Trump Tariffs Create Global Chaos
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Welcome back to Podtape of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. You enjoy watching the stock market crash?

I have a tip for everyone who's looking at their 401k. You got to make sure you go to the wine store or the booze store now if you're buying anything from overseas because it's about to get terrible. I did that, by the way. I did too. As a man who enjoys a glass of Bordeaux every afternoon or evening. I know your style. I definitely went after that. Yeah. I don't know how long I was thinking today. I noticed today that the front page of the Times doesn't have the ticker anymore. I was wondering how long we can watch this podcast

go down in real time. I did throw on, I was going to throw on Margin Call, my favorite financial crisis movie. Oh, okay. Go back to those days. Good. That's a good movie. I went to the booze store the other day. I asked the guy if people were hoarding foreign European wines yet. He said, not quite yet. Then I noticed a rum called Crossfire Hurricane, which I felt like they're definitely going to get...

They're going to get tariffed. Ben, first of all, I just want to say thank you to everyone who subscribed to the Pod Save the World YouTube. Yes, we need you to subscribe. We're over the 100,000 mark. Actually, 102,000. Like I said, you know, when I begged you last time, we are trying to catch up to like the Daily Wire, TPUSA, these horrible right-wing outlets that have massive YouTube presences. So we're putting more exclusive content on YouTube.

We're trying to really focus there because a lot of young people use YouTube as a search engine and what they find is awful conservative content. So Crooked Media has got to get in the game. We got to get in the game, guys. I've had some people dunk on me recently for, you know, well, look at TPUSA. Where are you guys? You know.

It's not a good feeling. Also, we're going to try something a little different in today's episode. So we're going to do a couple fewer topics with the goal of going deeper into each one of them. Listeners have probably noticed that we tend to have like kind of a really long top of the show. And then there's lots of things where we like maybe check the box at the end, which we want to do because there's, I don't

a million things we could discuss every week, but sometimes we feel like there's more value when we have more of a discussion into fewer things. So I don't know, tell us what you think. And there's some pretty big things going on that it's hard to deal with in a couple of minutes. Yeah, there's some meaty, meaty stuff like...

Liberation Day, happy Liberation Day, by the way, I didn't tell you yet. - It feels like that was a week ago. - Yeah. - Feels like a long time ago. - Feels like a year ago. So we're gonna talk about Liberation Day, Trump's tariffs. We'll talk about how a fringe right wing lunatic named Laura Loomer is literally dictating national security personnel decisions at the White House.

We'll cover the news out of Yvonne and Yahoo's visit to the White House on Monday, why people are concerned about a civil war in South Sudan. The president of South Korea was finally removed from office months after he declared martial law. We'll tell you the backstory there and what might come next and what it means for U.S.-South Korea relations. And then we're going to look to Europe, Ben, for some laughs. Always Europe and Australia.

Always a good source of love. Yeah, love, love the Aussies. Some weird shit happening with European leaders that we're going to dig into. Yes. And then, Ben, you're going to hear my interview with Noah Bullock. He's the executive director of CrystalSol, which is a human rights organization that is based in El Salvador. He's based in El Salvador. And Noah has been looking at Nayib Bukele's regime for a very long time and has watched the way he has used the

uh, the state of exception, the suspension of due process and constitutional rights for citizens there to sweep people up, throw like 2% of the population into these prisons, which has made the country safer, but has led to this, you know, incredibly authoritarian oppressive regime. So we talk about these prisons because the obvious most recent context is the United States sending Venezuelan men down into these transnational gulags with no due process. But we also talk about the role of these prisons

in Bukele's regime, how it props him up. And also his foreign policy views, like how we went from kind of like Bitcoin guy to Trump stooge to CPAC attendee. So really, really interesting conversation. And he had some, I thought, just like really thoughtful, smart observations about

What that kind of system does to a population over time and the comparisons to the slow erosion of rights we're seeing in the US Yeah, and something that we all need to learn more about so people should definitely listen to this one definitely But let's start with the tariff spend because it was Liberation Day where President Trump finally rolled out his tariffs and if you're a lover of global economic chaos or

Boy, did it deliver. Here's what Trump announced. There's a universal 10% tariff that took effect April 5th. Then there are country-specific tariffs on over 180 countries that go into effect on April 9th, so tomorrow when this comes out. The way the White House determined the tariff rate on each country was this nutty formula based on each country's trade deficit with the United States, which makes no sense. Also, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Belarus were exempted from the tariffs, as long as we're cataloging things that don't really make any sense.

For those who are like, what's a tariff? A tariff is just a tax on an imported good. The company importing the good pays the tariff. So if you're like Ben, you want some French wine, an importer purchases that wine, they pay the tariff that Trump slapped on, you know, whatever Bordeaux. And then the importer will almost certainly pass that cost along to me, Ben, the consumers in the form of higher prices.

Tariffs were the main way the US collected revenue through the early 1900s. In 1913, the 16th Amendment gave Congress the power to levy and collect income taxes, which over time became the main source of federal revenue. Presidents from both parties have put in place targeted tariffs, like on Chinese imports of steel or tires or electric vehicles. But what Trump did, again, was take...

each country's trade deficit with the U.S., divide it by the country's exports to the U.S., and then divide by two to get the rate. We're going to tariff them, which former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said the process was, quote, to economics what creationism is to biology.

astrology is to astronomy or RFK thought is to vaccine science. Good quote from Larry. - Wow, Larry, quote machine. - Good tweet from Larry. In practice, this math has a slapping 50% tariffs on tiny little countries like Lesotho, 41% tariff on Syria, and then massive tariffs on a lot of our biggest allies.

According to Treasury Secretary Scott Besson, more than 50 countries have approached the U.S. about cutting a deal, though nothing has been inked yet. The EU has offered to go to zero tariffs for zero tariffs. I just get rid of them all. But they're also preparing to retaliate. There are some key EU members like Italy, though, that seemingly don't want to retaliate against the Trump administration. China, however, is spoiling for a fight. They said they're going to impose a reciprocal tariff policy.

of 34% on US products, which Trump threatened to respond to with another 50% tariff. So Ben, everybody is trying to make sense of like what Trump is doing here. Do you have a theory of the case?

My theory of the case on why he's doing it, and we can get into the ramifications. I mentioned to you, Tommy, that for this book I've been working on, I unfortunately had to go back and read Trump's announcement speech for president in 2015. People will remember that he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower. People usually remember the line where he talks about Mexicans bringing in rapists and stuff.

But actually, like the preponderance of that speech, an extraordinary amount of it, like three quarters of it is about tariffs. It's about trade deficits. And this is a guy whose worldview was born in the 1980s when people were pissed that the Japanese were doing better than us economically. He seems to genuinely...

believe he's figured something out wherein, you know, you leverage tariffs to compel countries to do what you want and you kind of

orchestrate, engineer the global economy as you'd like it to be. So in Trump's mind, it's like some real estate deal. Somebody's sitting across the table from you and you want them to do something. And so you oppose a penalty on them. And therefore they start buying more of your stuff. And then you're making that stuff in the US and everything is great. The problem is

the world doesn't work like a bilateral real estate transaction. You know, different countries have different interests, different countries have different resources, different countries have different politics, different systems. You can't sit in Washington and enter a terraformula into like a chat GPT model. Which they might have done. Yeah, which it seems like they did and re-engineer the whole global economy

in a couple of years. That's just not how it works. And just to dig into that a little bit, what he seems to be primarily mad about is trade deficits, meaning we buy more of your stuff than you buy ours. But if you're a country that your export is bananas, we're never going to make enough bananas online

- On our own, right? The United States is not gonna have a banana industry. There's no logic here. - Yeah, I mean, I've really earnestly tried. - Me too, and maybe that's a mistake. - No, and people who listen to the podcast or like the stuff I've been writing since the election, this issue of globalization and de-industrialization and decades and decades of working class communities in this country being ravaged by,

job losses and globalization, that's a real problem. This is just not the answer, though. I think sometimes people think that because Trump figured out a way to speak to people that have been harmed by free trade, harmed by deindustrialization, that that means he understands it. It means he understands how to demagogue it. This is not the answer to the challenges that he's diagnosing. And you're not going to bring back

manufacturing to the industrial Midwest by putting tariffs on random African countries. You know, you're not going to isolate China for its unfair trade practices. What China does is like plows state subsidies into certain industries, steals intellectual property. It does things that are bad that deserve to be called out.

