Donald Trump's fractured approach to the Iran-Israel conflict, marked by a violated ceasefire and erratic military interventions, exposes deep divisions within the Republican Party between anti-war voices like Tucker Carlson and hawkish allies such as Jeb Bush. Simultaneously, the New York City mayoral race highlights cultural tensions as critics attack Zohran Mamdani's code-switching and socialist platform, contrasting it with fiscal concerns over union influence and infrastructure delays. Ultimately, these overlapping crises reveal a political landscape where unpredictable foreign policy and local governance failures threaten both regional stability and municipal solvency. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at noon east.
The news on Iran and Israel and President Trump's involvement in brokering a ceasefire deal has been quickly developing.
I mean, like, don't leave your phone if you want to stay up on the latest because it changes every 60 seconds, it seems.
President Trump announced last night on Truth Social that Israel and Iran agreed on a quote complete and total ceasefire that would take effect in six hours.
But shortly after that was set to take effect, Iran launched a wave of missiles at Israel, reportedly killing at least four.
Okay, so it hadn't yet kicked in, but it was about to kick in.
And Iran decided to do it to do a bunch of killing before it officially kicked in.
What the F?
Israel responded by targeting the sites from which those bombs had been launched.
They've got four dead in Israel, 26 wounded as a result of those pre-ceasefire, you know, for good, good old times' sake, bombings by Iran.
Again, WTF.
So Israel responded before the ceasefire.
And then there was a couple of collateral incidents.
There were a couple of collateral incidents right after the ceasefire kicked in, where Iran, question mark, launched two separate missile barrages at Israel, none of which hurt anybody, and both of which appear to have been stopped by Iron Dome or in some other way by Israel.
And that's Trump is unhappy.
He's unhappy because Israel responded to those two.
It's bombing those sites.
And the ceasefire, look, in the Middle East, ceasefire, it's basically paused, and there might be a few, you know, extra bombings.
We have to wait to find out.
But like, you could still be in a ceasefire.
But they just love bombing so much.
I mean, truly, they just bomb, bomb, bomb.
This is like what it's like.
I mean, so many of my friends, my Israeli friends, or my Jewish friends, are like, Megan, do you want to go to Israel?
We'd love to take it.
I don't, no, I do not want to go to Israel.
Thanks, but no.
Why would I want to go to Israel right now?
I'm sorry.
I love the Israeli people, but I have zero desire to go to Israel, just like I have zero desire to go to the Iranian nuclear sites, right?
I don't want to go places where people are getting bombed.
And what I do at night is pray.
I pray for my friends in Israel.
I have dear friends who have family there, but like, this is no way to live.
And Israel's been trying to stop it for many, many years.
They can't stop it.
There's many nations around them and factions that want them dead and wiped off the face of the earth.
And it's going to be really hard to talk Iran out of it.
The best we can do is get them to, at least on paper, maybe say that they'll stop which Trump has achieved.
But, you know, there's obviously a question as to: is it worth the paper it's printed on?
President Trump signaling he's not happy with Israel and he's not happy with Iran.
I have to say, what you're going to about to hear, you'll hear it here, and then we have a longer soundbite in a minute.
With him taking aim at Israel too, is very unusual for a U.S. president, but it's good.
It's good for Trump because he understands in order for this deal to have support, he needs Middle Easterners to be behind it.
He needs some of our Middle East allies to be behind it.
And it can't always be just a knee-jerk reflexive, we're with Israel, we're with Israel, we're with Israel.
And they can do no wrong.
That's what Trump is trying to signal here.
So he's not happy with either party.
And here he was on the White House lawn this morning, just about to take off for a NATO meeting.
Not mincing words.
We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing.
Do you understand that?
I mean, those are terms you might hear on the Megan Kelly show, but it's very rare to hear the president drop an F-bomb.
Very rarely he'll do it, like in one of his comedy bits at one of his rallies.
But I don't remember him doing it when, you know, commenting on a serious policy matter before.
