Institutional Decay and Future Challenges

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Head to join dot W ho op dot com slash politics to get started with Who Toda y . Roosevelt Truman two visionaries who understood a simple truth strong econom ies build stable politics, stable politics keep the peace. The post war world wasn't an accident, it was designed. So what happens when we forget the lesson? As today's politics grow more divisive and economic uncertainty spreads, are we risking the very stability they fought to secure? In The Visionaries, James Holland explores the urgent question Is our current turmoil the beginning of something far more dangero us. History is speaking. Are we listening? The Visionaries by James Holland is in all good bookshops in the UK and in the United States of America. That's right, in the UK and the US. And there's the fantastic audible audiobook read by me, Al Murray. What else could you want? Attention all passengers. The Uber ride for Jeff's rugby team will depart in five minutes from platform 15. Your ride comes with six toilets and a refreshments carriage that you'll empty within five minutes. Thank you for booking your tickets on Uber . Trains on Uber Welcome to the Rest is Politics US with me, Caddy K. Anthony Scaramucci is off making a movie with his son, which is super exciting. He's been sending me the photos and he is, thank goodness, playing the villain. He looks like a James Bond villain, so I think he's having a good time. But I'm joined instead by former Republican Lieutenant Governor of Maryland and RNC Chair and now co-host of the weeknight on MSNAM, Michael Steele. Welcome back to the program by popul ar demand, Michael. Top of the morning, Cheerio, all that good stuff. How you doing? What's up? When the king went before Congress, the best thing he said was, by Jove, Mr. Speaker. I love it. I love it. There were so many good moments with the king in the well of the Cong ress. First off, again, the history of that, it was just so profound and it's so rich for us in America. Given our relationship with Great Britain, um and certainly with the British people, and the the humor that he brought, but also a little bit of the hey, can I remind you guys why you kind of stepped away from the family in the first place , you know, conversation. Um I I I thought it was all well done and he was so well received. It was it was amazing how the American people responded to his being here. There was genuine interest um and genuine genuine delight. So uh thank you uh for sharing the king for a few days. He gave us a little bit of time when both Democrats and Republicans seem to agree on one thing, which is that they were all slightly star-struck by monarchy. So who knew? Anyway, long live the king, he is gone now. We're gonna talk about Trump. Trump saying that he doesn't care about American finances. Does the president care about Americans' pocketbooks? We're going to be answering that question. Looking at also how Pete Heggseth defended the Trump administration's handling of the Iran war. All of this, of course, tied up with very bad economic numbers that have come out that even former Trump officials are getting a bashing for on television. And then in the second half of the program, we're gonna get into another dramatic hearing up on Capitol Hill, which was Cash Patel, the director of the FBI, who is sparring with lawmakers, um, over excessive drinking, I happen to think they should be focusing on the all of the agents who've been fired at the FBI, which may be making Americans less safe, but anyway, we'll get into all of that. So let's start and dive in, Michael. The President of the United States may have just said the quiet part out loud. Here is what he said as he was leaving for China. The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon. I don't think about Americans' financial situation. I don't think about anybody. And then he got on a plane and flew over to the other side of the world. How many Democratic campaign ads is that clip going to turn up in? I mean, it's just like, here's your gift, Democrats. Let's run on it. And there's so there's so many over the past uh year and a half uh that touch on s even before you get into the the nuts and bolts of the affordability argument that Democrats have I I say quite successfully layered up um as part of the political conversation. You have the Iran War, you have um the immigration issues, the the the the toll that ICE has taken on American streets. You've got all of these things that have it in their own way, Catty, presented narratives that can be woven together, that can end with that clip. You don't even have to finish it because you could just stop it when he says, I don't care about Americans. And that is at the core of it. You don't care about Americans. The thing about Trump, though, is that Trump has been saying this from the very beginning. When you go back to the very beginning, before the war even started, he called his, you know, and the bulwark, our friends over at the bulwark, um have a great sort of comp ilation of Trump sort of stair-stepping us through the process of leading up to the war and how he viewed the economy in that at that time. And he says, you know, quote, I called in Scott Besson and all Apple cart for you because we have to take a little journey down to a beautiful country known as Iran. That was the beginning. He understood that while the economy and everything was starting to