In short
Podcast Episode Notes: The News Agents - USA
Episode Title
Is this the biggest political sex scandal since Lewinsky?
Hosts
Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel
Episode Description
The episode delves into the affair between journalist Olivia Nuzzi and Health Secretary RFK Junior, exploring its implications for MAGA culture, journalistic ethics, and the dynamics of clickbait versus investigative journalism. It also discusses the fallout from a leaked recording involving Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War, and the consequences faced by those who oppose Trump's policies.
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Key Themes and Discussions
- Olivia Nuzzi's Controversial Affair
- Background: Olivia Nuzzi, a political journalist, gained notoriety for her affair with Robert Kennedy Jr., which sparked significant media attention reminiscent of the Lewinsky scandal.
- Career Trajectory: Nuzzi became the Washington correspondent for New York Magazine at 24, known for her sharp insights into the Trump administration.
- Ethical Concerns: The hosts discuss the ethical implications of a journalist engaging romantically with a political figure she covers. Critics argue that she compromised journalistic integrity and blurred lines between reporting and personal involvement.
- The Nature of the Affair
- Digital Affair: Nuzzi described the relationship as “digital,” leading to public curiosity about the term and its implications. Discussions revolve around whether this implies a lack of physical intimacy or a modern interpretation of relationships in the digital age.
- Cultural Impact
- Public Fascination: The hosts explore why the story captivates the American public, linking it to broader themes of ambition, power dynamics within journalism, and the role of female journalists in high-stakes political environments.
- MAGA Culture: The episode touches on how Nuzzi's situation reflects the current political landscape and the normalization of scandalous behavior in politics.
- The Case of Pete Hegseth
- Leaked Recording: Discussion of Hegseth's controversial statements regarding military actions and accusations of war crimes, particularly pertaining to the killing of survivors following military operations.
- Accountability and Oversight: Concerns about the lack of accountability in military operations and how narratives in MAGA politics often deflect responsibility.
- The State of American Journalism
- Changing Standards: The hosts reflect on the current state of journalism in America, particularly regarding the First Amendment and the pressures faced by journalists in the era of Trump.
- Celebrity and Media: There is a discussion about the shift towards personality-driven journalism and how sensational stories overshadow traditional reporting standards.
- Ethical Dilemmas and Political Implications
- Consequences for Journalists: The episode questions whether Nuzzi's notoriety will affect her career and examines the broader implications for journalists who become part of the story.
- War Crimes and Military Ethics: The conversation shifts to the implications of Hegseth’s actions and the potential for war crimes, emphasizing the importance of lawful orders in military conduct.
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Key Takeaways
- Compromised Integrity: The affair and its coverage highlight potential conflicts of interest in journalism, challenging traditional ethical boundaries.
- Cultural Reflection: Public fascination with personal scandals reflects deeper societal values and the shifting landscape of political discourse.
- Accountability in Politics: Ongoing discussions about Hegseth's comments underscore the pressing need for accountability and oversight in military operations.
- Evolving Journalism: The episode serves as a critique of the current media environment, emphasizing the need for robust investigative journalism amidst sensationalism.
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Quotes > "Olivia Nuzzi has somehow become a symbol of who rises to the top in journalism in America in 2025." > — Emily Maitlis
> "There is a kind of sexual obsession that has blown up someone's career." > — Jon Sopel
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Conclusion The episode provides a layered analysis of contemporary political scandals, the ethical landscape of journalism, and the cultural dynamics at play in the current political climate. The hosts navigate through the complexities with insight and humor, prompting listeners to reflect on the ramifications of these stories beyond mere gossip.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:01RFK Junior:This is a Global Player original podcast.
0:20The name of that singer is Olivia Nuzzi and she recorded that song when she was just 16.
0:27Olivia Nuzzi:We all do crazy things when we're just 16. But she is now hitting the headlines big time. There is a frenzy of gossip surrounding her lurid affairs, her political sexual affairs, and the memoir she's just released called American Canto.
0:46RFK Junior:And so singing that song, age 16, that you're never going to forget my name, there is something prophetic about it. And it's roiling America in a way, not seen since the scandal involving Bill Clinton and one Monica Lewinsky. Why is this causing so much excitement and turmoil? Welcome to the News Agents USA. The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel.
