Trump makes explosive new announcement

0:01Brian Tyler Cohen:Donald Trump makes an explosive new announcement that signals bad news for opponents of forever wars. And I interview Pod Save America's Jon Lovett. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. So Trump just shook up the world with a brand new announcement. He took to true social writing, The Hormuz Strait is open and will remain open with or without Iran. We are instating the Iranian blockade, so named because it is only stopping Iran's ships or customers from entering or leaving. All of the countries will have fair and open use of the strait. the USA will be, from this point forward, known as the Guardian of the Hormuz Strait.

0:33Brian Tyler Cohen:Now, let me simplify this. What would it mean, in practice, if the United States became the, quote, Guardian of the Hormuz Strait? Would it mean that the US would need a permanent presence to guard that strait? And if we have a permanent presence in a hostile territory, then in effect, what Trump is announcing here is a forever war. The exact thing he campaigned against. The exact thing that his voters despise. which Trump basically confirmed when he said this. But Mr. President, you noted the United States is bombing Iran again. I mean, you've been bombing Iran for months now. Is this just the new normal for the American people?

1:08Brian Tyler Cohen:No, well, you know, we're in Vietnam for 19 years. We're here for four months. See, as long as we come in under 19 years, we're apparently fine. And then, of course, after Trump decided to vomit out the single least popular foreign policy position he could have cooked up, the rest of the party had to translate from Trump to English because apparently this 80-year-old man, who just so happens to be the president of the United States of America, isn't capable of expressing a coherent thought, and we need other elected officials to tell us what he actually meant. Yeah, it totally won't be a forever war.

1:43Brian Tyler Cohen:We're simply going to guard the Strait of Hormuz forever against the country that we're at war with. See, definitely not a forever war. And yet, what can we expect from a president who swore that prices would go down and instead he unilaterally raised them by launching a trade war? What can we expect from a president who swore that inflation would go down only to see it rise by 30 %? Who swore that the Epstein files would be released only to engage in a government-wide cover-up? Who swore that he would look out for the little guy and instead has immersed himself in gold and ballrooms and jets?

2:15Brian Tyler Cohen:There is not a single thing that Trump promised that's come to fruition. So of course he swore that he would avoid forever wars in the Middle East only to announce a policy that is, in effect, a brand new forever war in the Middle East. Par for the course for a president whose only consistent principle is his inability to deliver anything for anyone not named Donald Trump. Next up is my interview with Pod Save America's John Lovett. But first, a big announcement. Today is the official launch of my new book, The Day After. I've been working on this book for a year. I'm very proud of how it turned out.

2:48Brian Tyler Cohen:I would really love if you could order a copy. The book demands that Democrats learn how to wield power so that when we control the House, the Senate, and the White House, we don't waste a second of our precious time talking about it. We start doing it. And we don't let norms or traditions or processes stand in the way. And we deliver on health care, on voting rights, on climate, a fair economy, expanding the court, and so much more. If you agree with that message and you want to support my work, want to support this podcast, you can click the link in the show notes of this episode or go to briantylercohen.com slash book.

3:20Brian Tyler Cohen:There you can also grab tickets to my book tour. I'll be in DC, New York, and Los Angeles. Tickets are still available. So again, the link to both order the book and grab book tour tickets is in the show notes of this episode or at briantylercohen.com slash book. Okay, here's my interview with John Lovett. No Lie is brought to you by BetterHelp. The good news is that we talk about mental health more openly now, but asking for help can still feel hard and BetterHelp's latest research confirms it. BetterHelp's 2026 State of Stigma report surveyed 2 ,000 Americans and revealed that 85 % of Americans believe getting support is wise, yet 74 % say society discourages people from doing so.

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4:32Brian Tyler Cohen:A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences, and their more than 12 years of experience and industry-leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. Don't let stigma stand in the way of support. Start therapy with BetterHelp. Sign up and get 10 % off at betterhelp.com slash nolie. That's betterhelp.com slash nolie. I'm joined now by the co-host of Hot Save America, Jon Lovett. Lovett, thanks for joining me. Great to see you. So I want to talk about Cash Patel here because obviously Cash Patel is embroiled in something of a brand new scandal.

5:09Brian Tyler Cohen:This is in the aftermath of him snorkeling at Pearl Harbor and taking the jet, the FBI jet, to go to music festivals that his girlfriend is performing in. Now he's been summoned by the White House. And so do you anticipate this is in the immediate aftermath of Chuck Grassley coming out and saying that he is being investigated for possible waste, fraud and abuse. When you hear that that Cash Patel is being summoned to the White House, does that offer any indication whatsoever that he's that there's going to be proper oversight or that anything is going to happen to him? Oh, well, there'll never be proper oversight.