You're not going to solve that problem by putting like near 50% tariffs on Southeast Asian countries that are the alternative supply chains to China. Like everything he's doing is kind of in conflict with his stated objectives. And the bigger problem is, and where we should spend some time is,

It is just disappearing, not eroding, disappearing any global confidence in the United States as the central hub of the global economy and global financial system, which we've been since World War II. It is going to rapidly accelerate countries moving away from that.

and isolate us because why would countries say, okay, Mr. Trump, we come out, we're going to ship our factories back to the United States. There's no political incentive to do that. Even the jobs that are lost, we're not going to do anything.

textiles and we're not going to assemble iPhones and that's just not a workforce that we have anymore anyway even if you know we wanted to and if if we did want to do that that would take 20 years to to regenerate you know so this is just not this is him responding to like a worldview he already had

A political constituency that he effectively identified, angry white working class people largely, but not just white, but angry working class people in this country about globalization. But then like the remedy, the medicine, as he says, is just the wrong, it's like telling people to drink bleach during fucking COVID. It doesn't make sense. Like targeted tariffs can help protect an industry. One industry. Right. Or like help you grow a nascent business.

industry. But like just tariffing everyone is not going to do that. It has to be coupled with some sort of industrial policy and investment like the Chinese do, by the way, like the chips act was from Joe Biden that he now says he wants to get rid of. And the other problem with this is like, okay, I

I've been trying to, I probably spent way too much time trying to understand this too and rationalize it and sane wash it. I assume he's just trying to exert leverage to cut deals, but his, what he wants is so all over the place. Like for example, the European Union was like, all right, you don't like our tariffs? Let's go zero tariffs to zero tariffs, right? Like basically free trade. And Trump said, no, that's not enough. He wants the EU to buy $350 billion worth of energy from the United States. Like, oh,

okay, that's coming out of absolutely nowhere. So again, we're just trying to zero out the trade deficit. And I keep beating this drum, like the most confusing part of this is the China piece. Because if China is the real threat and that's what he ran on and that's where there's a bipartisan consensus in Washington, hammering all of our allies is not gonna help us deal with China. And also, Ben, if you look at these news reports,

The Chinese are telling people that they're trying to get meetings with the Trump administration and can't. And I've talked to people directly who've talked to the Chinese who say they're like, they want to meet with Waltz or Rubio or like someone on staff. They can't get a meeting or they're like running up against some grifter or hanger on who's trying to sell him or herself as like a line into the Trump administration because they have a Mar-a-Lago membership. Or there's just, you know, a bunch of kind of crazy hardliners in the administration.

And the Chinese are like, we're not going to put Xi Jinping just directly into a conversation or a meeting with Trump unless it has a clear agenda and an end game because no one wants to get Zelensky'd.

You know, and have fucking J.D. Vance pissing on your leg from the other couch as like Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend yells at you about your outfit. Right. Like, yeah, that's not a context they're going to go for. Yeah, I guess I'd summarize my concerns beyond the crashing market, which I'll end on. First, none of these countries know what the deal is that they are supposed to be striking.

So he's and I've talked to people and mainly in Europe, but they have no idea what they're supposed to be doing. Yeah. What do you want? What they want? What does Trump want? Right. And that's that that leads the second point, which is it is creating this kind of massive uncertainty.

Even if Trump lifted all these tariffs tomorrow, I think the damage is already done because no one will ever trust the United States, certainly not while Trump is president, will ever trust the United States to be a reliable trading partner, a reliable steward of the global economy. So in addition to everything else, what you're going to see is other countries are just going to begin to try to insulate themselves in the United States. So rather than reshoring things in the United States, they're going to try to have alternative supply chains, alternative trade agreements, alternative trade blocks that exclude us. So that's really going to hurt us in the long run too.

To your China point, that includes countries like Vietnam has been very careful. I remember when we were negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement, which Trump killed, the Vietnamese, I looked at a graph of their export-import relationships. They were very careful to have kind of the exact match of US, China, Europe. They wanted to diversify. They didn't want to be overly reliant on China. So they made a point of exporting to the United States.

They were hedging against China. They want to be a part of our China strategy because they fear a large, powerful China right above them that has historical antagonism to them. This is just us pushing them into the Chinese. If you are a Southeast Asian country now, you're going to want to sell your stuff to the Chinese and you're going to therefore need to buy stuff from the Chinese. That means we're going to pay higher prices. We're not going to get investment from those. This is not going to work in that regard. And even on the China piece,

The Chinese had this statement out today when Trump threatened higher terrorists, where he said, the Chinese said, "We will fight to the death," or something like that. They will. I mean, to take a bigger view of history, this is a Chinese Communist Party that lived through Mao Zedong, they lived through a famine, they lived through a cultural revolution. I'm no fan of theirs, but the idea that they're going to change their entire model

to please Mr. Trump. Who's gone. He's a one-termer. Who's going to be gone in four years when the Chinese Communist Party knows they're going to be there in four years. That's not going to happen. And that's just illustrative of how little he understands the countries he's dealing with. He doesn't understand the Southeast Asian countries' desire to have a hedge against China. He doesn't understand China's...

belief that their staying power is their advantage over us. He doesn't understand that the Europeans, it's the trust that they had in the United States that is the core of the alliance, not some brute force burden sharing that he forces on them. And so this is going to

have immediate impacts in terms of a potential global economic crisis that is already unfolding before our eyes. But beyond that, it's going to remake the global economy away from the United States. Things like the dollars or reserve currency are going to come into question because why is everyone who trades in the dollar if the person who's sitting on charge of the economy in the United States is weaponizing that to fuck everybody in the world? So it's hard to overstate the impact that this could have

over many years, not just the kind of weird, you know, stock market freefall we're living through. Yeah, I mean, just two final observations on this. Like, not that Trump gives a shit, but there's an organization called the International Trade Union Confederation Global Rights. They do an index of...

the countries that score the worst in terms of like conditions for workers in that country. Of the 89 countries that scored the worst in their index, about half of them got awarded the Trump administration's lowest tariff rate. So like the worst human rights abusers are getting the lowest tariffs. Again, I know he doesn't care, but it's just kind of telling. And then finally,

I keep banging on this, but the legal authority that Trump is using- - Oh yeah, this is important. - To put in places there, it's just crazy. So they're using a law called IEBA, it's the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. It gives the president the authority to regulate international commerce in response to a national emergency abroad. It's mostly used to freeze assets or impose sanctions on individuals or foreign governments.

Trump is essentially declaring an emergency all over the world and using it to create a de facto tax on every single American, really on every single citizen in the world in a way that has never been used before. Ever, ever. - And it's an important reminder that the kind of authoritarian stuff that we talk about is fundamentally connected to everything else.

Because the reason that there's checks and balances set up so that presidents can't abuse authorities like this is because this would never get through Congress. This would never get through Congress. Even with his compliant Republican Congress, they would never pass these tariffs into law. But because he's abusing his power, he's able to do things that the system would usually prevent him from doing.

And I actually think it's kind of an indictment of the U.S. kind of war on terror era that he is using some of those authorities on sanctions to

have been, I think, already overused by presidents, including, you know, President Obama when we were there. And he's now just driving a fucking truck through the opening that was created by those authorities in the same way that he is abusing his authorities and flying people down El Salvador with this kind of militarized ice force that was created after 9-11 too. So we're kind of seeing all the, you know,

This is the worst version of America showing up in the world. And that's what the world is doing. There's also just a meanness to it too, Tommy. Like poor African countries. Yeah, like Lesotho. Like Lesotho that he made fun of in the State of the Union getting these massive tariffs. Cambodia. You're going to impoverish like millions of people. Yeah. I mean, countries that- Of course they're exporters. They don't have money to import things. I mean, this is your thing about trade deficits. Like-

The people in Lesotho can't buy American goods. They can't afford them. So of course there's a trade deficit. It's crazy. Okay, then, speaking of crazy, if the global economy wasn't melting down, I do feel like this would be like the biggest story in Washington, which is that this...

Fringe right-wing conspiracy theory lunatic named Laura Loomer is, according to all these news reports and according to her own Twitter feed, making major national security personnel decisions. So just a quick 101 on Laura Loomer. Listeners might remember the time she literally chained herself to Twitter's office door in New York to protest getting banned from the platform. I don't know if you remember this, Ben. She was wearing a Star of David at the time to compare her treatment by Twitter to that of the Jews during the Holocaust. I do remember that.

Seems comparable. - Seems like someone who has seen some perspective. - Yeah, she said 9/11 was an inside job. She celebrated the deaths of Muslim refugees who drowned while trying to cross the Mediterranean, including children. I think she tweeted the clapping hands emoji saying more of that. She's just a truly vile person. But despite all of that context,

Last week, Donald Trump took 30 minutes out of his day on Liberation Day of all days to meet with Laura Loomer, where I guess she ranted in the Oval Office about the loyalty of various national security staffers and did it in front of Trump, Mike Waltz,

National Security Advisor, Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, and J.D. Vance, who I believe is still the Vice President, although it's not clear it might be Elon Musk. The next day, the firings began, including the Senior Director for Intelligence, the NSC Ledge Affairs person, the Senior Director for Technology and National Security, the Senior Director for International Organizations, and then later, Timothy D. Howe, the head of the National Security Agency, or NSA, and also U.S. Cyber Command, along with Wendy Noble, his deputy. So,

Ben, I just want to make sure our listeners understand how senior and influential these positions are. Obviously, people have probably heard of the NSA. That is the organization in charge of collecting signals intelligence. They intercept phone calls and emails, et cetera. They're probably responsible for, what, 75%, 80% of the intelligence consumed by the policymakers. They also conduct offensive cyber operations.

