uh, seafront property. He talked about how, uh, spectacular you could do a kind of, kind of condo rebuild, uh, in Gaza. So the idea of, uh, a Trump tower, Tehran is not ridiculous. And the idea of blood sacrifice. No,

no i mean they literally announced the trump organization literally recently announced they're doing a second saudi arabian tower like it's it's to your point ryan like yeah no but they're also like literally building these towers and with countries that we do these uh like extremely important foreign relations with and trump has technically divested from trump organization uh at all of that but we don't need to open up the can of worms to say that the joke has some legs

Yeah. And my view, my view on the Bolton, I'm curious for your take on this, my view on the Bolton decision to not, not give him this 24 hour security anymore is, you know, Bolton, like, I don't, you know, I don't want anybody killed, but, you know, Bolton has made his choices. Bolton has, you know, decided to live by the sword, like the most militaristic kind of policy career that you could

really conjure up in 20th and 21st century America. Like the body count that trails behind him is just completely countless. So he got to do that with his career. The public does not then have some special obligation to him because he made those decisions. Security details are insanely expensive. Like, you know, millions, you know, you know,

We don't know what it really cost, but like millions and millions of dollars. Like this is not a small amount of money to have a security detail on a single person like this. And correct me if I'm wrong, Ren, this was he was the subject of an alleged Iranian assassination plot. And that's related, related presumably to his push for.

to assassinate Qasem Soleimani, who was an Iranian official who was killed in Baghdad after landing in the airport and then getting into a car with some other Iranian officials wearing a suit and

You know, he was, he was, he ran the IRGC and, and, you know, he, you know, so, you know, he had himself a huge trail of bodies behind him. He made, you know, he made his choices. But assassinating him with a drone in another country was, was a huge, you know, break with norms. And, and, and I believe that's the main thing that, that Iran has said that they're, you

you know, angry at Bolton for. For Trump to so quickly strip the security detail from him does to me suggest that he's serious about actually some type of Iran rapprochement, which he himself blew up by walking out of the Iran nuclear deal and then entering into the Abraham Accords in an attempt to kind of butt, you know, combat and counteract

Iran through a combination of an alliance between UAE, Israel and Saudi Arabia. What's fascinating is that while we're inaugurating a new president here over in Davos, the World Economic Forum shows are meeting,

So, of course, the Saudis are there as well. You can put up F7 there. The Saudi foreign minister at Davos gave a speech basically very strongly encouraging Trump to continue pursuing warm relations with Iran. And and, you know, so Israel's

assault on Gaza over the last 15 months has created the kind of political pressure in the region that has pushed, paradoxically, Saudi Arabia and Iran closer together. China has actually helped to broker a rapprochement between them. And what the Saudi foreign minister is saying is keep that going. We don't actually need to be adversaries in the way that we are now.

with Iran. And so if this is some kind of blood sacrifice fig leaf, maybe that joke of a tweet was not reading too much into it. And go to this last element and then we can get your response to it. This is F8.

Yesterday, so the headline here in Jewish Insider is pro-Israel Republicans alarmed over Trump's Defense Department appointee. And it's actually kind of plural. Yesterday, the Trump administration announced a whole slew of top political appointees over at the Pentagon, a dozen or more names. And

Not a single neocon on that list, not a single Iran hawk on the list. They also announced that they were firing Brian Hook, who we reported on here, who was he was one of the hardest core Iran hawks in the previous Trump administration and was brought in to be the chair of the State Department transition. And when when he was appointed to that, a lot of people like, oh, yikes, like that's

this is bad news. Like if you've got him in there, this seems like you're going to be organizing for a confrontation with Iran. The first thing he tried to do was try to get Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. That failed. And now Hook himself has been fired. And Trump fired him, I don't know if you noticed this, in a hilarious way. He said, I have, basically he said, I have fired a bunch of idiots from the previous administration.

