President Trump whimsically threatens to glass Iran, White House leakers claim blowing something up doesn’t destroy it, and CNN defends friendly “Death to America” chants.
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If you were the president of the United States and you had just negotiated a tenuous ceasefire between two nations that hate each other more than any other two nations on earth, one of which has a nuclear weapons program of dubious legality and the other of which has a nuclear weapons program of certain illegality until you blew it up three days ago.
If you were that guy and you had managed to achieve an improbable peace without escalating the war and destabilizing the region, you would probably play it cool for a few days, right?
You'd try not to rock the boat too much.
That's what you would do.
Because you are not Donald Trump, who instead posted this to social media.
The country's got to be in the building in the ceiling.
Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
I don't have to tell you that that post is hilarious, but what I might have to tell you is that that post also achieved at least three strategic political objectives and exemplifies a political posture that goes all the way back to Julius Caesar on Michael Knowles' The Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show.
The New York Times has a new attack on President Trump.
This is the, I think, the desperation play for them.
It's that Iran's nuclear sites might not have been totally obliterated.
He didn't start World War III.
He didn't get American troops killed.
He didn't, check, check, check, check, check.
Okay, well, I guess the best way.
Maybe it didn't work.
We'll get into what the reports actually say.
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Bom, bom, bom, bom, bomb, Iran.
Okay, what does this do?
It's really funny.
It's really funny.
And people are going to say, this is Trump being crazy.
This is Trump being reckless.
Why did he have to do that?
Why, Trump?
Why?
That's what they're all going to say.
Oh, why would you, you just brokered this 10 years piece.
Look, I don't know how conscious Trump is of his excellent, obviously insanely successful political strategy that is undeniable at this point, even for all the haters.
But even if he's not totally conscious of it, the fact that he just keeps doing it for 10 years straight shows you it's a pretty good strategy.
What this post does is reestablish three things.
First, the post reestablishes tonal balance.
Two days ago, President Trump was walking to Marine One and the reporters asked him about Iran and Israel breaking the ceasefire.
And he got real angry, real visibly angry.
He wasn't telling jokes.
He said, these countries don't know what the F they're doing.
He really was serious.
But Trump needs to have a little balance.
He needs to have that levity.
Trump is a stand-up comedian in many ways.
Trump has that gift that Ronald Reagan had, which is opening with a joke.
He disarms people.
And so he's got to reestablish that balance.
By posting the bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb on Iran.
He's funny again.
He's light again.
Second thing that the post reestablishes is ideological balance because Trump was being hit from the right, not just from the Libs, but from the right over this mission in Iran.
You had people, very serious voices on the right, saying that Trump was no better than George Bush and he was going to get us bogged down in a forever war and he was risking American troops when there was no real American interest at play and this was awful and he was being dogwalked and all the rest of it.
So because you had this extreme dove position, not even just a dovish position, an extreme dovish position.
If the United States ever flies a fighter jet, you know, it's an immoral act or something like that.
Because of that, he has to mock that view.
And so he does that with the video.
He's got actual bombs dropping out of a B2.
And it's a joke.
Ha ha ha.
It's okay.
We're America.
We're the global empire.
We drop bombs.
We have not only the greatest military in the world, we basically have the only military in the world, the only actual military that can project power anywhere.
We have that.
It's okay.
You don't need to cry every time an American fighter jet takes off.
It's all right.
He's reestablishing tone.
He's reestablishing ideology, the balance of both of those.
And then, third thing, he's reestablishing his madman credentials.
And I think this is probably the most important.
These lyrics are crazy.
The lyrics, and it's not just, we've all heard the version of the song before, bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran.
It's the lyrics.
There I see a mosque going to throw some rocks.
That is provocative language.
Gonna take the Ayatollah and put him in a box.
The song is Trump coming out saying, ha ha, I'm gonna kill you.
Or am I joking?
Maybe I'm just joking, or I'm gonna kill you.
Gonna turn Iran into a parking lot.
I'm just joking.
