1/29/25: Trump Funding Freeze Blocked By Judge, Stephen Miller Spars With Tapper, Charlamagne Confronts Vivek On DOGE Exile, US Romania Coup, Trump Envoy In Gaza
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All right, good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. I was just telling Emily that my new favorite medium is TikTok. Yeah, I just learned Ryan is like a TikTok celebrity. Loving it. Loving TikTok. Just the last couple weeks. Thanks, everybody. It's fun over there. I'm going to stick around now that Trump salvaged that. But if he sells it to Microsoft or Oracle... Or our government. Have you seen that part of it? I mean, there's a big distinction. Yeah, but it's on the table.

Microsoft has never made a consumer product worth using. Oracle is basically a project of the CIA. And TikTok's a project of the CCP. So I guess we don't have any great choices. Drowning in alphabet soup. Yeah. Well, you didn't like the Zune? Wasn't that a Microsoft product? The...

I forget all of their products. Somebody at Microsoft the other day was like, remember how bad the Microsoft phone was? I was like, I literally don't even remember the Microsoft phone. I also don't remember a Microsoft phone. No. That's how bad it was. Okay.

Awful. Well, we do have a lot of news today. Actually, just like an almost impossible amount of news. Like every time you think a Trump era news cycle is crazy, you are not at the peak. We still have not peaked, even though it feels like, speaking of drowning, that you're just drowning in news by the hour. I heard your man, Steve Bannon, call it Days of Thunder.

Is that what he's saying? He was at an event last night with Breitbart, the old Butterworth's, the like, it's this right-wing bar that's become the like. It's great. It's like where Jefferson and Franklin and the French revolutionaries, it's like the French cafe version from the revolution. Yeah, so they're pumped. Oh, were you there? No, I didn't go. Oh, okay.

I'm not doing anything. This is about the only thing I leave the house for now with my wife. That's true. That's true. But so let's, we'll be talking about... I did get invited though. That's how weird this world is. See, that's, I figured that you were on the list. He's a regular War Room listener. You got to tune in to hear what's going on. So the shutdown, obviously, the federal aid shutdown has been significant.

throughout the last 24, 48 hours. But there are a ton of updates pertaining to what is, what is not, what was, and what was not covered that we are going to start with. We're excited to have Jeff Stein here, who was chasing down a lot of leads yesterday. As a reporter, the Trump administration is saying that Jeff and other reporters are part of a big quote unquote hoax. And that's how all of this got started. This is going to be their big thing. Anytime they screw up,

Yeah. They'd be like, see, hoax. Another hoax. Another hoax from the mainstream media. I'm going to do that too. And meanwhile, people would be like, I can't get into my Medicaid. Why is the mainstream media keeping the Medicaid portal from working? Yeah.

We'll ask Jeff why he's doing that.

up in these raids, Department of Homeland Security. Secretary Kristi Noem was- She suited up. She put on some gear. She suited up. They had the photog. They were ready to go. So we'll be doing a block on that. It looks like Pete Buttigieg might finally be in a good position to win elected office on the- Again, remember, this is the powerhouse mayor of whatever town that is. I was just going to say, on the federal

level because there is now a Senate seat. The town where Notre Dame is. A Senate seat open in obviously Pete Buttigieg's famous home state of Michigan, which actually a lot of people don't realize he moved to Michigan a couple of years ago, likely with something like this plan. Yeah, people are always saying that he's cursed because he's got such high ambitions, yet he's from Indiana where no Democrat is going to be elected to the Senate or the governor's mansion in a very long time. And

Buttigieg was like, wait, do I live in Indiana? No, I do not live in Indiana. In fact, I am a longtime Michigander. Yes, of course. He just bleeds Michigan. But we'll be talking about that. It's a pretty interesting Senate race that's shaping up. And Vivek, he bleeds Ohio. Yeah, Vivek was on Charlemagne and Breakfast Club, and we have a great clip, so stay tuned for that. And he was strongly suggesting he's running for something in Ohio. Yep.

American hero Jim Acosta signed off of CNN yesterday after they tried to bump him to a later slot. We have a truly hilarious video of Jim Acosta's sign off from CNN. Just great stuff. Excited for that one. Did you see his sub stack live? Oh, he launched a sub stack. And he said in his first sub stack live, he said, I'm going independent for now, which is such a delightful way.

to use the phrase independent to qualify it with for now. Just buy me out. It's like, well, wait a minute. It's one thing to say I'm going independent. Okay. Because that suggests you weren't independent before even if you did work for somebody. Yeah. But then to qualify it with for now. Yeah, right. Because independent has such a positive connotation. Right. But not to people like him. To him and his circle, it reads as a failure. Right. And for him, it's for now.

Maybe he gets scooped up by the contrarian, which is the new explosive centrist. The Jen Rubin joint. Jen Rubin and Norm Eisen. Yeah, maybe. Maybe he will. He would love that. We should also, in that block, make sure to mention the hilarious Chris Silliza thread. We're both obviously very close observers of Chris Silliza's Twitter feed where he just with all...

without any self-awareness goes through things that he got significantly wrong over the last decade. It's incredible. So we'll hopefully bring a little bit of that to the table as well. Romania, Ryan's publication Dropsite had an absolutely fantastic rundown of U.S. intervention in Romanian elections that just have a huge story that just really hasn't been covered. Really crazy story.

Yeah, so we're going to do that. And then your colleague, Murtaza Hussain, is here. Yeah, so Murtaza is going to talk about Steve Witkoff going to Gaza with Ron Dermer. So this is Trump's Mideast envoy said a week or two ago that he wanted to go visit Gaza, which shook up Israeli politics. Like, what do you mean you're going to go visit Gaza? You're going to talk to Hamas? Like, that's not how that works. He's a dealmaker. He's like...

How am I going to make a deal if I don't understand both sides here? Ron Dermer, who is Netanyahu's basically longtime top lieutenant, accompanied him to the Nizarim quarter. Murtaza just returned from a reporting trip in Syria. He'll also update us about what's going on there, what he has told me about what he saw on the ground there. It's utterly fascinating. He says the fighting is, by the way, not complete, in fact, and that while Assad has left, he

Because Assad's government was so heavily propped up by basically drug trafficking, they make Coptagon, this like disgusting, like low-grade speed that they sell mostly to Russia. Because they were making so much money from Coptagon,

And those commanders are like, we're not quitting. I don't care if you flew to Russia. We control this little bit of land. We got a factory that's making Captagon. We're making money hand over fist. We have weapons. What are you going to do about it? So it's a...

very incendiary situation. Well, that'll be a fascinating conversation with Maz. So let's dive into the news today with the federal aid grants, the federal aid, the loans, the grants, and the freeze slash shutdown on those. Let's go to Jeff Stein for some updates.

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A judge has ordered a freeze on the, or has ordered a pause on the Trump funding freeze. We can put this first hair shade up on the screen from CNBC. A federal judge paused, actually until February 3rd, the implementation of a Trump administration order that would have frozen the issuance of federal grants and loans. We are joined by Jeff Stein of the Washington Post, who just over the last couple of days has been working remotely

really hard on this story. Busy man. Busy man, running down all kinds of news and reporting. So Jeff, thank you for being here. My pleasure. Great to be on with Crystal and Sagar. That's Crystal. It's the only way we can get people on this program. And then we show up and they're like, what?

What's going on? I guess I'm here. Might as well do the hit. Well, Jeff, let's just start with this news about the pause. Can you just tell us a little bit about what this means? I think that's a good place to start because it's really confusing. Like at any given point yesterday, what was actually happening was confusing because people were interpreting what the White House sent and the White House was saying that they should be interpreting it differently. But actually in

practice, people's interpretations kind of become policy. So as of right now that there's a freeze, let's say you are the veterans charity that you talk to in California, mostly funded by federal grants. What does this mean for you?

What it should mean, at least, is that there is no stoppage of funding. And so whatever was expected to come in, you know, in the next few months would and that there would be no interruption. However, you know, in the last 12 hours or so, I've been receiving numerous text signal messages, calls, e-mails,

from people who say that their funding is being interrupted. And so it's 8.30 or so this morning. As soon as we get off this call, I'm going to figure out what's going on there because this federal order seemed pretty clear. There were some exceptions, for instance, things that had been frozen unilaterally by the Trump administration before this most recent stop order seemed like it would still be stopped.

But what the Trump people had done was massively expand, I mean, in an unprecedented way with pretty unclear legal standing, the extent of the president's hold on federal funds and

The judge really was very clear that the vast majority of that needs to continue, at least until February 3rd. But given all the confusion and given that I've been asking the Trump people, are you complying with this order? And they haven't said. So I think there was a huge sigh of relief there.

from a lot of people yesterday that this crisis would be over. For some, it doesn't seem to be yet. Provisionally, I'll say, because it's still so soon after the order, maybe things will get sorted out today. Yeah, I think this entire four years will probably be like the last 15 minutes of a horror movie where people keep sighing and thinking that it's over. And then boom, like something else comes out of the closet. So yeah, I would encourage people not to sigh and think that it's over unless, you know, they're trying to

draw some type of monster from around the corner. Let's roll a little bit of Caroline Leavitt yesterday at her first White House press briefing where she did not really kind of settle people's nerves about where this is going.

Can I clarify for a sec what you were saying before on Medicaid? It wasn't clear to me whether you were saying that no Medicaid would be cut off. Obviously, a lot of this goes to states before it goes to individuals and so forth. So are you guaranteeing here that no individual now on Medicaid would see a cutoff because of the pause? I'll check back on that and get back to you. John. On the freeze in federal funding.

-Who advised the president on the legality of telling government agencies that they don't have to spend money that was already appropriated by Congress? -Well, as the OMB memo states, this is --

certainly within the confines of the law. So White House Counsel's Office believes that this is within the president's power to do it, and therefore he's doing it. Okay, so they disagree with lawmakers who say that they don't have the power to freeze this funding. Again, I would point you to the language in the memo that clearly states this is within the law. So let's take the first part first, which is Medicaid. The memo that went out from OMB said that it

you know, money that's going out to individuals will not be interrupted. It also said none of this should be construed to apply to Social Security or Medicare. They could have added Medicaid and did not. And as one of the reporters there pointed out, because Medicaid flows first, you know, from the federal government to states and then from states to individuals, all these portals ended up

going down. The memo did specifically say that it excludes money going from Medicaid to payment providers. But they didn't, but either they forgot the state part or what. Now the White House is saying it was a screw up and we're going to fix this. What is the truth here? What can you tell us about how this happened?

So really good question, Ryan, that we're still honestly trying to get to the bottom of what we don't know precisely is whether, you know, we know for sure that at a minimum, they forgot to include in the order this health care program that 70 plus million people rely on for their insurance.