5:41Something could happen to him. Kash Patel is not indispensable. I think they could fire Kash Patel. They may not, right? This summoning may just be a stern talking to. It could be the end of his time at the FBI. It could be him finding out he's no longer going to be FBI director. And we find that out sometime later. I have no idea. I do think his posting about his lavish spending by saying, my jet ski is gold-plated, dumbass. It was not the successful media strategy he was hoping it would be.

6:11Brian Tyler Cohen:But I'm curious, though, because isn't this whole administration predicated on kind of like that exact macho, like alpha energy anyway? Like, that's why these people are there. Pete Hegseth is there because that's the shtick that he does. Dan Bongino was there. Kash Patel is there because they all do this shtick. I mean, these guys are out here doing pull-ups every five minutes wherever they can get a camera on them. And so why is it okay in one instance, but when they continue to do those theatrics, suddenly it might be disqualifying? I want to come up with some sort of term for their style of fitness, which is something like heavyweights, no cardio, no stretching.

6:52That is what I - Shirt off. It's heavyweights, no cardio, no stretching. That's what to me, what I see with this, with the style that they're going for. And fellas, boy, you may like the way your arms look now. But you're going to be shuffling when you're older. You got to. Listen, I know it seems a little bit gay and feminine to hop on the Pilates reformer, but I'll be the one that lasts last. Do I have the biggest muscles? No. Can I bench press the most? No. But I'll be lapping you fuckers when I'm in my 70s. All right. Because of the core strength. All right. And the flexibility. Core strength and flexibility is what it's ultimately all about.

7:27And you're going to, oh, wow, you're lifting a lot of weight, Pete Hegseth. You're going to be shuffling. You're going to be shuffling. Then you're struggling to get in and out of tubs. That's how it ends. That's how it always ends. Now back to Cash Patel. So Trump has a problem. And this is a problem with being under a kooky, egocentric autocrat, which is he doesn't draw the best people. And so he has to put in people that aren't that talented. That has certain advantages because if you're in a job you're only in because the boss put you there, even though no other president would ever have you in that job.

8:02you're kind of loyal to him, right? You have an obligation, right? Cash Patel serves at the, really serves at the grace of Donald Trump. But you can't be so boorish and stupid and incompetent that it embarrasses the dear leader. So he has these goobers who aren't qualified. That's helpful to him. They make a fool of Trump. He has to get rid of them. Cash has really skirted that line. Hexeth skirts it too, right? But Hexeth has had the same style of personal scandal that Cash has sad.

8:29Brian Tyler Cohen:I'm curious, you know, if we're in a position where Donald Trump lets go of Kash Patel, how can you be ensured that these people who are high ranking officials in the government where, you know, right now they're suppressing the Epstein files? How do you have some degree of certainty that because they have they know where all the skeletons are in your closet, that they don't go out and just vomit it out into the public? You mean like someone like Kash Patel doing something? Correct. Yeah. So I don't know. I don't know what what motivates someone like Akash Patel or Dan Bongino, you don't want to make an enemy of Trump.

9:05Right.

9:05Brian Tyler Cohen:And you just want to stay in the good graces of the MAGA universe anyway. Yeah, they all want to make money. They all want to have their deals. They want to do podcasts. They want to be lobbyists, whatever it looks like. And being on the wrong side of Donald Trump when you're already on the wrong side of everybody who hates Donald Trump doesn't leave a lot of places to make the kind of money they want to make. Akash Patel seems to have fancy taste. Yeah. Clearly. Look, the other problem is Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Todd Blanchett, these people are the bottom. We've had people like Barr who were political animals, but they were sophisticated.

9:44And they did Donald Trump's bidding. But they, you know, like when he put his memo out saying that the Mueller report actually found the opposite of what the Mueller report found. And you can a lot of examples of what people like Barr did. But Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, these are hacks just of the purest order he is. And so it's like that there's no there's no one who would be worried. Right. Like there were people that would have wanted someone like a bar to stay, even senators who would have wanted someone like a bar to stay because they didn't want like who the alternatives were. That's not the case for somebody.