really begin to find its sea legs and move forward and strengthen So why do that? Why when I mean you know you've had JD Vance saying the great thing about President Trump on record is that he's not going to take us into a war with Iran. He's going to focus on Americans first. You had Tulsi Gabbard, his head of you know national intelligence, saying something very similar. The great thing about Donald Trump is that he's going to focus on Americans. I mean, that's that's what the kind of America first wing of MAGA is all about. That you don't. I mean, it's where it comes from. It's literally where it comes from, from the George W. Bush escapades into the Middle East that cost Americans so much in blood and treasure. And then along comes somebody and says, we're not gonna do that anymore. We are gonna focus back home. We're gonna bring manufacturing back home. We're gonna implement these policies that may in the short term do you a little bit of economic harm, but we'll build America's economy back up again. We can get into that in a second. And then he does this thing that goes into Iran. And now you look at the results. Inflation, 3.8% year on year in April, the highest jump since 2023. The consumer sentiment index that the University of Michigan releases every year just hit a record low. You've got a new poll out by Atlantis Intel that shows by strong majorities Americans believe that pri ces are now higher for things like beef and eggs and rent and electricity under Donald Trump than they were under Joe Biden. There are no good numbers. You've got Larry Cudlow, the former director of Trump's National Economic Council quizzing the current director of Trump's National Economic Council, saying these are lousy inflation numbers. So when he knew it, why take that gamble? Why take that gamble if he knew that's what was going to happen, Michael? Because he saw Iran as Venezuela. He thought he could just go and knock out the leadership, uh, leave whatever remnants were behind, that they would be much more favor able to his plan to grab the oil. It's always been about oil. Donald Trump is an old school backwater, you know, guy from the nineteen fifties who believe that, you know, the core of the American economic engine rests on things like oil. Well, you and I know that was then. This is now. Our economy is much more diverse. Our resources are very different. We are a the leader in oil production in the in the world, yes, but we're also have a diversification in the energy space that is going to you know be a part of what leads us into the future. So there are a whole lot of dynamics there. Um but Donald Trump is stuck like he was like he is on tariffs in a 1950s economic model. He believed that he could go in and yippie kaye his way through uh Iran, like he did Venezuela. His people, from what I understand, were advised by national security types, and they advised the president that that was not a realistic scenario. Why? Because Iran has this little thing called the Strait of Hormuz. Um Which by the way, Zbigniew Brzezinski warned Jimmy Carter back in the nineteen seventies , don't go into Iran because they will shut the Strait of Hormuz and you will cause global There you go, Caddy. There you go. History. Damn, history. That's amazing what history can tell us, right? Means you have to read it. That's a problem. That is a problem. You'd have to read it. You'd have to read it , you'd have to understand it, and you'd have to connect the dots, which is not a s a strong suit for Donald Trump. He is he is in many respects linear in his thinking. And pieces of history and truth and reality for him are fiction. They don't align with the narrative that's in his head, and therefore it's not going to play out uh in what he executes We don't really know what the hell's going on in Venezuela. Donald Trump is the one telling us everything is, you know, fun and great and people love him and the world is wonderful. We don't really know. We don't know a lot of things about what's happening around us because the people who did that in the past are no longer there. They've been fired. They've been removed. Their departments have been elimin ated. So you have all of these, all of these things that, you know, Brzezinski and Carter, and even when you go to uh Reagan and Aran Contra, you have all of these presidents who had these instruments at his disposal to advise and guide his steps. Donald Trump does not follow any of that. So when you're looking at the economy, when you're looking at the strategy, he's not connecting those dots that the strategy will have an impact in the economy. And the economy can have an impact on the strategy. They do go hand in hand. You close the straight, you're going to feel it economically. You , you know, if you decide to take the pressure off the economy, you open the straight. You know, so it's just that for him doesn't compute. Where that leaves us is where we are. My prediction, Caddy, is that if and when this war ends sometime this year, we will be where Barack Ob ama led us. You know, JCPOA. That agreement will be the foundation for what comes next. Why? Because it is the thing Iran has already agreed to . And it is the thing Iran is the most familiar with. And it is the thing where Iran felt that not only could it live with it, but its sovereignty, which is important for any nation, stays relatively intact. That's the pressure point. Let's say we end up there, which I think a lot of people are now