Trump Desperate for Strait Allies

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22:18so the war isn't getting any more popular here in america and one way you can tell without even looking at a poll is by this well-timed and very courageous leak to politico sourced to two senior trump officials one of whom texted that in the lead-up to striking iran vice president jd vance made his opposition known is quote skeptical quote worried about success and quote just opposes the war. Vance was asked about this while standing next to Trump in the Oval on Monday. Here's what he said. Are you completely on board with the current war on Iran? I know what you're trying to do, Phil.

22:55Jon Favreau:You're trying to drive a wedge between members of the administration, between me and the president. What the president said consistently, going back to 2015, and I agreed with him, is that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon. So there's no hesitation given your past statements with the current operation well i think one big difference phil is that we have a smart president whereas in the past we've had dumb presidents and i trust president trump to get the job done so uh that should do it huh it's uh too cute by half i would say from jd vance too cute by half and there there's been you know a series of stories about people gunning for rubio the real kind of behind the scenes jockeying people who want to draft rubio and i don't know how plausible that really is.

23:40But what I take all of it to mean is just discomfort with Vance and the way Vance is just such a kind of like sleazy and like sleazy operator. Trump is a sleazy operator, but not in a way that you like him at the end of it, the way the others do. And so they look to Rubio as an alternative just because like Vance is just so full of shit.

24:00Jon Favreau:First of all, Phil knows what he did there. Phil knows what he did. You know, Phil was being pretty divisive. Like every time Vance gets this question, he has to whine and cry about the question itself and the questioner. He's like, I know what you're trying to do here, Pablo. It's like, first of all, that was not convincing. Like, you could watch Trump's face. I don't think it convinced Trump in that moment that Vance wasn't trying to put some distance between himself and the policy. The idea that Vance thinks he can run away from a policy this consequential when he's the vice president is insane to me.

24:34Jon Favreau:Maybe he thinks he can position himself in 2028 as being less hawkish than Marco Rubio. But like, I don't know how he does that. You're not getting any love from the isolationist wing of the party. Yeah, I don't know. Rubio has just as much stink on him, if not more, than J.D. Vance for this war, for any foreign policy adventure. Rubio is the national security advisor and the secretary of state. He's been one of the public faces, one of the few public faces. I think maybe J.D. could argue that Rubio is more hawkish than he is. Oh, I thought you were saying. Sorry, no, no. And you were saying that maybe they turned to Rubio.

25:05I think only, not because of any kind of policy difference, but because just they don't like J.D. Vance. He's just not a likable guy. He's just so full of shit. They want to, like, Rubio is smart enough to your point to know that there's no way to run away from being tied to this. He's embracing it fully because it's his job to embrace it. I think he's more prone to being, like he has a sort of neocon instincts more than Vance does. But he knows he's got to own this. So he's owning it 100%. The idea that, you know, J.D. Vance is going to be reluctantly the face of the war in Iran. Like it doesn't make him like to use an old joke.

25:34It doesn't make him a better person. It just makes him a worse prostitute, you know?

25:39Jon Favreau:So the broader like the the broader setup here is there's all these stories that Trump is polling everyone about who they like better. Is it Marco or is it J.D.? And it's like he did it to a bunch of donors down to Mar-a-Lago. And I think all the donors of Mar-a-Lago preferred Rubio. And maybe that's because they're in Florida. Maybe it's because the rich guys. Maybe it's because J.D. Vance a prick. Maybe because Rubio has been around longer. But yeah, I think I think they're both covered in the stink of this war. And this opens up a real like isolationist wing in the Republican primary next time that could be filled by someone like a Tucker Carlson or like, I don't know, Rand Paul suggesting he might run.

26:15The Tucker thing seems to me the most plausible result of this, right? Because you, so let's say the war ends next week or a couple weeks, right? And, you know, it is obviously destabilizing for quite a long time, but like there isn't any giant catastrophe with, you know, more, a ton of U.S. casualties and we're, you know, we're not there for like a year or whatever else. then J.D. Vance thinks okay well when it comes time for the primary it's not really going to get brought up that much anyway and maybe if I get asked about it I can say well I think everyone knows for sure back then I got some shit for it that I wasn't exactly for the war and then that's fine but in any scenario where this is still a problem where there are like real consequences for this war I think that like there is no way that J.D.

27:02Vance or Marco Rubio are ever going to be able to run away from this. And all the energy, even if some donors like Rubio and some of the party establishment decides to like Rubio, which you could see, whatever's left of the establishment, or Vance, all the energy in a Republican primary is going to be for these, the Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, anti-war, calling themselves America first, Marjorie Taylor Greene, whatever it is, that side of the party, that's going to have the energy in a primary. And like J.D. Vance is going to get killed. And so is Rubio. Yeah, I don't, even if, look, let's hope this is not something that is dominating the news, whatever, a year from now.

27:38I still think this has such a big, like, I don't know how these, like how J.D. Vance is gonna go around saying he's not for wars in the Middle East after this, because they did, they ran that. That was exactly what they said. And now we're in the middle of it. And I think it's a genuine conviction on the part of a lot of the, not just like the Megyn Kelly's of the world, but the podcast, like the kind of big influencers, like a lot of voices on the right. And they're just not gonna forget this. It's not gonna be able to walk back. And by the way, political opportunity is just so great. And J.D.