And he put him on the list of those idiots who worked for the previous administration. What he was implying is that he worked for Biden, but he actually worked for Trump and was the chair of Trump's State Department transition. So just a classic Trump of like hiring the guy. And then when he fires him saying he didn't even know him and he's like,

pretending he wasn't the chair of the transition. And hey, I'm not going to call him out because good, because, you know, get that guy out of here. I think Sagar posted something on Twitter yesterday saying like the list of names that were at the Trump department was just, you know, banger after banger. Like these are kind of anti-interventionists. You know these folks better than I do, but from my people in this world, they were thrilled at this. And the fact that

Jewish Insider, which is a very strong reflection of the kind of AIPAC

um, Likud wing, um, is, is alarmed, um, suggests that the, the excitement, you know, has some merit to it. What, what's, what, what's your assessment? Right. Yeah. They did this as well. Um, I forget which publication it was. It was a conservative publication and it was a, I think a relatively pro interventionist publication that did this with, uh, bridge Colby, um, at the Pentagon. Yeah.

Yeah, Sager's totally right that like this is again, we were talking earlier in the show about the immigration hawks seeing this as a generational moment for a crackdown because they had these kind of four Biden interim years to plot a potential Trump return and potentially with a popular vote win that they feel like is a mandate and the wind at their back.

And they got basically exactly what they were looking for. And that'll have some interesting ramifications. But one place where it could be really positive is on foreign policy, where the conservative movement has made a genuine shift. Not everyone, of course. But, you know, Donald Trump, you know, out with Bolton and in with these guys, in with the, quote, banger after banger list that you referenced from Zogger.

taking a look at who's at the Pentagon. You could say the same thing over at the State Department. It's shaping up from what I'm hearing to look really similar. So that's obviously not to say that this is going to be like Rand Paul's Pentagon and State Department or Bernie Sanders' Pentagon and State Department. But

But just about anything is better than the status quo we've been experiencing and, you know, for the last how many decades. And whatever you think about Donald Trump, he is very good at disrupting the status quo. And if it's going to get disrupted, please,

please disrupt our foreign policy because it desperately needs new fresh voices and trump is sincerely bringing them in so we'll see where that goes i mean the israel he seems very happy with steve whitcoff so far he seems very happy with the deal so far even if a lot of his republican allies are not

But this can all, I mean, obviously this is, we were talking about, this is the theme of the show is his coalition of personnel is so fragile. His coalition of personnel worth his coalition of supporters is fragile in and of itself. So there's just a lot that can change very quickly, but he's at least setting himself up in a much better position in terms of positive foreign policy outcomes than he did in 2017.

Yeah, and the reason we wanted to do all this in one segment is because all of those things are related. If Trump only cared about the Gaza ceasefire deal because of Gaza per se, it would fall apart because he doesn't really care about that. But the Saudi-Iran and Israel relationship is key to that. Trump very much wants...

a Saudi-Israel normalization deal. He desperately wants that, and he wants that to be one of the things he does. In order to get that, Gaza can't be in a conflagration. There cannot be a genocide still going on in Gaza. To get that Nobel Peace Prize that we were talking about on the show last week would require an Iran-Saudi-Israel. You're not going to get Iran and Israel, but if you can get Iran and Saudi Arabia, Iran and the U.S.,

Israel and Saudi Arabia together in a deal that's like peace prize worthy. And none of that can happen if Gaza is still undergoing the genocide. So that would be the structural reason that he would actually kind of push back on Netanyahu's effort to keep

to keep this going. The article you're talking about, by the way, also was in Jewish Insider. And the headline was, Rumored for a Trump Posting, Elbridge Colby's Dovish Views on Iran Stand Out. It's just absolutely stupid. It's complete nonsense. He's a realist. Anyway, we don't need to get into it, but it is just idiotic. And he steamrolled through. Elbridge Colby is in there. And people are very excited about it in the sort of DC MAGA world. They're very excited about it.

Yeah, so, all right, we'll see where that goes. Anyway, Emily, thanks for bearing with us on the road. Have a safe trip. Thanks for bearing with me. Yeah, for sure. No, Ryan and I obviously both have full-time day jobs, so sometimes life takes us on the road, but just great to be here with you, Ryan, and hope you have a great rest of your week. And we'll see you back here next week. All right, see you, everybody.

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