10:21Kash Patel has nobody in his corner. Yeah. So Donald Trump doesn't really lose a lot by firing that guy. And it's not like a lot of people are worried about who comes after Kash Patel. You can't do worse. Yeah. Or you know what? I swear to God, I'm so sorry. There we go. I'm so sorry. That is a curse I've just unleashed. I am having, I think it is hard to imagine what worse than Kash Patel looks like. However, I am prepared to be unpleasantly surprised.

10:48Brian Tyler Cohen:Yeah. I want to switch to a different topic here. But before we do, I want to let folks know that I'm going to be with you, Love It, live in Los Angeles on July 18th. And there are still tickets available. It's going to be in Santa Monica. So for those who are watching right now, if you live in L.A., if you have friends or family who are in L.A., and you're free at 4 p.m. on July 18th, we'd love to see you in person. So I'm going to put the link to grab tickets to our book event right here on the screen and also in the post description of this video. So with that said, I want to move over to some new news that we have now, which is Donald Trump made the announcement that he's not going to sign the housing bill.

11:19Brian Tyler Cohen:The housing bill that he ran on as a campaign promise, the housing bill that his own party passed so that he could sign it. And instead, he wants to use it as kind of a hostage that he can try and pass the Save America Act, which has no chance of passing anyway. But in light of the fact that already so many promises have been broken, costs are not down, they're up. Health care is not expanded. It's been gutted. Inflation's not down. It's rising. He's not only failed to prevent us from going into foreign wars, he started new ones. Epstein files aren't released. The government is suppressing them.

11:52Brian Tyler Cohen:And now, you know, on this one kind of bureaucratic aspect of things where he where he was able to get a win on housing, that's going to be a failure on his part, too. And so what do you think his thought process is here that he is preventing himself from notching his own win and and and delivering on a promise that he made? So first of all, he called up Mike Johnson and said, and I believe this is a near quote, nobody cares about housing. But they do care about suppressing the vote. That's his claim, right? We can't do housing if we're not going to do my voter suppression bill. Housing, especially among young people, it is one of the most important issues.

12:30Certainly long-term, it is the greatest obstacle that a lot of people feel to achieving the American dream. If you dig into why young people today believe they will not have a life as good as their parents, or if you ask people why they believe the American dream no longer exists is no longer or is no longer acceptable. It often will come back to housing. This was a rare moment of old school bipartisan politics. This received a ton of support from Republicans and Democrats. There were compromises. It's not perfect, but it was a rare place where Donald Trump was going to sign a bill that was meant to actually address a serious long-term problem in a thoughtful way.

13:08Yeah. And by the way, he's too much of a bitch to veto the thing, right? He doesn't want to actually, like what he's really doing is denying Republicans the light of him saying how great it is in their presence, which is what a lot of these guys really want. He's going to let it become law, but kind of begrudgingly because he's pissed that they won't suppress the vote. So the press conference, by the way, was already set. It was going to happen. There were speakers at the podium. He decided to do this at the absolute last minute. So ultimately, I do think it's a good thing that he's not, hopefully, is not going to veto the thing.

13:47Outright veto it, yeah. And that as long as it will, he's also not pocket-vetoing it, so it can become law. But what kind of petulant maniac tries to basically just, I don't even know what you would call it. It's just such an immature thing. There's no consequences of it. He's just kind of being mad. It's a tantrum. It's a tantrum. He's having a little tantrum. That's what he's doing. It's crazy.

14:12Brian Tyler Cohen:You know, there is some thought that Donald Trump is just giving up on the midterms because, again, we're engaged in this war that he swore he would never engage in. Gas prices are surging right now. And as the memorandum of understanding, as they've reneged on it, now gas prices took their biggest jump in, I think, since the start of this war. since the start of this war, we're seeing those gas prices surge again right now. But I actually I don't think that Trump has given up on midterms. I think he's given up on trying to win midterms on the merits because the fact that he's holding this bill, the housing bill hostage for the Save America Act shows that that's where his priority is.

14:50Brian Tyler Cohen:And there's a direct link between trying to pass the Save America Act and winning the midterms or winning elections by usurping control of state run elections into the federal government. So it's not that I think he's given up on midterms. I think he's given up on trying to win midterms on the merits and instead is just trying to shoehorn through victories by like these anti-democratic, small-D democratic measures. Yeah, well, so I think – and if he is ultimately going to lose the midterms, he would love to blame the Republicans for failing to do what it takes and having passed the SAVE Act. By the way, this comes back to the Kash Patel part of it as well, because, yeah, Kash Patel has these embarrassing stories and he's clearly incompetent and not up for the job.

