Have Republicans thought this through. Because that’s what I want to know. They may be potentially disenfranchising millions of their own voters because they think they’re supporting just a voter ID bill. We’re going to get down to business. And first up, talk about the war in Iran and President Trump’s approach to our allies. And Jamelle is going to explain to us what he thinks Trump is really focused on these days. Hint it’s not the war or even White House renovations. So got to note that we’re taping this on a Thursday, so the specific shape of the chaos will change a million times, probably before you all hear us. And with that, let’s get down to business. So we are moving into the fourth week of America and Israel’s war with Iran. There is no end in sight, and from best I can tell, no clear direction of where this is going each day we’re seeing new attacks on Iran. Oil prices have spiked. Trump decided he’d fix that by relaxing sanctions on Russia. And surprise, our allies are not super excited to send ships to protect the Strait of Hormuz to help with the war. They were not consulted on. So scale of one to 10 guys, how shocked should Trump be that he is getting the cold shoulder from Europe on a lot of this? And where do you think the dynamic is headed. Jamelle you go first. I don’t think Trump should be shocked at all. He spent the first year of his presidency doing everything he could to. Degrade America’s relationship with its European allies, in particular, undermine the NATO alliance. Threaten threatened territorial acquisition against a NATO member. Just all kinds of destructive things. And so, no, you shouldn’t be surprised that when you bully people and then you come to them hat in hand for help, they say, no thanks, not going to do it. And this is the other part of it that it’s a testament to how little this war was planned out and how little forethought there, there seems to have been that the same administration which has taken a hammer to America’s clean energy development, to its renewable energy development, that is actively hostile to it. In fact, our wonderful newspaper published a story this week about how the administration wants to spend up to $1 billion to keep a wind energy company from producing, from building new wind energy infrastructure, and instead wants to divert that to fossil fuel production. So you have this administration that is ideologically anti-renewable energy. And then it’s like, oh, also, I’m going to start a war with the one country that could unilaterally cause an energy crisis through the denial of fossil fuels. Brilliant work. Genius stuff. Strategery at its finest. David? I mean, look, this is a war that Trump started that our NATO allies were not consulted on. They had been relentlessly scorned. As of today, on Thursday, Michelle, we have received reporting that Denmark was actually preparing for a potential invasion of Greenland, that under the guise of exercises, they had sent troops and the troops had explosives to blow up airfields in case America tried to invade. I mean, this is the environment in which we launched another war. And then there’s a lot of reporting that says that General Kane warned Trump that the Strait would close and he pushed through these warnings in a way that was essentially he denied to himself the potential crisis could exist. And now that it is, he’s lashing out in a million different directions. And this is the first time in my life, that we have had a war leader where legitimately, you wonder – and I don’t even wonder that much – is he really mainly motivated by self-interest here, or is he mainly motivated by the national interest? And everything about Trump that we know says this is a dude that’s mainly motivated by self-interest. And also that he’s extraordinarily mercurial. And so we just saw this whole exchange, this big escalation in the war where there was an Israeli strike on Iranian natural gas fields. Then there was an Iranian strike on Qatar’s natural gas fields. And by the way, these are two of the most important facilities for the production of this vital resource in the whole world. And Trump comes out and says, well, Israel struck Iran, and then Iran struck Qatar. And I didn’t want any of this. And then within moments after that get reporting, saying, what are you talking about. Israel says they did consult that this was a strike approved by the United States, and that Trump just doesn’t like the blowback from the Gulf states as a result of all of this. And so you really get the sense that Trump, the commander in chief, is flying by the seat of his pants. The military is executing the missions that’s being assigned to execute with extreme competence. It’s just that if you have a flawed strategy to begin with if you have Mercurial leadership at the top, even the best military execution will often just be wasted. Well, it certainly seems like we’re running into with this administration. Or perhaps it’s just this president, that eternal tension between short term goals, and long term goals. And he doesn’t really seem to have long term goals on anything. So his approach to this seems to be, well, it’s great. I can blow