And at a minimum, it's clear that this stoppage was precipitated by everything going on in the federal government. What we don't know is, did someone at the Trump White House tell CMS, which runs Medicare and Medicaid, stop payments for Medicaid? I think that is not what happened. What seems more likely is that there was a rush from

amid the confusion of the stop order to this portal, which typically runs without that much frenzy. It's sort of just running on autopilot. And when this order went out saying, hey, everybody, we're ordering a cessation to federal payments and Medicaid is not included, it may have led to sort of an overwhelming response that effectuated the shutdown of this program. But again,

I think the critics would say, and I think maybe someone legitimately, it doesn't really matter why. It was clearly left out of their initial order, and clearly the events of the last two days precipitated this shutdown. So, you know...

The White House not having an answer to that question, you know, it was something that we saw repeatedly in the first Trump administration. He does not really care about the health care programs that serve poor Americans. I mean, he tried to massively cut it during his first term and characterize it as getting rid of Obamacare, even though it really is not the same thing. So, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, at a minimum, maybe it looks like negligence. Well, yeah, I was going to say, it's so interesting you said that, Jeff, because it did feel like something, everything is very carefully crafted that we've seen so far. This is the one thing that felt more like 2017. Like they just had the, they didn't have their bearings, you know,

You can love or hate the policies, but they have been sort of taken from years of planning at this point. And this one just seemed really haphazard. Let's roll another clip of Caroline Levitt getting questions about the payroll at some of these organizations who felt they may be affected.

again, during yesterday's press briefing. Is the Trump administration recommending that organizations that rely on federal funding make payroll, pay their rent in the meantime? It is a temporary pause, and the Office of Management and Budget is reviewing the federal funding that has been going out the door. Again, not for individual assistance, but for all of these other programs that I mentioned. I also spoke with the incoming director of

of OMB this morning, and he told me to tell all of you that the line to his office is open for other federal government agencies across the board. And if they feel that programs are necessary and in line with the president's agenda, then the Office of Management and Budget will review those policies. I think this is a very responsible measure, again,

The past four years, we've seen the Biden administration spend money like drunken sailors. It's a big reason we've had an inflation crisis in this country. And it's incumbent upon this administration to make sure, again, that every penny is being accounted for honestly. So Jeff, have the people you talk to, do they share that sort of

confidence or that they should be able to make payroll and keep the lights on for the next few months. I'm sure the judge's order, as we've already talked about, helps, but I'm sure they still sort of feel uncomfortable and in some state of limbo. Yeah. And just quickly, I laughed when I heard part of that line yesterday, because if you listen close to what she's saying, she's saying,

I spoke to the budget chair, the budget, incoming budget chief, Russ Boat, for the White House, whose office is responsible for the federal freeze. And Levitt is saying, he told me to say that the federal agencies should contact me if there's anything essential that they want to keep going. And I found that to be kind of an amazing thing because it's like telling us, the reporters, like, I'm not in charge of a federal agency. Right.

You're telling the press secretary to tell the world that the heads of federal agencies should contact the White House? Those are the president's personnel. So the fact that that communication didn't occur...

Well, an advance of this order reflected, I think, kind of an amazing lack of planning. And I guess on a sort of related note, this stop order seems to have been driven, my sourcing and what they've said publicly suggests,

by a feeling that the Biden people had screwed them by sort of funneling money at the door. And to give the Trump people some credit, like this is not something they made up. Like there was a real effort by the Biden administration in the last few weeks to say like, whatever money like that we think the Trump people don't want to spend, like, let's just get it out. Let's get it out there. Let's get it out there. And so they were discovering, as they've said, like,

I mean, I can't vouch for the accuracy of this, but they said, you know, we discovered like condoms for Gaza, which we should true squad that at some point. But like whatever that was, something that they didn't like, like there was a real ramp up of that spending. And so I think they said like, no, no more. Like we don't we can't.

what's going on out from every agency. So let's shut it all down. But then obviously like that created this other huge problem. And I wanted to pick up on another thing that she said in that clip there, which goes to the, also the second question that she got from the press that we played there about the legality of this question. We can put up

The next tear sheet the a4 this is a piece by Dave day and over at the American Prospect Which I suggest everybody read because it kind of makes the case that this stuff is actually not legal and the line that I wanted to get your response to from what we just heard her say was that the They were they were she was going to approve or the White House would approve Congressionally directed spending that was quote in line with the president's agenda unquote

That's the key point there. People might think like, okay, we had a presidential election. We elected Donald Trump. He has an agenda. He should get to then direct spending in line with his agenda. And that is certainly a kind of political system that you could design and that people might support and think is a good way to run a country. That's not the country that we have. Like what we have is we have a Congress that

where you have two senators from every state, and then you have for about 700,000 or 800,000 people in a particular state, they're represented by an individual, and they represent that area. They go to Congress. They hash out spending bills down to the decimal points. They then pass it, and then the president signs it, and then the president

has to then follow the law. Like you said, we want $13.65 million for this duck estuary in Long Island. Like it's not up to the president to change that. It's like that's what Congress did. And so for her to say that they would only approve spending that is, quote, in line with the president's agenda strikes me as

flagrantly unconstitutional and illegal. Like it's not, you know, it's not up to her or them to say that this, if they don't like it, they got to veto it. So I'm curious for you, because you would also flag this interesting post from a legal scholar. We can put up A9 so people can find it. This is on the well-respected Balkanization blog where he kind of lays out the points of

the kind of elements within the Impoundment Control Act that allow you to actually pause funding. And the only ones are, quote, to provide for contingencies or to achieve savings made possible by or through changes in requirements or greater efficiency of operations. So in other words, the only way, the only reason the White House

can pause funding is because if they think they can do it slightly more efficiently, it said, quote, no officer or employee of the United States may defer any budget authority for any other purpose. So how do you how how is the White House squaring this? Well, you know,

This whole topic, impoundments, appropriations, the White House Budget Act, the Impoundment and Control Act, it is so laden with obscure jargon that nobody has ever heard of. And yet, as you're saying, Ryan, this is a fundamental question about the balance of power, the rule of law, the question of whether our president

has unchecked authority to overrule existing law and do what he wants. I mean, that is sort of the core of this issue beyond all the sort of technical legal jargon that you sort of do have to understand to wrap your head around what's going on here. And

The White House has been very clear for a long time. I mean, the Trump people have been saying this since the end of 2019 when we had the impeachment hearing over the Ukraine aid holds. Their view is that the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act, something like that, is unconstitutional. That after Nixon's resignation, after the Watergate scandal, Congress enacted a law

That dictates and lays out very clearly the blog post that you just referenced sort of lays out in this specific instance how the president can pause funding, when he can or she can cancel funding, exactly the parameters of this relationship, this crucial relationship overspending between Congress and the White House.

And what Russ Vought, the budget chair, and Trump and his top deputy, Mark Paoletta, who's now the general counsel at OMB, what they have said is that they do not think that that law adheres to the Constitution and that therefore they are not bound to follow it. And I'll just stress here,

This was about pausing funding. And in many ways, pausing funding is a small precursor to what the Trump people have said that they have the prerogative to do, which is not merely to pause funding, but to cancel it, to say Congress told us to spend this money, but we will not. They have been arguing that the amount of money that Congress approves is not a ceiling fund.

on the amount of money they can, it's not a floor on the amount of money they can spend, but a ceiling. So as long as they're below what Congress tells them to spend, they are in compliance with the law. And now obviously, like most legal scholars who study this disagree with that, they have a very distinctive view. And I would note, like not a particularly conservative view, right? This is about massively expanding the president's power. So

This is not small-c conservatives. This is an attempt to really exert much more control out of the executive branch in a way that defies a law that's been in effect for four or five decades. Although, so it's a small counterpoint from the right would argue that...

What they would say is that Congress should take accountability of policies coming out of the executive branch. I'm sure you hear this all the time, Jeff, when you're talking to people. That's the argument that Mark Pelletta and Russ Veldt would make, is that it's expanding the power of the executive to sort of make Congress do its job or what they believe its job should be. Congress punts a lot of stuff to the executive branch now. But anyway, we don't have to get into that. No, I mean, I think that's exactly right. And it's also, it comes in the context of the Biden administration saying,

in numerous instances saying we should have more authority to do something that for instance, you know, cancel student loan debt that the court said violated the law. And so, and so the willingness of presidents to defy congressional statutes seems to be in part a bipartisan trend. I still think this is, this is beyond what we've seen. Definitely. But, but they are correct. I think that before,

Before the 1974 budget law, presidents did act with much more authority to cancel spending without congressional approval. And they are also right that the federal debt has grown to $36 trillion. And even though the funding they're targeting is not the fundamental part of that, there is waste and fraud in the federal government. And it raises, I think, a somewhat legitimate question of if the government discovers that money that Congress has approved is wasteful,

should they have to spend in any way, essentially? Right. On the flip side, like, then that takes the power away from Congress to make the decision about what is wasteful. Yeah, and it's, I mean, and

And it seems to me like people in the Russ vote, Mark Pelletticamp, understand that this is going to be kicked to the courts and are kind of eager to see how the courts decide on these questions. Let's put up some of the Democratic response here. A5, obviously the Democratic attorneys generals, have put together their efforts to, as Politico says, quote, urgently resist the

The freeze. This is a statement from the Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Naronha, who said it is astonishing that President Trump, through an agency most Americans have never heard of, would take an action so clearly unlawful that would impact so many Americans in so many ways. And if we go to the next element, this is a six.

This is a post from Alex Pfeiffer, who's a deputy assistant to the president and principal deputy comms director. He says this was in the OMB memo or the OMB like memo after the memo that explained, quote, mandatory programs like Medicaid and SNAP will continue without pause. But again, that is a question Caroline Leavitt didn't seem to have a clear answer to after SNAP.

the post that Pfeiffer is going for there came out, Jeff, right? Do I have the sequence correct on that? It was pretty interesting. That memo, after the memo came out, then the White House press briefing happened, and then they still didn't have a clear answer. And this brings us to A8, which is an article that Jeff, you wrote last June about Trump plans to claim sweeping powers to cancel federal spending.

This is something that has been in the works. This is like an ideological, it's like crafted in a conservative laboratory, literally. Always read Jeff Stein. Always read Jeff Stein. And Dave Dan's piece, I think a lot of people on the right at the American Prospect would read that and say yes.

They would disagree that it was unlawful, but they would say, yes, this is the radical revolutionary measure that we are taking. So Jeff, what's your, I guess, perspective on why a policy that's been thought about for so long was rolled out, I think at best, sloppily?

I think the core thing driving this to me seemed to have been, you know, Stephen Miller was on TV yesterday saying, like, we kept on hearing that we'd spent money that we didn't know was going out the door on gauze and condoms or whatever. And I think that sort of fueled some of the sloppiness. I mean...

The White House was like, if you read the order they sent out Monday night that we got that we reported on Monday night, it is the way it is read, like the actual words used specifically state that all federal grants will be paused, including but not limited to DEI, clean energy, all this stuff that they don't like. Right.