speculating that we probably will end up somewhere similar to where Barack Obama ended up.. Yep But we also had Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, who was up on the Hill as well. It was a very busy week for people being hauled up in front of the hill. The news has come out that in its 79th day, this war effort has so far cost America twenty-nine billion dollars. That's up from the twenty-five billion dollars that Hegseth had told lawmakers two weeks ago. It doesn't account for the damage that Iran has caused to American bills He said we don't have a number for how much damage has been done there. And it could end up costing the American taxpayer something like, according to the Harvard Kennedy School, about a trillion dollars in total. Meanwhile, of course, America's actual debt soaring as we talk about this. Did those kind of numbers along with the president's statement that he doesn't care about Americans' finances come back to haunt Republicans and even Donald Trump in some way as the country goes to the polls in November. I mean, it already has. Not just the polls, the results of elections. I mean, Democrats have won what, thirty-five, thirty-six of the thirty-seven special elections that that have occurred so far? Average move to Democrats 13 points. It's it's huge. It's huge. Look, when I was national chairman in 2009 and 2010, that was something I paid attention to is how we doing in the races that no one is paying attention to right now and that no one's calculating. Because for me, as someone who's a party official, I know how those how those st ones are laid out to create a pathway towards electoral success down the road. And so they're they're telltale signs. And and I said back in January, February of this year, um , that the voters are going to reach a point, a tipping point where they begin to bake in the election. How they feel about Trump, how they feel about the economy, how they feel about a lot of things. The war hadn't even happened at that point. And when they do , there's no going back . Vo you can't get them off of the idea. Ask Joe Biden what the price of eggs did to his administ ration. Right. Voters made up their mind that the price of eggs was too great for them. There was nothing he could say. And then when they flipped the script to Kamala Harris and she's asked, what would you do differently? Which is the easiest softball question you could be asked as a presidential candidate. What would you do different ? This is not about your party, your connection to the president. What would you do? And she said nothing. What did voters hear? Oh, I'm not going to do anything to change the price of eggs for voters. So when Donald Trump now comes out and says I don't care about the cost of my war to the American people, what are the American people here? That's his Kamala Harris moment. Cause I wanted to talk to you about this because of your experience, because you were chairman of the Republican National Committee in right after the financial crash. The you know the economic malaise might have been a bit more acute then , but basically you ran a midterm election based on the economy. That's what the issue was back in 2009. So at what point was it in the year that you realized President Obama was in for his famous shellacking? That he was gonna get hit hard in the middle. At what point was it that you say voters bake in their opinions and after that you can't really change their minds? Is it our opinions decided now, April, May? Does the president have a couple more months? Could he wrap up Iran? Hope that gas prices come down by, I don't know, the July the 4th holiday? Is there a moment in your mind when the election becomes pretty much predetermined because voters have decided which way to go? I think we're we're at that moment in in in In some cases, we're past that moment in others. So let's reset for you real quick. 2010 election cycle, that moment for me. Now remember, we were running on both the economy and health care because uh the the affordable care act was working its way through the Congress. So I was connecting a dot about the government standing between you and your doctor, which you know is is a big deal for a lot of Americans, for most Americans at that time, and making the case about that and tying it to the overall economic health of the country. I knew we had won the election the day Barack Ob ama referred to the Affordable Care Act as Obamacare . Why? Because now he's speaking my language. He's using the terms that we use to describe what he did, what he was doing. And the way we were talking about it was not good. It wasn't a nice thing. Obamacare was not a compliment. It was not a compliment. And so when he started referring to it that way, and he had to, because that had been baked into the psyche of the American voter, how they felt about that term . And he translated it to everything. And I kind of put a bow on it with fire Pelosi, right? That was our big push in the fall. If you want to reform this system , then you have to fire Pelosi, right? You, in other words, any actor in government who is standing between you and reform , you need to move out of the way. That messaging resonated with voters big. And again, we weren't dealing with a war. We weren't dealing with um, you know, immigration issues. We we were basically dealing with healthcare with the sub-current of the overall health of the economy coming off the uh out of 2008, 2009 . Um, but this is