6/2/26: Trump Says Everyone Hates Israel, Anthropic Pushes For IPO, Trump Hesitant On JD 2028

22:47David Dayen:And it's also crazy that the sticking point between two countries, the United States and Iran, when it comes to reaching a deal is what Israel wants to do in Lebanon. Like, if you just came to this cold, you'd be like, well, that sounds like a separate thing because the war is between the United States and Iran as far as we're told. And it's like anti-Semitic to say anything else. So then why is it being hung up by this other conflict that doesn't have anything to do with us? Yeah. If you were to say, hey, we could all pay less in gas and we can negotiate bilaterally tomorrow, but Israel just has to withdraw from a country which is literally not theirs.

23:26Everyone would be like, okay, cool. The only people who wouldn't sign that deal are the Israelis, right? Who are intolerable. Yeah, we're like, okay, cool, yeah, fine. We should still reach a deal with Iran. Yeah, we could just reach a deal with Iran. You guys just have to leave Lebanon. You know, it sucks for you. And if not, Iran can deal with it. It's not really our problem, right? Exactly, but ultimately, that's why, you know, maybe we can edit this in post. I've just been thinking about this all day. So one of my friends sent it to me. This is the mindset of Mark Levin, who basically is a traitor to the United States for doing something like this.

24:00We will soon celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. We're off to a good start, Ryan. The Declaration was, in essence, a declaration of war against the most powerful military force on earth, the British Empire. He ruminates on the patriotism. Every delegate who signed that document had signed their own death warrant. Here's where it gets good. Let us remember this when we listen to the debates about whether or not we should defeat the Iranian regime. So we have a full paragraph here, which is all about the courage of the American Revolution and how much everything was on the line.

24:32And now he goes, all the arguments and even excuses against it, despite 47 years of its killing, maiming thousands of our fellow countrymen, 47 years of lies and deceit, decades of developing nuclear and missile technology to obliterate our nation, and a far more dangerous and ideological agenda than that of the British monarchy. Yet, George Washington and the brave founders of our country personally risked everything. Ultimately, the British forces surrenders. The Iranian regime will never surrender. They will never abide by a deal any more than they have abided by a ceasefire. I am mindful. Only 35 % of colonists supported war with Britain.

25:07My view may be similarly be a minority view today. I hope not. But if it is, so be it. So he links the pluckiness and the courage of the founders of the American Revolution to his support for the war with Iran, which he now says is unpopular by his own view, but is just of a cause as the American founding was. Imagine the psychology of that.

25:30David Dayen:The irony, of course, which I bet a bunch of viewers have picked up on, is that the Iranian revolutionaries were inspired by the American revolutionaries. We both threw off the British. Like the Iranians threw off the British. Like the Shah was an American and British puppet. Like we installed the Shah because Iran had nationalized British Petroleum, like a British oil company. And the Brits wanted us to take it back for them. And so then the Iranian revolution threw them back. And I don't even know why we did it. In retrospect, when you read it, you're like, why did we do this? Yeah, why did we do this?

26:03David Dayen:They wanted to be our allies. They were a democratic government. They just wanted control over their oil resources, which is a completely reasonable thing to want. And we're not talking about 1912 or when the British Empire is at its peak. We're talking about, what is it, 1953? Yeah, they were already getting cooked in the Suez. They were on their way out. What are we doing? Why are we fighting for these people? Yeah, so yes, there are parallels to the American Revolution and the overthrow of the British monarchy, but it doesn't go in the direction that it's just, I mean, reading this and seeing, I mean, but you could only read this and say, and to compare support for the American revolution to support for war with Iran, which is existential in no way whatsoever for the United States, but it's existential for one country to Israel.

26:49You should ask, okay, who are you loyal to? Literally. Like if you believe that it's so existential, then that means that you seem to be much more loyal to Israel than to the United States. Cause you know, what's more existential to the U S Oh, I don't know,$6 a gallon gasoline, which, by the way, he even says is not that big of a deal. So, yeah, he's willing to sacrifice all of you for his war and to try and tell you that you're just like George Washington if you support it. That's the level, though. In some ways, it's good. If that's how reductive the propaganda has gotten, then it shows how untenable support the war is for itself because this is what the Iraq War was like, and I remember it well.