1:18Olivia Nuzzi:It's John. It's Emily. And the story of Olivia Nuzzi, the author of American Canto, begins either, I guess, when she first recorded that song Jailbait, when she was 16, some 16 years ago, or else it begins just over a year ago when news of the affair she was having with, hold your breath, Robert Kennedy Jr. first broke. She's a political journalist. She is very able and very ambitious and she was named Washington correspondent at the New York Magazine when she was just 24 years old. In other words, she shot to fame on the back of what she was doing and who she was pretty early in her life and she published a series of stories that really helped to define Trump's administration the first time round.
2:10Olivia Nuzzi:And she portrayed it as this sort of, you know, dysfunctional, cataclysmic, quite funny, turbulent time and she wrote a piece called I Examined Donald Trump's Ear and His Soul at Mar-a-Lago. And she'd just written that piece when news broke. And I remember this. I was told it by a New Yorker journalist, actually, in September of last year, that she'd had what was being called a personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This is before the election. Don't forget. This is long before he's become health secretary. but it was complicated because she'd already written about Kennedy's own presidential campaign the previous year.
2:52Olivia Nuzzi:Don't forget that he was rivaling Joe Biden and Donald Trump at one point for the presidency. And she'd also written quite a sort of strong piece about misgivings surrounding Joe Biden's fitness to remain in office. And so there were a lot of those who felt once this news broke of her entanglement, that somehow she was compromised. She'd broken every ethical rule for journalists, which is don't sleep with your sources, don't get entangled and don't write pieces which promote the bedfellows, the pillow talk that you're having and go against their opponents.
3:27RFK Junior:Let me talk about another great American writer. If Olivia Nuzzi can be considered as a great American writer, and that's Gore Vidal. And Gore Vidal used to say that every time I heard about the success of a colleague, another part of me died. So Olivia Nuzi, having risen so quickly, so young, so fast, has made a lot of enemies along the way. And people have always sort of questioned kind of the ambition, whether it was matched to the talent, whether it was matched to kind of, you know, the journalistic code and ethics and the sacredness of the First Amendment. All of that has been called into play.
4:03RFK Junior:So she's got plenty of people who want to pull her down. She was also engaged at the time of said affair with RFK Jr., ex-heroine addict and now vaccine sceptic and Health and Human Services Secretary, to a guy called Ryan Lizza, who's also a journalist, who's also got his own backstory. And his own baggage. And his own baggage. And by God, are they trying to tear each other down right now?
4:27Olivia Nuzzi:So Ryan Lizzer was the one who ended the career in the White House of Anthony Scaramucci by basically repeating stuff that Scaramucci had told him off-air, off-record. And Lizzer just printed it all in his, I think that was The New Yorker, wasn't it?
4:48RFK Junior:It was Scaramucci thought it was an off-the-record conversation, private conversation between two people who'd known each other a very long time. We grew up together in Queens. Mates, exactly.
4:57Olivia Nuzzi:And Ryan Lizard then goes and publishes this and it ends Scaramucci's career pretty quickly afterwards. So there is a lot of bad blood between Ryan Lizard anyway and Olivia Nuzzi that has come to the surface now. And there are a lot of people who are taking her side over his or his side over hers. I mean, basically, you know, I was asking a friend about this and he said, how can I put this? I just want them both to lose. You know, they have sort of...
5:22RFK Junior:It's the Kissinger quote about the Iran-Iraq war, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. It's a shame both sides can't lose.
5:26Olivia Nuzzi:Shame both sides can't lose. But for some reason, it is telling us a tale about America right now. Not least how Olivia Nuzi, when she was first confronted with this affair with Robert Kennedy Jr., described the relationship as, I mean, it left a lot of people wondering, not exactly platonic, but digital. They were having digital sex. And so everyone's head started reeling and saying, what does digital sex look or sound like in the 21st century? Like, does it mean that they were never together? Does it mean that they had phone calls? I mean, what does it tell you? Anyway, she has just written this memoir, American Canto.
6:09And one of the criticisms, I think, is that for a tell-all, it tells you very little at all.
6:17Olivia Nuzzi:but the other way of looking at it is that she has somehow become a symbol of who rises to the top in journalism in America in 2025 and we're going to explore all that with Helen Lewis who is a staff writer for The Atlantic and of course we're trying to be both salacious and highbrow about this at the same time because it is a sort of extraordinary story we want to know the gritty details of everything that it contains. But we also want to know, I guess, why is kind of upsetting so many people right now if it's just a not very well written book?