28:06Vance is not going to be able to walk it. Like Donald Trump is going to be around. You think J.D. Vance is going to be able to successfully run away from Donald Trump? I find that hard to believe. I do wonder there, like the way that Trump was, Trump was like seemed completely fine. There didn't seem perturbed. Like I wonder if Trump was like, well, I made the decision if you need it for politics to just. I wonder if Trump is OK with that is what I was wondering. Like there's a possibility.

28:27Jon Favreau:It's hard to tell. I can't tell either. I was trying to watch his face and it was not clear to me whether he was annoyed or not. I mean, as this thing goes, continues and gets worse, I'm sure he'll get increasingly angry at everyone around him. But if I ran against him, I would say, J.D., you can tell us now that you were opposed to this war. But when the chips were down, you were feckless and then you were silent. Yeah. Were you were you were you did you agree with it or were you just weak and ineffective inside of the administration? And by the way, like Rand Paul is one thing. If it is someone like Tucker Carlson, Tucker Carlson is going to rip him to pieces because he's not going to be able on a debate stage to get away with the kind of hemming and hawing that he's doing in this room.

28:59Definitely over and over again. Were you for it or not? Were you against it or not? Now, the smart politics for Trump would be to let J.D. Vance like have that other position, you know? I mean, honestly, even what even what Trump did there was better to J.D. Vance than what fucking Joe Biden did to Kamala Harris on Gaza. Right. And according to all the reporting privately, yes, privately, privately telling her no daylight certainly wasn't great. That's what I'm saying. Like she could have staked out a position where she voiced her honest criticisms about Gaza. And now we've seen from all the reporting that he didn't want her to do even that.

29:35Yeah. Which, just to be clear, was both, you know, Kamala had agency there, too. So Joe Biden didn't make Kamala Harris not have daylight there. No, that is true. It was interesting to me that Trump has like let this go and not had a big problem with it. I have the same thought, which is that it is. Are we going to be in a situation where Donald Trump gives more space to his VP to operate than Joe Biden did? I think it's possible. So the political blowback over the war is clearly getting to Trump on Sunday night. He falsely accused U.S. media outlets of working with Iran to amplify fake news about Iran and said that those outlets, quote, should be brought up on charges of treason.

30:10This was after FCC chair Brendan Carr, who was with Trump at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend, threatened to cancel television broadcasters licenses over their war coverage. Trump then spent his flight home to D.C. attacking reporters for asking even the most basic questions about Iran. Let's listen.

30:32You said that we're nowhere near sending ground troops to the Middle East.

30:38Jon Favreau:I've talked to people like you about that. I mean, why would I tell you I'm sending or not sending? I don't talk about military strategy. What we're talking about, I know it answers a question like it's pretty criminal because our media companies, who have no credibility whatsoever, putting out information that they know is false, that it's a very dangerous thing. I think they come in serious jeopardy. And your fact about fundraising emails, do you think Richard White has seen us if you have a two-hour device transfer? Do you think it's appropriate emails? I didn't say it's all for you. I think it's maybe the most corrupt news organizations.

31:24I think they're terrible.

31:26Jon Favreau:I don't want anyone from you. Do you have a problem until the six service members? That's what it will do. Testy. So, I mean, it's barely in the news today, but, you know, it does seem like the president threatening to shut down media outlets and charge them with treason. Kind of a big deal. Yeah, it seems bad. Yeah, we sort of, he does that. So it doesn't lead to, no, but Trump does that. He calls people he doesn't like treasonous and says he's going to bring them up on charges. I think the Carr stuff is more important because the threat itself is enough to try to intimidate people into kind of hesitating.

32:04Right. Like he's even if he never acts on it. Right. And people knowing that the FCC chair is like watching this closely. Like maybe just like worry about a headline a little bit more that seems to be antagonistic to the administration. I think it's really dangerous. Even Brendan Carr said that the government shouldn't censor speech. It doesn't like that. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the public interest. And the idea that he has now made himself the kind of assignment editor and national ombudsman of the media while kind of posting AI meme slop from the White House, that to me is really dangerous and more dangerous than Trump being in a bad mood because his war is going poorly and he doesn't like the coverage because brenny carr is doing thinking

32:47Jon Favreau:about this all day every day yeah i think it's worth remembering how bad the media coverage was in the run-up to the iraq war um and how the anti-war voices were censored because thinking back to then like the structural setup was for example nbc is owned by ge which is like one of the biggest contractors of the pentagon then you have reporters embedded with the u.s military and their networks booking like current and former military guests so you're constantly getting the pro-military perspective from that little silo. Fox News is branding anyone who opposes the war as anti-American, but even MSNBC was canceling their number one show with Phil Donahue because they were worried he was too anti-war.

33:27Jon Favreau:Then you have Judy Miller at the New York Times laundering intelligence for the Bush administration. And it's like a bad setup. It's very easy to be pro-war. It's very hard to be against these wars. And the natural instinct is to be patriotic. And there's the limitations in coverage that come from logistics and the nature of the Pentagon and how these things work. So you don't need to have Brendan Carr running around for the media to be tilted in a pro-war way already. But adding that on top of it, I think is a really big deal and a pretty dangerous development and a sign that he's really flailing and he knows things are going badly.