And he knows what he's doing.
I mean, he's expressing his frustration at the way things go in the Middle East and the way these players respond.
And he also really wants the ceasefire.
You know, it's kind of like Trump thinks this deal is done and that should be it.
You know, you should hang the deal toy off the ceiling at the 21 Club and have a stake.
21 Club is no longer, thanks to COVID.
In any event, that's how deals used to get done here in New York.
And actually, if memory serves, is Trump featured in Wall Street when they go into the 21 Club?
He might be.
He's in so many, he's in so many of New York movies featuring New York.
Anyway, my point is he's frustrated.
And who could blame him?
Aren't we all?
It's like they're never going to stop fighting.
That's how this feels.
They're just never going to stop fighting.
Look, we did our part.
He did our part.
He protected the United States.
He bombed the nuclear facilities.
It's what every president has said needs to be done in terms of stopping them.
Only Trump had the balls to do it.
Matthew Continetti, who's a great writer, he's writing over the free press, among other places now, and he's on the commentary podcast.
He had this post, and here's part of it.
He writes, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden all said a nuclear Iran was intolerable.
Yet only Trump paired words with deeds.
Only Trump sent Ayatollah Khomeini reeling.
The promises were clear enough.
Quote, I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously.
Bush, 2007.
Quote, we will not Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.
Period.
Biden in a vice presidential debate, 2012.
Quote, the goal for these negotiations is to reach a mutually agreed long-term comprehensive solution that would ensure Iran's nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful.
Obama, 2015.
Kamala Harris just last year when she was running.
As president, I will never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.
Contineti goes on.
And how have Trump's living predecessors and his 2024 rival reacted now to Operation Midnight Hammer?
Crickets.
Not one has issued a statement at this writing on the most significant foreign policy action in a generation.
Why?
Too busy at Huma Abedin's wedding to Alex Soros?
Great point.
All right, Trump did what was necessary to protect the United States of America.
Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
All those statements were not just because we care about Israel, which we do.
We care about ourselves.
We care about our troops in Middle East posts not far from Iran.
And it was very clear across partisan lines that Iran could not have a nuclear weapon, but only Trump actually did something about it.
But in terms of actually stopping these two from fighting and launching missiles at each other and bombs, I'm not hopeful.
I'm sorry.
I wish I were.
I'm not.
I think it's still a major win that the conflict that was starting between us and Iran appears to be off for now.
They launched those attacks on our bases in Qatar and one in our base, on our base in Iraq yesterday when we were on the air together.
And then they stopped.
That was it.
It was symbolic.
They gave us a heads up.
Trump later in his true social laid it out saying, thanks for the heads up so that nobody got killed.
We understand you sent 14 bombs, 13 of which we intercepted and one of which we allowed to land because it wasn't going to hit anything or anyone, and nobody was hurt or killed.
Thanks.
We appreciate it.
And nothing else has happened with respect to the United States for us, at least now, given the posture we were in 72 hours ago.
That's very good news.
So Trump now is off on a long flight to the Netherlands.
He has his phone and he's truthing away.
So we'll bring you some updates on what he's saying.
Tax Network USA Promo00:02:34
Plus, the New York Democratic primary for mayor is today.
And by the polymarket odds, it appears that socialist candidate Zoran Mimdani may beat disgraced former governor Cuomo.
I mean, I never thought I'd say these words, but go, Governor Cuomo.
Like, I can't believe it.
Janice Dean is just, she's got a shiver down her spine somewhere, but we can't have this lunatic, Mamdani.
We cannot have him running the world's greatest city.
New York City is the greatest city in the world, even as hobbled as it's been by years of Democrat control.
And it cannot be in the hands of an avowed socialist.
It cannot.
It's already hobbling along thanks to many years now of Democrat rule post the Bloomberg Giuliani delightful 12.
So that's what we're going to be watching today as the poll results come in.
First, we're going to be joined by our guests here to discuss it all and more.