27:28David Dayen:As the Founding Fathers said, we must always go in search of monsters to destroy. I think that's what it said, right? Yeah. George Washington famously in his farewell address said, we must go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. So well said. All right. Let's get to AI. Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers. And guess what? We have some big news. What's the news, Nick? Huge news. We created our own podcast called Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. Yeah, a pretty wide range of podcasts. We're starting a trend.

28:04But this one's extra special. So how did we actually come up with the name Hey Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it. Well, we were thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast, where people could call in and say, hey, Jonas. And then I wrote down on my little notepad, hey, Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title for the podcast. But thanks for remembering that, guys.

28:39Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Keith Giamanca seemed like a mild-mannered suburban dad. But secretly, he became someone else, a master of disguise who went on a crime spree. At the time, did it seem like a crazy idea? It seemed very crazy, but I felt so desperate that I felt it was the quickest, easiest way out. Did you allow yourself to think about how it could go wrong and what that might look like? No, I didn't want to manifest that. I was trying to manifest success. every family has its secrets but what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life that is not the look of an innocent man this is going to change my life and my family dynamic forever because everything that had existed prior in my reality is now untrue listen to deep cover the family man on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

29:56Mainstream media is full of crude depictions of the unhoused, stories that shame and blame and paint the unhoused as a monolith. We the Unhoused is the podcast that's changing that. I'm Theo Henderson, creator and host, and for years I've created a space where the unhoused and their advocates can tell their own stories. In the last few months alone, I've interviewed unhoused parents, immigrants, mutual aid organizers, veterans, the LGBTQIA plus community and the policymakers who make the laws that impact the unhoused existence. We do in-house as a two time Webby and Signal Award winning show with many exciting guests on the horizon.

30:39Tune in this week for my interview with Dr. Jill Wittler, a street doctor turned influencer whose work with the Unhoused community has made a huge impact online and in her community. Listen to We The Unhoused on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Turning now to AI. Huge news in the markets. Let's put this up here on the screen. Anthropic has filed to go public in a blockbuster year for IPOs. The filing could put the company behind Claude on a path to go public this year. They currently, I believe, have just raised a Series H, which I didn't even know was possible.

31:21Yeah, I'm like A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H. Okay, so there's eight rounds of funding valuing their company at nearly$1 trillion. It also comes on the heels of Sam Altman, OpenAI, OpenAI wanting to IPO, and also SpaceX, which, by the way, SpaceX we know as a rocket company, but whose current deals that they're inking with Anthropic and others are mostly behind compute and creating companies which would be able to have chip infrastructure and others, cloud storage, et cetera, for AI. So AI is at the backbone of all of these different things. And I think what is crazy about it is I've really been thinking a lot about what Derek Thompson said when he was here on our show, is that the simultaneous IPO of Anthropics, SpaceX, and OpenAI all in the same year will create more billionaires in a single year than at any time in history.

32:16and the distorting effect in modern history too. We will have literally hundreds of people worth, I mean, a collective, you know, several trillion dollars, very likely, just based on their stock valuations. What is that going to do to our society? First of all, in San Francisco, yeah, you're never buying a home. Unless you're, like, if you're worth a measly 10 million, brother, you better get your ass to Marin County or something like that. Yeah, right? You're driving two hours over the bridge. Slum it up there in Marin. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, sorry. I'm probably wrong. I think Marin is actually really nice, but I'm just coming.

32:49This is my limited knowledge of Northern California.

32:52David Dayen:It's the most spectacular place. Oakland. Okay, how about Oakland? Yeah, it's like you're living in a slum in Oakland. If you're worth a mere$10 million, you will never buy a house in San Francisco. That's number one. Number two, the state of California and its politics will become even more billionaire influenced than at any time. The number of all-in podcast copies is skyrocketing. The number of AI Twitter posts about - Oh my God. Lake Tahoe? Yeah, forget about it. It's just going to turn into even more of a billionaire playground. But to be actually serious, what he was pointing out was the distortionary impact that that will have on politics and political spending will be immense.