34:02Well, it's also worth pointing out how absurd the complaints are with the coverage here, which is like, first of all, what Trump was talking about is that there was like an image of, you know, Iranians celebrating the new supreme leader in the streets. And it turned out that it was AI and it wasn't that many people. Now, like that was a I don't even remember. Like there's not a lot of U.S. media outlets that were making that a huge thing. He famously cares about accurate crowd counts. I was going to say like that was that. So that's his complaint. The other the real complaints are that the media is what reporting, as Pete Hegseth said, the other week that it's front page news that Americans died in a war.

34:45That's the complaint now. We're talking about American deaths in a war and we're asking things like, hey, how long is the war going to ask? And are you going to send men and women into Iran on the ground and risk their lives? Just like basic questions like that. And he was angry about a headline about a Wall Street Journal story about a number of planes that were damaged by an Iranian bomb and how damaged they were. He's like sort of dancing on the head. of a pin. Hegseth on the end of last week, in sort of this petulant, childish way, was like, I can't wait for David Ellison to take over CNN.

35:19Like, they're all just petulant. Like, with Donald Trump, like, in that moment, what he really is saying is, you're also fucking negative. You're asking me about all, you're just being negative. You're supposed to have negative, you're not talking about all the good stuff we're doing. You're bringing up all the stuff that I, that is both terrible, but also wounds my ego, the fact that Americans have died. That's an insult to me, because it makes me look bad, because I'm the one who caused those Americans to die, which he did, right? By launching this war, he invited what were going to be a response and now Americans are dead because of it.

35:49He doesn't like to be confronted with that. That's what this is really about. Yeah. I think it's also worth pointing out that like Brandon Carr's threat is completely empty. I mean, he can try, but like from a legal standpoint, first of all, he only has oversight over broadcast licenses for local television networks. And, you know, Brian Stelter and some others looked into this. Like you, you, you start to try to threaten to take away a local broadcaster's broadcasting license because of what, um, in, you know, just made up inaccurate coverage, which he can't cite. It's just not going to happen now.

36:23He can still threaten them. And as we saw with the Kimmel thing, like you threaten the local broadcasters and then maybe you get the parent companies like the ABCs and NBCs to worry a little bit. But like, it's the whole thing is just like crazy fucking bluster, but it's meant to intimidate, you know? And I think that's the Trump treason thing is, too, because, yeah, Trump's not going to bring them up on charges of treason. But the DOJ has been charging people left and right or trying to charge people left and right. And he also has sued a bunch of people personally. Yeah. But I think it's more than bluster.

36:51Like Trump is threatening people. He's threatening people with DOJ prosecution. But then they kind of, you know, we just saw that the prosecution against the Fed chair got thrown out by a judge. Like they have running into the sort of the brute incompetence of his DOJ. Like Brendan Carr can tie things up. He can get all the affiliates to be worried, get the affiliates starting to be worried that the parent company is going to cause a problem. Like this can be like we saw that with Kimmel, but like we can he has a lot of just the threat, I think, is really dangerous. And yes, obviously, you don't need to be like a constitutional scholar to know that the FCC can't decide what the news is on behalf of these organizations.

37:31But that doesn't mean he can't do a lot of damage and get the network lawyers to become a little bit less permissive. And then all of a sudden they have had an impact on what we're seeing without us ever even knowing it. My only argument is that it's not it's not that it's it's just bluster. It's that Brendan Carr's threats and Donald Trump's threats are the same level of dangerous because I think that legally Brendan Carr doesn't have as much power as he thinks he is. But the threat from Carr and the threat from Trump, the goal is intimidation. And, you know, it probably can work. So Trump isn't just targeting mainstream outlets over their Iran coverage.

38:04He's pissed at Trump friendly pundits, too. One of his deranged Sunday night posts was a lengthy defense of right wing warmonger Mark Levin against the right wing pundits who criticized him over Iran like Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens. Trump called Levin's critics, quote, jealous and angry human beings who, quote, are not MAGA and, quote, will quickly fall by the wayside. The feud heated up over the weekend when Kelly hit back at Levin, calling her evil and diabolical. And so Kelly tweeted back at Levin, quote, I'm sorry you have a micropenis, but don't drag the rest of us into your drama.

38:43very importantly Marjorie Taylor Greene jumped in to say that quote MAGA has been destroyed by micropenis Mark Levin. Is she right? So where did micropenis come in? Like what, it's just from -

39:00Jon Favreau:A loaded question, yeah. Right, well, we know where it ends. We just don't know where it begins. I feel like the whole feud's been inching towards that for a while now. Yeah. Right, right. Obviously we're not gonna dive too deep into it, but Megan Kelly just as Mark Levin as a micropenis. Not a grower or a shower. This is just the tip of a much smaller iceberg. Right, right. No, I know. And it's just creating a lot of surprising amount of motion in the ocean. Very little friction. She tried to explain it in a lengthy video. You watched that whole video. I did too. I did as well. I started and I got out.

39:37Jon Favreau:Oh, it's great. Did you want to? Well, the short version of the TLDR is Megyn Kelly was mean to Mark Levin. Well, there is no long version. So Levin called Daddy Trump to send a tweet defending him against the mean woman who is not nice to him, who is Megyn Kelly. I think this fight dates back to the last buildup to the Iran war, if we want to get into that. I mean, like, Levin is very hawkish. He's in favor of bombing Iran. He's very in favor of Israel and Netanyahu in particular. Mark Levin, do you guys know that Mark Levin went and sat in the audience at Netanyahu's trial in Israel? Like that's how much of a buddy is.