Camille Foster, partner at Freethink, Michael Moynihan, host of the Moynihan Report on Tua, and Matt Welsh, editor at large for Reason.
Together, they are the hosts of the Fifth Column podcast, which you can find at wethefth.com.
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Guys, welcome back.
Hi, thank you.
Great to see you.
All right, let's just start with before we get to Mamdani because there's a lot to talk about with that lunatic.
And, you know, two out of three of you are still in New York.
So like really have a dog in this, in this race.
Lessons from Iraq War00:14:46
But let's talk first about what I said at the top about the Middle East and the ceasefire.
Is it on?
Is it not off?
Trump dropping the F-bomb at these two out of frustration.
You know, What do you just let's just kick it off with what you make of my take on it, which is like we should just be happy they're no longer launching bombs at us and that the retaliation for our drama bomb dropping appears to be done and that they're back to sort of launching these mini bombs at each other or not and maybe pausing and maybe not unclear.
Your take.
Well, one part.
Go ahead.
Well, let's start with this, Megan.
I mean, the response.
from the Iranians, there's two things about this.
One is that they telegraphed it to everybody.
They sent out like, this is what we're going to do.
And by the way, this is when it's going to happen.
This is how many missiles, because they don't really want to provoke us, but they want to symbolically say we're going to attack one of your bases in Qatar.
The Qataris are, of course, not an ally, but as close as you can be to an ally with Iran in the region.
And the Qataris, by the way, responded by shooting them all out of the sky and saying, well, we leave open the possibility to respond to this, which was pretty remarkable.
So what they did was what they could do, which was not much.
So that's pretty reassuring.
As you pointed out, Megan, down the road, we'll see what happens.
The Iranians have been hitting Americans and American citizens and American military targets since 1979 from taking hostages the second they took over in the American embassy in Tehran in 79.
So they had a long history of doing this.
But right now, they are absolutely defanged.
And you have somebody like Brett McGurk, who is the Biden White House's coordinator for the Middle East or something, saying that this is the best possible place that we could be in and congratulating President Trump for managing this crisis.
Good Lord.
I mean, talk about, you know, when you're getting Brett McGurk to say you're doing a good job, these are people that never say anything positive about Trump.
And one final thing is that I think you're absolutely right about something that I, for one, who have been incredibly critical of Trump.
I mean, the podcast has been incredibly critical of Trump for where we think he deserves it.
I'm been praising him for this.
But I think that you're right in the thing that people don't understand.
You have to keep so many people in the Middle East on board.
Everyone is pointing out that so many of these countries in the Middle East, like the Saudis, like the Qataris, and like the Jordanians, are quietly saying, go Trump, but not doing it publicly because they have a restive population that are not huge fans of the Israelis.
That that moment when he's like, these guys, they don't know what the fuck they're doing, which is like, I don't know exactly what he's saying, but when he's telegraphing to those people that, look, we're going to criticize Israel too.
We're not on board entirely.
You guys have been lovely and quiet about this, not criticizing us.
We're going to kind of reciprocate.
I think that was a, yeah, is he mad at Netanyahu?
But as you pointed out, Megan, that was a response to the Iranians breaking a ceasefire that, first of all, everyone said that they didn't really agree to and then said that they did.
But I think that that was definitely a wise decision.
Because of the way Trump presents so many things, we just tend to think that he's flying, you know, the seat of his pants and just, you know, kind of ad-living.
I think that that stuff is very well calibrated to say, let's throw a little dart at the Israelis, make sure that everyone understands where we are here.
We're not doing this on behalf of Israel, but on behalf of us and for you guys too in the Middle East, who actually don't love the Iranians.
My fingers are crossed that all of this is true and good and we're in a good place and the bad things didn't happen.
But I would really caution everybody not to get too optimistic about this because we have been similarly in moments of temporary euphoria about the exercise of American power in the Middle East.
And then things didn't go out so well in August of 2011.
A lot of Democrats over the opposition of Republicans were crowing that they got rid of the Gaddafi regime in Libya.