That leadership was decapitated. And then the NSC roles, like those are also incredibly influential. The NSC senior director for intelligence is the person in the White House overseeing the intelligence agencies, covert action programs, all like the most sensitive detail sources and methods, collection technology, like all the shit I don't even know anymore.

That person's gone, thanks to Laura Loomer. This is like, it's almost funny because it's so absurd, but it's really chilling stuff because these people, like, is she going to get to pick who comes next? We have no idea. It's a truly troubling story because what it tells you is that in the second iteration of the Trump administration,

He is listening to this wing of his party on everything. There's no Jim Mattis in there. There's no Jim Mattis. There's no H.R. McMaster. There's no, you know, even Mike Pompeo, who has any listeners to the show will know we're no fans of Mike Pompeo. Part of what's going on here is that when Trump staffed up his administration, he

You'll remember that they didn't like these kind of extreme MAGA people like Laura Loomer, didn't like the Rubio choice for state. They wanted Rick Grinnell. They wanted a true MAGA guy in there. Grinnell didn't get the job. Poor one out. Sorry, buddy. But they got kind of – there's a scattering of lunatics around the National Security Enterprise. And then you get Mike Waltz. And then there's this guy, Alex Wong, who's the deputy national security advisor.

who is like a pretty conventional right winger. He worked for Tom Cotton in the Senate. He worked in the first Trump administration on like, I think, Korea issues. And he's seen as by the lumers of the world as,

suspiciously conventional. Yeah. She went after him, but didn't get that scalp. Yeah. She went after him, didn't get a scalp, but all these people were kind of, you know, I talked to people in Washington, like these were like the Alex Wong people at the NSC, you know, the kind of professionals. His coaching tree. And by the way, not people that you and I agree on about most things, you know, they're kind of neocons or they're kind of hard ass China hawks.

but they're just not lunatics. They're just not like burn it all down, Laura Loomer type, you know, foreign policy people, or even they're not like the JD Vance flavor. They live in reality. They live in reality, you know? And so the first thing that this tells you is that,

Trump, like one meeting with Laura Loomer and suddenly like he's just clearing the brush of anybody that isn't kind of maga-pilled completely, even if they're pretty hard right-wingers, right? Then if you look at the jobs there, and as you say, the NSA, the director of the National Security Agency, his head rolled like the next day too. So you're talking about the people in charge of like intelligence, intelligence,

the National Security Agency, like, you know, signals intelligence, you know, people in the NSC that are responsible for things like export controls that sound wonky, but that's basically how do sensitive technologies, military technologies, AI move out into the world, massive portfolios that are just left empty so that he can appease and give a scalp to Laura Loomer. By the way, at

at the exact same time that he upends the American relationship with every country in the world through tariffs, he then fires some of the people that would normally have to come in behind and try to clean up that mess and figure things out. Never mind that these are also the people that are in charge of some of the most sensitive issues like AI and, you know, intelligence relationships. So it...

And Mike Waltz, their boss, is so embarrassed and neutered by the Signalgate scandal and inviting Jeffrey Goldberg to be in all his little chats about classified information that he just he can't defend them. Well, if you think about it now, you've got Marco Rubio, who's basically an intern at the State Department. Right. You've got Mike Waltz, who, you know, literally just got neutered because he argued against firing these people. And these are his staff.

and Laura Loomer fired them, basically. Who's in charge? No idea. It's Trump. It's just Trump and what's in his head and who he just talked to. And then it's J.D. Vance, who seems to have kind of wiggled his way into foreign policy pretty effectively. It's Steve Woodcoff, who is accepting paintings of Donald Trump from Vladimir Putin. And leading the Iran talks. And leading the Iran talks. That we're going to get to. It's Pete Hegseth, who is, you know, trying to get rid of women in combat. He's just doing burpees, having a good time. And like...

dropping emojis into signal chats. Like it's, it's Trump, Vance, Hegseth, Witkoff. Like this is real crazy town at a time when there were wars going on, tariffs, trade wars. There could be a global recession, uh,

Not good. Not good. But also, I think it's good to highlight this and to watch this stuff because if there is an intelligence failure or something bad happens, something slips through the cracks, we absolutely all need to point to this bloodletting from Laura Loomer that pushed out all these competent people

and created chaos in the midst of, as you mentioned, like an economic crisis. And God knows what else is happening behind the scenes that we don't know about. Yeah. And can I bring one more scary thing to this conversation since I guess it's that kind of day, post-liberation day. The Trump presidency just happens to align with the four years in which AI is going to move out into the world. That's already troubling enough. These were the kind of a

that were going to competently manage that. Now they're gone. Like who's in charge of this? We could have an economic crisis that is followed by mass economic and job displacement from AI, followed by like an AI arms race in the world between American and Chinese AI. You would think you would want some competent people just kind of running this store because Trump probably doesn't have strong views on these things. So that's just another thing to watch.

Yeah, not good. All right, we're going to take a quick break, Ben. But before we do, I want to make sure that everyone's listening to Crooked's newest series, Shadow Kingdom, God's Banker. I want to make sure it's your next obsession. This story starts with a tip to journalist Niccolo Mainoni from an old friend, one that pulls him deep into the story of a Vatican banker named Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging under a London bridge in 1982.

Officials called it a suicide, but Niccolo is not so sure. The question is, was Calvi laundering money, mafia money, through a Vatican bank? From there, things escalate quickly. An Italian warehouse raid uncovers a far-right society plotting a coup, toppling Italy's government and forcing Calvi into a corner. Just as he turns to the Vatican for protection, an assassination attempt on the Pope shakes the church to its core. What happens next? You're going to have to listen, Ben, to Shadow Kingdom, God's Banker, which is available wherever you get your podcasts.

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All right, Ben. So Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu was in Washington on Monday to meet with Trump, do his usual ass kissing and groveling session. The funny part of it all was Israel preemptively got rid of all their tariffs on the United States and Trump still slapped them with a 17% tariff in return.

During the meeting, there was like this extended Q&A with reporters. Netanyahu promised to eliminate Israel's trade deficit with America, but even that couldn't get Trump to commit to getting rid of tariffs on Israel. Now Russia, Russia got a pass. Yeah, Russia got a pass. Great relationship there. When asked directly if Trump would give Israel concessions on trade, Trump responded, don't forget, we help Israel a lot. And then he turned to Bibi and said, congratulations, by the way, on wringing all this cash out of the U.S. Honestly, I laughed.

Trump also rehashed his plan for Gaza. Let's listen. I think it's an incredible piece of important real estate. And I think it's something that we would be involved in. But, you know, having a peace force like the United States there controlling and owning the Gaza Strip would be a good thing because right now all it is is for years and years. All I hear about is killing and Hamas and problems.

And if you take the people, the Palestinians, and move them around to different countries, and you have plenty of countries that will do that, and you really have a freedom zone. You call it the freedom zone. I don't understand why Israel ever gave it up. Israel owned it. It wasn't this man, so I can say it. He wouldn't have given it up. I know him very well. There's no way. They took oceanfront property, and they gave it to people for peace. How did that work out? Not good.

So that was a thoughtful take on Gaza. And then Trump expressed surprise that Hamas is not nice. Let's listen to that part. You know, I had people right in this office, this beautiful oval office. They came in 10 people, hostages, you know that.

And I said to them, so how was it? And the stories they told me, I mean, as an example, I said to them, did the Hamas show any signs of like help or liking you? Did they wink at you? Did they give you a piece of bread extra? Did they give you...

a meal on the side, like you know, you think of doing. Like what happened in Germany, what happened elsewhere. People would try and help people that were in unbelievable distress. They said no. I said, all of them. I said, did they ever wink at you like, you'll be okay, you're gonna be okay? No, they didn't do that. They'd slap us. The hatred is unbelievable.

What is the German reference? Because the Germans killed 6 million Jews. He does seem to think the Nazis were nice, which is troubling. That's very troubling. He's also surprised that the terrorist organization Hamas is cruel to people. So the big news out of this meeting was Iran. We'll get to that in a second. But I did think it was worth reminding listeners that Trump is still pledging to ethnically cleanse and then occupy militarily the Gaza Strip and then also...

That part was very weird. He seems to think the Nazis were nice to the Catholics. Yeah, I'm sorry. I missed that the first time. That's why I just had this reaction of like the Germans, the Germans. Germans. I mean, they were hiding some people, not enough, obviously, in other European countries, but I don't really remember the... Maybe he saw Schindler's List. I was going to say, yeah. That's probably his understanding. I think he was chancellor. Yeah, look...