6:53Pete Hegseth:Well, there are two things going on, aren't there? One of which is the kind of grubby into journalist personal drama aspect of it, which I agree with you is quite salacious. But there are some quite big ethical questions about this. So the accusation made by Olivia Nussie's ex-boyfriend, Ryan Lizza, is that she essentially became a kind of political operative for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was then running for president, is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services. And she crossed that line between reporting on somebody and actually kind of working for their campaign in a stealthy way. And she sort of semi-alludes to this in the book that she, obviously, she talks about the kind of inappropriateness of their relationship, although she says it was only a digital affair.
7:34Pete Hegseth:What is a digital affair?
7:36Olivia Nuzzi:What is a digital affair? Come on, spell it out.
7:38Pete Hegseth:Well, it's sexting, essentially. Although there's some very odd things where she seems to admit that she watched him on FaceTime flossing his teeth, which she seems to have found quite erotic and I find profoundly disgusting. But there we go. Sorry, look at John's face. John's shocked face.
7:53Olivia Nuzzi:I'm just, you know... But that doesn't make for a digital affair, does it?
7:57Pete Hegseth:But I think it's the kind of things that I understand young people are very into, Emily, such as sending each other nudes and this sort of thing, rather than any kind of physical consummation of it.
8:05Olivia Nuzzi:So we think they never actually had sex, is that right?
8:08Pete Hegseth:I don't believe either of them, so I'm keeping an open mind on this. She never certainly admits to it. In the book, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has denied the whole thing somewhat implausibly, I would say. And as I say, simultaneously to the book release, Olivia Nussi's ex-boyfriend, Ryan Lizza, is dumping these substat posts in which he says the pair of them had this elaborate consummation plan for somewhere in, I think, Arizona, but never quite got round to it. So let's put an asterisk over that one. But I mean, the thing is, it doesn't, I mean, I'm sure it matters to people involved, doesn't matter to me, because what's obviously happened here is a kind of sort of sexual obsession that has blown up someone's career.
8:46Pete Hegseth:And the person whose career has not been blown up by this is RFK Jr. That's what I find most striking about it. I still live in a world in which if a politician had a very high profile affair in the middle of a campaign, you'd sort of expect that that might be a dent to their career. But we're now in a, you know, the post-Trump world where not even a whisper of a suggestion that anyone might object to this or that he might even think about his position, not even come up at all.
9:10RFK Junior:But is Olivia Nuzzi in that place of kind of Oscar Wilde, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, that actually in 2025, if you want celebrity and fame, you need clicks and she's getting tons of them.
9:24Pete Hegseth:I'm not sure about that because she's still hoping to make her career in mainstream journalism. I think if she was going to substack or if she was going to cross over to the other side and become a kind of MAGA influencer, then I think the notoriety would be good. She'd have a direct relationship with her audience who would clearly have sort of voted that they didn't mind this. But she is currently West Coast editor for Vanity Fair and they're reviewing her contract. And everybody I talk to in American journalism assumes that they'll sort of probably quietly drop her because she has a kind of in a sort of spin-doctory way kind of become the story.
9:54Pete Hegseth:How do you ever send her out to interview another politician when everyone will be going, her, her, her? Do you think she's going to sleep with this one, too?
10:01Olivia Nuzzi:But isn't, Helen, my only question is, isn't that quite an old-fashioned take on journalism now? Because, you know, she basically did this huge profile in the New York Times. She did all these sort of black and white Lana Del Rey shots where she was becoming the story and she sort of embraced becoming the story. And I mean, I don't know enough about her as a person to know whether, you know, we should think of her as a victim, you know, of some sordid affair with an older man or whether we should think of her as quite a canny operator who knew exactly what she was doing and knew the amount of sort of fame and fortune it might yield.
10:39Pete Hegseth:Well, we'll see, but I can't really think of a template for somebody who's managed to do this successfully. I mean, I did end up thinking about when I was reading the book and writing about it, about Monica Lewinsky and the kind of arc that she's gone through from being seen as a kind of scarlet woman and a temptress through to then being seen as the kind of victim through to then being seen as, you know, this empowered woman reclaiming her narrative. I don't think that story really works for Olivia Nuzzi who is now in her early thirties and was a, you know, bold faced name as they kind of call it in American journalism.