different. And this is driving vote voters harder because unlike healthcare, this is something that you feel every day when you go, when you have to fill up your car twice or three times a week. It's impact right there. You pay your healthcare premium once a month, you do the math , you kind of get it worked, and you pay the bill and you move on and you don't really stress about it until about a week before you have to pay it again, a month later. This is something you're living out every week, every day, because I'm filling up my car because I have to run the soccer practice for the kids. I gotta go to work, I gotta go gut by my parents. So by the time I get to Wednesday, I gotta fill up again. Well, also, Michael , healthcare it became much more popular. Obamacare did become much more popular after those 2010 midterms. But healthcare, there was an argument for trying to fix American healthcare to make it better for Americans . We have not had yet the argument from the president about Iran. Now it's interesting that in that little clip, what he says is we cannot allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Well, that I think most people would agree with that. I think most Democrats would agree with that. I think most voters would agree with that. But he hasn't connected that and the war. He hasn't, he just hasn't made a very good case. So you've got people looking at the cost of the war, the cost of gas prices , how this war is now, it hit Asia very hard, they were down to four day weeks, it's hitting Europe very hard, Lufthansa's cancelling flights this summer, and it is now starting to hit Americans hard. Without the president having made the case between you're paying this at the pump and we're stopping Iran having a nuclear weapon, but actually Barack Obama stopped Iran having a nuclear weapon without going to war and driving up the gas prices. That's the point. And and you know, Donald Trump is is stuck on stupid. I'm sorry, just is because that that is not the argument you make. Because prior presidents uh have have dealt with Iran without going to war with Iran. And as you just noted, Barack Obama actually landed an agreement that Iran agreed to without going to war with Iran. Yes, it took two years. Yes, it took principled vision of what you wanted the outcome to be. And you moved your negotiators in that direction to achieve that outcome. And they were successful in that. They gave a little bit, they got a lot, right? Donald Trump doesn't think that way. Donald Trump runs this econom y and this government the way he ran his enterprises. And all of them have largely been running to the ground because Donald Trump is not someone who actually thinks it through. He's he's he's unstable in the sense that everything becomes personal and emotional for him. And if it doesn't go its way, then it's it's it's a personal affront. And then his response is to lash back, lash out. And so if Iran gets in the room and says, no, we're not going to do that, his his next thing is not to have his nego okay, let's let's lock this down. His thing is to throw bombs . And and so it just doesn't it doesn't play out that way. It it's it's fundamentally, not the way the process is going to allow you to achieve success because you have to be honest in evaluating what your opponent has that they can use as their leverage. Back to the Strait of Hormuz, back to uh drones. Well, and back to all of the intelligence reports showing us that actually they still have about 70% of their missiles. Absolutely. And all that, you all that enriched uranium, every every you know, they got stuff on the ground, they got stuff spread out. When you disintegrate the intelligence network that is to provide you with the latest currency, intelligence currency that you will need. You've done this. You're walking into a negotiation like this with one eye completely shut. And then you're at the table and the president blinds you in the other eye, in the good eye, right? And and so what do you do if you're sitting there? And and and let's let's take this thing back. Where the hell is the secretary of state? You're sending two mor ons to negoti ate with Iran . I mean, you're sending your son-in-law and a business guy to go and sit down with the Iranis and they're sitting the Iranis are sitting there going seriously this is okay okay uh yeah can i have some more coffee you know what they know this isn't seriously you're gonna send jared kushner okay all right thank you. All right. So Jared how, how how 's the wife and the kids? They good? Okay . That's the negotiation. Give us Wendy Sherman. And by the way, I had I had an interesting conversation with Jake Sullivan , who was President Biden's former national security advisor that just this morning, who said to me this oil prices would even be a lot worse and gas prices would be higher for Americans, except guess what? The Iranians are actually getting out about half of their oil through alternative routes. They're sending out through pipelines, they're trucking oil to Turkey, they're trucking oil to Pakistan, they're even looking at sending it by train to China. So in fact, Iran is not suffering as much as we really think they are. And in fact, Katie, on top of that reporting, you have reporting that said that with with the current situation, with the American block ade. Ooh . Ooh, blockade. We like that word. Iran can go another four months. They can go another four months. They've have a system. They