And wasn't that the use of American power at its best?
In Hillary Clinton's words, we were a bit triumphant in March of 1991.
My God, we won the Gulf War so fast, people's heads snapped.
And wasn't it great?
And then that led to a thing that we should think about now, which is for the rest of the 90s, more or less, the U.S. created no fly zones over Iraq.
So it was just sort of this low-level kind of war.
We kind of control this.
What is Israel going to do in Iran right now?
Israel controls the airspace of Iran and doesn't want them to get a nuclear weapon and doesn't want them to develop missile technology.
Are they going to patrol that with the U.S. help over the next stretch?
We don't know because you don't know what is going to happen next, either in the Middle East or after a big war.
There's a lot of things to be concerned about going forward.
I'm less convinced as you are and Michael are that the use of U.S. power in this case was the correct one.
I think that we should be more skeptical in general about the use of U.S. force against people who haven't attacked us this week or any time recently, because we have the biggest most powerful military in the world.
And when you are using it against sovereign, crappy countries that are nonetheless sovereign, you open up a lot of potential downstream effects that you can't predict for now, but that could be negative.
So my fingers are crossed.
And you can see the window into how this work.
Everyone seems to be kind of de-escalating right now.
It's possible that the mullahs are so terrified that they are willing to make some kind of deal to protect their survival.
They don't have allies, really.
And that's partnering.
Where are their friends?
Many friends.
And Israel, you're a little bit pessimistic, Megan, about the state of Israel or its ability.
Israel has absolutely, not absolutely, but has like very impressively defanged the ring of fire.
And I know that's a mixed metaphor around it that Iran has created through proxies over time.
It's been kind of an amazing tactical success on their part.
So fingers can be crossed on this, but I'm not on the- I'm not skeptical about Israel's ability to fight, not even a little.
I'm skeptical about the prospects of a lasting ceasefire in the Middle East, that Israel will stand down, that Iran will stand down, that one of Iran's proxies will remain down.
Like someone's going to keep launching bombs into Israel and Israel always responds.
So that's what I'm saying.
Like I know Israel can do it.
What their military has done over the past couple of years has been spectacular.
It's been actually, I mean, I'm not endorsing the level of death.
I'm saying they're very, very competent at killing their enemies that we've seen.
So I have no doubt there.
I just, it's like, it's nonstop.
It's nonstop violence in the Middle East.
This is why I don't really want to go to Israel.
This is why I think a lot of people don't want to go to Israel.
And it's why like I think a lot of us who have been paying attention to the Middle East for a long time feel exactly how President Trump felt this morning.
What the fuck, these people don't know what the fuck.
It's like, right?
Like that's the right attitude when it comes to Middle East matters.
Sorry, Matt, go ahead.
No, just that they've defanged Hezbollah from firing those 100,000 rockets over the northern border.
That's a huge change.
Hezbollah is a completely Iranian created subsidiary.
And they're like, ah, we're going to sit this one out.
So that's a sign that they have actually made progress in having fewer missiles go at them, even though they had missiles kill people yesterday.
I mean, progress in this part of the world is awkward and incremental at best, but there has been meaningful progress.
And I'm a little bit surprised here because I think I might be not the least skeptical person about whether or not the Trump administration made the right decision.
Seems like they made a pretty pragmatic calculation that at this particular time, given the pressure Iran was under, given the fact that they didn't have anyone who was likely to come to their defense here, that the Americans could sneak in and carry out a pretty devastating attack on these nuclear facilities that have long been a concern.
And it is not yet clear how much, how effective those bombings were.
And we'll learn more about that in the days and weeks to come, we hope.
But what is pretty clear is that there was a concerted effort on the part of the administration to broadcast toran.
This could be it.
And that that message was well received by the Iranians.
And even the kind of calibrated use of profanity this morning, because it did seem pretty like a pretty deliberate choice on the president's part, the fact that he's directing some of the criticism at Israel as well.
I mean, they seem to be navigating this very difficult situation pretty well.