this up and look how tough we are here. And it speaks. I think Jamelle’s brought this up before. He’s got all these toys to play with and he’s got all this military might and we can worry about where this leaves us in broader picture terms for later, which I mean, what could possibly go wrong. It’s the Middle East. It always turns out well in the long term, but so what are we learning about his just view of American power. And also do we think the White House maybe is learning anything about the gap between how the president views that power and how things actually play out. I mean, do we think anything is sinking in over there. I’m skeptical. I mean, it’s clear to me that the president has a view of American power. That’s very childish. That’s very, very. We have lots of weapons. We have lots of things that can blow things up, and that’s all we really need. He seems to have also this view that American influence, both American influence and American military and other forms of power, economic power, are inexhaustible resources that you can just call on and again and again and again and do what you want. And that isn’t true. That is very much not the case. But there’s no indication that anyone in the White House, or at least anyone the president will listen to I’ll say that is capable of explaining to Trump, getting him to understand that they may be they may have already reached up against the limits of what the country can simply do, given the situation, given our deteriorating relationships with our allies, given everything, it’s always been so striking to me that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has these press conferences where he doesn’t at all talk in strategic terms about the conflict. It’s all we’re going to rain down death upon the enemy. And then why can’t you, Conan the Barbarian, harder, clap louder. Which I’ll say, beyond being, I think, evidence of someone who maybe doesn’t even understand the difference between strategy and tactics setting that aside. There’s something actually quite disturbing about the fact that high level American officials are talking about war as if it were a video game, which I hear is not impressing military veterans about this. Like they’re embarrassed by the idea that this is being treated like Call of Duty. Before, David, before you jump back in, I have a question for both of you, which is that I keep hearing that the Trump administration is surprised that this didn’t go like Venezuela. That can’t be true. Someone tell me that they understood the difference between Venezuela and Iran. Someone it can be true, Michelle. It can be true. Because here’s what I Donald Trump, I think, has trouble understanding the true believer. In other words, the person who actually, really, truly believes what they say because he doesn’t believe in anything. Well, he’s not a true believer. And guess what. He has gotten where he’s gotten by steamrolling over a lot of people and exposing a lot of people to not be true believers. So think about how many people in the Republican Party have bent the knee to Trump, in spite of all of the depredations, all of the corruption, all of the departures from previous conservative orthodoxy. I mean, heck is owned vice president compared him to Hitler at one point. Marco Rubio, his favorite, arguably his favorite member of the cabinet right now, was virulently against Trump. And so he’s seen this happen so many times where people who have postured themselves as true people of true conviction have just yielded, and that now he’s taking on as opposed to a strongman regime in South America, which has some ideological components, of course, but it’s still ultimately a strongman regime. And then you go to Iran, which is an Islamic Revolutionary regime, that one of the ways it cemented itself in Iran was by fighting a war with Iraq in such total disregard of the lives of its own citizens confronting American power. And we can hit them and we can hit them and we can hit them. And the true believers are still going to believe. And that is something that everyone who’s fought in the war on terror really understands. We really get it. We know it in our DNA, that we’re dealing with an enemy that really believes. And then Trump here is confronting this. And I feel like it’s just kind of doesn’t compute to him. And you see it in some of this temper tantrum that he’s pitching over. Why are they closing the Strait. We won. What are they doing. He doesn’t understand. He’s making the very fundamental mistake that so many war leaders make, which is totally misunderstanding the mind of the enemy. I think the observation that Trump does not understand people who actually believe things is so true. It’s maybe I mean, there are many things wrong with him. But in terms of just political strategy and his ability to operate in the political world, I think this is the big one. It leaves him ill equipped with domestic opposition, for one. But it also leaves him ill equipped on the foreign stage. He thinks everyone is as pliable with treats as he is, and they just aren’t. Oh, O.K. So in terms of repercussions, I get the sense I’ve always had the sense he just has no