He referred to Gaza as a piece of real estate. I don't think you'd usually refer to other countries as real estate. So there's a kind of dehumanization there. He referred to America owning it. I don't know what that means, like to take ownership of this land like it's a development. There are people that live there, there are human beings that live there, there are men, women, and children who have lived there for either generations or they got displaced here in the first place.

Then he suggested it was Israel's and they gave it back. It was illegally occupied by Israel for a period of time and some settlements were built. And then under Errol Sharon, not exactly a peacenik, they decided to pull out of Gaza. So there's so much historical inaccuracy and revisionism on the most sensitive issue in the world. And then there's this completely implausible idea of a US... I mean...

He's proposing a US military force there. It wasn't ambiguous. Because those always go well. It's always simple. And then we're moving the Palestinians around. What's scary is that he keeps coming back to this like tariffs. It seems like he really believes this. And so add this to the list of things that we probably should take both seriously and literally. Yeah. And you just kind of have to keep an eye on it. We should mention, Ben, that there was some really awful reporting. I think the New York Times had this about...

the killing of 15 rescue workers in Gaza. Just briefly, I mean, on March 23rd, Israeli forces killed six members of Gaza's civil defense emergency unit. This was an unrest after there were eight Red Crescent workers, and then they buried them in a mass grave. The IDF claimed that the ambulances were advancing suspiciously. They didn't have headlights on or emergency lights on, and they said that's why they opened fire. But video obtained by the New York Times from one of the deceased paramedics' phones says

very clearly shows the ambulance is lit up. They have lights and sirens. The IDF has since tried to walk back part of its story. They said the incident is under investigation. But like, look, longtime observers of IDF statements should not be remotely surprised that they lied so brazenly about this incident. And this is just another horrific war crime. Yeah. There's no other way to describe it. It's a war crime. And the only thing I'd add to this is that

the brazenness of how they lie about it and then say they're going to do an investigation. And I'm just going to roll back the tape. This is what just drove me crazy about Tony Blinken and the Biden officials. Every time something like this would happen, they'd say there's an Israeli investigation. And they get pressed at their briefings and say, well, the Israelis have the capacity to investigate. The Israelis never investigate.

Nobody's ever held accountable. It's a joke, you know, and this just proves what an absolute farce it is to think that anything that they're saying about these so-called investigations can be trusted. Same with the killing of Shireen Abouakla, the Palestinian-American journalist who was shot by

If you enable that kind of behavior over time, you get this kind of outcome. And it's why the ICC gets involved. Because if you can't trust the governing authority to actually hold itself accountable, that's why there's international justice. That's right. So the big news out of this Oval Office meeting between Netanyahu and Trump was that...

Trump just announcing that the U.S. is going to have direct talks with Iran this weekend about its nuclear program. Turns out I think they're indirect talks once the details came out. But the talks are going to take place in Oman. Iran's foreign minister said he's going to be their representative. And then actual Secretary of State Steve Witkoff is going to be the rep from the U.S. side. Noted Iran expert. Noted Iran expert.

We should get into that. So Netanyahu, I don't know, Netanyahu in the meeting was saying he wants a deal along the lines of what happened in Libya when they denuclearized. Basically, that was them putting all their gear into boxes, shipping it out of the country, fully getting rid of everything back in 2003. Here's how Trump himself, though, talked about these talks. Everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious thing.

And the obvious is not something that I want to be involved with or, frankly, that Israel wants to be involved with if they can avoid it. So we're going to see if we can avoid it. If diplomacy fails, is the United States, under your leadership, ready to take military action to destroy the Iranian nuclear program and remove this threat? I think if the talks aren't successful with Iran, I think Iran is going to be in great danger. And I hate to say it.

great danger because they can't have a nuclear weapon. You know, it's not a complicated formula. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That's all there is. Can't have it. If you're going to negotiate a new deal with Iran, can you elaborate how it's going to be more effective than the JCPOA? Well, I can't really say that, but I think it'll be different and maybe a lot stronger.

So I don't know that, I mean, I think Bibi floating the Libya comparison is interesting because I think people probably realize that that's way too hard line of an approach. And I think actually a smart Iran observer reminded me that back in 2020, Trump accused John Bolton of poisoning the well and talks with the North Koreans by bringing up the Libya model, which is interesting. And I wonder if Bibi was aware of that. But Ben, I was just thinking back to the JCPOA, like these are

highly technical conversations about like amounts of low enriched in uranium and centrifuges and inspections and heavy water plutonium limits and the arms embargoes and all this shit like

Steve Witkoff doesn't know fuck all about any of that. Like maybe he'll be, you have some, you know, state department experts in town. No. Cause they fired most of those people. I don't know. I maybe this is just talk design to kind of like feel out the willingness of both sides to make a deal. But I don't know. You like have to have some knowledge of the details. Yeah. I I've tried to not have extreme PTSD from this whole thing. Um,

But I'll indulge my own PTSD from working for seven fucking years on the Iran deal that Trump tore up. Our talks with the Iranians began, you'll remember, exactly this way. So the reports are that Wyckoff is going to Oman and they're going to meet and kind of meet indirectly in Oman with Omani's hosting both parties and kind of passing messages back and forth.

That's where we were in 2013. It was Jake and the stash. Jake Sullivan and Bill Burns. And we, after four years of negotiation and fighting with Congress, got this deal done that Trump tore up.

And so what was the point of this whole thing? What was the point of this whole exercise in tearing up the Iran deal just to stick it to the black president that you didn't like because he's more popular than you so that you could be sitting in the Oval Office in 2020, what year is it? Five. Ten years after the Iran deal was signed.

a decade run it back a decade after the Iran deal was signed we're rolling the tape all the way back to 2013 they're making a new naked gun movie I'm so apoplectic that I don't remember what fucking year it is like this is insane to me that we're having this conversation about Iran deal in the Oval Office he doesn't even know what was in the JCPOA no he doesn't even know what the JCPOA is no he doesn't know what that acronym

That's what the acronym stands for, right? And so here we are and you got Bibi floating the Libby option to kill the deal. Bibi is many things, he's not dumb. And the reason that that killed the North Korean deal is everybody knows that Gaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons and where did he end up? Fucking with a bullet in his head in a drain pipe. And that's what the Supreme leader does a lot. So, okay. That's off my chest.

I mean, I think the thing to watch here substantively is will the Iranians, you know, come out with their hands up and, you know, maybe I'll be proven wrong. They'll give up every bolt and screw of their nuclear program. If it's anything like the Iranians that the world has dealt with, they'll, you know, drag this out and they'll try to keep pieces of their nuclear infrastructure and make concessions over here for trades over there. They'll want sanctions relief over here. And, you know, I just...

Their capacity, if they can't just steamroll them because the Iranians are weaker, if they can't just kind of steamroll them, I see them probably coming out with something that might look quite like the JCPOA that they declare is stronger if they do get a deal. And what did we all just spend 10 years of our lives on? I don't know. I mean, yeah, the context is different.

similar but different in a lot of ways. I mean, the context around the JCPOA was years and years and years of crushing US and multilateral sanctions that were designed to pressure the Iranians to come to the table to have these talks, right? Now, Iran is so much closer to getting a nuclear weapon than they ever were then. So that's riskier. However, their proxies in Hezbollah have been decimated. Yeah.

I don't know. You make an important point, though. They're much closer to a nuclear weapon today than they were even when we sent the JCPOA. And so that's the urgency here. And, you know, he's pretty, like, blunt about the military threat. The one thing I'd just add on the table, Tommy, here is that there's this trip that I think Trump has planned. To Saudi. His first foreign trip is to Saudi. Yeah. And Israel, I think.

Watch that space because it wouldn't shock me. Trump likes to do things fast and he likes big announcements. And the Saudis have been getting tight with the Iranians. There's been, not tight, but they've restored relations. They talk to each other. MBS has talked to the Iranians.

it wouldn't surprise me if the Saudis try to use that trip to stage some meeting with Trump and the Iranians. You'd love that. Or some, he'd love that because he likes to make history, you know, or some announcement of a deal that maybe isn't fully negotiated. So that's, that's the wild card here is that, that, that trip. I bet that's what Wyckoff's assignment is. Yeah. And if, if look, if the Iranians are smart and they can just,

Put down the bullshit and the bluster. They will make up some nonsensical story about how they all went to the mosque to pray for Trump after he was shot in Butler and commissioned some fucking oil painting. A portrait, like to wake up a portrait. Yeah, get a rug made with Trump's face on it with a bunch of gold leaf paint.