The next day, their memo said the only thing affected by this pause are spending programs not compliant with our prior executive orders on DEI, green energy, et cetera, et cetera.

huge difference between one and two right like one is saying we shut down everything then we evaluate it and whatever is found in compliance with our eos will be allowed to go the second day is we will shut down only the things that are fat that are found to be in violations of our eos

they you know it was like how do you guys not understand like that these are like the same thing we haven't changed our message it's like blah blah and I was like I don't know what to tell you guys like I didn't write these memos like I am just reading what they say and they're like very clear like day one said that day two said that so like it's it's confusing like it's it's not it's not it's not us it's not the press and it's frustrating because like

I don't know. I don't know how to... I don't want to get myself in trouble here, but I think, like, for a lot of reporters, myself included, like, we know that the Trump people think that we're, like, unfair, that they think we're biased, that they think we're, like, all liberals, like, out to get them. And I have been working very hard to be, like...

I am reporting the facts. I am figuring out what's happening. I am giving you guys a totally fair hearing in all my stories. I don't want to be demagogued as someone who's just out here doing Trump derangement syndrome stuff. I think that's really important for the media to not get sucked into everything that might not be true. I mean, to just make it a very obvious point.

And, and, but then I'm in this instance where it's just like, they're telling everyone that we're lying. And it's like, I've been reading what you guys are putting out and it's confusing and it's hurting people. And, and it's, it, it's not saying what you said it says. So it's like, what am I supposed to do with, you know what I mean? Does that make sense? Yeah. We actually, before you got on here, Emily and I were talking about how, uh, or I was saying this, I'm not going to put this in Emily's mouth, but I was saying that

Because there has been genuine Trump derangement syndrome from significant elements of the mainstream media, now whenever the Trump administration screws up and actually does something like shut down all the Medicaid portals around the country, maybe accidentally,

What they they respond by saying oh, this is another MSM hoax. Yeah, don't believe the MSM This is this isn't this isn't happening. This is them lying again. That's like you can't say that all the time like something like Everybody makes mistakes and that's being generous. I think like look I'm being generous here and call this potentially a mistake You know me meanwhile, so I completely understand what you're what you're saying you're trying to give give them a fair shake and

And they are actually doing this very confusing thing and then saying that they didn't do it. You're like, well, how? There's no way to fairly report that and make you sound good. Like, you messed this up. Meanwhile, I'm totally bracing myself for the Supreme Court to come in and say that it was illegal for the Biden administration to underline the point that you were making earlier. Illegal for the Biden administration to restructure loan payments around student debt. But it is totally legal.

for a President Trump to just do what he wants with the money that Congress directed. How confident are your sources in the Trump world that the Supreme Court is going to meet them somewhere on this and give them new powers? Or are they going on that theory where, well, the worst thing that happens is we get our policy for a couple of months or a couple of years and then it gets shut down and we just keep doing it?

I'm honestly not sure. I mean, the people I was talking to last summer, you know, they have ties to Clarence Thomas and the conservatives on the court. And I think they feel pretty good about a few of them. Yeah, Mark Paoletta clerked for Clarence Thomas.

you know, I'm guessing this is a guess, but I'm guessing that they have a pretty good feeling of where Thomas is, but you went clear into Thomas. And so why, like you still need the rest or at least, you know, several other, you know, Supreme court justices. That said, I think the, the, the,

capacity or possibility that the Trump people just ignore the court order. You know, I could not get a straight answer to reiterate last night what they consider, whether they would abide by what the judge said, the federal judge had said. And, you know, for all the comparisons we were making with the Biden's tune loan order,

if the Trump people are just going to straight up ignore what the federal courts say, I'm not saying they have yet, but if that's what they're going to do, we are in really different territory in terms of just defying a court order. I mean, we haven't seen that really since, I don't know, you know, Lincoln and habeas corpus and ignoring the Supreme Court during the Civil War. I'm not a historian, obviously, but that would be a huge change in shock. So,

So the speed and blase nature in which they did this to me suggests that they might be willing to try sort of ignoring the courts.

And I should correct myself. Mark didn't clerk for Clarence Thomas. He was sort of a Sherpa in the confirmation for Clarence Thomas, but has been around those circles for a long time. So yeah, that's a, that's an interesting, that's a really interesting point. Actually, the makeup of the Supreme court is like tailor made. If you would want to have a decision, if you're a conservative who would want to have something like this litigated right now in front of the Supreme court. So Jeff, this is super, super interesting. Thank you so much for joining us and sticking with us for like a whole half hour to go through all of this crazy news.

My pleasure, guys. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. All right. Good luck. And up next, he was talking about that Stephen Miller, Jake Tapper interview. They also fought over immigration. We'll talk about that in a second. Save on Cox Internet when you add Cox Mobile and get fiber-powered Internet at home and unbeatable 5G reliability on the go. So whether you're playing a game at home or attending one live,

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And we're guessing most days, that's money. Workers have been feeling the sting of inflation. So as a new administration promises action on the cost of living, taxes, and home prices. The S&P 500 biggest post-election day spike ever. Follow all the big changes and what they mean for you. Make America affordable again. Listen to The Indicator from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get podcasts. Everyone's forgotten who runs this valley. Time to remind them.

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Listen to the official Yellowstone podcast now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go to work.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and also Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller was brawling with Jake Tapper on CNN yesterday evening. They touched on what we talked about earlier on the federal aid loans and grants and all of that, but also really got into an interesting exchange over the Trump administration's immigration policy. Let's take a listen.

How do you how does President Trump make sure that the effort to deport people who are not in this country legally doesn't end up hurting Americans who want safe borders? Absolutely. But also don't want to see even more higher prices and groceries.

Well, I'm sure it's not your position, Jake. You're just asking the question that we should supply America's food with exploitative, illegal, alien labor. I obviously don't think that's what you're implying.

Only 1% of alien workers in the entire country work in agriculture. The top destination for illegal aliens are large cities like New York, like Los Angeles, and small industrial towns, of course, all across the heartland, as we've seen with the Biden flights. None of those illegal aliens are

are doing farm work. Those 30,000 legal aliens that Joe Biden dumped into Springfield. Yeah, I'm talking about the ones that are. No, no, no, no, but I'm explaining this. It's important to understand. No, you're kind of changing the subject. I mean, I'm talking about the ones. I will go. Give me 30 minutes. I'll go as deep as you want. I don't have 30 minutes. I'm talking about the ones that work in the agriculture industry. You can come back and we can talk about the ones in the cities, I swear. I'll do the whole answer.

The illegal aliens that Joe Biden brought into our country are not full stop doing farm work. They are not. The illegal aliens he brought in from Venezuela, from Haiti, from Nicaragua, they are not doing farm work. They're in our cities collecting welfare. As for the farmers, there is a guest worker program that President Trump supports. Over time as well, you will transition into automation. So we'll never have to have this conversation ever again. But

But there's no universe in which this nation is going to allow the previous president to flood our nation with millions and millions of illegal aliens who just get to stay here. And we are especially not going to allow a subset of those illegal aliens to rape and murder our citizens. So we are going to unapologetically enforce our immigration laws. And as I'm sure you will celebrate, we are going to unleash the power and might of the U.S. government to eradicate the presence of transnational threats on our soil.

Now, of course, the criminal status or non-criminal status of people who are being deported was a topic at the first White House press briefing yesterday, which was absolutely packed. Let's take a look at how Caroline Levitt responded to some questions about that.

500 arrests ICE has made so far since President Trump came back into office. Can you just tell us the numbers? How many have a criminal record versus those who are just in the country illegally? All of them because they illegally broke our nation's laws and therefore they are criminals as far as this administration goes. I know the last administration didn't see it that way. So it's a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal, but that's exactly what they

- They all have a criminal record? - If they broke our nation's laws, yes. - Okay, so Ryan, there's an interesting debate happening right now about what constitutes criminal because it is under US code a crime, but it's a misdemeanor to cross the border illegally. It's not a felony. If you repeat, which many people have, it is a felony.

But it is still technically a misdemeanor, so you're sort of getting into a semantics game. And then the extra layer of semantics is that overstaying a visa is a civil infraction. Right. And many, many, maybe most of the people who are here illegally are here because they overstayed a visa, which technically actually is just a civil offense, not even a misdemeanor. The misdemeanor comes from crossing the border illegally.

Without the right papers. We're making right so And then I guess the question is if you commit a misdemeanor, are you a criminal? I mean how many misdemeanors have you committed?

Probably a lot. I think I jaywalked on the way in. Right, so it gets into this sort of semantic game, but Trump did repeatedly say that this would be about violent criminals. And so right now, what everyone's trying to do is kind of parse the amount of people who are violent criminals versus who have just committed the misdemeanor of entering the country illegally. The Washington Post, we can put this next Forbes tear sheet up on the screen. Forbes kind of was running down all

what numbers we have and found in the Washington Post that ICE officials have been directed by Trump officials to aggressively ramp up the number of people they arrest from a few hundred per day to at least 1,200 to 1,500 because the president has been disappointed with the results of his mass deportation. So these are quotas. And quotas obviously is how you end up with a different kind of, or you end up with

percentages of violent criminals versus kind of regular people who committed the misdemeanor crime of coming to the country illegally, then you can't guarantee that you're only sweeping up violent criminals as soon as you're saying we have to have 1,500 daily deportations. It just gets a lot harder, obviously. Right. And you can see Trump's mind working where he's like,

I keep being told there were 12 to 15 million illegals who like flooded into the country in the last four years and we're removing a few hundred a day. Like Trump can do the math on that. Like that, that, those are two wildly different sets of scales. And so people, if he had people around him who, who were honest, they would have told him like,

This is basically what we're capable of. And he has had people around him who have said, if you want to do this in the way that you see it, you're going to need to basically send the military into American cities all at once. There are factions on the right that want to see that happen. I think even Trump is like,

Okay, that's that's pushing it a little bit much like the the like black jackets and the black boots That's one thing the green ones going around the city like like maybe against BLM protesters But like just raiding like the Home Depot parking lot like that starts to look ridiculous and also the fact that they're being so coy about

the criminal records of the people that they're rounding up suggests an inherent acknowledgement among all sides of the debate here that there isn't actually an enormous amount of support for kind of violently deporting, aggressively deporting people whose only crime, if you want to call it that, is coming here illegally.

like there might be kind of polls say polls might say oh yeah we we think people should you know be here legally but then it seems like even the trump administration knows that like you know physically dragging people out of done anything wrong that's why they want to find people with these criminal records why they're at the very top of we didn't play it but at the very top of this white house press briefing she started by saying they'd arrested what a dominican guy who had murdered

his mother and her child or something. Those are the ones that the Trump administration wants to then kind of allude to all Democrats are okay with that. When really, if Democrats had any sense, they would have been going after people like that

And to some extent they were, but not, they wouldn't kind of make a big deal of it. Well, yeah. Like Biden wouldn't have bragged that they had done it, which is crazy. Like you catch a murderer, actually, like that's the number one thing a politician likes to celebrate is catching a murderer. Yeah.

