Episode 5278: President Trump Delivers Another Ultimatum For Iran, Deadline April 7th At 8pm
President Trump delivers an April 7th ultimatum to Iran, threatening destruction of bridges and power plants while hinting at regime change plans akin to post-WWII Germany. The episode contrasts this military aggression with diplomatic efforts, noting over 12,000 sorties alongside concerns over a proposed 4.4 million square foot Florida data center linked to potential Chinese involvement. Discussions also cover General Hegseth's controversial "no quarter" comments, OpenAI's industrial policy, and Sam Altman's trustworthiness, ultimately painting a picture of an administration prioritizing economic coercion and strategic dominance over traditional diplomatic norms. [Automatically generated summary]
To open it immediately, but there has to be a mechanism between CENTCOM, the Revolutionary Guard, what's left the Iranian government, and President Trump's government to make sure that there's some sort of mechanism to work towards a full opening.
It may not happen right away because this thing could take a week or so to actually do it, to actually get the straight open, but I think that has to be part of it.
If not, you know, you've put, here's the thing, you've put a deadline, like the president said, let's not lose track of what he said, he said, They asked for seven days.
And I'm just going on with what the president says.
He says, They asked for seven.
I gave them 10.
And by the way, since I didn't want to do anything on the day after Easter, I threw in another day, a bonus day.
It's 11.
That's enough.
If you do more, I think you're sending a wrong signal.
As much as people are looking for an off ramp here, you may have to drop a hammer on these people because right now they believe, and I think Treaty Parsier is right, in their mind, they feel they have the initiative.
They feel they've shifted the center of gravity of this war to the Persian Gulf.
Given the magnificent result we had on this operation to get the pilot back, I think the president now is in a situation that if they try to play games, he drops a hammer again, and then we see where we are.
I'm going to throw it to you very quickly, though.
I was in the trading pits when the Gulf Desert Storm happened.
I'll never forget, right the day of the Desert Storm, the night of oil had just run up from $25 to $40 a barrel in anticipation of a A massive drawn out war with a Middle Eastern country, producing country, oil producing country.
By morning, it had shot back down because we obliterated them in the air.
And the point is, this time's different, Steve, because we did the same thing.
We took out their defenses, but oil, the traders, for whatever reason, aren't seeing this as an opportunity to bring it back down yet.
But if that's the case, you're going to have to have more people like me because our country was being ripped off on trade and everything for many years until I came along.
So if that's the case, you're going to have to have more people to get into the objective area.
During this engagement, one of the Sandy aircraft, the one primarily responsible for communicating with the downed pilot, was hit by enemy fire.
This pilot continued to fight, continued the mission, and then upon exit, flew his aircraft into another country and determined that the airplane was not landable.
This was one of our A 10 Sandy aircraft.
The pilot then made the decision to eject over friendly territory and was quickly and safely recovered and is doing fine.
After picking up Dude 44 Alpha, the HH 60 Jolly Green Fight, Was engaged by every single person in Iran who had a small arms weapon.
And one of the aircraft, the trailing aircraft, took several hits.
The crew sustained minor injury and they are going to be fine.
When he was finally able to activate his emergency transponder, his first message was simple and it was powerful.
He sent a message God is good.
In that moment of isolation and danger, his faith and fighting spirit shone through.
You see, shot down on a Friday, Good Friday, hidden in a cave, a crevice all of Saturday, and rescued on Sunday, flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday.
A pilot reborn, all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing.
If I had my choice, if I had my choice, yeah, because I'm a businessman first.
With Venezuela, as you know, the war was over in about 45 minutes, and we have great people running Venezuela, very good people.
I mean, the relationship is good.
And we are a partner with Venezuela.
And we've taken hundreds of millions of barrels, hundreds of millions.
Over 100 million barrels already is in Houston, refined, and out.
And paid for that war many, many times over.
Many times.
And you know the old days, to the victim.
Okay, you know that.
To the winner belong the spoils, go the spoils.
And I've said, why don't we use it?
To the victor.
Go the spoils, and we don't have that.
We haven't had that in this country probably in 100 years because even the Second World War, you look at the Second World War, we didn't have it with the Second World War.
We helped rebuild all those countries.
We rebuilt Germany.
How about Germany telling us that, well, it's not their war.