11:10Pete Hegseth:She, you know, she wasn't some kind of 22-year-old intern like Monica Lewinsky was. So I think it's, you know, I don't want to see her as a victim. I think that's sort of slightly infantilising. But I also do agree that she's ending up taking a lot more of the consequences of this relationship than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is, which does seem kind of unfair to me.
11:31RFK Junior:So how does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. maintain this idea of innocence and that there was nothing to see here? Hasn't there been a poem produced of him describing, I don't know how to go there.
11:45Pete Hegseth:Yeah, don't make me quote from the poem. It's not, you can't ask me to do that. Let's open that door. There's an orgasm poem. There's an orgasm poem.
11:53RFK Junior:Like nothing more than a thunderous shuddering orgasm.
11:56Pete Hegseth:I mean, that's, that is the lighter end of RFK Jr.'s alleged amorous missives. So yeah, let's leave it there for the sake of everybody's lunch. But, you know, the thing is that the joy of the reason why so many of the kind of crooks and frauds and charlatans of American politics are attracted to MAGA is that it is a place that it's almost impossible to be cancelled from. You know, actually, by chance, I was watching the new Pentagon press briefing yesterday. So they've kicked out all the real journalists from the Pentagon because they wouldn't sign a very restrictive covenant about who they would talk to.
12:27Pete Hegseth:And in their place, they have a load of MAGA influencers who are all posting pictures of them in the room. And one of the people who is now apparently a journalist is Matt Gaetz. formerly a politician from Florida, who was one of the very, very few Trump nominees who couldn't get nominated because he's accused of having a relationship with an underage girl. But he's pretty much the only one. And that's, you know, that is still the only final taboo left in American politics. He, you know, some of these wildly unqualified people like Kash Patel at the FBI, former drunks like Pete Hegseth at Defense, Russell Brand is hanging out with these people.
13:03Pete Hegseth:You know, this is a place where you go when you've got some items on the CV that you aren't very proud of. And so for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he knew that he was never going to be embraced by the Democrats and he was never going to make it in the two-party systems and independent. So he did a very smart or calculating thing, which is he went, I'm endorsing Donald Trump now, knowing that nobody in MAGA is going to hold a little piffling thing like weird sex poems against him.
13:28Olivia Nuzzi:I mean, I guess that sort of takes us to the same place that J.D. Vance ended up after having called Trump Hitler once and then deciding he wanted to become his vice president. But if you sort of pull out from the minutiae of this affair then, and you're sort of taking us there with your description of the sort of cabinet now, what does this story tell us, if anything, about sort of America in 2025?
13:54Pete Hegseth:I mean, I think it tells you what a profoundly corrupting influence Donald Trump has been on its politics. The best bits of American Cantor, which is Olivia Nuzzi book, are about the fact that she kind of lost her sense of herself. She compares covering the Trump White House to having a mentally ill alcoholic parent. And that sense of you always trying to manage conflict or deal with somebody whose idea of reality was just so profoundly different from your own. And I found those bits quite affecting because I certainly found that it's very difficult to deal every day with people who just lie. just flat out bulb to your face just lie and if they're caught out in the lie there's not even a step or a beat where they kind of get taken aback by that they just move on to the next lie I think dealing with that is something that I know lots of White House reporters really struggle with and so I think that's you know that to me is the really big lesson of the book she quotes Nietzsche in it at one point you might say quite pretentiously but it is one of my favorite Nietzsche quotes which is you know when you gaze into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you and that's kind of the you know that's what's happened to lots of people in the republican parties they fought trump for a bit but eventually they just kind of let it wash over them because it turns out there were other
15:06Olivia Nuzzi:things that they cared about more does she write well i mean would you should we read the book
Read the full transcript
15:11Pete Hegseth:uh i would read her uh this is a actually my editor will be very happy when i say this i would read the work that she's left behind in new york magazine where she was edited because i think what happened with this book is that she bashed out first draft she wrote about how she typed it into her smartphone when she was out on hikes. And there are flashes of it that are good, but there's also big chunks of just transcripts of interviews and sort of quite random stuff in there. So I would always say, no matter how good a writer you think you are, you really do need an editor. And I don't think her book editor has had the opportunity to really go through this and give it the time and attention that would have turned it into a really good book.