Like entire careers are made off of that. Yeah. Yeah, it's what you do. Doesn't get any better than that. No. Well, so speaking of the optics, let's take a look at this next clip of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. I can't believe I'm even saying DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on the streets of New York City yesterday. You can see her. She tweets, 7 a.m. in NYC, getting the dirt bags off the streets. She's got...

I'm gonna get criticized for saying that. She's still up. But she's got a blowout, she's got her outfit on, and she's ready to go. You know, Ryan. Is that a still up look? Like usually people 7 a.m. in New York City with their hair looking like that.

She just went out the night before and went straight to the ice rink. Those bars are open very late in New York. I don't know what she was up to, but she looked great. I'll give her that. She was checking out kitchens at bars until 6 a.m. Checking the restaurant inspections. She's looking for bussers, barbacks. So 7 a.m. in NYC, getting the dirt bags off the streets. You

To your point, I will say we've all seen the polling recently. New York Times Ipsos had a poll just the day before the inauguration last week about how Americans support the concept of mass deportations. That isn't the only poll that's found that. If you just ask people right now,

about whether they support mass deportations, the answer to that is yes. And it's possible that dips a little bit more as the media starts focusing on, as the Trump administration starts focusing on deportations and then the media starts focusing on that. Those things are all entirely possible. And that goes my point. I think, I don't have any evidence for this, but I just feel like

the people who are answering that kind of want a snap of the finger. Like, okay, we didn't really see those people come in except we saw some images at the border and we don't really want to see them leave. But I agree that they should leave. Like, that's the kind of support for that. But when it gets ugly...

you might see that slip. We'll see. - Yeah, no, I mean optics-wise, you want to, I mean the Kristi Noem thing, you can see exactly why people who look at what happened to, for example, Lake and Riley would say, "Yeah, like hell yeah, let's get out of there. "Let's get people out of here "if they have prior criminal convictions." And they do, so this is from the Associated Press.

As of July 21, ICE said 662,556 people under its supervision were either convicted of crimes or faced criminal charges. Nearly 15,000 were in its custody, but the vast majority were not, including the figures of people not detained by ICE, where people found guilty of very serious crimes. 13,000 for homicide, 15,000 for sexual assault, 13,000 for weapons offenses, and 2,663 for stolen vehicle. The single biggest category, though, was for traffic-related offenses.

77,000, followed by assault at 62,000 and dangerous drugs at 56,000. But those numbers that we just went through here of homicides, sexual assault, weapons, stolen vehicles, assaults,

Those are really, really high numbers. Right, but it puts you at, what, 100,000 or so? Right, I was just going to say, if you want to do 1,500 on a daily basis of only the most violent criminals, that quota is going to put you in a position where there are just people who aren't the most violent criminals. And we're being told that there's 20 million people we need to get out of the country, and that's 100,000. What about the other 19,900,000? That's the...

That's the part that's going to get interesting. That is the part that's going to get interesting. Yeah, that is the part for sure. Because for Donald Trump right now, some of the toughest questions that he faced between his election and his inauguration were, are you going to be rounding up families and kids that came here, were brought here illegally over the course of the Biden administration? And this goes back to that Stephen Miller clip that we started with, where Miller does this kind of logical kind of fallacy where he says,

He's asked about agricultural workers and he understands that there's another implicit kind of agreement between Tapper and Miller there that most Americans don't want ICE going into the lettuce fields and rounding everybody up and hauling them to Mexico. And so instead of defending that, what Miller says is, well, actually most of the people that are here illegally and that were allowed in by Biden were dumped in the cities and they're not out there picking the fields.

That's not the point. The question is about the agricultural workers. And Tapper's, oh, you're changing the subject. He's like, how dare you change the subject? And the right kind of loves that Miller's given it to Tapper and Tapper's fans love that he's like standing up to Miller. But what gets lost in conversation, they are talking about genuinely two different things. Yes, yeah. So then Miller says, well, we have a guest worker program. And this is where I get so frustrated in the immigration conversation.

Because I am a big supporter of guest worker programs that smoothly allow people who, you know, if you've got a country where, you know, you've got a lot of laborers in Mexico who want to work these jobs like in the fields of California, but don't actually want to live here. Like they like Mexico. Their roots are there. Their family is there. Their community is there.

but they want to come for four or five months. Like that used to be how it was done in the 70s and 80s. And then we cracked down and we closed the border. And so all the people that were doing that told their families and their communities, just come up here because now it's too expensive to go back and forth across the border. The idea that there's a functional guest worker program that can be used at scale by our agriculture industry is just not true. And if Miller supports that, great, just pass it and put it back into law.

and make that the law. And then you can raise questions. Are they exploited? Okay. If they are exploited, they're now legal. They can join a union. The inspectors can come out and make sure that things are going well. And the pay that they're going to be getting is relatively so much better. But that's just thrown as a... And then he says, oh, and we're going to use automation to get rid of that soon anyway.

But all of it is actually just a way to avoid the actual conversation. I think he got Tapper pretty good when Tapper was asking him about, I forget exactly what

What description Tapper used, but like lettuce. Is that what they were talking about? Like lettuce, something to that extent. And Miller came back and was like, so this is just about bringing in an underclass of people. I thought that was pretty excellent rebuttal. I see what you're saying, that it's on a different... It is, and Tapper should be like, or Tapper's... The other side should say, yes, it is, actually. Like, we don't have people... You can't... We've got this economic problem.

Where we need people to do these jobs for wages that are less than you can actually live a dignified life in the United States. But we don't need that. And so the way you can do this, well, they don't actually live in the United States. They only live here for four months. They work here, make a good amount of money. Like just like H-2B people come over here, wait tables for four months and then go back to Poland or whatever. Like,

And they made good money for Poland or they made good money for Romania. It's like, is that the best system we could design in the world? No. But otherwise, the price of lettuce is going to double and see how people like that. When Miller will have to own that. Yeah. No, I mean, absolutely. I don't disagree that it causes price increases, but I don't think we all need to. I think when people look at this. The problem is people like Taber won't say, yeah, actually, you're right. Yeah. And

And we need, so it's going to be two tier. And the second tier is people that don't actually live here. They just come here and then they go back. And then over time, hopefully you can then develop a more equitable economy where you're raising the living standards of

everywhere. Well, the disorderly process over the last few years has definitely made exploitation a lot easier, which is why they've actually just like lost a certain number of even like children who have gone into the labor system here at times at a great expose on how many kids were being

like forcing the exploit of labor. And then we just lost custody of them. I think it was Mayorkas, it was like DHS just lost custody of them. And part of that is because our system was so overwhelmed and disorderly. And so I think the Trump administration's best argument probably is not just, you know, people are here and they shouldn't be here. We've lost track of them. We need to adjudicate their asylum claims. If they made, you know, dubious asylum claims, like, you know,

adjudicate those, get the violent criminals out, but then also have some system that makes sense. And that is way harder than actually deporting people. And we can talk about that too with all of the other sort of radical reforms the Trump administration is doing. That first step is kind of the easiest. It's politically the hardest, but then rebuilding a system afterwards is definitely going to be really difficult.

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And we're guessing most days, that's money. Workers have been feeling the sting of inflation. So as a new administration promises action on the cost of living, taxes, and home prices. The S&P 500 biggest post-election day spike ever. Follow all the big changes and what they mean for you. Make America affordable again. Listen to The Indicator from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get podcasts. Everyone's forgotten who runs this valley. Time to remind them.

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Listen to the official Yellowstone podcast now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go to work. Let's move on to the Michigan Senate race that suddenly opened up yesterday. Nobody really expected Gary Peters to step down. He's a pretty run-of-the-mill, conventional, well-liked establishment Democrat, wouldn't you say, Ryan? Yeah, he's very, like, unions are cool with him.

He's like a rank-and-file politician who worked his way up. Now he's a senator. Probably sit there for life. But you only make, what, $174,000 a year as a senator? Boring. You spend all your time with incredibly rich people doing the coolest rich people things. And at some point you're like, wait a minute, if I have power over these people, they're asking me for things, yet I got no money. Yet here I am with $20 million in my campaign account.

But I can't spend it on myself? Let me just cash out of here. Start making a couple million dollars a year for 10 years and just really live large. I don't know what he's going to do. We'll see. I wouldn't expect anything different. Right. No, but it did take everybody by surprise that he announced, Peters announced his retirement yesterday. And if we skip here to C2, we can put this access report up on the screen that former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is, quote, taking a serious look at running for Peters' administration.

See, this is from a person close to Buttigieg. Quote, Pete is exploring all of his options on how he can be helpful and continue to serve. He's honored to be mentioned for this and he's taking a serious look. What I love about that quote, Ryan, is I hope the person who said he's honored to be mentioned for this is the one who mentioned him for this.

It's like- Liz Smith. Yeah, probably. It was, yes, probably. It was probably like, hey, Pete, let's call up Axios and just say we're honored to be mentioned. And that will create the mention of us. The thing about Pete is his consultants probably don't even have to tell him that. You know, he's on the ball. Yeah. Like he's- This guy is- He's wanted this for a very long time. And so, yeah, so it'll be-

Mayor Pete, how is the Republican field looking over there? I mean, they keep losing to very seemingly beatable Democrats with pretty good candidates. Yeah. Yet they've won two out of the last three presidential cycles. Right. Close races. But on the gubernatorial level and the Senate level, they just get waxed.

Yeah, he, it's a really good point because, and I actually just wrote a piece about Alyssa Slotkin yesterday for Unheard. Very close race. It was a very close race, very cultural. Yeah, that's true. She eked it out. Yeah, and she actually had an interesting campaign on abortion, which is where Mallory McMorrow, who many people remember, was sort of conspicuously posting. She went really viral. This was a couple of years ago, and it was about,

Correct me if I think it was about like banned books quote-unquote band books something like that wasn't she like Mike staffer or something like that Oh was she? She was like a state Yeah, she was yeah, but she so she's Brooklyn hipster who moved back to Michigan moved back home Yeah, many such cases great speech. Yes viral. Yeah in many such cases She seems to have political ambitions and could be a rival to Buttigieg on in this race Weigel was Dave Weigel was

You know quoting her her tweets wishing Gary Peters a happy retirement yesterday with interest. Yeah, and her problem is She is in the same lane as Buddha judge kind of though. Mm-hmm. Well cleaning center-left. Yep. Yeah aware, you know, you're not in the Bernie Lane And and you the way you differentiate yourself from establishment Democrats is you're more aggressive and how you fight on behalf of cultural issues

And I don't think you could beat Pete on that because he's just the best at that. So, but who knows? We'll see. Yeah. And maybe Pete keeps his powder dry for 2028. This is this is back to who Republicans possibly have. I mean, yeah, maybe he does, although he could still technically I guess he could run in 2028. You could just kind of weird. Like you're going from your swearing in to Iowa. Yeah. Well, they don't do Iowa anymore, right?