Am I?
Am I joking?
No, no.
I mean, I just did.
I just bombed it, but I didn't kill you yet.
Hey, what am I going to do?
That's what he's doing.
He's reestablishing his madman cred, which is very effective.
It's helped him in the Middle East.
It's helped him dealing with Iran in both terms, helped him dealing with Syria.
It's helped him dealing with Putin.
Famously, it was reported that Trump warned Putin, said, Putin, if you invade into Ukraine while I'm president, I'll bomb Moscow.
I'll hit the Kremlin.
And Putin might think, okay, look, 95% chance he's bluffing, but 5% chance he's a crazy guy.
He's the kind of guy who, after securing a tenuous ceasefire, a real stop-and-go ceasefire between two nations, at least one of them has nukes, one of them almost had nukes, two nations who hate each other more than any other nations on earth, I got the ceasefire.
I completed the mission, got the ceasefire.
And you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to take my finger and rub it right in their wound.
Yeah, I'm going to take some salt and rub it in there too.
I'm going to kill you, Ayatollah.
Just kidding.
Am I kidding?
That is very effective.
And it reminds me of an ancient anecdote.
Some people are going to look at this.
They're going to say, this is not how statesmen believe.
This is not how statesmen behave.
This is so, this is shameful.
George Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden would never do that.
Yeah, okay.
There's a temptation to say that posting this kind of video is modern or postmodern even.
No, this goes back to classical antiquity.
It reminds me of a story about Julius Caesar.
This comes to us from Plutarch's Parallel Lives.
The year is 75 BC.
Julius Caesar is on his way to study oratory at Rhodes, and he's captured by Cilician pirates.
So they capture Caesar, and they...
He's not a commander.
He's not a big political leader yet.
And they say, okay, we're going to set the ransom at 20 talents.
And what does Caesar do?
Does he cower?
Oh, please.
Does he throw himself on the mercy of the pirates?
Please, no, please.
Let me, does he haggle with them?
No.
He mocks them.
He laughs at them.
And he says, you idiots, you don't even know who you have.
I'm a Roman nobleman.
You should set the ransom at 50 talents.
You think I'm only worth 20?
I'm worth 50. Then he sends his entourage back to Miletus to go get the money.
And for 38 days, he's captive, but he doesn't behave like a captive.
He decides he's going to order these guys around.
He starts bossing the pirates around.
He starts reciting speeches of his.
And he's going to study oratory.
He recites poetry that he's written.
And when the pirates don't get it, he makes fun of them.
He calls them illiterate.
And he plays the games with them.
They're playing games.
He's playing games, bossing them around.
And then every so often, he would say, I'm going to crucify you.
This is all recorded.
You can read this in Plutarch.
He says, oh, they're playing games or he's reading.
He says, but don't forget, I'm going to crucify you.
And the pirates think the guy's completely nuts.
So 38 days later, his entourage comes back.
They have the talents.
They ransom him.
And what does he do?
25 years old, does not command any armies or anything.
He raises a navy, a private navy, goes back to the island.
The pirates are still there.
He captures all of them.
He then takes them to Pergamum and puts them in jail and goes to the governor of Asia, who's Junius, I think.
And he says, hey, you got to punish these guys.
They captured me.
They kidnapped me.
And the governor's like, well, I don't know.
I'm not that interested in this issue.
And he's vacillating on whether or not to punish them.
So what does Caesar do?
He goes to the jail and he crucifies them himself.
And the lesson, I would say the chief lesson of that classic political episode is you probably don't want to mess with Julius Caesar.
That's what Trump's doing here.
That's exactly what Trump is doing here.
He goes in, he's got a lot of credibility.
He just dropped a bunch of bunker busters and blew up Iran's whole nuclear program.
The thing that they have wanted, that they have been pursuing more than anything else for decades.
He just blows it all up.
Then he gives them an off-ramp.
He's a good diplomat, gets them to come to a peace.
Then he says, but don't forget, I'm going to crucify you.