You know what I mean? Load up Witkoff's plane with some barrels of oil. Buy some Trump coin. Well, that's the thing. They probably would. Like the funny thing is they'll probably offer all this oil, which we never could have accepted because we'd be violating our sanctions. Trump would be like, I got the oil. Oh, listen, by the way, can you imagine how much, how many of these tariff deals are going to be sorted out via Trump coin transactions? Oh yeah. Yeah. A little meme coin. Something to look forward to.

So

Thank you.

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testing testing we are live from chick-fil-a this is grant and this is laura and a little thing we love about the chick-fil-a smokehouse barbecue bacon sandwich is that sweet bun and that chicken filet was perfectly crispy and soft at the same time and that smokehouse barbecue sauce it's a lot of fun and the brown sugar bacon definitely had a little bit more pizzazz also the mac one of the all-time greats man i'm getting hungry we're

Order the Smokehouse BBQ Bacon Sandwich and our Coca-Cola on the Chick-fil-A app for a limited time. Real guests paid for their testimonials. All right, Ben, let's change gears here. So we've talked a lot about the civil war in Sudan over the last two years. We've not dug into the situation in South Sudan recently. So we did want to cover that today because there's some real concern that it could tip into a civil war there, too. So just some background that I'll try to be quick about.

South Sudan gained its independence in 2011. This came after decades and decades of civil war that finally ended after the Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, or SPLM, signed a peace agreement in 2005 called the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement, or CPA, set forward this process that ultimately led to a near-unanimous vote for independence in South Sudan in 2011. But

But unfortunately, soon after South Sudan's independence, the country fell into civil war that killed literally hundreds of thousands of people. In 2018, mediators finally got both sides to agree to a power sharing structure to stop the fighting and calm the

ethnic tensions between the two main ethnic groups in Sudan, the Dinka and the Nour. But that was sort of a temporary fix. So Salva Kiir, who represented the Dinka, became president. Rayak Machar, who represented the Nour, became the vice president. This deal was also included a bunch of other steps that got it to a more durable piece that I will not outline for you guys because none of them got implemented.

But over the years, South Sudan's government and power sharing structure was basically held together by patronage from oil revenue that was sort of papering over these ethnic rivalries. But...

So here's where the challenge comes. South Sudan is really dependent on these oil pipelines that flow through Sudan itself. And because of the civil war in Sudan, one of those pipelines became inoperable in South Sudan's oil exports and revenue were cut off for about a year, cutting off that source of patronage money that could kind of keep the lid on things.

Further complicating things is the fact that the oil pipelines go through territory held by both sides of the civil war in Sudan. So it led to complicated politics. So in the last few months, Salva Kiir, the president, has started firing ministers close to Machar, the vice president, that violated this power sharing agreement. And then in late March, Machar himself was arrested and put under house arrest. Meanwhile, these militia groups that seem to have political ties have been attacking civilians, government troops, even UN forces.

So Ben, in previous administrations,

the international community would probably look to the United States to try to help mediate the conflict, prevent it from spilling out into a civil war, prevent something even worse from happening. But what did State Department junior help desk technician Marco Rubio announce over the weekend? That he was revoking visas for South Sudanese nationals and barring any South Sudanese citizens from entering the U.S. The South Sudan is apparently not accepting repatriation flights fast enough. So then I was talking to some

like South Sudan experts today, I try to get a handle on this. We got into a bunch of the details, but big picture, one of them said to me, this is basically the final act of a failed state and a state building project that began in 2005 during the Bush administration when the US was at its height, the height of its nation building frenzy. And that really has been deeply troubled ever since. I mean, even in 2011 after the referendum vote, a lot of people saw the writing on the wall here. And the really hard part is there's just no clear sense

of what, if anything, the international community can do to kind of help or reverse the trend line. And it was just very sobering conversations. Yeah, it's, you know, we had...

the precipice of civil war between the same two guys, Salva Kiir and Bashar, in the second Obama administration. And it took a lot of effort to kind of get them to climb down and come up with some power sharing formula that they continually push against and violate. And the reality is that the country's never really had, it was born without any institutions, without any infrastructure, so to speak. The leadership, the political leadership, Salva Kiir, I remember talking to someone who went to deliver a message to him once and he was,

Had a strong smell of alcohol and he yelled at the person about how he's fought in the bush his whole life. He's not going to surrender. I've heard similar stories. You've heard the same story. And, you know, it's tragic for the people of South Sudan that they are kind of trapped under these leaders who just revert to...

patronage, tribalism, and violence to kind of maintain their fiefdoms and do nothing to kind of build up the country. And I think, so where does this go? You're right. In normal old times, those good old days that weren't that great,

But the UN, the US would get involved with the African Union and a group of regional countries and try to negotiate something and try to have experts on the ground and try to have some kind of peacekeeping capacity and stabilize things. There is no functioning capacity for the UN to do that with the US so out to lunch and trade wars going on and a civil war in Sudan just to the north.

And so what I think is interesting to watch here is it just is going to push it further and further, like even in the Obama years, like I remember we relied a lot on Kenya and Ethiopia and Uganda and the kind of regional powers that had influence into these different parties.

to kind of lean on people and to kind of arm twist and to do whatever diplomatic formulas they could work out. I think what we're going to see is the kind of increasing regional, and by the way, those are the countries that are bearing the burden of hosting refugees. So this is a real issue for them because they already have huge amounts of refugees in place at Kenya. So I think the burden is just going to get pushed further and further onto regional organizations like the African Union and regional powers like that. Because you know what the US did in the middle of all this? Junior...

to the assistant to the assistant's assistant, Marco Rubio, announced last weekend that the US will be revoking all visas for South Sudanese passport holders. We have no answer to this other than our immigration policy. Like we have no formula for it, right? And so I think that that just pushes it. It's just going to be left on the laps of the regional parties to deal with it. And adding to your point about like legalization

leaning on these regional actors, I think into the phrase entered another one that we've talked about in the Sudan context, which is the UAE.

And they are funding one side of the civil war. They're funding the RSF, but also I think UAE turned to South Sudan and some of these tribal militias to get fighters for their project in Yemen for years and years and years. And they built these ties to Salva Kiir. And it sounds like the guy that Kiir is named to be a successor is sort of like seen as the UAE's guy and kind of a money guy with no real political or military experience.

or clear ties to the SPLM, but he has these clear ties to the UAE that I think are making people wonder about that. It just, Sudan is just,

Got in a raw deal, Sudan and South Sudan. It's just this playground for these external parties. And these ambitions, by the way, the US, right? I mean, we were going to... I mean, Bush got very involved in this because it's Christian part. South Sudan is a Christian part of what used to be Sudan. And we were going to state building. In the Obama years, we got all excited about the newly independent country of South Sudan. And we kind of projected this...

like savior complex, let's be honest about it, onto this place where we had no capacity to build something. - Yeah, and there's the real question of like, once the international community creates a failed state, what do you do with it? What happens now? - What should happen is like basically a receivership, right? The UN, I mean, there've been times like in Central African Republic where they're with borderline UN governance essentially.

But that requires kind of the Security Council to be able to get together and put that together. And I'm just not optimistic that the U.S., Russia, and China could agree to some receivership for South Sudan. Yeah, I think that's... With a huge peacekeeping force. Yeah, and there's some speculation that Salva Kiir, the president is

dying and again, he's trying to anoint the successor. I mean, these guys have been around for a while. They've been around for a long time. And here, Mashar, someone was telling me they barely have armies at this point. They're all sort of like linked militias. But, you know, I was talking to Alan Boswell, who's a crisis group expert on Africa generally. And he was just saying that like regionally,

The pressures that are leading to fragmentation are so much stronger than the pressures that would normally consolidate countries. And there just doesn't seem to be any force kind of bringing them back together. That's a really good point. Well, because this is, again, what the UN is supposed to fill that gap. But the UN can't. It's not their fault that you have a dysfunctional security council because they can't do it. It was hard enough when you had things working well in like the 90s.

Now it's seemingly impossible. Seemingly impossible. Speaking of political dysfunction, let's turn to South Korea, Ben. So we talked in the show a bunch about South Korean President Yoon Suk-yool's political drama and career. It's finally coming to a close. Four months after he invoked martial law, the country's constitutional court has finally ruled that Yoon should be removed from

And South Korea's interim president has announced a snap election on June 3rd. So a quick rewind on how this all played out. Last year on December 3rd, Yoon shocked everyone by declaring martial law. He claimed at the time that these anti-state forces were a threat to the country and North Korea, blah, blah, blah, and then sent troops into the parliament in what was clearly a coup attempt. That was...

Obviously, bullshit in a pretext. The reality was Yunet effectively had been politically neutered because the Democratic opposition had taken control of the National Assembly, and they were not only trying to impeach a lot of his cabinet members, but also slash his government's budget. So the martial law decree created chaos, but that chaos only lasted a few hours thanks to really brave protesters.

who took to the streets and then members of the National Assembly who rushed down to the National Assembly and voted to lift the martial law declaration by about 4:30 the next morning.