We had nothing to do with it.
They wanted me to go and tell them everything I was doing.
We didn't know anything about it.
Well, if I would have told them, they would have leaked it and we wouldn't have been nearly as successful, possibly, right?
But to the victor belong the spoils.
So we haven't heard that in, I think, maybe hundreds of years.
unidentified
Mr. President, are you willing to end this conflict with Iran charging tolls for passage through the strait?
It means you use any means possible to kill people.
You know, you're not going to let people escape.
You're not going to take any prisoners.
You're basically going to rape, pillage, and plunder, taking it back to the 17th century.
And Nicole, what we're talking about is behavior that modern societies have condemned and said we ought to at least.
Provide dead guidelines for those who have to execute violence.
Those are soldiers.
And, you know, I'm going to go back to something you said a minute ago because I've trained for 40 years as a soldier and as a commander.
And when you're an officer in the United States Army, you're loyal to a couple of things.
You're primarily loyal to the Constitution.
You are also loyal to your superiors if they give, as you said, Lawful orders.
When they start giving unlawful orders, you find a way to push back on them and to make sure they adjust their approach.
But you also are loyal to the soldiers that are under your command.
So those three loyalties sometimes are conflicting.
So I'm sure there's a lot of military commanders right now, a lot of senior officers who are saying to themselves, I can't obey an unlawful order.
I can't do things that I know are absolutely wrong.
But they also feel like they have to provide support for their soldiers who don't just get to quit.
They have to stay in the military and potentially see an uprising in all of these things.
So the senior military officers are in a real quandary on this one because they know they can't do some of the things that the president is asking them to do.
They have a secretary of defense who has continually said, lethality is better than legality or words to that effect.
So it's really causing some dynamics within those who are thinking soldiers saying, How do I continue to serve my Constitution and live by the rules that are in law and still conduct these kind of actions which are horribly immoral and illegal?
It is Easter Monday, 6 April in the year of our Lord, 2026, that you see what President Trump is up against.
They're going, oh, these are all war crimes.
They're not war crimes.
It's ridiculous.
And Pete is laying out what a battle strategy is.
He's not saying to kill surveillance.
Look at the number of sorties.
You can tell this.
There's some dispute whether it's 11,000 or 12,500, but there's a ton of combat missions and a ton of weapons that have been dropped.
And relatively few civilian casualties.
It's kind of shocking how low the civilian casualties are because people have gone out of their way to make sure they're hitting military targets about the electric grid and the oil resources.
They're inextricably linked with the war machine of the theocratic government.
Like I said, we're in this thing now.
You got to win it.
The President of the United States has said hey, they gave us a proposal.
It's significant, but it's not there, it's not enough.
And he doubled and tripled down today in the press conference with what he's going to do.
I think you see the valor of our arms in this amazing evolution that took place, this mission that took place to retrieve the pilot.
It ties in with what we did in the June 12 day war, what we've done so far.
Well, we started as just a group of people that were trying to get information to our city commissioners and representatives because all they were hearing.
About hyperscale data centers was all the glorious things that the money was going to be able to bring to the city.
And what we were seeing definitely showed a lot of negative sides that are being affected to every other data center in the areas that are being thrust upon by these things.
And we needed to give the other side of what was happening a voice because right now, All of our representatives are hearing and seeing is the money that they will be getting from tax dollars from this big development coming into our area.
And they're not listening to the people of the area who are saying they don't want this here in our city limits.
There are smaller data centers that already exist in the area, but this hyperscale one is enormous 4.4 million square feet.
And we still haven't gotten anything nailed down on exactly what equipment they're going to be putting in, in the way of generators and so forth, because as we understand it, they're going to have to build a power plant to support this in particular so that.
All of the area grids don't have too much of a pull on them, and it doesn't affect our prices of our electricity, as the commissioners seem to think it won't happen.
They got a lot of the zoning changes done without the community really having a clue as to what was happening.
But as soon as we started finding out about it and we started doing the research on how large this thing was and all the water usage and the power that it was going to be pulling and the noise it was going to be making, we started putting up a little more of a fight, and more and more people will keep coming into the fight.
And it got to the point where We had to organize formally because our representatives don't seem to be listening to us.
All they're looking at is the money that they're going to get.