I'm just kidding.
Am I?
Am I?
I don't want to hear any counter signaling the Boma Rand video.
The Obama Rand video is very funny and it's worth it for that.
It achieves at least three political objectives for Trump and it's an example of strong political leadership.
We have good precedent for this.
It goes all the way back to Julius Caesar.
I have much more to say, a lot to say today, more than usual even.
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Now, speaking of Trump threatening people, declaring war, meme, Not only did we get that short film from the president yesterday, we got this novel.
We got this war and peace of truth social posts.
This is about AOC.
I'm going to fly through it, but it's good writing.
Why is Trump going after AOC?
Because AOC wants to impeach Trump.
Why does she want to impeach Trump?
Because Trump as commander-in-chief led maybe the most successful military expedition we've had in my lifetime, just in terms of cost to the United States, cost in destabilizing any region, strategic objectives attained.
This was pretty amazing.
This was, what, like a three-hour military operation that obliterated Iran's nuclear program.
Haven't seen anything this successful, at least since Desert Storm, and maybe including that.
Anyway, Trump writes, stupid AOC, Alexandria Casio-Cortez, one of the dumbest, in quotes, people in Congress, is now calling for my impeachment, despite the fact that the crooked and corrupt Democrats have already done that twice before.
The reason for her rantings is all of the victories that the USA has had under the Trump administration.
The Democrats aren't used to winning, and she can't stand the concept of our country being successful again.
When we examine her test scores, her test, like her SAT, we will find out that she is not qualified for office, but nevertheless far more qualified than Crockett, who is a seriously low IQ individual, or Ilhan Omar, who does nothing but complain about our country.
Yet the failed country that she comes from, Somalia, doesn't have a government, is drenched in crime and poverty, and is rated one of the worst in the world, if it is even rated at all.
Rated by whom?
It's just total stream of consciousness.
This is like beat poetry.
I love it.
I love it.
How dare the mouse tell us how to run the United States of America?
Is that Ilhan?
Because she does kind of look like a mouse, and that's never occurred to me, but that's an apt description.
As often, not always, but most of the time, Trump's nicknames usually work.
The mouse.
That's interesting.
Okay.
We're just now coming back from that radical left experiment with Sleepy Joe Kamala.
The auto pen in charge.
What a disaster it was.
AOC should be forced to take the cognitive test that I just completed at Walter Reed Medical Center as part of my physical.
As the doctor, all sorts of random capitalizations throughout.
As the doctor in charge said, President Trump aced it, meaning I got every answer right.
There's actual political import to this, but you kind of have to read all of it to get to get through it.
I am going to read all.
I changed my mind.
I'm going to read all of it.
President Trump aced it, meaning I got every answer right.
Instead of her constant complaining, Alexandria should go back home to Queens, where I was also brought up and straighten out her filthy, disgusting, crime-ridden streets in the district she represents and which she never goes to anymore.
She better start worrying about her own primary before she thinks about beating our great Palestinian senator, crying Josh Humer.
He calls one of the most famous Jews in America the great Palestinian senator because he's kind of a traitor to the Jewish interests, at least as regards Israel.
And he ended up backing a lot of the anti-Israel measures, which there's a lot of political conclusions one can draw from that.
But anyway, our great Palestinian senator, Kriyan Chuck Schumer, whose career is definitely on very thin ice, she and her Democrat friends have just hit the lowest poll numbers in congressional history.
So go ahead and try impeaching me again.
Make my day.
Okay, what is all of this about?
What is this about?
One, it's very, very funny.
It does the same thing as the video, which is intentional.
Trump, at least at some level and maybe totally consciously, knows what he's doing here.
It restores tonal balance.
It's funny.
Okay, no more.
They don't know what the F they're doing.
Shoot, I'm starting to look like I'm losing my cool here.
All right, hold on.
I got to be funny guy again.
Reagan did the same thing.
It restores ideological balance.
Now the right has just been fighting over this Iran war.
The doves and the hawks at each other's throats, Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin at each other's throats.