15:35One thing Donald Trump wants to do is investigate his political opponents. He wants to use the Justice Department to go after Democrats. We don't know yet what's going to come out of their attempts to do that with Gavin Newsom. We don't or some of these other. Letitia James, James Comey, Tim Walz, Jacob Fry. A lot of these things are ongoing, but all it takes is a couple of MAGA prosecutors to start looking into Tallarico or Sherrod Brown or any of the other places where we have a potential pickup in the Senate. Right. So even before we get to Election Day, he would like to be using all the levers of power to go after his political opponents and try to tilt the favor towards Republicans, even though they're based on the polls, not in a very good position.

16:22that is partly about suppressing the vote. It's also about using the law against his opponents. But yeah, he doesn't care about winning fair and square at all. I do think he would like to win unfairly. Below that would be winning fairly, even though that's not on offer. After that would be losing, but having people he can blame. The worst case and unacceptable version of this is losing and being expected to take responsibility, which I don't see as in the cards.

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18:33Brian Tyler Cohen:Helixsleep.com slash BTC. In terms of Donald Trump losing and having somebody else to blame, World Cup, the Trump curse, is it real? Everything was fine. Everything, and this has been a recurring theme. Everything was fine with the Knicks until Trump showed up to Madison Square Garden. Then they lose. Trump now decides to intervene in the World Cup in a red card. They were able to suspend the suspension and suddenly the U.S. loses to Belgium. Is the Trump curse real? So I don't know a lot about sports, but I've watched a lot of sports movies. And in an 80s movie, think about the Mighty Ducks, all right?

19:13you want to be the mighty ducks you want to be the mighty ducks going against against the well-funded rich kid team yeah right these are scrappy kids all right they don't have a lot of the supplies right rocky's he's chasing chickens drago he's got the the technical equipment behind him he's got the he's got the soviet machine behind him rocky's just a man on his own all he's got his patriotism that's all he's got behind him he's got heart and donald trump the president of the united states he made Belgium he made them the guys chasing the chickens around he made Belgium the fucking mighty ducks and we're the black suited people showing up our limos rolling down our window saying I think we're going to try to win this soccer game that he made us the fucking like the villain in the story and so look I joked about of all the ways Donald Trump could be corrupt attacking the European chauvinist at FIFA is like, you know, not high on my list of problems, but he did fuck the vibe.

20:15He fucked the vibe. Yeah. Because if you like some like if you're the you think about the fire in the belly of those fucking just just just waffles and ambition just inside their stomach, just dipping fries in mayo and just getting ready to fucking bring everything they had to taking on the Americans.

20:34Brian Tyler Cohen:A hundred percent. And I think it's also worth noting, like we were the underdogs going into this. Like the U.S. is not a soccer country and we could have been. And by the way, people, we had curried some goodwill because we have people coming from all over the world. They were eating our shitty fast food and enjoying our shitty fast food, talking about how much, how, how, how much they like all of our sugar filled everything. And, and we curried some favor despite the fact, in spite of the fact that the government is so shitty. And I think that's what people think of when they think of the United States.

21:04Brian Tyler Cohen:But now we have people, the host cities are doing great. Everyone's enjoying themselves, a lot of goodwill. And then all of a sudden, to your exact point, we become the bad guy. We're no longer the underdog. Belgium is the is the is the scrappy underdog. And yes, it killed the vibe. Those Belgian players going back to going back to Brussels. Their only problem is they can't have sex twice at the same time. Yeah. Just having been so heroic and defeat for one buck. But the the like Donald Trump, like part of this, right, is I can see like Barack Obama like being asked at a press conference after the red card.

21:41Like, what do you think of that red card? And I could see him being like, I think it was he's president. I think it's bullshit. Yeah. Right. Like I can see a politician doing that. It's not bad to have a president who advocates for the country. It isn't. The problem is this is where it's like this is the problem of corruption. Right. Which is in a moment where there was something unfair, you can't trust that FIFA is not going to be beholden to Trump because they gave him the fucking peace prize and they rented office space in in Trump Tower. You know that they rented office space in Trump Tower.

22:08I actually didn't know that. FIFA rented office space in Trump Tower. And according to the Times, it basically sat idle and unused just to curry favor with Donald Trump. And so they're so corrupt that in a moment where you would want like kind of an advocate to say you can't trust any process that comes out of it. By the way, he pays for this, too. Right. One reason the Epstein story doesn't go away is because if you turn the Justice Department into your personal law firm, then when the Justice Department says there's nothing to see here, nobody believes it. Right.