Since then, though, the drama has not stopped. So Yoon was impeached on December 14th. On December 31st, South Korea issued a warrant for his arrest. He refused to come in for questioning over and over again. There was a six-hour standoff. It got crazy. But now Yoon has finally been removed from office. He still has to deal with criminal charges, a criminal trial that starts on April 14th that includes the charge of insurrection that could get him life in prison or even the death penalty. So this election that's coming up will likely

put the opposition in power. E.J. Myung is the leader of the opposition Democratic Party. He's the current frontrunner. He has dealt with his own legal challenges in the past, but more interesting than is how much he differs on policy. So I was talking to our buddy Danny Russell earlier today. He was a top Asia hand in the Obama administration. He's now the vice president for international security and diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

And Danny was saying that if, you know, if Myung wins, Trump is gonna have a partner in South Korea who is far more accommodationist with North Korea, which I don't know, that could cut both ways with Trump. Like he loves, you know, Kim Jong-un, but also is probably gonna be far more willing to work

with the Chinese and resistant to US entreaties to be hardline against China. So a huge change from the context that Biden was working with with Yun, where you had hardline on North Korea, the willingness to mend fences with the Japanese and have these trilateral meetings, et cetera. So Ben, thoughts on this saga and just like what things could look like going forward between the US and South Korea?

Quite a saga. With everything going on in the world, this didn't get quite the attention it might have otherwise gotten. I think one of the things I learned throughout the saga, Tommy, is like, okay, on the one hand, the institutions of South Korean democracy kind of held, right? Like they resisted the martial law declaration, the kind of coup attempt, and they ran through a process that ultimately removed a guy that

You know, I'm not a legal expert on South Korean legal legalese, but pretty clearly there's pretty good grounds to put this guy. For sure. What I don't fully understand, I have to acknowledge, is the kind of depth of these cleavages in South Korean society that were so on display.

There's always been a kind of left-right divide, generational divides, divides about the feelings about the military dictatorship, divides about feelings about the U.S. presence, right? So all of these things enter into this left-right divide.

And I don't think you heal that just with booting this guy and having an election. Totally agree. You've had now two consecutive conservative presidents get impeached. Now, this guy for pretty good reason. And then I think three consecutive ones at least going to prison. So the stakes, they're playing high table stakes in South Korean politics. For the U.S. piece of it,

What's interesting is as creepy as some of these more conservative leaders have been, they generally work better with the U.S. because they're generally hawkish on North Korea. They're generally supportive of the U.S. alliance. And so if it swings to the left, I think that the combination of Trump, I mean, you teed this up, but the combination of Trump and the tariff dynamic and this change is

we should expect a South Korea that is getting much closer to China and starting to see that maybe its long-term kind of economic security, if not its security, is going to have to depend not just on the United States, but on China as well. And that raises questions about like the U.S. troop presence long-term and certainly alignment with U.S. diplomatic priorities. So, you know, that may be fine with Trump, but we could start to see this really intense network in the same way that NATO is fraying that kind of network of a

Asian alliances praying as well. Yeah. I mean, on the tariff point you just made, I mean, South Koreans, like the Japanese, made huge commercial investments in the US, like building factories and production plants. And now they're like, hey, Mr. President, you're still going to tariff the shit out of us? But Trump only cares that they did it under Biden, so it doesn't count. And they have a free trade agreement. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's kind of missing is we're tariffing all these countries that we have

Free trade agreements ratified through our Congress with. Yeah. I mean, like it's crazy. It is completely crazy. What's the point of an agreement? It's just words on paper. And by the way, people used to say to us after the Obama administration, I used to get this line of criticism when Trump tore up the Iran deal and the Cuba opening. Well, you guys should have pushed that through Congress. Then he wouldn't have been able to do it.

He's tearing up stuff that is ratified, treaties, treaties ratified through Congress. Free trade agreements ratified through Congress. By declaration. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. Someone I was talking to made a similar point to me about like South Korea will remove this chapter of their political saga, but the population kind of went from like a third left side

a third moderate to a third right wing to like 50-50 polarized like us and there also there's this weird growing divide in South Korea between men and women there was a 2019 poll found 70% of Korean men in their 20s think the problem of discrimination against men is a serious one that's

A lot of that stems from mandatory military service for men. But there was a 2021 Ipsos poll that found polarization among men and women in their 20s and 30s is the most severe in South Korea. And women are increasingly identifying as liberal and men are conservative. And President Yoon- Sounds a little familiar. Yeah. President Yoon ran similar kind of reactionary getting rid of like- Did he go on Joe Rogan? Yeah.

Basically, yeah. Sort of like ran on some of this stuff. I mean, I do think you alluded to something I think it's really important, which is, is Trump going to want to withdraw troops from the Korean peninsula? And you're starting to see polling where like two thirds of South Koreans are, you know, supportive of getting their own nuclear weapon. I mean, if the US pulls out, this, like if a more lefty administration comes in, that will likely blunt that

sentiment because I don't think they're going to want to develop a nuke. But if we leave... Yeah. And it was always like the older generations were more supportive of the U.S. presence because they remembered the aftermath of the Korean War and the U.S. kind of feeling like it saved their country in some ways.

So that could all be dissipating. We're moving out of this era, the era defined by all these post-war, post-Cold War institutions and relationships, and this is a big part of that. By the way, just one light point. Do you remember before Trump, even years before Donald Trump, when we were in Korea and we're trying to negotiate the course agreement? And I know you remember this, that's why I'm taking this up. I won't name the reporter, but

Barack Obama's doing a Jordan press conference with the president of South Korea, Lee Moon-bak, and this reporter stands up and starts screaming at the president of South Korea about why Americans who fought and died for his country should have to pay more for like Hondas or something. I was so embarrassed. That was one of the worst trips we've ever been on. Because we got it...

They stiffed us on, I forget where we were before that. It was one of those 10-day trips to Asia where you just never sleep the entire time. We were in India before that. Yes. And then we didn't get the free trade agreement finalized. Then a reporter for the New York Times lectured the South Korean president about how people died and shouldn't have to buy Hondas or something. And then we got really drunk on...

at the karaoke place in Yokohama, Japan. - Yeah, on the Bloomberg tab. - Yeah, I was gonna say, okay. - Thank you, JG and Hans. - Actually, Hans and JG don't work there anymore, so we can say that Bloomberg paid for a really good karaoke. By the way, to defend them, I'm sure that they learned a lot that night. - Yeah, God knows what we said. God knows if they remembered it. - They certainly learned that I sang "The Greatest Love of All" by Whitney Houston. - Beautifully. - And blew out my voice. - Beautifully.

Okay, we're running a little long. A couple fun things to close, Ben, because it's been dark lately. We've been skipping the fun section at the end of the show. So we found some stupid shit that brought us joy. So the first such stupid thing happened at a recent event at Windsor Castle. King Charles blew a carrot.

A carrot that had been carved into a recorder gifted to him by the London Vegetable Orchestra, which, according to their website, is a real thing, and two, features a mouth-watering selection of courgettes, peppers, potatoes, swedes, and butternut squash, accompanying a soaring lineup of carrot recorders. Charles took the instrument for a spin. Here's the results. Hey! Oh, oh, oh, oh!

- Do we have video of this? - Oh yeah. - 'Cause this is why you should subscribe to the YouTube. - Yeah, when I think of what royals do in their free time, it is fileting a carrot. Well, to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." - It did look like the kind of blow job class in old school, you know, where they're sitting around with the fruit, you know, like, except it was the King of England.

I immediately sent the link to Alistair Campbell and I was like, tell Rory Stewart to get his shit together and not let this ever happen again. He's like, I don't know, man. Brits like this weird shit. Across the channel, Ben, staffers in the Elysee Palace are reportedly close to wearing gas masks or at least clothing pins on their nose because President Emmanuel Macron has taken to a certain style. So a new book reports that he wears, quote, industrial amounts of

of Dior eau Sauvage, I think it's how you say it, using the musky floral scent to mark his territory. A direct quote from the book is, quote, "Just as Louis XIV made his perfumes an attribute of power when he paraded through the galleries of Versailles, Emmanuel Macron uses his as an element of his authority at the Elysee." I always like to imagine, Ben, what the Oval Office smelled like during his visit.

when the Dior mist with the Trump signature scent of fart lingering in a love seat, you know? Well, actually, I'm interested in taking this opportunity to make the... Did you see how much gold is in the Oval Office, too? What happened to that place? Like, it looks like a tacky...

I don't know what it looks like. There's gold leaves on the side of the fireplace. Yeah. All the statues. Like, wasn't there a plant there that was from like the Kennedy administration? Yeah. Now there's like some weird gold flourish. I mean, people should look at this. Look at the before and after the Oval Office. Yeah. It looks like a Saudi like receiving room. That's what it, I was trying to think of what it looks like and that's exactly what it looks like. And it probably smells kind of funny, especially after Emmanuel Macron visited. Yeah.