That's right. But so the – Alyssa Slotkin is out here talking to, for example, the Free Press, Barry Weiss's publication about how Democrats just need to get back to being quote-unquote normal and how she is the kind of normal person whisperer because she eked out this Michigan Senate race by talking about the economy and blah, blah, blah, which –

by the way, really isn't true. She sort of tried to pivot to that, but when she was in the House of Representatives was pretty eagerly leaning into some of these, like, she's the co-sponsor, I think she may have even been the sponsor of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Well, everyone was for that. Yeah, everyone was for that, right. But she, like, really leaned into it, took the initiative on it. So anyway... CIA, right? Oh, yeah. So, like, let's...

I mean, it's a tough race for Republicans because Democrats in Michigan are just smarter than Democrats in different parts of the country. They're forced to be because Michigan has an interesting demographic profile of the people that Democrats are losing. So they kind of got to that question first. But it'll be an interesting race for sure. Less interesting probably than Vivek Ramaswamy's— We'll see Rashida Tlaib run. Yeah.

Less interesting than Vivek Ramaswamy's Ohio run because, I mean, he has to get out of primary. The primary is where it would be interesting. General election would be less interesting. How cooked is he because of his Urkel tweet that got him thrown out of Doja? Let's take a look at his interview with Charlamagne Tha God on Breakfast Club where Charlamagne really laid into him. Do you think you were pushed out of Doja because Trump rolled back the DEI initiatives?

No, contrary. And, you know, I would say just to be super clear about I've no I've no problem with, you know, framing or whatever. It was really just an actual mutual decision where you look at here was one vision on approach. Here's a different vision on an approach. That's great. There's no right or wrong answer with a technology driven approach and a technology first approach. There's no better person than Elon to run with that.

With a constitutional law focus, with a legislation focus, some of the areas I was focused on, probably the right place to do it is elected office. And so we all agreed on that. And I think that that's actually a good thing where we're able to where we're actually able to collaborate, divide and conquer. I hear you, Vivek. Yeah, I don't believe you. I think I think you either got pushed out or, you know, that is going to implode.

I think that you know Elon is going to crash and burn it, and you're a smart guy, and you said, you know what? Let me get out of Dodge and go do my Governor of Ohio thing. So look, here's- Let me get out of Doge. Doge. Exactly. I knew that the right step for me in the long run is elected office and to pursue the vision that we're talking about here to actually translate that to action in my own terms. That's what I've been called to do. It was clear that I could not do that and serve on Doge at the same time. Even for logistical reasons, it came to be in the government rather than an outside body.

I was proud to be able to spend the first couple of months offering my contributions and setting it in the right direction with its focus now, with its digital technology focus. No better person to do that than Elon in the way that he's going to lead it. And I am hopeful that there's going to be a lot of streamlining of government bureaucracy that comes out of that.

And I'm pursuing my next steps at the state level. Are they going to endorse you? Is Elon going to endorse you? Is Trump going to endorse you? We're all on very good terms. And so I wouldn't want to speak for anybody else. But I will say that they are very supportive of the decision that I made to pursue as my next step. Yes, I'm sure they are very supportive of the decision for that next step. He is going to need a better answer to that question. He's smooth, but way too smooth there. Right. That was some real politician talk.

The part that was absurd to me was when he said he can't run for office and also serve on this Doge committee. It's like, wait a minute. Elon Musk is tweeting 24 hours a day, faking being a good video game player, running SpaceX, running X.

Tesla. Running Tesla. Neuralink. Neuralink. There's a little SolarCity still part of it. His AI company. So he can do all this, but you can't run for Senate and also go after seniors or whatever you're doing over there. Well, it's the digital technology focus. So that was the substance of it. I'm curious if you have any insight into how serious that dispute was between them. What he seems to be suggesting is that Elon Musk

is going to focus on technology. Basically, I guess, trying to analyze where, you know, using algorithms to analyze where money is being spent and then using a scalpel or a sledgehammer to go after them. Right now, he's going with a sledgehammer. You know, we talked about in the A Block with, you know, asking for every federal worker to, you know, consider taking this buyout. Whereas Vivek was saying

saying that he would prefer a constitutional law approach and passing legislation.

On the one hand, you could read that as some shade of like, I'm actually going to try to do this legally. Like we have a system set up where people vote for representatives who pass laws and then implement them, and I'm going to do it within that system. By the way, that's the entire point of what Russ Vought is trying to do at OMB. Just get rid of the representative democracy. No, it's to force Congress to actually pass laws or take them away from the executive branch in the way that Elon Musk is trying to use executive powers. Right, except Congress already did pass laws.

Rust is just doesn't like them. That delegated the funding to the executive branch. They did not delegate funding. It directed the funding. The agency shall. It's like if you have an Uber driver. Did you delegate your destination to the Uber driver or did you direct the Uber driver? What if the Uber driver is like, yeah, 401 9th Street.

How about 914th Street? Yeah. This is going to the Supreme Court. Like, no, there's two different branches here. The branch who's the driver directed the Uber driver and sent the money. This exact... Your job is to just drive the Uber. This exact argument is being... I think one of the reasons, one of the things that VOTE is doing is this is designed to go to the Supreme Court to actually hash out its impoundment. We can talk about...

We did talk about this. We talked about this with Jeff, but we should add Ramaswamy. This is according to a local Cleveland paper, is actually expected to announce his governor bid in mid-February. So just in a matter of weeks, makes sense then why it was going on Breakfast Club. And he's brought on some advisors from- The governor? J.D. Vance's political team. Yeah. Governor. Governor, yep. So he will be in that

primary with the Attorney General Dave Yost and the treasurer Robert Sprague and I actually think getting out of that primary is really going to be the tough one for him. It's not guaranteed at all. Yeah, and I wonder if he's gonna have to face questions about that Alzheimer's scam he did again. Like in any reasonable society, he's in prison right now. Like for people who don't know and we talked about this, now it's cool to talk about on the right, we talked about it years ago.

He bought an Alzheimer's drug that had already failed its FDA trials a bunch of times, did his Ramaswamy hype to it, which pumped the stock up really high, promised like, oh man, this is going to be amazing, hired all his family, pulled the rug out, took all his money out, and then

The FDA rejects it for like the fourth time and everybody who put money in based on his hype lost right? It's one thing to run in a national political or national presidential primary. It's another thing to run in a very localized race Where those questions are just it's just sharper because there's less national noise. So I expect that'll be a pretty significant part Yeah. All right. Let's move on to Jim Acosta's departure from CNN. I

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Listen to the official Yellowstone podcast now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go to work. CNN anchor Jim Acosta is out. Let's watch his sign-off. I just wanted to end today's show by thanking all of the wonderful people who work behind the scenes at this network. You may have seen some reports about me and the show. And after giving all of this some careful consideration and weighing an alternative time slot, CNN offered me...

I've decided to move on. I am grateful to CNN for the nearly 18 years I've spent here doing the news. People often ask me if the highlight of my career at CNN was at the White House covering Donald Trump. Actually, no.

That moment came here when I covered former President Barack Obama's trip to Cuba in 2016 and had the chance to question the dictator there, Raul Castro, about the island's political prisoners. As the son of a Cuban refugee, I took home this lesson. It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant. I've always believed it's the job of the press to hold power to account. I've always tried to do that here at CNN, and I plan on going doing all of that in the future.

One final message. Don't give in to the lies. Don't give in to the fear. Hold on to the truth and to hope. Even if you have to get out your phone, record that message. I will not give in to the lies. I will not give in to the fear. Post it on your social media.

so people can hear from you too. And so Acosta, as he was alluding to, has new plans. He is over at Substack. And he said he is going to be independent for the time being. So I actually have a thought here. So for people who are just

tuning in. Acosta was known as the CNN guy that was really going after Trump at every single briefing. Trump absolutely loved it. Trump called him a real beauty. He's like, you are fake news. Like in his first briefing, like really setting the tone that this was going to be combat between CNN and Acosta. Acosta later, you know, really cashed in on that with a book called The Enemy of the People, which was

Echoing a phrase that Trump shamefully used to describe the press that's and still uses to this day as the enemy to describe the fake news media fake news media Not not all the rest of the media. It wouldn't include you because you're not fake news. Yeah, there's real news right here But the thought I have is that the Democrats problem is that they hitched their wagon to a corporate structure yes rather than a people-powered structure

that is not going to stand with them when there is a rise of a right-wing populist, fascist, whatever you want to call it. When there's a rise of that movement,

corporate America which you have hitched your wagon to through your corporate donors over at the Democratic Party and also corporate media through MSNBC CNN and New York Times and all all the others that are funded by corporate advertising times now a little bit less so because it has so many subscribers that it's kind of that it's kind of pulled in both directions But the point is that when the chips are down these companies are not ideologically hostile

to right-wing authoritarianism as they demonstrated during World War II when they were willing to work with Nazis even. So these companies are not with you when the going gets tough. So now the going is getting tough. CNN on Inauguration Day told Jake Tapper and the rest of them covering it, we don't want to hear any

uh pearl clutching no no kind of expressions of outrage from trump the complete opposite of four years ago did their ideology change no the power balance changed and so because the power balance changed sienna's like acosta you're out of here we're not we're not taking on trump the way we did last time and so now the democrats are left uh defenseless because they allied

with people that were not actually allies of them. So when you use corporate media as your center left mouthpiece, you're going to get screwed and you're going to get wiped out whenever the corporate parents' profits are threatened.

When you say when the chips are down, as they are now, I then, though, think back to like 2017 and the media collaborating with basically the deep state to help take down Donald Trump. They believed it was a winnable fight then.

Well, the chips were down to, the chips were down, meaning from their perspective, the chips were down. They thought Trump was a fluke. They thought Trump was a fluke. They thought that he was in kind of an emergency. And now they're sort of- It could be a threat to the stability they need for profits. The stability. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. So this cuts both ways. This is not a left or right thing. Yeah, I agree. The right allying itself with corporate power.

is going to find itself not with hardcore allies if those corporate allies think

that the right is going down and the right is a threat to them. They'll happily ally with corporate Democrats instead. The hand-wringing in 2018, 19, and then definitely in 2020 over the Chamber of Commerce was really fascinating to watch from inside of the conservative world because they realized what was called fusionism, the three-legged stool, Frank Meyer, National Review, William F.

Buckley meaning you combine libertarian economics with strong foreign policy. That's already kind of hilarious. And traditional values, also kind of hilarious. That the ally with the business community and libertarian economic policy had been unaligned.

undermining what they were pushing on family policy for years and years. There wasn't harmony on the right by allying yourself with the Chamber of Commerce. They started going towards ESG, DEI, and all of these things that conservatives were like, we have helped you with tax cuts. We just helped you with a massive corporate tax cut. And what you are doing is

undermining the idea of like the nuclear family and men and women. And we've been on your side for years. And this is what you're now doing here. So those, I mean, I don't know, those fissures have been like very real. And they're still losing corporate America. See, this is what's interesting. Democrats are, I mean.