have they have contingencies and plans for this. This American has been the great Satan. They've always envisioned and imagined and planned for this kind of a confrontation with the United States under this under this regime, right? Uh, under the Khomeini regimes. And and so you don't think over 47 years they've not figured out how to get around our bullshit? And now that's all layered out in plain sight because we've got we've got the idiocracy running our foreign policy? We don't have serious people at the table and in the room. We don't. The the secretary of state, that image of him on the couch when Zelen sky was there, sitting there like a huddled mass, shell shocked by what you're getting out of here, photo. Get me out of here. That's been Marco Rubio. So you can go and do all these Catholic videos and you can go and meet with the Pope and all this stuff. And we didn't even talk about the fight with the Pope. Talk about dumbass decisions in the midst of a war, given the intelligence network that the Vatican has. I mean it just in none of it, none of the dots are connected, Caddy. And you just sit there and you go, why is this man sitting in the Oval Office? What were the American people thinking? I know our friends in Great Britain and the rest of Europe look at us and go, what the hell's wrong with y'all? I what what are you doing right now? What do you not understand? By the way, to get us back to where we start and then we are gonna take a break. In much politer language, that was kind of the the message that King delivered to Congress, let's be honest. Yes. Before we go to a break, don't forget that the general sale for our live tour across North America opens this Friday at ten AM Eastern. Head to the rest is politicsUS dot com to get your tickets. We can't wait to see you out on the road. Okay, let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk about the Trump mobile phone that costs you $100 for a deposit, but you may not actually ever get. And cash patel up in front of Congress. This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. You know, Caddy Alistair Campbell taught me how to use NordVPN on a train from Glasgow to London. I love this product. I want to be connected as soon as I sit down, but speed can come at a cost to security. Most of the time, cyber attacks are not Hollywood style. 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This podcast is sponsored by Trump Mobile. You can buy the T1 phone if you put down a hundred dollar deposit and are quite happy with the idea that you may never get the phone, it may never be made, and that you have been succored into handing over money to the Tr ump organization. Which may mean we need a little bit more money. Okay, I have to fill everybody in. This is the only big story that is going round Washington this week after a young man on TikTok, who was very unhappy , posted a video saying that he had put down a hundred dollar deposit last summer for not one, not two, not three, but four Trump phones, which were announced by the Trump family, by the Trump sons. They said they were gonna be proudly made in America in June of 2025. And delivery, Michael, don't worry, not very long. If you'd put down a hundred dollars in June of 2025, you would get your phone in September of 2025. I mean, that's fine, right? And it was gonna be made in America and it was gonna be guess what color it was gonna be? Uh red, white, and blue? No nearly. Nearly. You're not thinking trumpy enough. You're not you're not trumpy enough. No, I'm not . No. It really was. It was gonna be gold. Gold, yes, gold, of course. And guess what? All of these people I, don't know why, but it wasn't nobody who put money down. Some 600,000 people paid a deposit, which netted a nice cool $59 million to the Trump organiz ation, but they didn't read the small print because in the small print it said a pre-order doesn't guarantee that this device will get produced or made available for purchase . I I don't know about that. You you buy, I mean, talk to me about this. That is such a summation of everything Trump touches. It's a scam . These guys are nothing but carn artists. His sons, him , the things he has done. It's not, folks, not saying anything out of school. The the the history on this is leg ion. Legion from stakes to univers ities to this , to sneakers, gold lema is sneakers, all of it is a scam. It is a way to put up cheap crap in front of you, dangle it, make it gold because, well, there it is, right? Everybody loves gold . And then the bait and the switch. Oh, well, just because you gave me $100 doesn't mean I'm going to give you anything for it. How stupid. And the thing about it is , you know, you get people caught up in this whole thing where they want to be a part of what it is you're doing. This is an extension of you to them, and they feel connected to you. And oh my God, I got a Trump phone. No No, you ain't getting crap. You're not getting crap. It's like you bought the Trump meme coin on the on the evening of the inauguration and the Trump family made a whole load of money out of it. Sixty million bucks. 