This restores the ideological balance because we have a common enemy, our most prominent farcical enemy that we've had for 10 years now, AOC.
Seven years now, AOC.
Okay, good.
Now the ideological balance.
We can all make fun of AOC.
And the madman credit.
This is written like a madman, and he knows what he's doing.
He understands the effect of his rhetoric.
This is the guy who wrote the tweet about the taco bowls at Trump Tower.
Happy Cinco DiMayo.
The best taco bowls in the world were at Trump Tower.
I love Hispanics.
He knew how that would be received.
He is a consummate showman.
He was the top-rated guy in network primetime TV for like 15 years.
It's not an accident.
The Trump haters, the best they can muster at this point is, well, it's all just an accident.
He's just accidentally really good at all this stuff.
Okay, man, sure.
Whatever helps you sleep at night, whatever helps you maintain your self-conception, having been wrong about the Trump admin for 10 years now, it restores the madman stuff.
Man, maybe this guy's really crazy.
And if he's really crazy, maybe I better tread lightly.
Really funny stuff.
Also on the charge, though, it triggered AOC because AOC responds and she goes, also, I'm a Bronx girl.
You know, you should know that we eat Queen's Boys for breakfast, respectfully.
I'm a Bronx girl.
She's not.
I have a little insight into this because AOC and I, AOC is maybe a year or two older than me.
AOC and I were raised in almost exactly the same place at almost exactly the same time, and it wasn't the Bronx.
AOC is, she grew up in a town called Yorktown Heights.
It's a very nice little town.
I grew up, it's a suburb about an hour, a little more than an hour north of the city.
I grew up in the town right next door.
You can see it on a map, right next door.
It's called Bedford Hills.
The irony is that AOC actually grew up in a slightly wealthier and whiter suburb than I did.
But place I grew up was lovely too.
And it was about an hour north.
So if you look on a map, if you're watching this right now.
You can see the red circle, that's AOC's town that she grew up in.
The blue circle is my town that I grew up in.
And then that circle all the way down at the bottom of the map in black, that would be the Bronx.
She ain't Jenny from the block, okay?
She's Alexandria from the Burbs, which is fine.
The suburbs are great.
But AOC has gotten in trouble for years lying about this.
And it's so silly.
And because I, oddly enough, AOC and I actually have very similar life circumstances, even family matters.
And it's kind of interesting.
But I have a lot of insight into how she grew up.
And she didn't grow up on the streets.
Okay.
I spent a lot of time in the Bronx too because I'd go to the Bronx to the Italian section to go grocery shopping on the weekends.
So I like the Bronx, but I didn't grow up in the Bronx.
And she didn't grow up in the Bronx either.
And she ain't Jenny from the block.
And so she seems like a fraud.
The funny thing is Trump actually did grow up in Queens.
He was a rich kid.
He's been a rich kid all his life.
But Donald Trump has much more in common with the average guy on the street in Queens or the Bronx than AOC from the fancy northern Westchester suburbs does.
And that helps him.
And it's the reason why his tweets hit like that and AOCs, you know, we eat you Queens boys for breakfast.
That's such a northern Westchester thing to say.
That's such a suburban thing to say.
We, do you know, actually, we eat like you're trying to come up with the playground taunt and you don't have it because you didn't actually grow up on them mean streets.
She lies about that.
So she tries to concoct this personality.
Whereas with Trump, whatever it is, if it's a show, if it's authentic, if there's no difference between the two, his performance is more persuasive.
And that's why he has greater political effect than she does.
Now, really, really bad stuff coming out of the Bronx.
AOC is positively conservative compared to the next mayor of New York.
One second, hold on, put a pause, stop your car, sit down.
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Mossad Espionage, Spying on Trump.
In this episode of Michael and the former spy, I sit down with Jack Barski, a former KGB agent who lived a double life as both a Soviet spy and a suburban American dad.
We dive into the secrets of Cold War espionage, the lies he told to survive, and the psychological toll of living a life split in two.