And this is what's interesting for, but also for conservatives, this is what's interesting right now is if you just go crawling back to the corporate world because, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is giving you money again and is talking nice to you again. Or CNN's parent is firing Acosta.

Yeah, but it all goes to your point. And I would recommend people watch our interviews actually with Don Lemon and Brian Stelter because those were really rare opportunities. Like we literally played the Chomsky clip of him saying, you know, you don't need people to pay you.

to tell you what to say. Just the fact that you ask the questions you do, you don't need anybody to tell you to do that. You just agree with them. You're in the position you are to ask those questions because you're the kind of person that would ask the questions that you do of people in positions of power. And Don Lemon and Brian Stelter were very much in the Jim Acosta vein

of the sort of media resistance to Donald Trump, this kind of breathless fact checking that would fact check if he said he had one or two scoops of ice cream for dinner and has put the media in a situation where trust has dipped to the low it hit in 2017, back again. It's not going up, it's going back down after having all of these years

to learn the Biden lies for years, I think are probably, that's probably the biggest reason that trusted media is dipping again to a record low. And media with people, aligned with people like Jim Acosta has put itself in a situation where, to your point, you get Jim Acosta or you get

independent media or conservative media. You're forcing people, corporate media forces people to choose between Jim Acosta and Sean Hannity. Right? And the key difference between independent media and corporate media is that you're not actually allying with Jim Acosta himself as the man. You are allying with Jim Acosta as the anchor for CNN because that's where he gets his power. And so

If the parent company doesn't want him to be Jim Acosta, the anchor anymore. Now he's Jim Acosta, the sub stacker. And so Democrats put themselves in a foxhole with corporate media and fighting back against Trump. And it worked the first time around. But now the second time, Trump is more powerful. And Democrats are looking over at the foxhole and they're like, all right, you ready to go over the top? Let's charge. And they're like, they just put bullet in Acosta's head. And they're like, no.

We're over here with this guy right now. And Trump, you know, he's not going to welcome them back automatically. However, CBS News, for instance, got busted for, and we talked about this on the program, for this like kind of crappy editing for this Kamala Harris interview where they made a like airheaded answer, less airheaded. They cut off some of the rambling. But

That's well within your First Amendment rights. And when you write an article, you don't put the entire quote. You take the quote that kind of conveys the message. You can agree or disagree with it. It wasn't a crime what they did. Trump sued them, and it was a completely laughable lawsuit. No chance this goes anywhere. Like, what are you doing? You can't sue over, like, editing that you don't like in 60 Minutes. CBS settled with him. Yep.

Which is fascinating. So, in other words, this corporate giant... Disney did it too. ...cut a big check to the man who's the President of the United States. We used to call that a bribe. Like, that's very clever. File a frivolous lawsuit, get a big check in response. Because CBS doesn't care about journalism? Whatever, they don't care either way. Paramount, really. They have a merger.

that Paramount, which is the CBS parent company, is trying to merge with Skydance. Like it's a huge thing that they believe they need for their corporate entity. So if you thought that CBS, as Democrats, if you thought CBS was going to be part of the resistance, CBS has other things. Well, forget CBS. Paramount has other things that they care about. And this merger is

Being much more important. So they're like, you know what Trump take some money Sorry, sorry about our fake news media over at 60 minutes and that and that lousy edit. You're right We won't do it again

By the way, how's that merger looking? You're not going to keep any Lena Kahn fans around, are you? So the interview that Marc Andreessen did with Ross Douthat recently where he talked about how Silicon Valley, everyone sort of thought they were good Democrats and actually would put their sort of standing as quote-unquote good Democrats above Democrats.

Tax cuts right like they would say we know Obama's gonna like raise our taxes, but it's important for us because it sort of helps us internally personally psychologically Morally whitewash what we're doing right because as long as you support the Democrats Which is the party of progress and this is the era before Obergefell Then you can be on the right side of history and you can keep you know doing whatever the hell you're doing to the country radically changing the country and

And so this is a huge conversation. We could do this for hours, but I think that's like to the extent the corporate media was resisting Trump, it was, I think, along those lines. But when radical reform for the left or the right comes up, that's what you see, the resistance too. And it's

happens with Bernie. It's going to happen with Tulsi Gabbard this week. It'll definitely happen with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. There are all kinds of reasons, like legitimate debates to be had about these people. But we know what side the media, we can predict what side the media is going to be on basically every single time, given the parameters of the conversation, if it's about like

upending the system that benefits them. So I agree with a lot of that and I think it's important for the left to think about this right now because of what we talked about with Jeff Stein, that the Trump administration is now calling what is at best a very sloppy rollout that ended up through somebody's fault, we don't know who yet, freezing Medicaid portals and sent charities into like freakouts. I saw this like personally and it's just like,

The hoax lie is going to work. It's going to work because nobody trusts media. And so this is like a situation that everybody's found themselves in. And this is a good lesson, Ryan. You've laid out some really interesting stuff for the rest of this segment about where the resistance goes from here. Yeah. And the consequence of Democrats allying themselves with corporate media rather than helping to produce

an actually kind of grassroots democratic media ecosystem is that now

those mainstream media outlets are not broadcasting all of the genuine resistance that is going on. If you get your news from the news, which is where people get their news, either from mainstream press or from the right-wing press, you're not hearing anything about this upsurge in resistance that's going on. Whereas in 2017, it's all you heard about. Yet, I can tell you, it actually is happening. So last night, for instance, you may have seen this.

There was a special election in an Iowa state Senate seat. The Republicans had won that seat by like 21 points last time around. Democrats won it by four this time. It was a swing of 25 points last

That's the exact same thing that you saw in 2017, that these kind of outraged Democrats were shocked and started coming out to the polls in ways that they really had not before. And Republicans, when Trump was not on the ballot, kind of just stayed home. And it led to a bunch of, you know, Trump district candidates.

people losing in special elections and that foreshadowing a 2018 blue wave, but now you're not hearing about any of that and the for instance like throughout throughout the country, you know people are indivisible

immigration groups, et cetera, are organizing all these meetings, they're getting absolutely overflow crowds. Like there is energy out there. And so, and Democrats are actually fighting back. It's just not getting any, any coverage. So put up D3 here, J.B. Pritzker in Illinois, and we can roll through these, you know, fairly quickly. You know, he's, he's pushing back

against a lot of the immigration push. A bunch of mayors are saying that they're pushing against that. You can put up D4, this is the Pittsburgh mayor saying, you know, they're not working with ICE.

We talked about this earlier. Democratic attorneys general sued both over the birthright citizenship and also about the funding freeze, even as kind of congressional Democrats have been flat footed and all over the place and slash. But here's a key point that that people need to remember, because I think people who watch this program don't fall into this category, but they need to understand that there's millions of people who do put up D6. This is a tweet from David Siegel, progressive

progressive populist activist, he points out on Twitter, Harris's approval rating among Democrats is 79 to 12. That's now. So let me say that again.

Kamala Harris' approval rating among Democrats is 79 to 12, and Biden's is only slightly lower. He writes, So,

This is not to defend the 79% who are saying that. It is to defend the idea that we need to be objective about what people actually believe. Reforming the Democratic Party is going to be interesting, to say the least, when that is the circumstance that they're in. Yet at the same time, you're not seeing that reflected

in the media coverage of it either because they tied themselves to corporate media and corporate media, when its corporate interests were threatened, are abandoning the Democratic Party. This is basically what Rick Santorum, in a weird way, was trying to tell Republicans back when he was running the 2012 primary that some of these allies were not really allies. And, you know, obviously from a somewhat pro-business perspective,

conservative in the Tea Party era, he had to make that argument in a different way. But it took Donald Trump coming as a wrecking ball to totally upset the two-party system and force Republicans, at least on the surface, to change for a little bit. And what we're seeing now is a backslide into the warm, welcome arms of big tech and people like Jeff Bezos. But I mean, I don't know how Democrats, I mean, it's just, it's the problem of entrenched

two-party power. What incentive do they have really to change when you can just keep cobbling together coalitions that put you slightly over the edge with PR outreach? It just sucks. There's no real incentive. And what Trump did was screw with the primary. And Democrats tried to come in with a wrecking ball in the primary through Bernie Sanders. And

Right. They were thwarted by the DNC and for whatever reason the RNC wasn't able to do that with Donald Trump probably. But also and we need to internalize this.

They were also thwarted by Democratic voters. Yeah, no, 100%. Trump was... It gives me no pleasure to say that. But that was a primary that easily could have gone another way because Trump was one of, what, like 19 candidates or whatever. But if that had just been Trump and a couple of other people, it may have gone a different way. If other people had been... If there was a coordinated dropout effort like there was to beat Bernie, it could have easily gone the other way.

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Listen to the official Yellowstone podcast now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go to work.

Alright, let's talk about this wild story of the Romanian election that's getting virtually no attention here in the US. They canceled an election because they didn't like the result. That's the short version. The longer version is wild. But it's getting attention at dropside. There you go. So because news has been flying so fast, you may have missed an event in November that in retrospect may turn out to be of truly historic importance. A presidential election was held in a European Union country. The two establishment parties lost to two outsider parties.

and the Supreme Court simply annulled the election. And there was no allegation that there were any problems with the voting or the vote counting.

So we have a new story up at Dropsite by Alexander Zajic that takes a deep dive into what happened. It's a wild story and worth a full read. But the short version is that on November 24th, Romanian voters delivered an unexpected victory to a right-wing populist named Calan Gorgescu. And in the opening round of the country's presidential election,

So always considered a long shot, Grugesco had been polling in the single digits just weeks before surging to claim first place with 23% of the vote moving on to the runoff. The result shocked Romania's two dominant parties who found themselves on the sidelines as Grugesco campaigned for the runoff against another anti-establishment candidate who came in second place, Elena Lascone of the reformist Save Romania party.

Now, five days later, a news outlet called Context elevated claims that the election had been swung by the Kremlin through a social media campaign. On November 29th, the outlet published a report that included a summary of an analysis it conducted using software

from a Ukrainian firm that for the last several years had had NATO and EU and others as clients. Now, for the past several years context

has participated in a region-wide NGO project to investigate the "pro-Kremlin conspiracy and alt-right disinformation ecosystem in Central and Eastern Europe." The participating groups often have similar funding streams and various Western institutional connections. In the case of Context,

Its budget is overwhelmingly covered by funding from the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global reporting network that we recently reported over at Dropsite is heavily funded by the U.S. government. So Contax's executive director...

spent 20 years working in the press office of the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest. Now, on December 4th, four days before the deciding round was supposed to take place, Romania's Supreme Defense Council released a small batch of heavily redacted documents from the country's foreign intelligence service. The documents outlined allegations of a Kremlin-backed social media campaign that supported Gorgiescu in violation of national election laws.