40:11Jon Favreau:And then Tucker Carlson at the time, this is last June or the run up to the June war, was very against the war. Also not a big fan of Israel. Also not a fan of Netanyahu. He converged into anti-Semitism. And then so the two started going to war over this policy. And then Charlie Kirk gets dragged in. Megyn Kelly gets dragged in. You sprinkle in like a tablespoon of Candace Owens. You got a dash of Ben Shapiro, you know, like a little bit of Nick Fuentes. And now this is just a full on MAGA media war. And there's some polling that shows that MAGA is for whatever Trump is for. And I think that is generally true.

40:45Jon Favreau:But Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, they are attuned to their audiences and they know what is getting downloads and attention and they watch the data. So I don't think they go down this path that they didn't feel like there was an audience for it. And there's also polling that shows that U.S. views towards Israel have changed dramatically since 2023. Dramatically. Including among Republicans, nine-point shift in favorability among Republicans. I think there's things happening under the surface. So Trump might be MAGA, and that might be the case for now. But I think this is a fight for the future of MAGA.

41:15Jon Favreau:And there are major shifts happening under the surface. Some of it is foreign policy, like we talked about with J.D. Vance. Some of it is support for Israel. But we get to enjoy the fruits of it in the form of a micropenis. Yeah, under the surface. and, you know, under Mark Levin's pants. It's really, it's actually like really been popping off. But yeah. To your question, Lovett, though, basically she says, so he like tweeted about her a hundred times and said all these vile shit about her. And she said like, you know, I sent a few brushback tweets as she has want to do. And then she said, you know, and then I just decided to just reveal that he has a micropenis.

41:51Not that she's like, not that I've seen it myself, but clearly we've all been exposed to it because someone who acts that hawkish and tries to overcompensate clearly has a micropenis. Like that's just something that you know. Yeah, she said,

42:03Jon Favreau:thankfully I've never had to look at it firsthand, but you can just tell. Then she goes, when they go low, we go micropenis. And then she said, so obviously Trump's truth social post was drafted by Levin and Levin's post thanking the president is equally long. It was the only thing that is. Wow, that's good. It was just a runner from McKinley. When they go low, we go small. That's good. That would have been, yeah. And I know, and like Ben Shapiro has been basically challenging Megyn Kelly and others to like denounce Candace Owens, which I don't think she has done. Yeah. Or at least not to his satisfaction.

42:33And so like, there is like this, it's a real like. Yeah. And it is, I always say like, nothing is more upsetting to a right wing figure than to be treated like a Democrat. It's like the most horrible, like they can't understand what's like, what, why are you talking this way about me? I'm not one of those people. You're not supposed to talk this way. And like, it's a shocking experience. It's amazing. Speaking of Tucker, did you guys see that he said he thinks that the administration might charge him with under a FARA violation acting as an agent of a foreign power for talking to people in Iran before the war, which he claims they knew he was doing because the CIA read his texts?

43:10Jon Favreau:Yeah. So I didn't watch the whole episode Tucker did on this. He did like a five minute clip that I did watch. It is certainly possible, if not quite likely, that if Tucker was emailing with some Iranian officials, that gets picked up by the NSA or somebody and maybe that can get reviewed. I find it very unlikely that the government would then tell him that or that he would have committed a crime in the process. I don't get how that's a FARA violation or any kind of violation. And there's been some other anonymous sources batting it down, saying, no, no, no one's going to charge Tucker, which is obviously, you know, I don't want to see Tucker Carlson charged with a crime for simply talking to people and doing journalism.

43:47I don't want that to happen. Candace Owens said that if it happens, we ride it, Don. But where? So I guess, are we joining that as well?

43:55Jon Favreau:Yeah. First Amendment, protect Tracy Town. Yeah, I think the Ben Shapiro feud with Megyn Kelly is that Ben wants Megyn to denounce Candace for saying that Erica Kirk got Charlie Kirk killed. Right. And she won't. Yeah, the Candace stuff on that is getting real bleak over there. She's a disturbed individual.

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46:00Believe it or not, since it involves Trump, there's also a corruption angle to the Iran story. Last week, and we heard some of this in the clip, a PAC affiliated with Trump called Never Surrender Inc. sent out a fundraising email featuring a photo of the president in front of a flag-draped coffin at the dignified transfer of six soldiers who were killed during the war's first week. The email presented readers with the opportunity to sign up for a, quote, quote, national security briefing membership, which for the price of a donation would send them the president's personal private, quote, national security briefings and unfiltered updates on the threats facing America.

46:37That news came after The New York Times reported that Jared Kushner, the president's second choice son-in-law and one of the United States lead negotiators in the Middle East, has been asking governments in the region to fund his private investment firm. Isn't that nice? Kushner's firm reportedly recently met with Saudi's Sovereign Wealth Fund, which already contributed$2 billion to the fund at the beginning of the Trump administration, and is planning to seek funding from the Sovereign Wealth Funds of the UAE and Qatar. Where do you guys all want to start? Fundraising for your PAC off of the death of American soldiers, or fundraising for your investment fund off of your alleged role as the diplomat tasked with ending two wars?

47:16What's worse? What do you think? really one of the most disgusting images i think i've ever seen shocking actually shocking he's there in that white hat there's a literal coffin in the image you're using the coffin of a dead service member to raise money uh unconscionable in any other era would be a massive ongoing scandal if the president were asked about it he would immediately say it was a terrible mistake that the person who was responsible would be fired. It would still be a big scandal. There would be apologies. There'd be across the board condemnation from Democrats and Republicans, but this is just a blip because it's Donald Trump.