33:36I mean, almost indescribable. And one of the things that makes that really dangerous is that all of these people, all of these people will have their wealth directly tied into these AI companies and they will need it to function, which means a couple of things. Number one is it will become too big to fail. It probably already is, which we'll get into in a little bit, requiring government bailouts and all kinds of stock manipulation or regulation incentive to keep the companies at the valuations they need because it's just too much money being sloshed around. But the second thing on that is then it fuses their political power with this technological power and genuinely sets the ground.

34:17I don't want to be hyperbolic, but for like genuine techno feudalism. Like that's where things currently seem to be going.

34:23David Dayen:Yeah, we've talked before about the variations in public attitudes in China versus here when it comes to the advent of AI. And in China, people generally have much less anxiety about it and feel like it's going to be deployed responsibly. uh here in the united states people feel the opposite that it's going to lead to enormous numbers of job losses and yawning inequality and just produce a whole bunch of new billionaires and make life much more miserable and none of this you know none of this i think is going to disabuse people of that feeling the only possibility i can think of well two possibilities one is what we'll talk about later with bernie and two would be that it runs into a wall of like arithmetic and that they just can't compete with the Chinese products because their valuation is built on the idea that they are selling something of serious value.

35:22David Dayen:The Chinese are basically giving it away. And maybe some of the US ones are a little bit better. But if it's free versus like super expensive and a little bit better, you're going to go with the free one. It's possible. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like the Apple and Microsoft debate. Obviously both massively profit. Anthropic said recently that they're really losing a lot of market share to Gemini among the public. And it feels to me like it's becoming similar to how a lot of kind of, you know, if you have a master's degree or something, you have an iPhone. But most normal people have an Android.

35:57Is that true? I didn't know that.

35:59David Dayen:I mean. I've looked at it. I think it's like 40, 50 or something like that. Yeah. For a very long time, like the Androids are more of a regular person. I don't know if that's the case. But they're spreading out a little bit. It's becoming, normal people are using Gemini. Because it's there, it's right in front of them. It's just right there. Probably already have a Gmail account. And it's free to start. And so that is going to really hurt. Because Claude can't be a trillion dollar company unless it's, you know, unless you completely block the Chinese from competing. Which is difficult to do, but maybe they can pull it off.

36:33David Dayen:and it's somehow not a mass consumer product because it has competition. I think their selling point is about the frontier model with their ability to sell to these enterprises because that's where they make all the money. They should just say, our business model is we're going to hack the Federal Reserve and steal all the money. Did you see that, what was it, some company forgot to set spending limits and they spent half a billion dollars in a single month on Claude? So that's what shows you a little bit about how they're making money. I am interested also, So let's put B2 up here on the screen just to highlight again how, look, we're all in.

37:07Like we're beyond all in. So April and May of 2026 is one of the best two-month bull runs in the history of Wall Street. So they show here that you have got January to February 1975, January, February 1987. Can't think of anything bad that happened after those years. March to April 09, famously a phenomenal time in American history. April, May 2020. Wow. Yeah. I remember that one. and now April and May of 2026. And actually, in the journal, they write, it suggests the gains will keep coming. However, of course, some sort of crash is inevitable. We just don't know when or where. They write that chip stocks have powered the S &P up 16 % just across May and April, matched only four other times since 1950.

37:50And the index six months later each time was higher by a median of 17%. However, skeptics remain with those troubled by the sheer scale of the moves For example, Micron Technology, an Idaho-based memory chip maker, has increased roughly tenfold in value over the past 12 months to a market cap of$1 trillion. Samsung is up around 465 % in South Korea over that period. And a semiconductor index just posted its strongest performance through its first 100 days of any year ever on record. Even some of the companies involved recall the tech bubble era. Intel has tripled to 2026 for its first record since 2000.

38:34Cisco and Qualcomm have both surged 50%. Many on Wall Street are all riding the wave. And so, look, you know, obviously this is not financial advice or anything like that. But what I do think is that it surges a level of froth and of confidence at the higher levels of the economy. I'm talking about very, very rich people who on paper are worth extraordinary amounts of money in terms of the gains that they've had. But we've also seen the inverse now in consumer confidence. And I think that's exactly what's putting downward pressure on quality of life. What's interesting, too, is to see the existential risk for a political level.