When Donald Trump criticized the CIA and the FBI, partially I think it was his ego, but he was also right.
There was a lot of misbehavior.
Right.
They said 51 intelligence officials, past and present, see Trump as a threat.
51 did not ask for proof.
If Russia today is sending amateurs to do their spying, are there any countries that are still good at it?
Israel.
Yeah.
The Mossad is superb.
And they also have a lot of Arabs among their ranks, which helps them a lot.
Well, that's one of the reasons that they could blow up a bunch of Hamas people with drones because they knew exactly where they're going to be.
Watch the full episode now at the Michael Knowles YouTube channel for the uncensored ad-free version.
Subscribe to DailyWire Plus.
Speaking of New York politicians, the results are in from the New York Democrat mayoral primary.
And the next mayor of New York is going to be freaking terrible.
Just terrible.
Just the worst we have seen in our lifetimes and well beyond our lifetimes.
Maybe the worst ever.
I feel confident to say that now before he's even won the general election before he's won, before he's ever entered into office.
The race was between two guys.
On the one hand, you had Andrew Cuomo, former governor of New York, who left during a big scandal.
They pretended it was a sex scandal.
It was really because he mishandled COVID and lied about COVID.
And he was trying to mount a political comeback.
Andy Cuomo, I was a waiter for him one time in northern Westchester.
He has been a fixture in New York politics for 50 years.
His dad was governor, a very famous governor, almost ran for president.
He's just been around forever.
He wanted to make a comeback as mayor of New York.
And then you had this guy, Zoran Mamdani, a 12 or Shiite Muslim socialist who wants to stop arresting criminals and affirmatively wants to trans little kids.
A cartoonishly horrible candidate.
Guess who won?
And it wasn't even particularly close.
Zoran, Zoran Mamdani, won the primary.
And we should look at why, because it's going to give you, forget about New York.
I actually do care about New York.
You know, some people are saying, who cares?
It's Democrat cities.
Let them burn.
That's not my view.
There's like three views on this that get you to deepening levels of conservatism.
The first view is, we should care because the New Yorkers are our fellow countrymen.
And even though it's our city, or even though it's their city, you know, we should care about what happens to them.
I mean, though it's really their right to elect whoever they want, but we should kind of care.
The next tier of conservatism is, well, whatever.
It's a bunch of libs in New York.
It's a terrible city up by the axis of evil and whatever, let it burn.
But then the deeper level of conservatism is, it's a great American city.
I'm an American.
Those miscreants up there who elected Zoran Mamdani don't have any right to ruin it.
And give me my city back.
I don't care that I don't live there.
It's my city.
You don't get to do that.
You don't get to do that.
I'm an American.
It's an important American city.
Sit down and shut up and give me my city back.
I go there twice a year and I want to make sure I can safely walk to go get a bagel and even maybe ride the subway.
So no, I care about it because I'm an American.
That's kind of my view of it.
And I am a New Yorker of extraction.
So what's really interesting about this race is both of these guys ran on the same issue.
The chief issue was affordability.
That was it.
It wasn't a campaign about abortion.
Andy Cuomo has leftist credentials on abortion that cannot be exceeded.
Andy Cuomo changed the law to permit abortion up until the moment of birth and changed the penal law to redefine murdering a pregnant woman as double homicide to single homicide.
And then he lit the Freedom Tower up pink.
Andy Cuomo is a left winger, even on all the social issues.
But the issue was affordability.
And each of these guys ran a TV ad about affordability.
Check out the difference.
Here's Andy Cuomo's on affordability.
New York City has an affordability crisis, but we will rise.
The minimum wage will rise.
I raised it to the highest in the nation as governor.
I'll do it here.
500,000 new affordable homes will rise.
I did it as the nation's housing secretary.
We can do it here.
We built new bridges, train stations, and airports and got through COVID together.
Because there's a simple solution to a crisis.
You act.
So let's rise together.
Pay for it by Cuomo from NYC.
We're going to rise.