60 million bucks. The people who bought the meme coin, they made nothing out of it. Oh, and by the way, the other good news about this phone, Donald Trump Jr. went on television and said that it was going to be built in America because it is time, folks , to bring manufacturing back to America. That is the patriotic thing to do. That language was quickly scrubbed from the website, and now it says the phone is going to be designed with American val ues in mind. That phone is being made in China. You can't build a phone in America. Come on. You can't build a phone in America. Oh, you know what that phone would cost if we built it? Yes, a lot more than a hundred dollars. It's a metaphor for the whole manufacturing campaign. Manufacturing jobs have declined. There has been a net loss in manufacturing jobs in the United States of America since the president was inaugurated. What are we doing? Including the people who might have been going to be build the Trump phone. Okay. I had to get that off my chest because it's just it's too good and I feel too bad for the people that put the money down. Oh, I don't. But I also think why did you do it? I don't feel crap for that. You spent four hundred dollars on the phone. Anything Donald you better read the fine print. Ask the lawyers. I don't feel anything for you. Sorry. He would have done very well as a kind of 1950s salesman. He likes doing a sale. He is Harold Hill. He is a corrupt. He makes Harold Hill look like Saint Francis, right? He is a corrupted Harold Hill. He's a P.T. Barnum, knows a sucker is born every minute. He prays on the suckers out there. He lathers them up in the red, white, and blue, and he lathers them up in the in their angst about um america becoming less white. He gets them all fired up about you know communism and and and Muslims and this and any other ism out there. And then he takes their cash. There we are. We're gonna do a series on that. We're gonna do a deep dive on how much money the family has made. Oh, please do. It runs into the billions. One billion just last year? I think it's even more. I think it's even more. Meanwhile, as the Trump organization is raking in $60 million for a phone that doesn't exist yet and the purchasers can't even get a reply from the customer service. There is Cash Patel, the director of the FBI, up on Capitol Hill. It's like a cast out of a sort of comedy movie, except that it's not a comedy. There is Cash Patel, who's the former podcast host, nothing wrong with podcast hosts, of course. We just perhaps shouldn't running be running up the FBI, who is up on Capitol Hill because lawmakers are unhappy. The wanty to grill him about a story that came out in the Atlantic. We talked about it, about his episodes of excessive drinking. Uh, reportedly said that his secret service detail can't even find him sometimes because he's passed out in his bedroom and won't answer the door because he's hung over. It was a weird spectacle because you had all of these Democrats hammering him on the drinking. You had uh Chris Van Hollen challenging him to take some kind of a subordin Are you willing to take the test that it's it's called the audit test that members of our active duty military and others take to determine whether they have a drink ing problem? I'll take any test you're willing to take. I will take it, Dr. Director Patelli. I'll take it. You ready to take it? Let's go. Yes or no? Let's go. Side by side. I'll take it. And then you had them challeng ing him on what's happening in the FBI that has been reported in multiple outlets in terms of who's been fired and who's had to resign and the character of polygraphs going on at the FBI, the character of recrimination and retribution against journalists. And Cash Patel just denies all of it. It was the weirdest hearing. I don't know Well, and made of it what I make of everything uh about the folks who work for Trump who have to then go before Congress, they go there not to be held accountable for what they're what they're doing or not doing, what their departments are doing, how they're running things. They go there to perform. They go there as my mama used to say uh to show their ass. That's what they do. They go there to perform for Donald Trump. That was a performance for Donald Trump. We saw it with Pam Bondi. We see it down with cash. We've seen it with others. And to the extent that there's anything that gets answered, um, it's all gobbledygook. It makes no sense. It does align with the facts. Look, we know the storylines about Cash Patel from when he was a podcaster. Just like we know the storylines about Pete Hexeth and his alcoholism before he became secretary. Cash Patel is on video boasting about his drinking. Boasting about his drinking. So the fact that you now have agents , staff , and employees in the department who are concerned about the head of this organiz ation behaving in a manner that is not only possibly putting the organization in disrepute, but making it far less effective than it already is or already has been made by the cuts and the implosion within the FBI. Which I think by the way is the real story. It's the real story, Caddy. Of course cash patel's drinking is a problem. But if you look at the number of people who've been fired from both the Justice Department and the FBI or have resigned because they don't feel that they are doing the job that they were brought on to do . They have a real problem now where they are having to promote people who are too junior, they're having to cut training times, they're having to relax the conditions for people to become agents. They've launched a whole social media campaign to try and hire people back again because so many people have either been let go or have decided to let themselves go, or because Donald Trump had it in for the FBI because the FBI was involved in