15:45RFK Junior:Let me just ask you about journalism in America, because in Britain, we call ourselves hacks and scribblers and whatever else it is. And we kind of embrace the sort of shabbiness and grubbiness and kind of, you know, we're chasing a story, whatever it is. Whereas in America, you've got the First Amendment and people are very high and mighty and think they're sort of pillars of the Constitution. And they are much more serious about themselves and take themselves much more seriously than we do. And I can imagine Olivia Nuzzi. I mean, you know, she's not the first journalist who will have slept with a contact.
16:19Pete Hegseth:Well, OK. Yeah, I mean, very, very true. I think there's another thing there, which is just the amount of money in American journalism is kind of fascinating, you know And also the way that I think maybe the TV anchors and people like that see themselves as kind of political players There is a kind of scene as well, right? I'm not sure there's there's not a lot of kind of fraternity and brotherly love I think in British journalism And I'm not saying there is in America, but I think there's much more sense of being part of a kind of pack But, you know, I find it very odd that the White House press pack, you know, sort of stands up when the president comes in.
16:53Pete Hegseth:You know, there is this kind of ritualness and deference. You know, in the same way that I find it odd when you're in an American school, the national anthem plays and everyone stands up and puts their hand over their heart. It is a country that has always played lip service to a kind of being a country that's also an idea and a kind of really beautiful and aspirational idea, which I don't think is how Britain thinks of itself as a country either. but I think one of the things you take from this is that American journalism has been completely kind of disemboweled by MAGA what's fascinating to me about it though is that you still see these MAGA influencers who moan all the time constantly on about the mainstream media they still don't really think something is true until it's appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times the reason they get so stressed about what those you know outlets are saying is that they know that they're the ones that still are putting money into reporting they don't really believe what dc drano or libs of tiktok or whoever it might be that's you know that's sitting in the pentagon blasting out tweets is saying either really so there's a kind of i always think of it it reminds me very much of kind of wrestling there's a huge amount of kayfabe involved where everybody pretend you know everyone goes through these motions of saying how much they hate the msm whilst also ripping it off and talking about things that it covers and arguing about it well you've taken us
18:04Olivia Nuzzi:into a very good place because we're going to be talking about the story that the washington post broke this week about the boats in Venezuela and Pete Hegseth's remarks. So, Helen, thank you so much for joining us and great to have you on The News Agents. Brilliant. Thank you so much.
18:32RFK Junior:The News Agents USA. I did not personally see survivors, but I stand because the thing was on fire. It was exploded in fire or smoke. You can't see anything. You got digital. This is called the fog of war. This is what you and the press don't understand. You sit in your air conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post about kill everybody, phrases on anonymous sources, not based in anything, not based in any truth at all. And then you want to throw out really irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment that they made.
19:07RFK Junior:I wrote a whole book on this topic because of what politicians... That is Pete Hegseth, the Defence Secretary or the Secretary of War, whatever you want to call him. Secretary of War Crimes. Well, also being called the Secretary of War Crimes. And what he was answering there was questions about the kind of worst euphemism I've heard, which is the second tap, which is they blew up a boat full of drug runners, saw two survivors and then just thought oh well two survivors in the water let's kill them as well and the suggestion in the washington post was that it was on hegseth's orders that these people were killed which would be a war crime if they're surviving and hegseth is saying nothing to do with me guys anyway you journalists don't understand a bloody thing about it so why are you asking me this because you sit in air-conditioned offices and then he kind of throws the admiral under the boat as it were to say no it was the admiral who chose that there should be a second tap i mean
20:05Olivia Nuzzi:that air-conditioned officers stuff i'm sorry that was pure jack nicholson from a few good men wasn't it you don't understand what it's like pete i hate to break it to you but neither do you mate you're just some jumped up weekend fox news anchor who suddenly decided to become the the secretary of war and you are ordering the death of people whom you don't know, who you've got no record of. You don't know anything about their lives or their putative crimes. And if you think they're criminals, put them on trial. Find out what they knew. Who were they working for? This goes back, we should explain, to the firing of missiles on a boat in Venezuelan waters back in September.
20:49Olivia Nuzzi:There have been plenty since. and he has never had to explain his actions. He's never had to justify why he hit the boat, why he killed people. He just calls them drugs runners and narcotics runners, and there is no way of proving any of this. And added to this is what he's actually doing to the Pentagon oversight now, which is taking the journalists out, making the journalists say, we will write a memo, We will sign our names in print saying we won't report on anything that we're not allowed to. That's not, you know, peep behind the curtain here, how journalism works.