47:59Jon Favreau:Yeah, I had the same reaction. I mean, it was genuinely shocking how tasteless it was, but also how politically stupid it was. I mean, I can't fire that person. That's criminally stupid. And by the way, as this is happening, there's there are gofundmes going around for the families of these dead service members um that i don't think donald trump is supporting so it's um yeah shocking anyone to tf on jared uh i'm gonna take the i'm gonna take the over on it all right because jared kushner and whitkoff and maybe the maybe the the other bozos real sons uh potentially making money on this is the only way i can see to to war in Iran ending with the most recent living Ayatollah in the Oval Office with Trump talking about how beautiful the Strait of Hormuz is and like what a beautiful property it's gonna be.

48:48And actually, I didn't know until Jared showed me how beautiful it is. It's a beautiful place. All I think about is, you know, remember we were talking about the mines, all was all about the mines. The mines is gonna be beautiful. It's gonna be a fantastic place. And we're so grateful to the new Ayatollah for recognizing Israel. It's gonna be a beautiful property. New head of the Palestinian Authority will be there too. to talk about all the new high rises in Gaza. Well, that's Wittoff, so that makes sense. So the younger. So yeah, that to me, I'm going to take the over on that one. I think the corruption is good.

49:15Jon Favreau:Yeah, so Jared left the administration, started this investment fund, and he raised a bunch of money from the Saudis, billions from the Saudis, a bunch of money from the Qataris and the Emiratis. And that to me felt like kickbacks for services already rendered. And there was all this reporting at the time that the professionals at these sovereign wealth funds did not want to invest with Jared, but they were overruled by like MBS and other political actors. Jared then went into the wilderness for a while. Now he's back. He's doing negotiations with the Russians, with Ukraine, with he's doing stuff in Gaza.

49:47Jon Favreau:Now he's part of the Iran talks. And he said that he would not be making any money off the board of peace. He would not be raising money from the Gulf countries that he's working with. Of course, that was a lie. To avoid conflicts, He said that too. Use the words. And now he's trying to get more money for, I guess, for future favors. Also, at the same time, I mean, there's all this reporting that the Russians are providing intelligence to the Iranians to help them kill U.S. service members. I saw that the guy who runs the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund was back down in Miami for meetings with Jared and Wyckoff, presumably at one of their homes.

50:22Also, we're removing sanctions on the oil, which is going to give them more money. were ostensibly funding now both sides of this conflict, not only, and also strengthening Russia

50:31Jon Favreau:and Ukraine at the same time. Yep, and the Emiratis bought 50 % or 49 % of the crypto company that the Trump family started. So the corruption and the rot is just so deep that I almost wasn't surprised by Jared raising this money, but it's just, it's so frustrating because this man doesn't have a government job. He has no official role. There's no oversight. There's no nothing. But he's like out there briefing reporters as a senior administration official. Yep, yep. Even though he's supposed to not be having an actual role in the government, except his role is apparently to cosplay making peace and and then raising a bunch of money for his fund.

51:05Good for Jared. Yeah. Like over the weekend, I just was hearing from from different people. And I have friends with family in Iran and they were talking about how they just are waiting for regular updates when the member of their family can get Wi-Fi just to say that that he's safe. Right. Like that's what that's what they're living in between. Thankfully, some members of the family got out before, but now they just just they're always really nervous. They hope everything's OK. And they just wait for when the Internet's working to get a regular update. And then at the same time, I was hearing from family friends about an elderly relative in Israel who is infirmed.

51:43And so it is difficult for her to get in and out of shelters when there are bomb sirens that are going off. And that's happening all the time. And it's just really difficult. It's hard on the health. And you just like the real world consequences of this are just nowhere for these people. Like there's the actual day to day, the sheer scale of what they've unleashed, right? The amount of people impacted by this, the number of people who are getting killed and whose lives have been upended, like the chaos they've unleashed. It just feels so abstract to them even now, two weeks into it for Kushner, obviously for Wyckoff, but for Trump, which is why when he's asked about the dead service members or anything like that.

52:19He's like almost angry to be confronted by the actual reality of what he's done because he wants to only live in the fun story version that he's telling himself. But as Orwell had said, as famously quoted by Christy fucking Noem, like war is the one thing that intercedes on an authoritarian, right? The reality of a war, you can't pretend it's not happening. And that's what's happening.

52:41Jon Favreau:And the true, the Pentagon has been hiding the true casualty count. We don't really know, but I saw today the Washington Post, I think reported that 200 service members have been wounded as well. So there's a lot of people getting hurt. And also like add to your list of real human beings impacted by this war, the 800 ,000 people who have been evacuated from their homes in Lebanon because the Israelis are basically telling everyone who lives within like 25 miles of the border that they have to leave. Do you see the Israelis announced today too that they're not allowed back? I think what's happening here, I think this is gonna go, I think what's happening in Lebanon is gonna go on a lot longer than what's happening in Iran and that it's going to end with Israel trying to permanently occupy a lot of Lebanese territory.

53:22Sounds like they want to if they're not going to let fucking 800 ,000 people return to their homes.