They're actually going to be getting a loan from the developer when this is all approved for $10 million to improve the infrastructure of the city.
So they're getting paid so that they can make City Hall bigger.
It's not going to do much for the residents.
Job wise, we're not going to see any permanent jobs because the 50.
Or so, people that are going to be working in this 4.4 million square foot area are going to be coming from other places because they're going to have to be specialists in the computer technologies, AI technology, the hardware that's in, and even the construction jobs are specialty jobs.
I was in highway construction for 20 years, and I can tell you that this is not going to be the local contractor that's going to come in here and lay the concrete for this.
This is going to be specialists from all over the country that are building these things all over the country, bouncing in to Do the work and bouncing back out with their help.
They're claiming they're going to be 465 employees, but they will not give us a separation on how many employees are going to be offsite employees.
Because they can have somebody in the Philippines or India doing all of the data entry and programming.
And getting paid from this facility.
But on site, none of these data centers have very many people manning them at all.
As a matter of fact, the more technology that they come up with, the fewer jobs in the data centers themselves are available because they're using AI to take their own jobs.
The developers refuse to tell us who's going to be running this facility.
They have refused to confirm or deny that this may even be a Chinese group that buys it up and operates it.
We had a large meeting where the developer did a nice little presentation, and he was asked point blank if he could guarantee that it wouldn't be a foreign nation that bought and ran this hyperscale data center.
Well, our plan is it's planning and zoning is the meeting tomorrow night.
And we'd like to convince that board that it doesn't fit in with our community.
It shouldn't fit in with our community with the way that our charter is already written up.
It should not fit in.
And we're going to be speaking, trying to reach them because, unlike our commissioners, we'll be spending the money that they get from the taxes that this will.
Bring in this board won't be enticed, hopefully, by that money that's going to be coming in.
They won't let that blur their idea of what the plan for the future of our city is.
They're going to vote on changes to the agreements that they've already made for the changes on the planning, the PUD development zoning that they've given this.
It's currently not set up for industrial.
The build that this will be, and they're making those changes.
Our main fight's going to be on the 14th when the commission themselves are voting on the contract.
The third contract they've been handed by the developers.
That I've gotten a look at the contract that they put in in the agenda today for next week's meeting, and it doesn't say anything about what they're putting into this building.
They've got a lot of contractual.
Information, but no details on equipment or anything like that.
And that's one of the selling points that the developers are using with our commissioners saying that they're using the newest technology that won't have any of the problems that other data centers are having.
Now, for us, we've got the watch, it's watchdogsoffortmead.com is an address to check out.
And we also have a Facebook page, and the pinned post at the top of our page has details on our commissioners and who to speak with to give your opinion and voice your voice.
A plan because of the power of our military where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o'clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding, and never to be used again.
I mean, complete demolition by 12 o'clock, and it'll happen over a period of four hours if we wanted to.
We don't want that to happen.
We may even get involved with helping them rebuild their nation.
And you know what?
If that's the case, the last thing we want to do is start with power plants, which are among the most expensive things, and bridges.
You saw the bridge.
The bridge went.
We were very close to a deal.
And then I got a call from Mr. Whitcoff, Mr. Kushner, and JD saying, I think they're breaking the deal.
I said, tell them that's okay.
Don't worry about it.
But tell them to look out their window and watch.
And within 45 minutes, I gave the order to knock out the biggest bridge.
I gave the order to knock out the biggest bridge in, I believe, the Middle East, but the biggest bridge in Iran.
And within 10 minutes after I gave that order, that bridge was over.
Let's leave the nation building topic for a different day.
Let's get through this ultimatum.
Dr. Thayer, we had Trita Parsi on a day, and I do think that there are elements of the Republican Guard, and I think a lot of the elements that are running the show right now that think they're winning.
They think that the initiative has shifted ever since the Israelis.
Bombed the gas field with the Qatar.
You can see that shifted the center of gravity of this war, this battle, down to the Gulf, made the Strait of Hormuz a major strategic entity in this, even more so than it normally would be.
They think they've got the initiative.
They think they're winning.
And so the president's given an ultimatum and he's pardoned more forces in the area.
And he's saying, hey, look, if I don't feel that I've got at least the movement or some sort of deal that looks like it's real, and I think somebody to actually enforce the deal on your side starting at 8 o'clock tomorrow, we're going to take this thing up a notch.