21:28RFK Junior:Yeah. And we just heard Helen Lewis a moment ago in the context of the Olivia Nuzzi story talking about the craziness of what's going on in the Pentagon.
21:35Olivia Nuzzi:Yeah. So basically, what is all this extrajudicial killing about? Well, if you want to kind of take a deep dive at this point, you say it looks like Trump is trying to either manage regime change because he doesn't like the president of Venezuela, Maduro, or and he's trying to get hold of Venezuelan oil supplies. Venezuela has the world's largest oil supplies and exports for a few of them. is there something afoot here which would allow trump to come in declare war declare regime change for sort of you know anti-communist reasons and then just grab the oil reserves and it is perfectly
22:15RFK Junior:possible that an invasion of venezuela by u.s military forces could take place in the next few days there's been a massive build-up of american forces in the caribbean in the eastern caribbean waiting to launch such an attack should the order be given by donald trump to do so and that of of course, splits the MAGA world because, you know, I thought MAGA was all about getting out of foreign entanglement. America first. Don't get involved in what's happening in other parts of the world. But there's another part of this, again, which goes back to Hegseth. And he was saying at that same kind of briefing when the cameras were in the cabinet room at the White House, that this is just the beginning.
22:53RFK Junior:We're going to go after narco terrorists wherever they are. No one should feel safe. We want to stop these drugs coming into America. It is only this week that Donald Trump has pardoned the former president of Honduras, who was convicted of drug trafficking by a federal court in America. He was alleged to have paid a billion dollar bribe to El Chapo. And that the Honduras president. He sounds like a nice guy. Yeah, who's another nice guy, misunderstood, but nice guy who was responsible for importing hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States of America. Why has Donald Trump pardoned him?
23:32RFK Junior:Well, because he was very nice about Donald Trump. And so you get pardoned if you're nice to Donald Trump and you get blown out of the water if you're not very nice to Donald Trump.
23:42Olivia Nuzzi:Or if you're just minding your own business. We actually don't know what they were doing in that.
23:46RFK Junior:No evidence has been brought forward that those boats needed to be targeted. We've had the assertion that they were narco-terrorists, but no one's been put on trial. No evidence has been given. There has been no oversight of these particular killings. And, you know, people are saying, look, this is something that Congress needs to approve. That over 100 people have been killed so far in these missile attacks on boats in the Caribbean. now they may be carrying drugs they may not be who knows because the americans are not saying what their intelligence is or how certain they are or giving any evidence to anyone and no one
24:27Olivia Nuzzi:is overseeing any of this yeah whilst hegseth is blaming it all on a fog of war and blaming his admirals there are people higher up in the military or ex-military who as we were discussing last week are now trying to warn those in the armed services they don't have to follow the orders of Pete Hegseth. They think he is a liability. They think that he is asking really serious military men and women to commit acts that could be war crimes. How do you say no?
24:59RFK Junior:Exactly. It's not just that you don't obey the orders. Of course you obey the orders, but you obey lawful orders. And there are laws of this sort of... There's international law and there is US laws as well. about the conduct of war. And if you have got survivors of a boat and the boat has been completely disabled, you don't blow up the survivors. And this is what has happened. And this is why I think it's so interesting that there is now, Donald Trump is trying to say, those people who criticise the issuing of orders should be put on trial and hanged. Court-martialed, yeah. Court-martialed for sedition.
25:35RFK Junior:But some of those people are fighting back. And one of them is Senator Mark Kelly from Arizona, who has posted this most powerful video. I will not be intimidated by this president. I am not going to be silenced by this president or the people around him
25:55Olivia Nuzzi:because I've given too much in service to this country to back down to this guy. In 1991, when Donald Trump was driving the Taj Mahal casino into bankruptcy, I was getting shot at over Iraq and Kuwait. In 2001, after Donald Trump said that the collapse of the Twin Towers meant he now owned the tallest skyscraper in Manhattan, I was carrying flags honoring 9-11 victims into space on a rocket ship. In 2003, when Donald Trump was writing birthday greetings to the monster Jeffrey Epstein, I was the first on the scene to recover the bodies of my fellow astronauts who died when space shuttle Columbia exploded during reentry.