Look, it's a little unaffordable now, but we're going to grow.
We're going to make government more efficient.
I did it when I was governor.
I did it when I was housing secretary.
Under Clinton, we're going to have abundance liberalism.
We're going to have stable leadership.
We're all going to rise together.
That's how things are going to be more affordable.
Here's how the other guy talked about affordability.
I'm Assemblyman Zavran Maldani, and I'm running for mayor to freeze the rent for every rent-stabilized tenant.
Wait, you're going to freeze my rent?
Yes.
Did I hear rent freeze?
Yes!
This guy's going to freeze the rent.
No hike?
None.
This guy's going to freeze the rent.
It's true.
As your next mayor, I will freeze your rent.
Paid for by Zoran for NYC.
Did you catch the difference?
Andy Cuomos, we're going to be more affordable by growing and by raising the minimum wage a little bit and rising together and growing and being abundant.
And this guy, Zoramba Donny, comes out.
He says, hey, you're going to have more money because I'm going to eat the rich.
We're going to eat the rich.
We're going to get those dirty, nasty landlords.
We're going to slit their throats.
They're not going to get one penny extra.
I'm going to freeze your rent.
Money, money, money, money, money.
You want money?
Hold on.
I'm going to get it from this guy.
Hold on one second.
Give me that money.
Hey, you want it?
Hey, here you go.
Here's his credit card.
Take his credit card too.
Money, money, money.
Guess who won?
Guess who won?
Mom Dani.
Andrew Cuomo was running on a 90s liberalism campaign.
Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, George Bush, Mike Bloomberg in New York.
Hey, we're all going to grow together abundance.
We're not going to worry so much about, you know, hostilities and tensions.
No, we're just all going to grow and be rich.
And we're going to have a truce on some of the social stuff.
And that's 90s liberalism.
And Mamdani ran on socialism.
We're going to freeze your rent.
Implicit is someone's going to have to pay for that.
It's going to be the landlords and they're whatever.
They're not going to get their money.
Forget about them.
Screw them.
We're going to, I'll eat them if you get hungry.
And guess who won?
Now, there is a Republican candidate, Curtis Liwa.
He's great.
Curtis Liwa is the founder of the Guardian Angels, the civic group to protect people when the political order was failing to deal with crime on the streets.
This group, the Guardian Angels, would ride the subways and just protect people from the criminals and the vagrants who are coming back because of bad governance in New York.
He's great.
He's a total legend in New York.
I don't think he's going to win.
George Pataki, the former Republican governor of New York, he came out.
He said, I think Curtis Sleewa might be able to win here.
Maybe.
I mean, it might be the case that Zoran Mamdani is just so radical that the Republican has a chance, but I don't think so because Curtis Sleewa is such a colorful character in his own right.
And New York has become so liberal.
And so many conservatives have left New York even since COVID, since Cuomo's terrible management under COVID.
They've left for places like Florida and Tennessee and Texas.
I just don't see it.
I think this guy, Mamdani, is going to get it.
I think that politics has moved away from a kind of squishy procedural norms where we're all just different shades of liberal.
I think on the right, we've concerned ourselves more with substantive goods, family, virtue, natural law, flourishing societies.
It's all good stuff.
And on the left, they've concerned themselves with more putative substantive goods, not actual goods.
They're actual evils, but substantive goods like class struggle, race struggle, soaking the rich, real substance, not a kind of broad procedure that supposedly is going to allow everyone to abound together.
That's done.
Cuomoism is deader than disco.
Now, what rough beast is this?
I don't know.
I don't know.
That replaces it.
Speaking of threats and New York, you're getting some reports out now.
New York Times has a report that the Iranian nuclear sites might not have been totally obliterated.
So you got this piece here.
Strike set back Iran's nuclear program by only a few months, U.S. report says.
Preliminary classified findings indicate that the attack sealed off the entrances to two facilities, but did not collapse their underground buildings.
And here's why, actually, it wasn't that good.
And what Trump did, it's just not that impressive.