grasp that things could later come back to bite him or have an enduring impact beyond, that went boom. So he started this war, caught the American people and all of our allies completely off guard. Only Israel seemed to be in the loop. So how is this sitting with our NATO allies. And are we going to see of permanent ish shift with global alliances going forward. I’m so glad you brought up that word permanent ish, which should be a word if it’s not. But I think this is really important for people to understand is that he is breaking things you can’t fix just within the next election. And one of the things he’s breaking is our relationship with our NATO allies. Because think of it from this standpoint. If you’re a defense planner, a defense planners plan on the 20 to 25 to sometimes 30, 40 year time horizons. And so if you’re planning and are you at this point, can you count on the United States of America. Even if Trump loses, you’re one election away from another Trump figure, you would need a generation of Trump like rejection of Trump like figures before you could reincorporate a consistent America into your defense planning. Because the one thing, it’s not in the United States. It’s not just Trump, it’s Trump in the 77, 78 million people who voted for him. And that is the message that has been sent. It’s the message that’s being absorbed and it’s going to haunt us for a generation. But other than that, everything’s fine. Jamelle I think that’s exactly right. As long as there’s a possibility that swing voters in Wisconsin could deliver the country to a guy like Trump, there’s you’d have to be you’d have to be delusional if you were in another country to trust us for anything but the immediate short term. There’s no reason to. So, David, you wrote that the global rules based order is done. Was Trump’s kind of transactional approach the final blow, or was it already moving in that direction before he entered the room. Let me put it this way. We’ve had a global, rules based order that’s always been teetering from the moment it was created. So it’s always been relatively fragile, in part because had the five powers of the Security Council Russia, China, France, Great Britain, and the United States. So long as the most powerful of those five, the United States was largely in agreement, never perfectly, but largely in agreement with the rules based order. It could stick together. It would be like this tape and baling wire and everything, but it was holding together enough to do the number one thing it was designed to do, which was to prevent great power conflict. But if you take the most powerful of those five countries and you remove them from the category of largely siding with the rules based order like Britain and France, and turn them into something much more like an independent, autonomous actor like Russia and China, then you fracture it, and we’re already entering into a moment of real peril as a result. I know we want to move on to the next topic, but just to add to this and actually to be a little tiny bit exculpatory for Trump with regards to the rules based order, President Biden took a blind eye to Israel’s horribly destructive war in Gaza. Like in as evidence mounted that the Israeli military was wantonly bombing civilians in Gaza. Biden continued to provide arms and that as much as anything is really put a really convinced people that the notion that there are rules that nations must follow is one on the decline, that the US would turn a blind eye to really awful behavior. As is often the case with Trump, it is taking existing trends. And then just like running, dashing down the track. So hypocrisy in American behavior, both its own behavior and its approach to its allies, has now been embraced in a kind of nihilistic might makes right way. But you can see the continuities there. All right. So we’ve spread the blame a little. That seems. That seems fair. So Trump’s approach to the war seems all over the place and hopelessly muddled. But when it comes to what he wants back here with things that directly affect his fortunes the midterm elections, it’s pretty clear exactly what he wants and how he wants to achieve it. And in this case, I’m talking specifically about the SAVE Act. Jamelle, you’ve been writing about this. You want to just start us off by laying out what the SAVE Act is, and why the president is so fixated on it. Sure so the safeguard American Voter Eligibility. American act is Trump’s current obsession. Was it two weeks ago that he said he would not sign any New Bills unless this was passed into law. And what the SAVE Act ostensibly is meant to do is protect the integrity of American elections from voter fraud and citizen voting. Now, this raises a natural question. Well, how serious of a problem are voter fraud and citizen voting. In part because the provisions of the SAVE Act, and in particular, a pretty strict requirement to prove your citizenship in person, registering to vote could potentially disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans. So if that’s the risk disenfranchising tens of millions of Americans, keeping them from exercising their right to vote, their constitutional right to vote, which, although is not explicitly written in the Constitution, I think is heavily implied by the Constitution and its amendments. This how big is this problem. And it turns out that this problem doesn’t exist. It’s a fake problem. Voter fraud. I’ll put it this way. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, very conservative think tank, has a database that purports to show all the examples of voter fraud over the course of several decades, and what the Heritage Foundation finds is that effectively, it’s not an actual problem. And the thing, the times when it does happen, most often than not, it’s a mistake. It’s someone who thought that they were. They could register to vote and they registered to vote. So it’s most often just kind of simple administrative mistakes, not malicious activity. And certainly not as the president portrays as Speaker Mike Johnson portrays an organized effort to defraud Americans of their votes by hundreds of thousands of millions of people going to illicitly and illegally vote. So I. For Trump to say back and he has said, this is a means to reduce the electorate so that Republicans have an easier time to win. I’m not sure that’s how it would actually work out in practice, but that’s the intent. And I do think it’s just vitally important to say that there is simply no world in which it is justifiable to deprive, potentially deprive tens of millions of Americans of the right to vote in order to prevent a nonexistent problem. It’s like going to someone in Rhode Island and saying, do you want to spend a million on volcano insurance. Why are you against volcano insurance, Jamelle. Aren’t you aren’t you worried about volcanoes. Do you want molten rock to destroy your home. A sensible person would pay for the volcano insurance. Jamelle is pro lava. That’s right. He is. He is pro lava. So here’s one thing. That is, there’s a couple of things that are driving me crazy about this debate. Number one, just a couple. Go ahead. Just a couple. Well, it’s just the two top, top two things. Number one, this is not when somebody describes this as a voter ID bill. They are being deceptive. First let me just say, I have 0 objection to a normal voter ID requirement. In other words, you have a driver’s license. You walk in show your driver’s license or your state ID to show that I am the person I claim to be. I’ve done that for years and years and years. Voting in Tennessee. Show my ID. No big deal. This is not a pure voter ID bill. It is not. It is saying that when you’re registering, you’re going to have to prove citizenship. Now, how do you prove citizenship. Well, there’s a list of approved ways to demonstrate citizenship in the bill. That includes things like a passport, which a lot of Americans don’t have or it includes a birth certificate, which tons of married women, for example, don’t have a birth certificate that matches their current last name. Your driver’s license in most states, even your REAL ID driver’s license isn’t going to be enough. Now, there are a few states. There’s a handful of states where the driver’s license is also effective as proof of citizenship. But there’s a specific list that is not just show up with your driver’s license. And so this is something that is adding layers. It is adding hurdles that I think the vast majority of Americans aren’t even aware of because it’s been presented to them as a voter ID bill, and they’ve got a driver’s license in their pocket, and they don’t think a thing about it. They don’t realize that there is this extra requirement for registration different from what they’ve experienced before, and that millions of them do not currently have access to the necessary documents. And to get access is going to cost money, and it’s going to cost time. The second thing that’s really interesting, and Jamil, in your latest piece, you touched on this. I have Republicans thought this through because that’s what I want to know. If you look at the numbers in 2024, Kamala Harris won college educated voters by more than 10 points. Trump won non-college voters by more than 10 points. And there were more than there were more non-college voters than college voters. O.K fast forward to right now. Who do you think has their citizenship documents squared away. More college voters are not college. It’s college voters by a mile. Well, one of the things that would be interesting to see how it panned out is I think mail in voters would have to start submitting copies of their identification. Now, if you’re me and you have a printer at home that you can easily copy your driver’s license with that’s not a problem. I think that Republicans are working on this. And to clarify, most Republican lawmakers are not that keen on doing things that would throttle mail in voting. This is Trump’s personal obsession. He’s still bitter about 2020, the blue shift, all that stuff. But I think Republicans, to some degree aren’t factoring in the fact that used to they were seen as the party who had the most reliable voters. But if you have switched to being the party that has to rely on voting to be easy enough that non-regular voters are going to put you over