Yeah, it was an important press conference, I think, for several reasons.
First, he illuminated the diplomatic track.
So the diplomatic track is active.
And, Steve, we could see a breakthrough.
At some point in time, right?
You never want to box Trump in, of course, and surprise is something that goes hand in glove with President Trump.
Second, the military track is proceeding exceptionally well ahead of schedule.
Thirdly, he's broadening the target set tomorrow, right?
So we're going to go after the infrastructure target, economic and infrastructure targets explicitly.
All three of those.
Reinforce one another, the diplomatic track, the military track, and then broadening that target set to put more pain on the Iranians.
You're right, there's certainly going to be a coterie of Iranians who believe that they're winning this and that they need to stick through to the bitter end.
And if they just endure more pain, endure another day, another week, et cetera, they're going to come out with a semblance of victory.
The last point I would make again is that.
We should expect this to go on for weeks.
As Secretary Rubio and President Trump himself have said multiple times now, that this is going to be going on for another two weeks or another four weeks, right, through April, at least.
So, unless there's a break on the diplomatic track, which could certainly happen, this is going to be going on for some time.
More pain is going to be applied on the Iranians with the expectation.
That they do have a breaking point, and that is going to be reached when the economic target set is similarly attraded, the way the military target set is greatly attraded, obviously.
So, this whole initial idea of essentially state collapse, because you're seeing from some of the top economic papers around the world that their economy now, a big part of it has gone to barter because they've been cut off in many different areas, although not totally cut off with getting money because I don't think Dubai has done that yet.
If you're talking about state collapse, how much intent?
I mean, look, we've had 12,000, 13,000 sorties already.
On these people.
How much do you think you continue to go to get actually?
Because this gets beyond, I want people to understand, this is beyond the original Captain Fennell and CENCOM, Admiral Cooper's presentation of defanging and decline.
You're basically saying we got through pretty much the defanging and decline.
Now we've got to make these people aren't paying attention to the guys that run it.
We've got to get state collapse on top of them.
And we do that by a, as you call it, different target set.
So he's gone after the military target set, it is getting near completed, the 13,000, and we're well into that, obviously, north of 11,000 targets hit.
But those are going to be precision targets directed against, if you will, military command and control, other military targets, the missiles, the Air Force, the Navy, et cetera.
The damage to the economic target set is going to become, is In a military sense, easier to inflict.
They're softer targets, right?
They're countervalue targets.
And the effect on the economy, of course, is explicit, right?
That's the point of targeting them.
They're going to do great damage to the Iranian economy.
And that's going to facilitate, as you said, perhaps, you know, it's going to generate instability in the regime.
It's going to lengthen the time that Iran needs to rebuild.
And it's going to inflict more pain on the Iranian government.
As well.
So the diplomatic track is moving, the military track is continuing, and now President Trump has said we're broadening on the economic target set.
You're right.
The Iranians are certainly, again, a group of them that are going to see this through the bitter end.
And it's a question of whether this pain, right?
This is the application of pain, after all, to coerce Iran to come around our way of seeing things, whether that's going to be sufficient or not.
We should expect that Iran is still capable of complex military operations and surprise.
So I go back to the Diego Garcia attack, right, with the IRBMs, intermediate ranges.
Ballistic missiles.
We should expect that the Iranians are going to have some tricks up their sleeve, and they're not anticipating that, whether that's in the Gulf or elsewhere, Steve, I think is important to bear in mind.
Have strategic bombing look, you take three separate time frames Japan in World War II, Vietnam in the Vietnam War in the 60s, early 70s, and the Persians today.
Did we understand their cultures well enough?
Because, look, in Japan, I mean, we firebombed Tokyo.
We firebombed virtually every industrial city in mainland Japan.
We were getting ready for a four million man invasion, and we were looking at a million casualties.
And the people didn't, in the military, I don't think LeMay even knew about it.
Or wasn't very familiar with the atomic weapon.
We dropped two atomic weapons.
Remember, we had to drop two atomic weapons on them.
The first one didn't get their attention enough.
My point is that the strategic bombing in 1944 and 45 didn't break the Japanese.