Sean Parnell, who is the spokesman for the Pentagon, he responded.
He said, we dropped 14, 30,000-pound bombs directly under target, 420,000 pounds of bombs.
It doesn't take a genius to know that these nuclear facilities have been completely obliterated.
New York Post, though, even, which is a little bit more right-wing, is hitting it from another angle.
It says, top Trump official calls U.S. airstrikes on Iran pointless, suggests deep state Suede President.
Now, this is great clickbait because it's a total red herring here.
The Trump official reportedly called the U.S. airstrikes pointless before we knew what their effect was.
He was just opposed to them in principle.
So this actually has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not they collapsed the nuclear facilities.
It's just a guy who said, look, I just disagree with military intervention generally.
And they're trying to turn this into a narrative that says that the strikes weren't effective.
The New York Times is going at it more directly, saying, well, they didn't even stop the program.
To me, this is total, total desperation.
The libs are just out of ways to criticize Trump.
And the right, in many ways, is out of ways to criticize Trump.
Trump is going to, he's a coward.
He's getting pushed around by the Ayatollah.
Or on the flip side, he's a maniac, belligerent.
He's going to start World War III.
He's going to get American troops killed.
He's going to get us embroiled in an endless war in the Middle East.
And then the criticisms even from the extreme right.
He's just doing Israel's bidding.
He's going to do whatever Netanyahu says.
Didn't look like that yesterday.
He's just going to get us embroiled in a regime change war.
I don't see any regime change wars.
He's going to this.
And Trump defied all of them.
Defied all of them.
Carried out probably the most successful military operation of our lifetimes.
Just so, I mean, it remains to be seen if the ceasefire holds, but assuming it holds, it was just a complete grand slam.
It was a hole in one.
It was just unbelievable.
I've exhausted my sports metaphors.
So they're out of ways to criticize Trump.
The only way they can criticize it now is, yeah, well, I don't know.
I mean, maybe it didn't like totally 100% work.
But it probably did.
I mean, I don't know, maybe it didn't, but like, that's your best criticism?
Well, maybe it just only like 99% worked.
It didn't like 100% work.
Yeah, okay.
All right.
Go back to the drawing board, guys.
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Now, CNN is responding in a slightly different, though equally farcical way.
CNN is not focusing on the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the bunker buster attack.
CNN is trying to cultivate sympathy for the Ayatollah because you just misunderstand.
You, ugly Americans, you just don't have enough cultural enrichment to understand that when the Iranians chant death to America, it's actually an act of friendship.
To Israel stays in place, and that is part of the discussion, right?
Yes, absolutely part of the discussion.
And, you know, I remember, Dan, at one point being in Tehran years ago, and they're chanting death to America all around me, even as I say, oh, I'm an American reporting for CNN, and they were happy to speak to me.
So those two sort of jarring realities of the chant and yet the friendliness have existed together.
Mostly friendly murder threats is what it is.
We had mostly fiery, but mostly peaceful protests.
Now we have mostly, mostly friendly death to America chants.
Going to have to go back to the drawing board on that one, too.
I don't think that's persuading anyone.
Now, speaking of jokes, President Trump was flying on Air Force One, and he was asked by reporters if he was going to see Zelensky.
Remember that war?
Before the Israel-Iran war, there was this other war we were dealing with, the Ukraine-Russia war.
We're also a little focused on the war that could break out, the China-Taiwan war.
But what about happening to Ukraine and Russia?
You remember that?
He's asked if he's going to see Zelensky.
Here's his answer.
Do you think you'll meet with Zelensky when you're there?
Yeah, probably.
I'll see him.
What would you say to him?
How you doing?
He's in a tough situation.
Should have never been there.
So he opens up.
Well, what are you going to say to Zelensky?
Oh, I don't know.
I'm probably going to talk to him about the weather.
What do you think I'm going to say to him?
This answer brushes her off.
And then he keeps it up.
He's asked, he might even have volunteered this story about a phone call he got from Vladimir Putin.