the top, you should really be doing a gut check on what it means to just. All of these things are geared at making it less convenient for people to vote. And I’m not sure that’s going to pan out how they think it’s going to. I’m tied. I have a very maximalist view of voting and voter participation. I think it should be as easy as possible. Like if we’re not going to have universal voting, of which I think I have been persuaded of would be desirable, where you just kind have to go out and vote. You don’t have to necessarily cast a ballot for a candidate. But like you, as a civic ritual, we all go out and vote. But short of universal voting, I think it should be as easy as possible. You want to mail in a ballot. Go for it. You want to vote 10 days, two weeks before the election. Go for it. It doesn’t matter to me if the trade would be an ID requirement, with IDs being readily available, that you can easily go obtain an ID to prove your identification, and then you can vote. It’s amazingly easy. The barriers are incredibly low. I would take that trade in a heartbeat. But if what you want to do is disenfranchise a bunch of working class white voters who are the bedrock of your coalition, I’m also not necessarily going to stop you. I’m going to say you shouldn’t do it for ethical and moral reasons. But if you insist on it, the safe America Act is not supposed. It’s not expected to pass the Senate. So what is the point of spending so much time and political capital trying to push it through not to be putting too fine a point of it, but especially when it seems like there are better uses of this president’s attention and time. Jamelle I mean, I’d say this is Trump’s obsession. As you noted, Michelle, he is still incredibly bitter about the 2020 election. He still complains about not winning the popular vote in the 2016 election. It’s like a fundamental injury to his ego that he has lost an election and he blames everything but himself. And so it’s his personal obsession and the Republican Party as it exists. It’s just not it has built itself around satisfying this guy’s ego demands. I have no doubt that Republicans with their right minds, it’s not all of them, but Republicans with their right minds, understand the points you’ve been making about the basic counter productiveness of this legislation, but also the muscle of opposing the president on one of his priorities. It’s just something they’ve never exercised. And so they’re going to go through this. They’re going to waste floor time on the Senate. When you’re right, there are better things that could be that they could be doing. There’s a whole war that they’re fighting. They may, they might want to eat up floor time talking about that, debating that, dealing with legislation with that. But it’s the president wants it. And he’s pouting and holding his breath and stomping his feet. And so they are they’re going to humor tantrum David. It seems like it could be not so hot for their political fortunes. In a year when voters seem to want to talk about other things and they’re concerned that their leaders aren’t focusing enough on ways to make their life better. I mean, do we really think that this is what is driving the majority of the American public crazy. The idea that elections need to have a better ID requirement. I mean, you raise a really good point, and that is that we’ve been having this pattern in American politics where the vast bulk of voters are saying, hey, guys, I want prosperity and stability. This is what we want prosperity and stability. And every two years, they come forward and they vote for prosperity and stability according to their best assessment at the time, and then recede back and get back in their lives. In the meantime, the activist base never recedes back anywhere, and it just keeps hammering away at its pet issues. In this case, the President of the United States and his MAGA activist base have this same pet issue. And so they are hammering away at this when they’re about to experience a general electorate that a general election electorate that’s going to come forward and say, where is my peace. Where is my prosperity. Where is my stability. And I think they’re going to experience a tremendous electoral consequence. And I feel like I live in DC, I feel like I should just go down and stand on the Capitol steps waiting for the Republican lawmakers to come through and just start screaming. He’s not on the ballot. He’s not going to pay for this. But you guys are really risking getting your butts thumped this year because he can get away with things even when he is on the ballot that this team cannot. His team does not do that well when they are answering for what he has been doing. And it just everything we’re looking at with the midterms suggests that they are in trouble, and he’s not making it better. I mean, a war in Iran is definitely not what people signed up for, much less all of this weird conspiracy mongering and clinging to 2020, which is just beyond ill. And instead they’re clogging up some housing bill that the bipartisan housing bill that they were very interested in waving around as an achievement. No, that’s just sitting there