investigations into him at Mar-a-Lago and the documents that he took. The FBI was involved in investigating the January the 6th insurrection, and the FBI and the Justice Department were involved also in investigating Russia's ties to Donald Trump. And all of that caddy was laid out, and we saw the culpability of one person at the center of each of those investigations, and that was Donald Trump. And so the FBI just doesn't, unlike now, under Donald Trump, randomly go out and and start investigating people. It just doesn't do it. Just doesn't go, okay, what do we do? Why don't we just go and investigate a former president? Okay, why don't we do that? Let's put resources that we need for other things into that. That's not how this works. George W. Bush and under George W. Bush was not doing that about Bill Clinton, and Bill Clinton was not doing that about George H. W. Bush. No, it just doesn't work that way, unfortunately. But here we are. So these storylines that are being laid out in front of the American people are real storylines connected to real actions by individuals inside this administration, Cash Patel, Pete Heggseth, et cetera, and the president himself. And so I'm sorry, don't hate the game, right? And don't hate the players. It's how you're playing in the game. And if you're the bad actor , you're going to create the kind of attention that the FBI, the Department of Justice, and other institutions are going to look at what you're doing. So now that you control those things, and this is where the weaponization issue or storylines have been turned on their heads. Donald Trump has always, from the very first time I met him and worked with him, he's always struck me as the guy that will flip the script. He will always project an action that you're doing because it's an action either that he's doing or wants to do, right? And you're not doing it. Projectional confession. Exactly. And so look, you know, the Cash Pat el has got a problem. Now here's the deal. I said this from the very beginning of the storylines about Cash Patel being on the hook to be fired. Cash Patel's not going anywhere. Why? Because Cash Patel is doing the thing Donald Trump once done. And what is that? He's investigating the people Donald Trump once investigated. Why did Pam Bodney get in trouble? Because she didn't do the perp walk after the investigations. Remember, the FBI is an investigatory body. It can investigate the ham sandwich on the lawn, right? Why is that ham sandwich there? Who put that ham sandwich there? What is the ham sandwich doing to disrupt the neighborhood? The Department of Justice is the agency that will come in and handcuff the owner or handcuff the perpetrator or putting the ham sandwich on the lawn. Right? So those two pieces in Donald Trump's view, all right, Cash, I want you to go out and investigate James Comey. All right, Pam, I want you to go out and and give me the perp walk. I want him in handcuffs. Doesn't matter whether or not there's evidence and facts. That's the problem . Those lawyers then have to go before judges and say, Your honor, here are the facts that have brought James Comey or John Brennan, the former CIA director, to you in handcuffs. And the judge looks at that and goes, What the hell are you doing? Get the hell out of it. No, there's nothing. There's no there, there, boom, right? They don't want that because guess what? On the back end, those lawyers then have to pay for that with their law license. Right now, Caddy, there are a number of lawyers who are standing before their local bars up on charges of bringing false legal action against individuals. And so people are looking at that going. That's why they're to your earlier point are res igning. Yeah. Because they don't want that. So when you turn the system on its head and you turn the what's left of the system in on itself, this is what it looks like in America with Donald Trump as president . Here's the bottom line, though, Caddy. It's going to be hard for us to rebuild from this . These institu tions have been, I think, irreparably broken . They're not going to be the same. The Institutes of Peace, the USA ID, all of these organs that once served a great purpose and did good things, including those institutions like the FBI , they're going to have a future generation of lawmakers are going to have to rethink how to rebuild them. What we had once is gone. That talent, that institutional knowledge is not being passed on to a bunch of idiots who are left to do Donald Trump's bidding. And the people that they're hiring, if you look at the ICE agents who are being hired because they're yippie kaye, they want to go after black and brown people and put them in handcuffs and beat them up and treat them. Do we know what's going on actually going on in the detention centers? No, because they won't even let members of Congress inside to look at them.aron Powell the members of Congress are paying for those detention centers. Yeah, I agree. I think it's going to be a real challenge. And for people who don't think this impacts ordinary Americans, another extraordinary thing came out of the Cash Pat el hearing. Just before the war with Iran started, a dozen counter-terrorism agents who were experts in guess which country were fired from the FBI. Out of here. They were Iran experts. They may have been useful during this time of tension with Iran. Okay, guys, we will be talking in our bonus episode, guys, uh, which I f recorded with Eugene Daniels about