Quote, data were obtained, the accompanying government statement read, quote, revealing an aggressive promotion campaign that exploited the algorithms of some social media platforms to increase the popularity of Cal and Gorgasco at an accelerated pace, unquote. Within hours, the U.S. State Department expressed its, quote, concern over the allegations.

Two days later, on December 6th, Romania's Constitutional Court unanimously ruled the November 24th vote was invalid. Quote, the entire electoral process for electing the president of Romania is annulled, the court announced, citing government claims of irregularities on social media. Now, a week and a half ago, the court finally announced a new date of May 4th for a new election.

Radio Free Europe and Radio Radio Free Europe slash Radio Liberty, which is funded by the U.S., reported Romania had become the latest victim of a, quote, aggressive hybrid war waged by the Kremlin. Four U.S. senators issued a statement condemning, quote, Vladimir Putin's manipulation of Chinese Communist Party controlled TikTok to undermine Romania's democratic process. So it wasn't just Russia now, it's Russia and China.

The State Department, though, seemed fine with the election cancellation, saying in a statement, quote, we note the Romanian Constitutional Court's decision today, unquote, and expressed, quote, confidence in Romania's democratic institutions and processes, including investigations into foreign malign influence. Okay, so that's the case they laid out.

The whodunit is so fun, I don't even want to spoil it for readers, but I'm going to because this is a newscast. I'm going to tell you how this ended. It was not the Kremlin. It was not Chairman Xi. What happened was the PNL, which is one of the establishment parties, did that thing where you go and support a fringe candidate to try to draw votes away from your opponent. Both major parties in the U.S. do this.

The Democrats love to boost libertarians. Little Reid Hoffman action. See, it's Reid Hoffman likes to do it. And Republicans are the most aggressive advocates for Green Party ballot access all the time. So what happened here, imagine the scenario, is that basically both the Democrats and the Republicans lost and the Greens and the libertarians went to the second round, accidentally boosted by these moronic establishment parties.

So that's what happened. So the funding for this TikTok campaign came from one of the major establishment parties. And what's wild, and Alex goes into this in the article, is that when they originally put out that batch of documents showing that this whole thing happened,

The name of the consulting firm that had run this entire operation was redacted. So in other words, Romania knew the name. And not only did Romania know it, the U.S. knew it. The name of the consulting firm that ran it was redacted. We now know the identity of that consulting firm. And it is a consulting firm that works almost only with this one establishment, Romanian party. So...

From the very beginning, and also Alex talks about how they'd seen this consulting firm, you know, people had seen them going in and out of the offices. Like it was, everybody knew, everybody knows that this consulting firm only works with this party. Like that, it's like that we have the same thing here in the United States. You got firms that work with Republicans, firms that work with Democrats. So once they identified, oh, this social media campaign is being run by this consulting firm, they immediately knew.

that it was one of these parties, that it was this particular party that had funded this operation. Yet instead they redacted it and claimed that it was Russia, knowing full well that it was not. This was not a

where they're like, oh, boy, sure has all the hallmarks as those 50 intelligence. Yes, the 51, yeah. All the hallmarks of a Russian counterintel operation. Wasn't even that. They knew with certainty for a fact who ran this thing and the State Department publicly supported

the annulment of this election. Anyway, the key point here, why they care so much about Romania? You used to think that Germany had the most important European American military base. Not anymore. Romania now is host to the most important American military base in Europe. And a right-wing populist who has said that the war between Ukraine and Russia ought to end is a direct threat

to American military interests vis-a-vis that base. And so here we are. The other part of the story, first, as I was reading this reporting, I was like, it needs like a flow chart.

Because the other one is relying on the assessment that it was Russia from a firm that does most of its work with NATO, right? Right. They use this Ukrainian AI software company. They claim that, and this is the US-funded news outlet, relying on a Ukrainian NATO-funded analytics firm that's using some AI that says, yep, we have concluded. So think about this.

Back up for a second. Like, the U.S. and those Romanian establishment parties are accusing Russia of interfering in Romanian politics. Who is leading the charge in making that accusation? A U.S.-funded news outlet relying on a NATO-funded Ukrainian software company claiming that there is foreign interference. Yeah.

It's like, guys, that's kind of foreign interference. It's foreign interference. You're actually doing the thing that you're accusing Russia of doing. Yes. And it's getting like no coverage in American media because it's like, oh, Romania, whatever. I think it should because it's the cancellation of an election. A NATO country. When you don't have any evidence of voter fraud or anything, like no allegations that the vote was tainted. Like the

People went out and voted and voted for these two characters. There's zero evidence that votes were tampered with. And it doesn't mean I like this Gorgesco guy. He's like a right-wing creep. But come on. Like, the guy won. It's...

If votes are not tampered with, if you cannot prove that votes are tampered with and you're just mad that someone came in and put up a bunch of, let's just say, billboards, whether they're digital billboards, physical billboards, digital flyers, or literal flyers, and you say that it was foreign interference. But it was actually Romanians. But it's like saying that we have to cancel out, like, yeah. But let's say hypothetically that it was Russia.

And it was like Russia's little Facebook campaign in the closing days of 2016 election to divide Americans along the BLM lines and the LGBT lines. So those ads are still like very funny if you go read the Senate report from 2018 when they found the memes that Russia was posting. Let's just say that's what happened hypothetically.

Do I think that we should be transparent about if foreign powers are funding propaganda? Absolutely. Do I think there should be rules about what money you're allowed to take in elections from foreign powers? Absolutely. But people are making up their minds. You're still fundamentally getting mad with voters.

It's fundamentally about voters. It does raise a thorny question because there are also sovereignty questions. So I think there's a threshold issue, like Russian TikTok thing. Let's say it was Russia and it's a little TikTok thing. It's like, get out of here. Like that's not persuasive enough that you've swung the entire election. But let's say Russia came in and like ostentatiously spent a billion dollars supporting Russia.

the candidate that they liked in complete contravention of Romanian law. I can see a case where you're like, no, you can't do that. Like we are like, what does Trump say? Like we got we have borders. You know, you're not a country. Right. And you're not a country if you can't pass some laws and have them respected. Totally. So but I understand how that can be a slippery slope to exactly what just happened. Yes. So.

But, you know, this is tricky stuff to think through. However, none of that even happened here. This was a Romanian establishment party. It's this. That screwed itself accidentally and then used its own screwing

to annul the election. Yeah, I mean, it feels like we're in the vibe shift moment now, but this is what you're going to see attacking the populist left and populist right long term as a major theme. It's going to be technocratic elites using the powers of, or abusing, exploiting the powers of technology, which completely shrinks the globe.

to undermine people. So saying that we couldn't control TikTok, we couldn't control the messaging on TikTok. So elections canceled, like, sorry, because everything is now so consolidated and centralized that you can look at a campaign, an alleged campaign on social media and say that it totally upended the election and validated the election. And you can do that from your perch.

in the technocracy. So this is, I mean, this is a taste of what's to come, but it's a significant taste of what's to come because it screwed up the Romanian election, NATO country, EU country, and we were involved, shamefully involved. Yeah. Great story. Fascinating. Good reason to subscribe to Dropside. That's right. Go subscribe to Dropside. Cool stuff like that. And this was published in collaboration with Truthdig. Alexander Zajic is an editor over at Truthdig.

Up next, we've got Trump's real estate buddy, Steve Witkoff, went to Gaza. You made it sound like we were having Steve Witkoff on the show. That would be cool.

But even better, we have... Witkoff is welcome on the show anytime he wants. That's right. Even better, we have my dropside colleague, Murtaza Hussain, who just returned from a reporting trip in Syria. He's going to talk about that and also about this Witkoff visit to Gaza. Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff visited Gaza today along with Netanyahu Lieutenant Ron Dermer visiting the Netzerim quarter. If we can put up this first element here, scooped by Barack Ravid, as all things Netanyahu seem to be scooped by.

He writes, White House envoy Witkoff visited on Wednesday the Net's room quarter inside the Gaza Strip together with the Israeli Minister for Strategic Affairs, Ron Dermer. This is the first visit by a U.S. government official in Gaza for at least 15 years. So joining us now to discuss this and also a recent reporting trip that he took to Syria is my Dropsite colleague, Maz Hussain. Maz, thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. And so Witkoff had actually floated this in, I believe it was in a Fox News interview recently, causing complete pandemonium among Israeli political observers and political participants saying, you

They're already panicked about this guy because he forced Netanyahu to work on Shabbat and then forced him into this deal that is now unfolding. They accuse him of being basically a puppet of Qatar. When he said he was going to go visit Gaza, they completely lost their minds. Oftentimes, that kind of meltdown would yield a backing off, a retreating.

from the position. Instead, he ends up going to Netzerim corridor, I think importantly with Ron Dermer, who is this guy that, you know, very well known around Washington, used to be Israel's ambassador to Washington. He's a guy from Miami. Netanyahu is probably closest confidant. Very smooth operator.

So they wanted a babysitter with them as he's going in there. What do you make of Witkoff's willingness to go through with this kind of in the face of Israeli opposition?

Well, you know, I've been watching very closely the Trump administration's nascent sort of approach to Israel, Palestine and the Middle East more generally, because of the fact that obviously the Trump coalition contains very different streams of people with different views of foreign policy. And some people are the more neocon type people, you could say, who dominated in the first term. But there's this very strong, you could say, America first nationalist type of contingent as well, too. And they're very skeptical of further policy.

deep US military involvements in the Middle East and even Europe to an extent too. So they would like to extricate themselves from the situation. And, you know, I don't know exactly yet. And obviously from the first Trump term, I'm cautious and wary of

the approach he's going to take. But I do think there's some hints that maybe the latter category is seeing its views represented more strongly. And we saw this in some of the personnel decisions, too, or some of the, not even personnel decisions, some decisions Trump made to kind of sideline the Iran-Hawk people from his first term in the last few weeks. So Wyckoff, you know, he's taking these steps, pushing for the ceasefire, kind of, as he's mentioned, forcing Netanyahu to work on Shabbat. I think Netanyahu is very secular anyway. I think that was a good point.

He made him do that. And now, you know, the ceasefire, we see people returning north to north of Gaza. We see Witkoff actually visiting. These are all tentatively good signs, potentially, that Trump will be taking a different path than he did in the first term, at least to some degree, a relative degree, vis-a-vis Israel and Palestine. But also, it seems like a repudiation of what Biden was doing. Biden was giving Netanyahu every single thing he wants. And one very consistent theme with Trump, maybe even more than...

any particular views he has about foreign policy or the US role in the world is that he likes to stick it to the Democrats, stick it to his predecessor. So if Biden was giving everything Bibi wants,

well, let's make Bibi work on Shabbat, and then maybe we'll force him to end the war. And Trump, if he did have one consistent message, he said he would end the wars. He wasn't very specific always how he'd do that, but he did say he did end. So I think he does have a lot of political capital invested. So I would say I'm cautiously monitoring, and there's some glimmers of hope there. And Witkos' visit to Gaza seems to be another data point in that. And speaking of...