stuck because he can’t quite get past his pet obsession anyway. It just boggles the mind that so much important stuff is going to get left to wither, because he is just he can’t let go, man. Can’t let go. It’s astonishing. The generic ballot right now for Republicans is devastating. Like Democrats are up plus 8 plus 9. In the generic ballot, if the. Even if the Iran war were not causing a global energy spike, the cost of energy going up, it would be an anchor on the president, on the Republican Party. But the fact that I drive an electric car. So I’m a little bit gas prices don’t think about them too much these days. But I do notice them. And I’ve noticed gas go up like $0.50 in a couple of weeks. Diesel has gone up to $5 a gallon. And if anything people were voting for it was cheaper gas. Well, rural America is going to feel it much more than say, me or David, because we’re in urban areas. We have public transportation. But right. So he’s literally taking money out of people’s pockets with decisions he’s making. And this is going to trickle down to Republican lawmakers like people. People are not going to respond well to this. And that’s on top of the fact that Democratic energy around the election is sky high. So you’re going to have lots of Democrats motivated to vote. You have lots of Republicans discouraged. You have lots of infrequent voters who are just angry and not going to come out to vote. And it could be a total collapse. And I do not understand. I just cannot get into the psychology of a Republican lawmaker who looks at the objective political conditions of this year and says to themselves, I’m going to hug the president even closer. It makes no sense. All right. I think let’s leave the doom and gloom there and the predictions and move on to everyone’s favorite piece of this, which is recommendations. Jamelle, what do you got for show and tell this week. I watch a lot of movies with my kids. That’s how it goes. And I recently showed them a movie that I liked a lot when I was their age. And it is the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film directed by Steve Barron. But more relevantly for our purposes, the production company Golden Harvest, which is a Hong Kong production company, did a lot of martial arts films. And so I have fond memories of this. From when I was a little kid. And I’m watching this again with my kids, and I’m like, O.K, first of all, this movie much darker than I remember it being. It’s kind of like it’s actually like quite the Ninja Turtles is dark. The first Ninja Turtles movie is quite gritty. And then the fight choreography is excellent. It’s exceptionally well made. The suits, the puppets are by the Henson companies or they look great. Yes, yes. So yeah, I don’t know. I’ve never seen that. It’s fun for kids, but also it’s a legitimately good movie. The equals are terrible, the equals are genuine. The kids will lap up any slop will give to them. But the first movie is quite good. O.K, David. So I’m going to go in a completely different direction here to anything I’ve ever recommended before. I’m going to go food. All right. And I’m going to ask Americans to reconsider the McDonald’s double cheeseburger. No, no. Yes no Yes. Yes O.K. So when you travel as much as I do, and you begin to reacquaint yourself with what are the good fast foods to eat that are like the perfect size of meal and sticktuitiveness. And I just want to say, I think too many Americans sleep on the McDonald’s McDonald’s double cheeseburger. It is the perfectly sized sandwich. It is perfectly flavorful. And then when matched with of course, the medium fry, it really is the most efficient, high quality. Lunch food that consistently reliable. Always good. I just I want to present it to the listener. If you have written off McDonald’s, give the McDonald’s double cheeseburger another try. O.K, I’ll back you on the fries, but that’s as far as I’m going. Also, shout out to the Taco Bell bean and cheese and rice burrito. Grilled I will strong do me some tea. Bell you always. You always gotta. You can. If you order from a kiosk, you can get any kind of modification you want. So you have to request it grilled and it’s terrific. O.K O.K. Well I’m going in the direction of music for reasons that I can’t even remember why I have of late, just been revisiting Lucinda Williams basically car wheels on a gravel road 1998 complete masterpiece. Can’t recommend highly enough. But the nice thing about talking to my phone is I can just say, play me Lucinda Williams, and it’ll just go through all of the catalog, whatever I want. And then by chance, I discovered that she is going to be in DC for a concert or two in May. I’ve rounded up a bunch of women. We’re going to. We’re going to crash this. It’s going to be fantastic, but it’s been a while. I want to recommend just going back, listening to her greats and remembering a time when we were all more naive and optimistic. Love it. And with that, we’re going to land this plane. Guys, thank you so much. I couldn’t do I couldn’t make sense of all this without you. Let’s do it again. Thanks, Michel. Always happy to chat.
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