39:09So let's put this one up here, and we can talk about this. The Florida attorney general is now suing OpenAI, seeking to hold Sam Altman personally liable for alleged harms. The 83-page complaint says that chat GPT has helped mass shooters in deadly rampages, driven some people to suicide. The complaint said that the harms are the result of open AI's insatiable quest to win the AI arms race and amass large fortunes. I mean, that's kind of inarguable. But the big question is about, well, what exactly is his responsibility? And I think this is like a bigger question. It just tells us all there's no regulatory oversight on this whatsoever.

39:53They can just do what they want. Sam Altman was this close to doing pornography, like to doing literatica and sexy. He only didn't do it, I think, because of some advertiser or business pressure. But one of the reasons they wanted to do it was to get you more hooked on ChatGPT, to siphon even that part off of the internet. I mean, their desperate desire is to get everybody to use this thing and then not just to use this thing, to put all of its data in it, amass all of that knowledge, and then to create frontier models, which will make it so that you don't have to work anymore or really so that you won't work and they will do all the work for you and capture all that value from Anthropic to OpenAI, all of these frontier model companies.

40:31Everything is based on making the human less important in the workplace. They claim otherwise, but what gives it away is every single op-ed and public utterance that they have is just about mass AI job loss. That's the entire thing.

40:47David Dayen:Yes, and if you put a B4, I think this is the key development here. This is comparing public sector transportation infrastructure spending versus spending on data centers in the United States. And as you see with this chart here, they're now equal. And I'm sure they looked for a bunch of different things to compare, but this is a useful one because this is roads, bridges, everything we need to basically live in a civilized society versus dirt roads in the backwoods. And it's now equal to data center spending. and I've been doing news for 20 years. I don't remember covering any debate over this, not a presidential level debate.

41:39It just happened so quickly.

41:40David Dayen:Yeah, not a, there was no vote in Congress. There was no presidential campaign that was run on, I think our national priority should be building data centers to develop AI. There was no Senate race. where that was even asked that, yet we are considered to be a democracy, and yet we made this extraordinarily pivotal decision. Somebody made it because it's happening, but it certainly had nothing to do with democracies. People were like, okay, well, this is the business community, the market signals just decided that this is what we could do. Okay, that is a system you can have, but that is not self-government.

42:31David Dayen:We are governed by something else. Yeah, I mean, you're effectively governed by disparate market forces, but it's not all that disparate. It's really like 100 - It's like six guys. Yeah, it's six guys. We're all on the same podcast. Who are making this decision, many of whom are on the same podcast and also work in government. In the government. What I think is really scary, though, is just about their explicit desire and public utterance about how, yeah, there's going to be mass social dislocation and job loss. And this is actually a big debate right now in Silicon Valley. I like to go on the TVPN show with my friend John Coogan, and we talk about this all the time.

43:04And from their perspective, they believe that a lot of it is marketing, is that the Anthropic and OpenAI and all of them use these talking points as marketing because it shows how transformative their tech is. But at the same time, there's only so many times that the CEOs of the companies themselves can in all seriousness be like half of humans aren't going to work. And Elon being like, by the way, all of you will just get UBI. That you're like, maybe there's something to it. And I've seen researchers and others. We've had so many of them here on the show talk about, no, like they're not lying to you.

43:36They're actually telling the truth because, A, it makes them phenomenally rich, but they want to have some level of – they want to prep the ground for what that type of thing is looking like. To the data center point, I mean, and the level of CapEx spending, that is the only reason why we are not in a full-blown recession. I believe Canada is actually in a formal recession. One of the reasons they are is they don't have AI. They don't have Antropic and OpenAI. I almost any company which is living in the real world of manufacturing, of goods, of agriculture, of oil is facing a massive downward pressure.