All of that said, I will say that once it gets to the point where you're lobbing bombs at people as opposed to using the tools of diplomacy, this is, I suppose, by definition, something of a failure if someone hasn't lobbed a bomb at you already.
But they do seem to be making some progress here and one has to hope for a good outcome.
And again, a really difficult, protracted situation that we suspect this is probably an interregnum as opposed to a durable lasting peace.
But it could be a really useful interregnum.
And it could very well be the sort of thing that creates substantial problems for the Iranian regime.
I mean, it's one of those things where it's like, it's not our job to create peace in the Middle East.
It's really not.
Right.
And it is our job to protect American interests and the American people.
And I think Trump, consistent with all those other presidents, as I just went through, citing the Continenti piece, and we did some of this yesterday too on the show, believes truly that Iran cannot get a nuclear weapon.
They're too crazy.
They're too jihadi.
They're a little too keen on killing the Western infidels in order to trust that.
So given how weak they've been, they are right now, Trump's opportunity.
And he took it and was also given intel.
Yes, by the Israelis.
That's got an asterisk on it, as always, but also by the IAEA's assessment that they'd reached 60% uranium enrichment and that there had been an acceleration in the number of centrifuges over the past seven, eight months.
So he did have data in front of him.
And who knows what else?
We don't get to see what President Trump gets to see in terms of intel.
So I trust him that he thought that it was a valid intelligence assessment that they were speeding up toward the nuclear bomb.
And it makes sense to me too, given how weakened they were.
I mean, when you corner an animal, it lashes out.
It doesn't usually just fold and ask for peace.
It will tend to bite you from that corner.
And so it makes sense to me in any event.
But the larger question of peace in the Middle East, I mean, like, okay, how many presidents have tried that?
Some have gotten Nobel Peace Prizes only for the whole region to wind up, wind up under missile fire again.
It's just that that's just too big.
I applaud him for trying.
You know, when we were talking about possibly a deal yesterday, I was saying to Emily Jashinsky, like, what is the deal?
What's the deal?
Like, we said stop trying to develop a nuke.
They slowrolled us.
Then we bombed their nuclear facilities.
It's kind of done.
We got what we wanted.
And the big announcement was ceasefire between the other two.
Great.
I mean, I care about that too, but that's really between them in the same way, like the fighting since 10-7 has been between Israel and its many, many haters over there.
And on this show, we haven't really covered the day-to-day battles because it's really not America's fight.
But look, I understand Israel's our ally.
Iran's not.
Its proxies aren't, but it's really not exactly our fight.
Go ahead, Michael.
Well, a couple of things about this.
I mean, to your point about Trump's intelligence and what he has and what we haven't seen.
And, you know, just kind of bouncing off of what Matt said, there are a lot of lessons to learn from Iraq and to be skeptical.
And I agree with Matt, by the way.
It's like, this is a momentary success, but let's not think this is a lasting success.
There should be no spiking the ball in the end relating to everything in the Middle East.
No, if you defeat Grenada in 1983, spike the ball.
If you defeat anybody in the Middle East, no spiking.
But the difference is this, is that in 2003, until 2003, leading up to the Iraq war, you couldn't find a lot of Republicans who disagreed with the Bush administration's desire to go into Iraq and dislodge Saddam Hussein.
Trump is doing something that is actively going to fracture part of his coalition or runs the risk of fracturing his coalition.
And he did it anyway, which is pretty interesting and pretty impressive.
And look, there's a couple of political points here.
I mean, he put on True Social something about some congressman who had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
And by the way, to get nominated, you just need somebody from a legislature anywhere in the world can nominate.
So I think that's how he sees this.
And that's perfectly fine to see it that way.
Because what happened in 1995, Congress passed a bit of legislation, what was the, I think it was the Jerusalem Embassy Act.
What was it, 23 years later, after, as you said, Megan, quoting the great Matt Continetti, who's a friend and I think he's brilliant, is that everyone said they were going to do it.