You know, I'd like to see a deal with Russia.
As you know, Vladimir called me up.
He said, can I help you with Iran?
I said, no, I don't need help with Iran.
I need help with you.
And I hope we're going to be getting a deal done with Russia.
So he's just working out bits.
That's what that, what's the point of that story?
It's just a funny bit.
Yeah, he calls me this guy.
Trump might as well light up a cigarette on the plane, you know, spotlight on him, grabs the microphone.
So this guy, you want to hear about this guy?
This guy, Vladimir, he calls me.
He says, hey, can I give you any help with Iran?
I say, I don't need help with Iran.
I need help with you.
Yeah, yeah, Zelensky.
What am I going to say to Zelensky?
I don't know.
I say, hey, I watched the Yankees lately.
These guys, I tell you, I tell you, I get no respect.
No respect.
You all know my doctor, Dr. Vinny Bumbats.
He's doing a stand-up routine on, which he's done For 10 years.
I mean, there's nothing new about that.
The clearest example of that was back in the 2016 race when he was pinned down on a question by Megan Kelly.
So you've called women fat and ugly and stupid and whatever.
And what's Trump's answer?
It's not, no, I didn't really.
Actually, you don't understand my meaning.
Actually, actually.
His response was, yeah, only Rosie O'Donnell totally wins over the audience, completely cuts the tension, disarms everybody.
And it's not the mistake that people make when they look at him is they think he's a clown.
The mistake that people make is they think he's frivolous, that he's a superficial person.
I don't know how you could continue to think that, especially because we're citing historical examples of these kinds of political strategies.
This is an obvious one, much more recent than Julius Caesar.
This is exactly the kind of thing Ronald Reagan did.
Ronald Reagan started every cabinet meeting with a joke.
This is exactly the kind of thing Winston Churchill did.
Winston Churchill, famous for his wit, so famous for his wit that people attribute jokes to him that he never told.
Even more recently, Berlusconi, Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister of Italy, had this, in many ways, he was kind of a proto-Trump, this media mogul, billionaire playboy persona, always telling jokes, but it was for political effect.
Now, as a related story, a media story.
It's not even directly related to politics, but there are implications for it.
New York Times has a story app.
For the first time ever, streaming took over TV viewing.
Network TV and cable TV combined.
Streaming just beat them.
This was in May of this year.
First time more Americans watch TV on streaming than on cable and network combined.
This is according to Nielsen Ratings.
It's the first time that that has ever happened over a full month.
This presents a political risk to Trump, to the Republicans, to everybody, really, which is we've had an expression for 10 years now, which is Twitter is not real life, which is kind of true.
We get all wrapped up in it.
If you're in media, if you're in politics, you're on Twitter all the time, but most people are not on Twitter all the time.
And so the Twitter algorithm doesn't really reflect reality, especially now.
I mean, it promotes all this like really fringe, crazy content that a lot of people have never even heard of.
And so it's easy to get sucked into that and think that Twitter represents political reality, but it doesn't.
If a political candidate campaigned only on what Twitter favors, that political candidate would go down in flames.
And you've actually seen a few people.
This guy in California that he's running, and it's just a total Twitter campaign, and no one's even heard of his name, really.
So you can't make that mistake.
However, as streaming overtakes TV, network and cable combined, Twitter will become real life.
Twitter matters now because perception can affect reality.
But Twitter will soon matter because that will be where people are living, streaming online.
It's a little bit different than being on your phone or being on your tablet or being on your laptop or something, but it's pretty related.
And so you could see the political order, political incentives, political opinions begin to shift rapidly.
I don't think it'll be a gradual change.
When streaming really takes over, and we've been waiting for the death of TV for 30 years now, when streaming really takes over, that's going to be a rapid shift.
And politicians are going to have to keep up with that.
Now, there's so much more I want to tell you about.
So much.
We didn't even get to.
Apparently, Big Balls has left his employment at the White House.
I don't know that that's his name on his birth certificate.