44:10The only reason we are not and that stocks are literally at all time highs is because Micron and all these companies are worth a trillion dollars. If we were any other country in the world, it wouldn't be that way. And I think that that demonstrates, you know, the reliance on this tech. And that's why I kind of said you're screwed if it doesn't work out because then it's a bubble and then it's dot-com all over again. It took, I think it took 13 years to recover the same market top from two, yeah, I think it was 2000 and 2013, 13 years for the market to return, which is insanity for the people who invested at that time.

44:47But I think it also shows how if it does work out, well, then yeah, if you're an asset owner, oh, then great. But if it doesn't, there are all kinds of problems. And then, Ryan, you and I, we were there for the phone revolution, we similarly didn't have a debate. It was just all of a sudden, we all had phones. This time, because we just went through that experience, we have enough knowledge to be like, well, let's hold on a second.

45:10David Dayen:Social media, like, yeah. Let's put this next one up here, which is a great story. And it's about how the University of California system went all in on AI, and now it's just tearing itself apart. They said, newly admitted students to San Jose University, received an unusual message from the institution's president. They said her cameral curls were tucked behind her shoulders. Her hands were neatly clasped. Dressed down in a royal blue hoodie, she appeared composed and approachable. She said, congratulations on your admission. You'll have opportunities to dive into technologies, shaping the world, and redefine what's possible.

45:44That was not actually her addressing them, but a brand new custom AI avatar. The avatar said, I'm thrilled to share this special moment with you. It's only fitting. Technology is now a cornerstone of what makes the university such an incredible place to learn, innovate, and to grow. This is now the AI Everywhere strategy, which aims to integrate technology across all campus life. And the story, I mean, again, it's very, very long, but what it does is it just goes into the way AI has gone into every single facet of this organization and how it's basically ripping the community apart, et cetera.

46:21But I mean, for even that, it's like you don't have the time to film a video. Sorry, my parents are in academia, all right? Like, let's be honest here. Let's be honest. In terms of - All summer? Yeah, it's like, sorry, no shade, but some shade. You know, university president, like, what is your job? You're dealing with tenure bullshit and cutting ribbons and talking to donors. You can film the damn video. You can film the video. It just shows you how they're basically trying to come up with use cases for it for everything. And it is extraordinarily useful, but it's also destroying a lot of student life and homework.

47:01And it's like everything is becoming AI. And the students, as we all saw at those graduation ceremonies, they don't even like it. They're booing it at these commencement addresses. Yeah.

47:13David Dayen:No. Yes. And you're also seeing a lot of companies that are starting to say, wait a minute, like it's costing us a lot of money to have these agents doing the work. They're not doing it as well as the people were before. And now we've run through our budget, our AI agent budget. And now we don't, so we don't have them anymore because we're out of money there. and we got rid of our employees and the agent doesn't actually know where things are. Like there's a knowledge base that you have to have to keep things going and you got rid of all those people. So that is the other hope. That's the math.

47:56David Dayen:That's the wall of math that this might run into. But in that scenario, there is just a river of tears that flows from this entire structure kind of collapsing. But the other idea from Bernie, Bernie's saying, we'll introduce a bill to have the public take 50 % ownership stake in the country's biggest AI companies. The American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would have the government take AI companies 50 % of stock and put it under public control. And I think before people freak out, it's like, hey, look, if we're allowed to nationalize TikTok because Israel doesn't like the way that the slaughter of Palestinians is allowed to be posted on the app.

48:46David Dayen:If we can literally go ahead and seize that, then I think for something that is much more significant to the United States, we should consider this as well because, and speaking of, we talked about Troy Ciacobardi earlier, one of the unusual things about him is that he has an actual AI plan. And one of his ideas that he's running on is he says, if something is free to provide or effectively free to provide using AI, then it should no longer be the realm of kind of private profit. And the government should just make it available to people. Like if it really is free to produce or effectively free to produce a small amount of energy and running on an open model, just let people use it.

49:36David Dayen:And then they can build businesses off of it. They can use it in their own lives to make their lives better. And if the U.S., if the government owns half of it, then you can actually start to make those decisions as a society. Right. Right, and look, Trump has already laid the ground for this. Trump took stake in TikTok. Took stake in Intel. I supported all of those, actually. Did he get Cisco, too, or something? Yeah, one of them. You know why I support it? Like, with Intel. I'm like, yeah, Intel is a vital manufacturing, high-tech piece of the U.S. economy, period. Yes, the government should have a say in it.