Finally, Ben, save the best for last year. So imagine you're the world's largest bird and you get sentenced to live out your life in a Texas wildlife park where people constantly gawky you from the cars. One day you spot a deeply unserious mop headed blonde man looking at you particularly stupidly and you think I fucking had it. You lean into his rented Chevy Malibu and you go for an eye. He dodges barely, but you catch a whiff of the scent. Prawn mayo sandwich, red wine and incompetence.

He survived to live another day. But if he ever comes around again, you're going to get him anyway. This fan fiction around is actually about a real encounter with former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had with an ostrich. Here's the clip. Oh, right.

So that very brief audio was actual real audio of Boris Johnson getting bitten by a massive ostrich while he's holding his little toddler that was brought to us courtesy of his wife's Instagram feed. What I would like is in the movie version, maybe we should produce this because we're all going to have to find additional work in this new economy.

What if we took all the villains of the last 15 years, right? Boris Johnson for Brexit and Trump and Putin, MBS and whomever. And what if the world's kind of weirdest collection of animals just decided to attack them? - Oh, I like that. - And nothing could turn it off. Like nobody could explain it.

Like all of a sudden, you know, like Tony Abbott goes back to Australia and like a kangaroos are just descending upon him like crazy, you know? That's funny. I like that a lot. Or maybe all those horrible leaders become animals who are characters in like the worst zoo. Oh, that's good. It's sort of like a fascist populist incompetent zoo. Or Liz Trusby.

I guess I had a lettuce. Oh, just getting eaten by it was earlier resistance humor. It's good stuff. Uh, okay. That is it for the new section of the show. Uh, we're going to take a quick break and we come back. You're going to hear my interview with Noah Bullock. We're going to talk about, uh,

All things El Salvador, their mass incarceration regime, the prisons that these Venezuelan men are getting sent from the United States into, how Nayib Bukele uses the prison system to prop up his authoritarian rule. So stick around for that. Pots of the World is brought to you by Quince. It's travel season. People are getting ready to go maybe abroad somewhere this summer. If you need a new suitcase, love it.

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Noah Bullock is the executive director of Christosal, a human rights organization based in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Noah, great to see you. I should tell listeners that we were next door neighbors when I was, what, four years old? You were two, you were one. What's the timeline we talk about here? Yeah, that's right. You were like the first friend I can remember in my life. So good to see you 40 years later. Yeah.

Good to see you for years. Under such great context. Yeah, we're not playing Thundercats or whatever it was back in the day. You remember playing Thundercats? It's one of the best TV shows of all time. I kind of remember you always wanted to be Lion-O and I wanted to be Lion-O.

Today, we're both Lion-O. That's a little snowflakey of you, Tommy. Wanting to be Lion-O? Everybody wins. I don't even remember the other characters. That is true. That is a very lib thing. It's a very four-year-old soccer team. But we digress. We're here to talk about El Salvador, Naye Bukele, a

insufferable millennial dictator who has been on my radar screen for a while, but I think has sort of leapt into the consciousness of a lot of American citizens because of the Trump administration's policy of sending these Venezuelan men down to rot in these hellish prisons in El Salvador with no due process. But along those lines, I mean, earlier today, the White House announced

President Trump is going to welcome President Bukele for a working visit to Washington on April 14th. The conversation is going to focus on this policy of sending migrants in the U.S. to El Salvador to be held in their many mega, there's one mega prison that we're all seeing on the news, but there's a whole network of prisons there.

Let's just start there. Can you tell us about the conditions in these prisons, both the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center, but also, you know, I know you guys have looked into the conditions at prisons all over the country. Yeah. Okay, let's start there. The Terrorist Confinement Center is a new prison. It was built during what we call in El Salvador the state of exception. So three years ago,

In response to a weekend where gangs massacred over 80 people, the president of El Salvador asked the legislator to declare like an emergency in El Salvador. In El Salvador, the constitution is called a state of exception. And in that state of exception, in the emergency decree, they basically restrict due process rights.

And police and soldiers proceed to do mass roundups of people. Where I live, Tommy, like literally a cattle truck rolled into the... I live in kind of a village. Into the, like the rural village and pulled people out of their houses in their underwear without even checking their IDs at like 11 o'clock at night. So...

Three years later, 85,000 Salvadorans have been detained without previous investigations, without due process. And they have been held almost indefinitely in a series of maximum security prisons in which they haven't had contact with their families. They don't have access to legal counsel.

Those are conditions that constitute forced disappearances. Family members tell us that they don't know after three years if their family members are dead or alive. That sort of separation is one component, and lack of transparency is one component. The other really important part to understand is that our organization has documented systematic practices of torture.

So when people enter the prisons, it's common that the guards will say to them, you won't leave here walking. There'll be sort of induction beatings. You see a little of that aggression in the videos of the Venezuelans. But in the other prisons with Salvadoran prisoners captured in the state of exception, it's systematic. Just last week, our forensic investigators were in the field verifying the death of a 24-year-old man.

He apparently died of kidney failure. We were able to do a forensic assessment of the body. 24-year-old men don't usually die of kidney failure, Tom.

much less than a question of months. Those are usually deaths that are caused by two things in the prisons. One is the systematic denial of access to water and a bathroom that causes kidneys to fail or beatings that destroy their internal organs. We see that also we have cases of people who have died of starvation because their stomachs were destroyed by beatings. So this is the panorama. This is the context of

of the penitentiary system that President Bukele offered to President Trump. But I should make like one caveat here. It is really important for listeners to understand the maximum security prisons were the overwhelming majority of the people captured in the state of exception. The 85,000 are being held are the older maximum security prisons. The Secot that was built during the state of exception is where as far as we can tell,

older gang members who were already in prison serving sentences prior to the state of exception were transferred there. And you can see that because the image of these people are fully tattooed faces. You see the names of the gangs on their chests and on their faces. That's a practice that gangs haven't been doing for like 15 years. So the reason I bring that up is because the sekkot has become

the terrorist confinement center, we call it the SICOT, has become sort of the public face of the Boukali security model. It's the branding. And they do that intentionally to show these images of gang members that are somewhat terrifying looking, but they are in these videos and photos dehumanized. And the optics of it tells you the message, which is these are monsters. These are people who are enemies of society.

And this is how strong men deal with the worst of the worst. That's the narrative that they convey through the optics of it. But it's the actual people in El Salvador who have been detained. In our research, in a sample of like 1,200, only 54 even had tattoos. And only nine of those were gay members. The people being detained are poor. They're farmers. They're informal salespeople. They're construction workers, day laborers, even like pregnant women.

So I guess it's important to make that distinction. The conditions that you see on the videos of Sikot show a modern looking facility whose architecture and design is built for cruelty. There are no doubt that they celebrate, even in those videos, certain practices that are analogous to torture. But sadly, those conditions might be better than the conditions that the 85,000 are being held in another maximum security prison.

Yeah.

Most of the information that these lawyers know or their families know about where these men are, are because Bukele is this super online, like millennial dictator who had not only his own kind of like internal camera crews filming these like hype videos where we see some of the torture like techniques you're talking about. I mean, these men are being at a bare minimum roughed up, but then there are these situations they put them in where they essentially like

get them down on their knees and shove their faces into the ground and stack them together. The inhumanity and brutality is on display and very much by design, as you said. But Bukele, he's been president since 2019. His shtick is he thinks he's a cool dictator. He launched this aggressive crackdown on gangs. He locked up 85,000 people, as you said.

He was reelected last year in this landslide victory, although you guys have documented a lot of context for that victory that I think would be worth you getting into. Can you explain to listeners, though, how this sweeping mass incarceration policy that you just described is at the root of his political strength, essentially? Yeah. I don't know. I would say I would start with...

this idea that's consistent in El Salvador and I think around the world that the punitive populist brand of politics is very effective in election cycles. Very few politicians can tell societies that are being affected by indiscriminate violence that they're going to defend rule of law and due process.

and win against a candidate that's saying, I'm going to do whatever it takes to destroy these enemies. And so the idea of punitive populism is a seductive political strategy that's worked for Bukele, but it's worked...

consistently everywhere. And actually one of the things that most concerns me when I listen to the discourse in the United States right now is how, as I'm hearing the discourse of security in exchange for rights, this idea that the only way to deal with this emergency and to eliminate the enemies that are affecting our society is to suspend rights, is to

And to hype the threat, right? Like no one had heard of Trend de Aragua two or three years ago. Now that Fox News, the Trump administration, they're trying to put them on par with like Al Qaeda in 2002. Right. And to be honest, Democrats like the little d ones, people who believe in democracy as a superior form of governance, need to figure out how to address the security narrative.