Vietnam, I was reading the other day, I think it was something, I don't think I got this number wrong.
It was 5 million sorties or something over the entire length of the war, right?
And they still fought on to the end.
The Persians here, it doesn't seem like, and here's the thing I'm not saying they are winning.
But you can tell their belief is that they're winning.
Is this strategic bombing, which we'll go to, on not directly military targets, but the infrastructure, the power grids, the oil, the things that provide the wherewithal for their military complex?
So it's certainly not a war crime.
That's ridiculous.
But do you think that brings them, do you think that gets their attention?
Or are these folks in this asymmetric war they're fighting just going to hunker down more?
Well, we want to keep in mind, of course, that what the military won in North Vietnam with those campaigns, again, joint campaigns, the Navy, Army, Air Force working together, the Marines, Henry Kissinger gave away in the accord, right?
He wanted out of Vietnam and put the North Vietnamese in a position where they were going to be able to conquer South Vietnam two years later.
By March 73, of course, in April 75, North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam.
The military can win conflicts, but the civilians can give it away, right?
The diplomats can give it away.
So they have to work hand in glove.
What the military is achieving in Iran, right, the diplomats are going to have to secure.
Steve, people can reach me at Brad Thayer at X and Bradley Thayer at Getter and on Truth.
So I think I'm very pleased to talk through this as we really look at the consequences of this war, how it's going to terminate, and to recognize that.
As we go into that economic target set, the infrastructure economic targets, it's going to take Iran years to rebuild from this, conceivably.
And it's not going to be a threat to regional hegemony.
If you recall, President Trump mentioned that near the outset of the war, where he talked about one of our aims here was to ensure that Iran does not stand any chance of being a regional hegemon.
Going after that economic target set is really going to damage the Iranian economy, clearly.
And coupled with the destruction, the defanging, decline, they will not be a hegemon regionally or otherwise for quite a while.
Dr. Thayer, we'll see you tomorrow.
Thank you for your time and attention on this matter, as the president says.
Joe, you're going to hold over until the next hour, but I got to ask you you've done a magnificent job, Humans First, all these different groups we're working with to really stop the AI amnesty the first time in the big, beautiful bill, stop it the second time in the.
NDAA, the must pass NDA.
They come up with a framework.
The framework's kind of shattered right now.
David Sachs has been relieved for cause.
He's gone, no longer.
AIs are.
I feel like we're winning, but now we got Sam Altman and others that are stepping forward.
Am I misreading this?
They're now coming forward and said, hey, we're the guys that can put this all together.
We're the good guys.
AI is coming faster than you think, harder than you think, bigger than you think.
And you better embrace us and you better embrace us today.
And today, OpenAI released their industrial policy for the intelligence age.
They subtitle it Ideas to Keep People First.
Basically, it's a very vague set of policy recommendations, everything from how to tax companies that are automating, redistribute the wealth, turn the entirety of the American society into cyborgs, and mitigate the risks that they say are imminent.
Of cyber attacks that are enabled by AI systems such as ChatGPT, bioweapon production, which would be enabled by systems like ChatGPT, and of course, loss of control.
What happens if the AI that they create goes rogue?
They suggest using government agencies to audit all AI companies.
But I thought it interesting.
They focus in on CASI, the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, which is really very much kind of a nascent organization still.
In the Trump administration.
It's very unclear exactly where it goes, but you can see that OpenAI is trying to position themselves as a partner with the Trump administration.
And also, the language about wealth redistribution makes me think that they are preparing perhaps for a change of guard after November.
And it's much more, I think, Democrat friendly than Republican or Trump friendly.
It's worth noting, though, Steve, that the same day, actually, hours before.
They released this and the Mike Allen interview on Axios with Sam Altman.
Ronan Farrow at the New Yorker released a very long, in depth article painting Sam Altman in the worst possible light through the eyes of his peers as former executives at OpenAI.
It's entitled Sam Altman May Control Our Future.
Can he be trusted?
Interesting.
That was a question that Mike Allen asked Sam Altman directly.
And of course, he weaseled and waffled around it as Sam Altman is wont to do.
Want to see the semis and want to see the factory floor.
Birch Gold, we're talking a lot of economics tomorrow because this war is obviously centered around the economics of oil, also the U.S. dollar, end of the dollar empire.
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