50:09I mean, how can you look at TSMC or any of these major Chinese conglomerates and not say that it's obviously the best way for it to work? Same here with AI. We're going to say that this is going to have a national and massive import on our quality of life, our way of life, our ability to work, on our wealth, et cetera. Not only should the government have stake and or ability to guide it from a shareholder perspective, but it's actually an old Republican value of like, fine, let's take a stake in it too from a value perspective and actually make something out of this, not just tax some of the actual dollars that it will create later on in the economy.

50:44I think it's a good idea. At the very least, somebody's thinking about it, you know, as he has in the past. So I like it. I like it. But anyway, a lot of new billionaires. We are about to see. There will be more billionaires in 2027 than any time in human history. And 2026, they even go down. Probably someone watching this right now. Yeah, probably. Which a lot of them may watch it.

51:04David Dayen:Congrats. Based on my ideas. But there are actually a lot of good people that work inside these companies, too. who were like, look. Well, some of them are like, we want to guide this to the least bad or a good possibility. Others are like, hey, I got to have a job somewhere. Got to become a billionaire somewhere. You got to become a... It's like, how else can I buy my house in Marin County? Second home in Marin. That's fair. Who's going to buy a yacht at the Newport Yacht? What is it? The Yacht Club in... Newport, Rhode Island? No, I'm thinking of the one in California. This is my property. Say, we don't know.

51:36David Dayen:I don't know my California geography, which is what they always say to me. They're like, you're not even from here. Like, why are you talking about this? All right, let's get to J.D. Vance. Number one hits, millions of records sold, awards, sold out tours. You think the Jonas Brothers are satisfied? Nope, it's podcast time. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Hey Jonas is available now and their first guest is a big one, Paul Rudd. You know, Steve Carell is a great singer. Can you tell you not to audition at The Office or something? I told him.

52:04Whoa. We were filming Anchorman. Clearly, I was the idiot. Thank God he didn't listen to me, right? Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans. A show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships.

52:50I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to A Slight Change of Plans on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

53:31grocery store I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway. If you're an historian and you leave out half of what the history is, you're not doing your job. I'm Akilah Hughes and Rebel Spirit Season 2 goes deep on both of those things. The fights, the politics, the people who won, and my personal campaign to add something to the Kentucky State House that's actually worth the wall space. We are more than our bodies. We contain essence. We contain spirit. How do you represent that? They are just fueling a fire that is really catching. You'll see what I mean. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

54:13Turning now to J.D. Vance and the new long profile in the New York Times. Let's put this up here on the screen. Is J.D. Vance the 2028 frontrunner? Trump has questions. Quote, in recent conversations with aides and allies, Trump often interjects with a question. Does J.D. Vance have what it takes to go all the way? He usually answers his own question. He's not so sure. It's not that Trump is abandoning Vance. He involves him in major decisions, has given him high-profile opportunities for partisan warfare, and trusts the 41-year-old to wage partisan warfare on his behalf. Trump recently compared him to Elliot Ness, the mob-busting federal agent.

54:48Trump has long conducted running focus groups on his closest aides and appears to enjoy needling them and keeping them off balance. When it comes to Vance, the stakes are higher. As the default frontrunner, Vance's fortunes thrive to a substantial degree on the enthusiasm and support he gets from Trump. And Trump's regular polling people of whether they prefer Vance or Rubio has become one of the most closely watched early indicators of how power in the Republican Party might pass to the next generation. When he conducts these polls in private, Trump often compares Vance's performance to his own achievements.

55:19He has told several allies Vance has never won a tough race without his help. He has brought up the number of vacations that Vance has taken as vice president. Here, I just want to do a quick fact check. They write, Mr. Trump generally does not take them. Oh, really? That would be news to every single weekend of Mar-a-Lago, which I guess is a word. Yeah, his literal life is living on Air Force One in Bedminster and Mar-a-Lago. But whatever. I'll move past that one. But this was the key line. He has repeatedly mentioned the vice president's initial opposition to starting the war with Iran and has done so in front of Vance, quote, I'm more of a peace person than you are, but I had to do it.