It's a very challenging one. There's a lot of pitfalls. We begin to talk about defending institutions against threats, real or perceived, and we look like we're defending the status quo against a reformer who's going to finally fix the problem. So it's a narrative that's known. It's a dangerous one that really opens the pathway to expanding executive power

and consolidating authoritarian control. So it's just that piece of it. But going back more specifically to your question, our organization has spent the last 15 years assisting families fleeing gang violence, narco-trafficking violence in Central America. All of us who live in Central America, all of us who live in El Salvador have lived under the terror of the gangs. We've seen the atrocities.

It's a society that after the signing of the peace accords in 1992 had incipient hopes of becoming a democracy, but very quickly mass migration, corruption, gang violence creates a sense of sort of collective humiliation. And so the Salvadoran people's support of President Bukele

is very similar to other authoritarian sort of psychological, emotional connections that leaders build with populations who have suffered collective humiliations. He promises a better future. He promises a new idea of a country. And that becomes very seductive to people, especially the people in the diaspora in the United States, right? And so...

With the narrative of having, like, the day one when Bukele comes to office, they begin to say, we have reduced homicide rates. So security becomes his way of sort of consolidating, it's the physical proof that he is the change, right? What's ironic about that is what the indictment of the Attorney General of the Eastern District of New York says about that period of time.

And they say that Nayib Bukele made an agreement with the gangs during his first three years in office to create the perception of reduced homicide rates that benefited the president and his party in two elections. In a sense, this popularity that you're referring to in the early years of his presidency is the result of an illicit negotiation, according to the Attorney General of New York, with the very gangs he is now accredited for.

having combated, right? So there is an irony to that. What I'll say though is after the three years of state of exception, that outburst of violence is understood to be sort of the sign that the agreement between the Bvlgari government and the gangs is over.

And after you round up 85,000 people and imprison them indefinitely with no due process rights, most of the population understands then that the government can do whatever it wants to whoever it wants. And there are no institutions in the country that are independent to intervene to protect rights. And in that context, polling shows that 80% of the population say they support President Bukele.

While 83% of the population also says that they fear expressing an opinion that is not aligned with the president and his party. So in a sense, what the Salvador people are telling you is, sure, I support the president. But if I didn't, I would be too afraid to tell you. And so that's an indicator not of a free and open society, but of a closed and autocratic society.

I think that's really important. You made that point to me that you have to understand his approval rating in the context of the security situation, but also the freedom of speech and the political and media climate that exists on the ground. I think that's an important barometer for understanding, I think, the approval of any authoritarian government in the world, really. It's been interesting from over here in the U.S. watching Bukele's kind of like public image and

political efforts abroad evolve over time. He made himself kind of this early cheerleader of Bitcoin. He was celebrated by various Silicon Valley luminaries who mostly ignored his authoritarian tendencies. They've also kind of mostly ignored the total failure of

by the government to get actual citizens of El Salvador to use Bitcoin, but never mind. Now, it's clear he seems to have pivoted a bit. Right now, he's doing everything possible to cozy up to the Trump administration. He's become a fixture on the kind of conservative political conference circuit. How do you describe or make sense of his foreign policy worldview or efforts at least?

Yeah, that's a good question because he was elected as a social democrat, really. If you listen to his campaign speeches in 2018, I would give him a job at a Cristosal human rights organization to do workshops on democracy and social justice. He was a social democrat when the Salvadoran people fell in love with him. And he transitions. It's hard to know exactly how that happens. But I think his worldview, where is it now?

And this aligns very much with Trump is he sees himself as a disruptor to a rules based international system. Right. He says, for example, he repeats this phrase often that human rights and democracy standards are the failed prescriptions of the international community.

And I think you can see alignment with the way Trump deals with DEI, for example, or he says sometimes like, what does he say, a radical left, lunatic left agenda. And so they have this shared idea that the rules based order.

It's an alternative to like the great power diplomacy, like that phrase, the powerful do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Now, that was the old system. And then after World War II, we decided, oh, maybe we should have limits on power, even geopolitical power, and it could benefit everybody. They see that system as a limit on their own power or their own ability to act, and they don't like it.

So that is like one of the world views that unites them, but unites the autocratic world in general. Right. And so Bukele definitely identifies himself with that. And I think specifically on the issue of like the deportations of Venezuelans, President Bukele and President Trump are allied in an effort to normalize

this idea that in societies there are internal enemies and that these groups of people are such threats to society that they should not be protected by law and that the president claims a power to decide who those individuals and groups are. President Bukele has claimed that power in El Salvador and exercised it to the extent of rounding up 85,000 people arbitrarily.

And President Trump is now claiming that power in his supposed response to the immigration situation in the United States. So they're aligned in one... Literally declaring them terrorists. They're aligned in that idea, that normalization of that. And I think they're also aligned in trying to legitimize the idea that you can take away those people's rights and do whatever you want to them.

And so that for President Bukele, he has this deep desire to be seen as an international model. And he gets that when the United States contracts his penitentiary system known for massive systematic human rights violations.

the contract services from them, you legitimize that model of security. And it's a model of security, like we talked about at the start of the conversation, that's based on this idea that human rights, that democratic checks and balances, that any person or institution that would obstruct the power of the president to do what he desires to is an obstacle to security.

human rights and democracy themselves. It's a total country. Sorry, I'm going on so long, but it's a total contradiction of what the universal declaration of human rights says, right? Like this is, I read that and I get weepy. I hope people now go home and read just the preamble is good enough. It's like four paragraphs. It's the world war two generation, our grandparents saying to us that when we reflect on one of the darkest moments in human history, we conclude that we're fundamental respect for

for human rights and dignity is the basis, it's the foundation for peace and security in the world. Not agreements between great powers. It's the limitation that is implicit in respecting human dignity and rights. And that's what's being turned on its head with these, on a micro level, that's what's being turned on its head. I think...

That's something that like, you know, in all societies like Salvador, maybe in the United States, I don't know who really feels in the United States that their life has gotten way worse because of the trend at Aragua or how many people that is.

So it makes sense if you are affected by organized crime to say at first that, you know, do what you need to do. You're right. Let's sacrifice rights in exchange for security. But sooner or later, the sacrifice of rights for one group

affects everybody. And that's what we'll see. Absolutely. And, you know, last question for you. I mean, unfortunately, the United States were Elon Musk and the Doge crew and Trump are killing off USAID and the humanitarian work and the pro-democracy work that the U.S. government used to do abroad. That gap is

to the extent it can be, being filled by NGOs like yours. I mean, what is it like for you to work at a human rights organization in a country led by a scary, powerful, authoritarian man who doesn't want your research seen by others and probably resents it? I mean, do you feel, is it dangerous to operate? And then, you know, can people listening support your work?

Yeah. I would say that Crystal South... Well, so when I was in New York last week and I was talking with people and they were like, you know how liberals are talking about this at the moment? And I said, people are a little hysterical, like this is autocracy. And they're like, well, you're so, no, you're like so mellow. And I was like, well, yeah, I mean, we've been living with dictatorship for six years.

And, you know, like that means that's meant for me personally and for our organization that, you know, like my phone has been tapped with Pegasus. So espionage, monitoring of our work.

The sort of administrative and legal oversight authority of the state has been used to take away our tax status, to try and revoke our operating permit. There's constant campaigns. Bukele has a sophisticated troll network. Constant campaigns trying to delegitimize me and my colleagues individually, but our work in general. And people who work around us have been detained and threatened and criminalized.

But some of that you get used to. But every single day, we are still, people like me, we are better off than the people in the communities who have denounced abuses, denounced corruption. The consequences for people at the community level for speaking out, proposing something that's not aligned with the regime is potentially risking being detained in the state of exception.

Just a couple weeks ago, colleagues of ours in a smaller human rights organization were arrested and accused of illicit association, disappeared into prison along with 30 community leaders. So it is a context in which defending rights isn't free. But for now, we still have a space to work in. And I say that maybe for people in the U.S. too because in these processes of

consolidating autocracy.

there's like an abundance of pragmatic people who say, no, I'll just keep my head down. I won't confront. Maybe this won't get worse. And what we need are people who fight back against the normalization, the shifting of standards that is implicit in an autocratic process. Like autocracies are not reform projects. They're destruction and revenge projects. And people should not believe that that won't affect them at some point.

Yeah. Wow. Really well said. Well, Noah, thank you for the work you're doing. Folks who want to read more about Crystal Sol or donate to your organization should go to the Crystal Sol website. And I don't know. Thank you again. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you, Tommy. And good to see you again. Yeah.

Thanks again to Noah Bullock for doing the show. And I think thank you to Boris Johnson's wife for posting that. For posting that. Yeah. Yeah. Props to her. Also, dude. Thanks to King Charles for being good support. Yeah, that's good luck there. Also, Boris, I don't know. Maybe you don't have your little kid like in pecking distance of the giant ostrich. And laughing at him, though. That was the best part of the clip. It was mocking his dad. Good stuff. All right. Talk to you guys next week.

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