53:25Jon Favreau:I mean, they're just learned it in Gaza. And so now they're... Evacuating like major swaths of Beirut, which is a huge city. Just using the opportunity of the conflict to pursue their larger purposes. In the region, which Trump is totally fine with and Huckabee is totally fine with, there's no breaks. Yeah. Hezbollah, obviously, terrible organization, kills indiscriminately, kills Israelis, kills Druze, kills Christians in Lebanon as well. But yeah, I mean, the idea that it's strategically smart to undertake this massive operation as you're in the midst of a war with Iran, it feels like a bad idea.

53:59Jon Favreau:And it's just more of a cynical way to use everyone being distracted to do things you always wanted to do. So speaking of corruption, the Times also published a piece over the weekend about the stock trading habits of Senator Mark Wayne Mullen, Trump's pick to replace Christine Ohm at DHS. Mullen reportedly bought shares in Chevron, The only U.S. oil supplier with an active operation in Venezuela, five days before the United States attacked the country and later vowed to take over oil operations. According to the Times, Mullen has become quite the trader, reporting at least 130 trades last year and outperforming the market by 8%.

54:34I'm sure it's just a coincidence. After selling his company, this is from the Times story too, after selling his company in 2021, Mullen reported fewer than 30 stock trades in 2022. In 2023, his first year as a senator, that jumped to 100. So suddenly, he just is trading a lot of stock these days. And, you know, his assets originally when he got to the Senate were between$2.8 and$9 million when he first got to the House. Now it's between$29 million and$97 million. Jesus. Guess he did some good trading, huh?

55:06Jon Favreau:Yeah, it's good work, dude. What do you guys think about Mark Wayne Mullins? He's got a confirmation hearing this Thursday. It is very tempting, I imagine, for Democrats to focus on this story in the hearing. But what do you guys think? Divide and conquer. I mean, this should be a part of it. Someone should dig in on this because Donald Trump in the State of the Union, one of his biggest applause lines was banning stock trading. And he wants to make it all about Pelosi and her preventing that from happening. And frankly, Pelosi has not been good on this issue. And it really sucks because it makes Democrats look bad.

55:35Jon Favreau:But members of Congress should not be allowed to buy and sell individual stocks. It is an absolute no-brainer that they should have their assets in a blind trust or something. They should not be buying and selling crypto. They shouldn't be selling futures or using Polymarket or Calci to bet on events. I mean, like, I will never believe it's a coincidence that this guy bought a bunch of Chevron stock five days before we toppled the dictator in Venezuela and installed a much more oil-friendly dictator in Venezuela. It was a third party. It was a third party. Yeah, sure. Well, if you read that statement, there's definitely like, even if you take the statement as being accurate, which I don't know that necessarily you can, there's plenty of room inside of that statement for him to be doing whatever he wants.

56:14Yeah, they should not be trading individual stocks. None of us should be trading individual stocks because we're not stock traders. And the only reason it would make sense for members of Congress to be trading stock is because they have insider information. Even an example they were proud of in the story, there was a member of Congress who was on a board and was bragging about the company to everybody on the committee. So that's one of the reasons people were buying stock in that. What are we doing here? Chris Collins. And he went to jail. And well, he went to jail, was pardoned by Trump. Well, not for that specific thing.

56:42I know. He goes to jail for insider trading, for not that, not the one he was most proud of. And Trump pardoned him. And Trump pardoned him because he doesn't believe in insider trading. He thinks that's just good trading. And we also have all, by the way, God only knows what these people are doing on the betting markets, which we don't have any insight into, where they're trading with insider information. Because the only way it makes sense is because these trades on like Calci and Polly market are because of insider information. So of course it should be banned. And by the way, the disclosure rules should be better.

57:09Why on earth do we have ridiculous ranges where we find out how much money they have between nine and 90 million? That is a ridiculous space set up by members of Congress to make it kind of confusing how much money they have and how much money they've made. We should have more disclosure for them more frequently. There's a whole bunch of reforms that would make this less of an issue.

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58:15Jon Favreau:You know, I was over at the Fabros house the other day, and Charlie had just solved Fermat's Last Theorem. Oh, he did. And it turns out the previous proof was wrong, so he really actually is the first one ever to solve it. Oh, that's great. I'm glad they finally cleared that up. What is, what is, I can't even remember what Fermat's Last Theorem. What is this about? A to the N plus B to the N. Oh, oh, yes, because obviously we all know A squared plus B squared equals C squared, but it turns out there are no integers for which anything above two can be solved. But the question is, is that true? It wasn't an elegant proof until Charlie started taking Haya vitamins, which he loves.

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59:38So one kind of fun, kind of pathetic story before we go. You may have noticed the recent trend of Trump just giving random interviews to any reporter who calls him. It turns out there's a reason. Everyone now has access to the president's personal cell phone number. The Atlantic reported over the weekend, and then Semaphore followed up as well, that Trump's number has become the biggest open secret in Washington, with journalists openly trading it among themselves. So many now have access to it and have been using it to regularly call the president that White House advisors have stopped keeping track of who's calling.

1:00:11And according to one White House official, as many as, quote, 10 reporters will call in a matter of two hours. Trump, unsurprisingly, loves the attention. He apparently has gotten into the habit of keeping his phone screen face up during meetings to just watch the notifications roll in. Let them roll in. Loves it. Trump aides have said that at the moment they have no intention of changing the number and have no plan to stop more people from getting a hold of it. You guys have it yet? Yeah, yes. Should we give him a call? I got it. You got it? Yeah, I got it from a reporter. Let's call him. I'll call him now.