26:54Olivia Nuzzi:In 2011, when Trump was hosting a reality show and peddling conspiracy theories against President Barack Obama, I was sitting next to my wife's hospital bed as she recovered from a gunshot wound to the head. I mean, look, there will be cynics who say this is a man who is comparing himself to a failing and unqualified president because he intends to be standing for the Democratic nomination in years to come. But I think what he's done there is paint a portrait of seriousness versus unseriousness. And in the day following that, his office has already reported death threats, violent graphic threats since President Trump called him out.
27:44Olivia Nuzzi:So every single day that you get somebody standing up and saying, I will not be intimidated, you get a whole load of, you know, whatever the threats are coming to your office, coming to your house about him and his wife, who, as he explained, was already shot once in the head. And yeah, it makes every gesture of defiance a little bit harder.
28:04RFK Junior:But it's also, I think, so easy to forget that there is normal in politics when you've got the Trump world and you've got the confection of lies and everything else that goes on on a regular basis. Look, he has had an extraordinary life. He was an astronaut. He served, blah, blah, blah.
28:22Olivia Nuzzi:But there were also a lot of people... They did blah, blah, blah. It's good. Yeah, it's great. I mean, he was an astronaut, a military man, an arms service commander, and senator.
28:30RFK Junior:Of course, but it didn't used to be that unusual that you would find people with those sort of backgrounds who stood for a certain set of values, whether Republican or whether Democrat. And what you now have is you now have kind of, as we discussed at the top of the show, RFK as the Health and Human Services Secretary, Pete Hegseth as the Defence Secretary, and a whole bunch of others as well, who you wonder what their qualifications are other than slavish loyalty to Donald Trump. And it's just a useful reminder to think that there are still normal politicians out there. Yes, some Republican, but it's the Democrats who are making the noise on that at the moment.
29:05Olivia Nuzzi:I mentioned to one Republican who has stood up on exactly the issue we've been discussing, Rampall, the centre for Kentucky, has said Pete Hesketh is either lying to us or incompetent. Now, Rampall was somebody who got elected in the Tea Party years of 2010. And I remember his speech then. He said, I'm coming to Washington to kind of blow it up from within. And actually, weirdly, he's become a voice of reason within the Republican Party. He is now somebody. I mean, he's I think he's head of the Foreign Affairs Committee, isn't he? the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, he has basically called out his own party time and time again over stuff that has been unlawful, made absolutely no sense to either party.
29:52Olivia Nuzzi:I think that's the division now. It's not actually Democrat and Republican. It's kind of normal versus normalised.
30:00RFK Junior:In the first term, Rand Paul played quite a lot of golf with Donald Trump. Not so much in the second term. We'll be back in just a moment.
30:15RFK Junior:The News Agents USA.
30:17Pete Hegseth:Have you ever tried this one? Have you ever tried this one? I know you want my time.
30:24Olivia Nuzzi:That is Sabrina Carpenter's song, Juno. And she is furious right now because the song and the lyrics, Have You Ever Tried This One?, has been used by ICE agents over clips of them chasing, tackling, handcuffing different people, only some of whom have had their faces blurred. And she has hit back at Trump and the administration saying, this video is evil and disgusting. Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda.
30:55RFK Junior:Well, you can imagine what sort of response Sabrina Carpenter will be getting from the MAGA ultra faithful to that, as we were just discussing a moment ago. Standing up doesn't win you friends. Well, it does win you friends, but it also brings an awful lot of threats as well. But fair play to Sabrina Carpenter for saying enough.
31:14Olivia Nuzzi:Yeah, they've actually referred already to it. Here's a short and sweet message for Sabrina Carpenter. We won't apologise for deporting dangerous criminal, illegal murderers, robes and pedophiles from our country. In other words, we're not even answering your question. Yeah, get lost. Yeah, but are they going to leave her song alone? I don't know. What can she do?
31:31RFK Junior:Well, the arrogance of it is sort of quite breathtaking, isn't it? It's good. Yeah. Anyway, we will be back next week. We'll see you then. Bye bye. Bye. This has been a Global Player original production.
From the publisher
The story of the affair between journalist Olivia Nuzzi and Health Secretary RFK Junior has been called the least important and most important story of our times. What does it tell us about MAGA culture, journalistic ethics and the power of click bait versus deep dive investigation? Why is America so obsessed with her story?
Later, has a leaked recording of Pete Hegseth, Secretary of WAR, opened him up to accusations of war crimes? And what happens to those who speak out against Trump's extra judicial killings?
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