Syria and the Netanyahu administration's kind of pressure here. Israel cats, you may have seen this, visited what they call Mount Hermon recently in the Golan Heights and said that basically they're not leaving and they're just fortifying it more aggressively. Do we have this in English or should we just roll this as a VO? All right, so people can, if you're watching, you can read this. So he went up to this basically ski resort,

that is in the Golan Heights that is now illegally occupied by Israel. And they're claiming that they're going to keep this territory that they've claimed indefinitely. And so, Maz, you just got back from Syria. I guess the first question is kind of like, what were your impressions after having not been there for so long? What is the place like on the ground?

You know, Syria was a very nice country. My family used to go on vacation in Syria because it was just a nice place to go. Today, if you go to Syria, it's like the apocalypse happened there. Beyond, you know, you see pictures of Gaza, half the country looks like Gaza. It's just completely flattened buildings, rubble, destruction, even in the quote-unquote normal areas.

It's, you know, people don't have food. They don't have, you know, their fancy areas. People are selling, you know, Fifth Avenue. It could be turned into people selling used shoes and things like that. That's kind of the level of economic devastation that's taking place there.

even the supply chains, like for food and things like that, they've broken down. So people are just doing whatever they can. Uh, the level of suffering is just unbelievable. It's a post-apocalyptic, I would say sort of environment inside Syria. And, you know, I mentioned a lot of areas are destroyed, uh, their whole cities, which are destroyed. There are people living in the rubble who have been living there for a very long time. Uh,

with no electricity, no water. Somehow they're still managing to get their kids educated, doing everything they can, even trying to make the best they can situation. But it's just an unbelievably devastating situation. And as long as it's going to take Gaza to rebuild, it's going to take a very, very long time. You have to extrapolate that to a whole country, maybe 10 times the population of Gaza

That same level of destruction is very, very evident there. And secondly, you know, I'll tell you from the beginning, it was a very strange environment because when I crossed the border from Jordan, I drove over, I was expecting to see the former government people working at the border, maybe with different bosses.

Because my understanding, as you read in the news, there's people that the government was not dissolved entirely. They kept personnel there. What I found, actually, was that the new guys are completely in control. The old government guys are not there. And everything was very informal. They were just guys with assault rifles. And no one was wearing uniforms. And they just kind of waved me through. They were like, you know, welcome. Didn't really ask too many questions, things like that. It was a completely, you know...

a barren situation and maybe it'll change sometime in a couple weeks or months but it's very much in flux and they have a tremendous task ahead of them to hold the country together if they can and if they can rebuild the country even better but it's not going to be easy

And this is another immediate test of Donald Trump's foreign policy. And I'm curious, Miles, what you might have picked up on what people there are expecting to see or maybe aren't sure what to expect to see from the Trump administration. Obviously, his policy both towards Israel and Syria. We're kind of like reading the tea leaves trying to figure out what might.

extrapolate from the first administration and public statements and personnel to what might happen in the near term future. Did you get a sense of what people are hearing or expecting or maybe what they're not hearing or not expecting when you were over there?

Yeah, you know, first of all, it's very interesting because it was never the case you could ask people their opinion before. So, you know, having the idea of having a casual conversation, what do you think about what's going to happen politically, domestically, abroad? That was a completely new thing for people there because there was so much fear before and people just weren't comfortable doing it. So now you can have those conversations. And I would say, generally speaking, people...

You know, they're relieved in the short term that, okay, something is changing and, you know, we're a bit freer. We have to pay bribes all the time, just day-to-day life. But, you know, to your point, like what's going to happen now domestically and nationally is great unknown. People are very, very concerned. Many people I spoke to were concerned that, well, this could just be a breather before a new war. It could be a breather before, you know, foreign powers, potentially the U.S. among them, may seek to divide the country. They may seek to partition it on ethnic grounds or...

You know, there's a lot of concern about that. So I think Trump, the concern about Trump is one of many concerns people have. And obviously the U.S. role in the region is often mediated through Israel. So what Israel does is kind of see an extension of what the U.S. is doing because of the fact that obviously Israel is heavily armed by the U.S. and gets

political and diplomatic cover. And there is concern. There's concern that maybe they may try to carve off more parts of the country. They may try to arm people inside the country to format more chaos. People are very, very, very concerned about this. And, you know, for Trump's, from what I've seen of Trump so far, it doesn't seem like he wants to get deeply involved in nation building or quote-unquote nation building or

having the US deeply invested in Syria or anywhere else in the Middle East for the most part. I believe he announced or there was a leak that he may be planning to withdraw US troops from Syria. And US troops in Syria, they play a very particular role. They were there to fight ISIS when ISIS was very, very active and they were defending some of the Kurdish groups that were helping fight ISIS at that time. And they also keep this very large prison complex, a hole where tens of thousands of former ISIS members

and their families and also some innocent civilians are incarcerated. So the U.S. may withdraw that presence, and if they do, it'll inevitably create a vacuum where something else happens in there. So there'll be a resumption of fighting between central government and the Kurdish groups, or maybe ISIS people will revive. These are all open questions right now, but they're things that people are thinking about and concerned about.

And as I said, the situation is still very much developing, but what the US does is very much top of mind for many people. And something you had mentioned to me I found really interesting where you said that Assad, of course, has fallen and fled, but elements of his regime

are still holding some territory and still fighting. That the war is over in the sense that it's been won by HTS, but yet the war is not actually over yet. Can you talk a little bit about who these elements are that are still fighting? And could you imagine them, let's say the US withdraws, now the Kurds are more vulnerable, could you see the Kurds, you know, allying with some of these kind of gang elements?

to try to weaken the central government to maintain their own position. What's going on with the fighting? So by the time the government collapsed, the degradation of the state had been so extensive that you effectively had gangs. It was basically a gang with no ideology, which was controlling the country. And they were involved in drug trafficking, particularly Captagon, other forced smuggling. They're making a lot of money for themselves.

And so the regime left. It was decapitated, you could say. The head of the regime fled to Russia and many other leaders scattered. We don't know exactly where. But there are all these military units were controlled by officers and

And they'd be turning into gangs, basically. They were their mafias. And when the government fell, they disappeared. Like, you don't see them in Damascus anymore. And interestingly, in Damascus, there used to be Bashar Assad's photo every single corner. There's not a single trace of him anymore. So they kind of disappeared from Earth, at least from the major cities. But they've gone to the countryside. They've gone to the coast. And, you know, they still maintain they have their money. They have their cliques around them and so forth.

And the government has offered that people can, you know, demobilize certain cases, you know, former soldiers and so forth. They can turn in their weapons and go home. But, you know, a lot of people who are more senior or who were allegedly implicated in crimes during the government, they don't have that option. And some of them don't want to do that either. They have financial interests. They have power independently in their own right.

So, you know, it's kind of like it's a very Hobbesian situation, you could say, because there is a state now which is trying to assert a monopoly on violence. But the previous state didn't have a monopoly on violence. So you're trying to reimpose order on this very, very big country with lots of guns and lots of money and lots of drugs floating around. It's a pretty significant amount of territory. And I'll tell you that the level of traveling around the country, the level of control that the government has doesn't seem totally clear because there are not that many of them. There are only maybe...

A couple of tens of thousands of people that controlled one province, and now they control suddenly the whole country, which I think they're not expecting. What I saw of HTS is mostly 16-, 17-year-olds with AK-47s who were just kind of standing around and guarding stuff or taking pictures and things like that. They're not seemingly ready to assert control of the entire country. So it's going to take a very long time. And to your point, this creates a very fertile environment for HTS.

potential subversion or infiltration of the country. Obviously, these former regime elements, they kind of don't have many options left if they were implicated in crimes and things like that. So they may seek to outside patronage. So a country that you could think of as the UAE potentially can get involved, which they've done in other countries like Sudan and Libya and so forth, Israel and the U.S. They could seek to arm certain elements to cause trouble for the governments to

carve out pieces of Syrian territory for themselves. It's a very, very febrile environment. And I would say everyone wants a piece of Syria, fortunately. And the people have suffered so much, there's been so much destruction. And I would say the vast majority of people of all backgrounds simply just want no more wars. And they want the economy to recover and sanctions to be lifted and go back to some more semblance of normality. But I think that the geopolitical interests of other countries are so strong that there will be a lot of resistance to that.

And you can only hope that whoever's in charge is able to reassert control. But it's going to be, like I said, a very, very difficult path. And, you know, reasserting just physical control is the first step towards that. Yeah, it would be incredibly difficult to do it if Syria had real borders and was just fighting among the factions that were within the Syrian borders. But to your point...

the instability can be kind of generated and furthered by elements that have a lot of interest in making sure that Syria isn't able to kind of reconstitute itself

As a real state and I get somewhat related this up point out that so today's Wednesday tomorrow night Thursday at 8 p.m. At drop site. We're screening a documentary about Syria and which focuses on American leftists like we had a we had one of the Brooklyn hipsters on this program talking about how he kind of went over and fought with the YPG Isis will be screening that documentary at drops that I can put a link in there and Mazel be leading the Q&A with a director afterwards

But so I hope everybody checks that out. There's an opportunity to catch that for free. Maz, welcome back to the States, and thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. All right, yeah, so these rebels might have bitten off more than they can chew. It's almost impossible to see how they're going to be able to build an effective state under these conditions. And what he was telling me before is,

They have electricity, even in the best areas, like two hours a day, which means that the food is all like inedible. The meat is gray. Like imagine trying to run a restaurant or a grocery store or anything when you have two hours of refrigeration. So, you know, he was eating like a lot of nuts and berries and stuff or dried berries because it's not like you can.

Not like you have access to like fresh fruit. And people, as he was pointing out, have been living like that for more than 10 years. Right. Right. I mean, the other thing I just wanted to say as a takeaway from that is I'm really glad you guys are sending people at Dropsite into places like this where typically only corporate press can afford to go. I mean, it costs a ton of money. You need to have a reasonable assumption. Your reporters will be safe. Right.

It's really hard to do and to have independent eyes on the ground, I just think that's a really good sign of what you guys are up to. Yeah, really, really interesting stuff. Yeah, definitely. This was a packed show. We fit in all the debates about the constitutionality of executive spending. Settled all those. Yeah, we did. We solved the problem. And we even got to have some fun with Jim Acosta for a bit. We did. I consider that a win. Definitely.

BreakingPoints.com is where you can go to get a premium subscription, support the show. We always appreciate that. Thanks to everybody for tuning in. We'll be back here, of course, next Wednesday with more CounterPoints. All right. See you then. Carla only has the best tech. Can't connect to network. But she didn't have the best internet. So she got Cox Multigig speeds to power all her...

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