55:59The president has also questioned his decision to send a Vance-led delegation to a negotiation session in Pakistan that failed to end the war. And I think what this does is it combines with Trump's obvious preference, or at least more recently, with Marco Rubio, because basically all of what Trump has done in the second administration, on a foreign policy level at the very least, it's Rubio copy and paste. war with Iran, Venezuela, Maduro, Cuba being our existential threat. And so, I mean, this just demonstrates like the sheer futility, which I think, you know, really I've realized here, where Trump demands absolute loyalty, even internally, if you were to oppose or, you know, marginally oppose, let's say in the case of Iran, where publicly you're making a beclowning yourself by, you know, comparing Iran to a suicide bomber or something like that.

56:54Even that is not enough. Like you need to be so enthusiastic of a bootlicker, both publicly and privately. And yeah, I mean, for him, he made the devil's bargain. He said, OK, I'm going to be the vice president. But the theory behind that, which I have a spouse here, and I've said publicly I did know him in a previous life. And what the theory of the entire policy project was, we go, we work for Trump. And in exchange, because Trump is effectively tabula rasa blank slate, you push from the inside to have better policy. It's been a total failure, an abject and a total failure. Now, there's a lot of reasons for that.

57:28And really what I think it ultimately comes to is there's no forcing mechanism because even in this case, let's say you did oppose war with Iran. Nobody will ever know the truth, even if that's true. And even if you do so internally, Trump still demands absolute contrition in public, which neuters any ability that you have because in public you have to go out and defend this very nonsense as it is happening. So it just creates a mechanism where Rubio would be the more honest succession at this point for MAGA. What is MAGA? Like Trump. Okay, so Rubio. Let's do it. Low taxes, war with Cuba, war with Iran, war with Venezuela.

58:03All right. I guess that's MAGA. Yeah, that's MAGA.

58:06David Dayen:And what's crazy is that in this article, it suggests that Trump privately makes fun of J.D. Vance for opposing the Iran war, which blows my mind because you would think that at this point in the war that Trump would be like you know what JD you actually should have listened to you? No dude it's bunker mindset. Have you ever watched that movie Downfall? Not yet. The German movie about Hitler and the bunker. Yeah it's the bunker. This is pure bunker mindset. It's like you gotta be all in. If you're even marginally off and to that extent this is where I don't even want to portray that there's some marginally off maybe behind the scenes Maybe.

58:44To the limited extent of what I know, there has been, you know, he went to Islamabad and all that. But even then, Trump set him up for failure. I was saying - And just yanked him immediately. You remember, we talked about this. J.D. had no ability. Goluboff and Arachi, at that table, they had some scope to negotiate that they'd been given from the Supreme Leader. J.D.'s getting up from the table every five minutes to call Trump or Bibi to say, okay, what about this? Or Jared was calling Bibi. Yeah, exactly. They had no discretionary authority. Spends 18 hours in Islamabad. Nothing happens. Literally nothing.

59:16And from that, J.D.'s also, I mean, Trump has put him out. And this is J.D.'s fault as well. He's the attack dog. So what does he do? He goes out and defends the stupidest shit possible. Let's put that. Yeah, this is my segue. The absolute stupidest shit possible that later on they have to rug pull and say, yeah, no, actually, it was a bad idea. So here he was a couple of days ago being questioned about this slush fund that Trump was setting up. Let's take a listen. I want to ask you about that one point eight billion dollar fund set up weaponization fund is being called. Why should taxpayers be paying to settle a 10 billion dollar lawsuit that was brought by the president of the United States?

59:58And should people that attacked the Capitol building and assaulted police officers, should they be eligible? should they receive money? Should they receive money from this fund? Well, let me say a couple of things about that. First, John, I think in some ways the media has misrepresented what this is actually about. This is about compensating Americans for the lawfare that we saw under the last administration. And by the way, anybody can apply for it. Republicans can apply for it. Democrats can apply for it. As you know, the president of United States has pardoned a number of Democrats who he felt were actually subject to this lawfare.