1:00:42Do we have a plan? What are we going to say?

1:00:44Jon Favreau:I was just going to call and say Tom Vitor from Pod Save America calling on a recorded line. How are you? Great. Recorded line. Oh, that's important. West Palm Beach number.

1:00:59Jon Favreau:It'd be so awkward when he calls me back after we're not recording. You think he calls back? I don't think he... No, he's just a receiver of calls. This could be the last call.

1:01:13Jon Favreau:Didn't we prank Rudy Giuliani once? Sean Hannity. Boy, did he get the last laugh. Sorry, guys. Didn't deliver on that one. You think he's checking his voicemails? Well, I'm sure what happened with me today was I sent two texts to people who I thought might have the number and one of them gave them me the number. And, right? I mean, there's been a bunch of news reports about how easy it is to get it. So maybe today was the last day. And now he's finally going to have to change his number. Like whenever his emails were in that Sony hack. Yes, yes. Because it sounds like there was one, someone wrote a piece on, the Atlantic piece on this made it sound like, I think one reporter kind of figured this out early.

1:01:51Jon Favreau:It was like Garrett Hawke or somebody and got Trump's reaction to something about Biden really, or dropping out by dropping out really early on and had a scoop and then every other reporter was like oh this dude is just taking calls from presno also i think maybe next time love it or i should try because we have 202 numbers and so he probably sees 202 and says oh it's dc and you you don't have a 202 no i'll let it rip well we'll try again we'll try again we'll try once an episode okay great i like that i like that uh uh just to see remember when biden would do an interview every six months tell us tell us what we should ask everyone send in send in your ideas when to ask the president in case we in case we get him on the horn get him on the blower you know what gives you hope i have to there's a whole story about so the story in three books yeah right how do i how do i convince my relative who loves trump to not vote for him anymore where's the climate pod you fucks so apparently like ceos and crypto bros are offering money for the number this is in the story um sure yeah like there's a couple other funny parts so before we go one of them says the administrator so like everyone's calling you know they're like not just the big outlets but like the smaller outlets us now you know but then it says the administration officials say sub stack authors have started to call forcing white house staff to look up names they don't recognize.

1:03:14That's so funny. Oh no, the sub stick up. Well, we didn't talk about this, that today in twice, it is two different press events today. He made reference to a former president who he likes, who said he was right to go in to Iran. And then he's asked. And said, wish I had done that. I said, wish I had done that. And then he's asked by Ducey later that day, who are you referring to? Was it George W. Bush? No. Was it Bill Clinton? I'm not saying. But you know, it's from these endless from him being on the fucking phone all the time yeah well i assume that donald trump

1:03:46Jon Favreau:uh probably called bill clinton to commiserate about being unfairly treated over jeffrey epstein 100 i feel like that's 99 i mean it's not barack obama yeah i i have a hard time believing because he also said he's like someone i actually like but it wouldn't be good for their career well he's like they don't they don't have much of a career anywhere at this point well i mean none it's for it's for former that's what i'm saying so we think it's gotta be it's or or as he often does he's just lying he could be making it up but i mean clinton biden obama i do not think obama is talking to trump on the phone saying he wished he had bombed iran it's not don't think it's obama so it's i think it's clinton biden or bush doesn't make sense for it to be bush the way he's talking about it probably not biden so you're really like the clinton people are saying it wasn't him i mean which i may not know they may not know i don't know if they're jimmy carter well that's a that's huge news was there was there a window where jimmy c might have said i wish i'd gone into him not before this current operation when did jimmy carter die was it was it before after midnight hammer it was before midnight do you think peace advocate and nobel peace prize winner jimmy carter in his hundredth year got on the phone with donald trump and said god damn it i wish i fucking bombed iran i mean it did i mean it did fuck up his administration it did fuck his presidency up hey listen let's put him on the list yeah it's tough to be i bet he had a conversation with bill clinton where he mentions a run and in in trump's mind clinton said that and in clinton's if you ask clinton about the conversation clinton didn't say that well that's what i would two guys that are famously great at remembering what they said that's what i'm that's what i'm getting at that's what i'm getting at i think we have just a serious thing about how accessible donald trump is because this goes to what we're talking about earlier which is like oh he's calling people treasonous like he is incredibly accessible and i do not think a democrat needs to be as accessible as this but like man there is value to having donald trump like in their everyday communicating non-stop and whoever we use is going to be somebody that that represent us to learn like man how much uh space he has to move because he's out there time after time after time just sort of new layer of pain you know like like just new layer of paint new layer of pain and yeah sure the windows don't open anymore because they're sealed shut from fucking paint you can't access the outlets because there's so much paint.

1:05:55But man. Do we think it is? Do we think it is? It's certainly better for freedom of the press, for sure. It's probably better for the public to have the president be more accessible. I think that the next Democratic president should obviously be much more accessible than Joe Biden was. Do we think it has been good for Trump to be this accessible in this in this administration with his sub 40, his 40 percent approval rating?

1:06:18Jon Favreau:I think that he definitely gets a lot of flexibility and leeway for doing so many reps. I think he's figured out how to make scandals go away a little bit faster. Not all of them. Epstein didn't go away. He was alive for months and months. It's still alive. I think in this instance of Iran, he's taken like 30 phone calls from reporters and given 30 different messages. So that part has not helped him. Yeah. I also think that's in C at times. Part of his ability to control the narrative is not his choice to be accessible, but his choice to kick out most reporters and not sit down for challenging questions or interviews from many people.

1:06:55Yes and no. We just watched him get the four hardest questions he could have gotten in any interview. His approval rating is 40%. He's the worst president in American history. I think it does inure him to what the coverage would look like if the space were filled by a voice other than his. And I think in ways that are subtle, him being so accessible kind of takes the teeth out of the Democratic argument that he's like a raging authoritarian looking to squash the free press and destroy American democracy. Like being around him all the time, seeing him all the time, I think kind of blunts that a little bit, both for reporters and for Americans.

1:07:33I do. I think we don't know what it would look like for him to not be doing this much. But I don't think the fact that his approval rating is so low is because this doesn't work. Yeah. Yeah, I think that I think there's a difference between accessibility and like I think that because of Donald Trump, the expectation now among both journalists and probably a lot of Americans is that their president will be constantly communicating about everything that happens all the time. And so I think that if you do not do that as a president, you will get yourself into trouble. Like I think his constant style of communication is probably helpful.

1:08:06I think like, you know, being more accessible to reporters here and there is like, I think for him, it might be OK because he's lying about everything anyway and he's screaming at them all anyway. But like I feel like the next Democratic president doing a million, 30 interviews a day by phone is not going to redound to their benefit. No, I would say, well, we don't we just don't have a counterfactual because it was, you know, Joe Biden was Joe Biden. And before that was Barack Obama, who had more of a traditional kind of relationship with the press. I think the answer is somewhere between, it's not between Obama and Biden, it's between Trump and Obama as to how much access you'll want.

1:08:40And because I think the Obama style and someone who is as disciplined as Barack Obama, being more accessible and being a little bit looser is probably the answer.

1:08:48Jon Favreau:Yeah, look, I think him freewheeling it is probably a net benefit. That said, just like in the Iran context again, like he is a big shit right now because despite all this access, he did not prepare the country for what he was gonna do, right? He didn't use the State of the Union to lay out a plan. He hasn't really delivered a speech about what we're going to do in Iran. So I think it has harmed him in that he has come away as being unserious when he's doing like an event with the MLS soccer team about casualties in Iran and then telling like Lionel Messi that he looks hot. That literally happened.

1:09:22Jon Favreau:I suppose the guy next to Lionel Messi told him he was hot. I forget his name. Yeah. And I've noticed that the quality of the questions he gets is just lower because he doesn't face all the time. It was garbage. There's like a couple good real reporters and then you'll have like Lindell TV or whatever. Yeah, like the way that Sean McCreish asked that question, I think last week about the school in Iran. Yeah. And just like the way that he, not just the fact of the question, but the way that he phrased the question, you never hear that. Well, I would just say, I thought it was a great question.

1:09:53That is the hardest question I've ever seen a president asked. Like, I don't think you've ever seen a question phrased exactly like that because we've never had a president that - Yeah, we've never. Well, that's the point. Because that is the right way to ask a question of someone so despicable as Donald Trump. But it's hard to find that balance. But to your point, what was that, Friday, Thursday? So we're just saying that, oh, it's been a weekend since he was in a full press conference where half the questions were real and serious and tough questions, and half of them were full of shit, dumb questions.

1:10:24If you just took the serious questions he's getting, he is taking probably far more serious questions. forgot Joe Biden and went to Barack Obama took when Barack Obama was what we considered a very accessible president. I don't think that's true. Oh, serious questions. Like I can remember from Trump, like you can remember the interviews where Trump sitting down with Tapper, Trump sitting down with Savannah Guthrie, Trump sitting down with 60 Minutes. Like those are tough, real, difficult interviews. He like Peter Doocy is maybe one of the better ones when he's running Caitlin and Caitlin Collins when she's allowed in there.

1:10:55But he does it with a light tush. Right. Peter Caitlin's probably the best one in the press corps.

1:11:00Jon Favreau:There are some real reporters sprinkled in with some very stupid, ridiculous people. I think Sean McCreish's question was great and good on him for asking it. I think that used to be the norm. Yes. I remember my uncle was a political reporter. And I think it was George H.W. Bush said that the United States should be okay with assassinating foreign leaders. And he and his buddy ran around to every event and asked him who he would kill first and why. And just ruined his whole rollout event. and like that should be where we're at. Yeah, well, yes. Those were, when Barack Obama or George W. Bush or someone did a press conference, remember it would be like you would set up the East Room or you'd set up a space.

1:11:38It was outside of the normal room. It was like you made a moment of it because it was like kind of less frequent. And then the questions were all very serious, hitting on all the major news topics. Like Trump breaks that up. And like, I don't, you'd have to, you know, do the actual math on the give and takes. But the fact that he is just as, he is as accessible to the mainstream media as any president we've ever had. It's the truth. All right. Well, we'll, including to us, hopefully. Yeah.

1:12:02Jon Favreau:Call me back, sir. Okay. Should I text him? Oh yeah. Text him. Just a pic of me. I can text him. All right, guys, that's our show for today. Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to cricket.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. Also, please consider leaving us a review. That helps boost this episode and everything we do here at Crooked. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our producer is Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farah Safari.

1:12:36Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Reid Churlin is our executive editor. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer, with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Matt DeGroat is our head of production. Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant. thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Ben Hefcoat, Mia Kelman, Carol Pellaviv, David Tolles, and Ryan Young. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.