1:00:32I mean, if Hunter Biden wants to apply for this particular fund, he is welcome to. It's going to go through a normal process where we vet everything, where we try to identify whether people's claims are actually legitimate. But here's the question. You say, why should taxpayers fund this? Whenever the United States government incurs legal expenses, it pays out those legal expenses. When it's settling a lawsuit, it pays out money to settle that lawsuit. And the question is, is a dollar of this money going to the Trump administration? No. Is a dollar of this money going to Donald Trump personally?

1:01:05No. Is a dollar of this money going to Donald Trump's family? No. The people that would get the money are people, some of whom have been prosecuted completely disproportionate to any crime they've ever committed. So he gives his passionate defense of the fund. And now what happens? Let's put this one up here on the screen. Oh, oops. Trump is now having to drop the whole fund because they're blaming the DOJ for, or sorry, They're blaming a judge for ruling against it. Here's what really happened. The entire Republican Congress rallied up against, so this is what I'm talking about. He's forced to go out and defend the Iran war.

1:01:39He's forced to go out and defend the weaponization fund. He was point man on the shooting. What am I thinking of?

1:01:45David Dayen:Rene Good. I mean, this is just a bad moment. He was out in my replies. Huh? He was out in my replies about the Rene Good thing. That's right, my God. I forgot about that. What are you doing, man? Yeah, so he's like, dude, and actually, allegedly, in this New York Times story, there was this meeting, there was this moment where Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, allegedly tells him to give up social media. He says he gave it up for Len. Off of the, he gave it up for Len. I don't, I mean, again, who knows how much of this is true. Who knows how much of this is like a Rubio op also as well.

1:02:14Probably a lot of it. And look, I don't care. But my point behind this is this demonstrates, I think, the failure of a project, which again, I believed in, was Trump, tabula rasa. He's a good politician, whatever. But what happens is you have a bunch of people who work for him. They have a specific ideological worldview. They'll use his presidency to push that said worldview, in which Trump ostensibly agrees, although Trump says a lot of different shit. It hasn't worked. It simply has not worked. The pro-Israel lobby and the rest of these people rolled that entire faction of the administration.

1:02:48To this point now, Iran is what Trump will be known for as of right now. In terms of his presidency, it really has what has pushed his polls in a dramatic new and a different direction it's changed and shifted the culture dramatically i think and you know and already things were not going so well for the administration but this really put things over the edge so in a certain sense i'm like why would you even want to be the successor of donald trump now at this point let rubio have it you know and then maybe you know you're a young guy maybe you can make a case uh sometime in the future uh but yeah i don't know i'm curious for what you think uh put simply

1:03:23David Dayen:the bums lost dude the deplorables lost yeah they were up they were up against they were outmatched yeah the neocon and pro-israel and business lobby AI guys they beat the bums I was rooting for the bums it is a remarkable in this intramural fight it is it really is a remarkable story like to think about how that happened and what I've really seen is that because Trump ultimately is just a cult like a personality at the end of the day for the vast majority of his supporters. That if you cannot oppose him on any ground, you have to publicly support. And that removes any function to push things in a different direction when he is easily influenced or decides of his own accord.

1:04:07Iran war, massive amount of corruption. I mean, can a single MAGA Republican, a real elected official, say what he has done with the pardon system or personally enriching himself is massively correct? They can't even say that. Can't even say that. Look at the Jubilee thing with Glenn Greenwald. They're sitting there just barking at you. They're barking at you. But what about Joe Biden? Or, but what about, and we're like, yeah, that's bad. What did Glenn say? Add a zero, and that's Trump. Multiple zeros. Add multiple zeros, and that's Trump. And it's like they're brain short circuits. They are not even willing to make a okay, lesser of two evils argument.

1:04:44They're like, no, it's just not true.

1:05:18We'll see you next time. You know, tired and sick. Tired and sick. Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans. A show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program.

1:06:02Listen to A Slight Change of Plans on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is. Getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is. Getting a new one put up in its place. I'm Akilah Hughes, and Rebel Spirit Season 2 is about both of those things. As I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city, in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:06:38This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.