And then 2018, Trump does it.
Everyone says they cannot have a nuke.
And people are shocked that Trump has done this.
It was pointed out, and I hadn't even realized this, that Golden Escalator speech, the very speech, he said that evening that Iran can't get a nuclear weapon.
So he's pretty consistent on this issue.
And I think it's, you know, to his incredible credit, again, as someone who's been very critical of him, I think it's to his credit that he's actually said, this is what I'm going to do.
And I did it.
And I've seen a lot of, I saw someone this morning saying, you know, it is, it is a right.
Why isn't it not their right to enrich uranium and create a nuclear weapon?
And it's the same thing as the Israelis done, et cetera, the United States, Pakistan.
They're too crazy.
Well, that is what you said.
And that's right.
It reminded me of what William F. Buckley once said.
He said, if you see someone pushing an old woman out of the way of the car and another one pushing a woman into a car, they're not both people who push old ladies around, right?
This is a different thing when they have a nuclear weapon.
North Korea Nuclear Threats00:15:47
And so, look, I don't in any way, I'm not celebratory about this.
I am happy.
But as you point out, this is the most important point for everyone to realize is that what Israel tries to do is to push back the capabilities of people trying to destroy them.
The people of Hezbollah, the leadership has been destroyed.
The IRGC leadership in Tehran has been destroyed.
The Assad regime has been destroyed.
Assad is now in Moscow.
These are great victories.
It has not changed the idea of the people that followed Assad, the people that signed up for Hezbollah, the people that are allies of the regime in Iran, that Israel must be destroyed.
That is something that you cannot necessarily bomb into submission.
So when people say, like Trump said the other day, what's the problem with regime change?
They're a bad regime.
I'd like to see them change.
It's like, me too.
I oppose us getting involved in that and trying to dictate things.
But if it precipitates the falling, the failure of the disgusting, horrible, murderous regime in Tehran that has been oppressing its own people since 1979, great.
But I don't want to.
Trump, as you guys know, we've discussed, Trump actually proposed Gaziera, Maragaza.
Trump looks at his region like anything's possible.
Yeah, let's say, hey, let's make everybody rich and we'll build instead of destroy and things will be so much better.
Like, just, let's just do that.
And it's like, he's a sunny optimist in so many ways.
And then when people don't live up to his optimistic vision and like version of them, he's like, what the fuck?
What's wrong with you, Peter?
I mean, I bought a timeshare in Kanye because I was like, this is going to be amazing.
Probably a bad investment.
I think there's one problem or at least one caveat we should think about in terms of the Matt Continenti perplex, which is you could make the exact same clip job of statements by U.S. presidents, every single one, saying that about North Korea.
And we didn't press the do something button.
We have the mother of all do something buttons, which is the U.S. military.
We didn't do that.
So should we have?
Should we now?
That's a difficult question.
I think my answer, being a sort of a constitutionist, libertarian, semi-peacenik, is no, we shouldn't bomb North Korea.
North Korea is arguably more psychopathic, but has much less reach than Iran.
Iran has been an active menace in the Middle East for the last half century.
North Korea has thrown some cannon fodder into the Russia-Ukraine war, but otherwise it's pretty ineffectual, generally speaking.
But whenever, you know, part of diplomacy is saying, well, you shouldn't have this.
We refuse to have that.
But do you really mean by that, that if the other actor doesn't abide by those words, that we're going to press this incredibly lethal, destabilizing do something button against a sovereign country?
I recognize that diplomacy and especially diplomacy between people who are antagonists is absolutely frustrating, messy, ineffectual, and bad.
That is what it's always been.
That's kind of the point of it is that people who disagree with each other are trying to come up with some kind of way to coexist without shooting each other.
But it is kind of a failure of diplomacy when you end up in a war situation.
And we should be skeptical.
I think we should be reticent to hit that do something button, even when psychopathic regimes are developing nuclear weapons.
But I have no love for Pakistan.
Don't.
They sheltered Osama bin Laden last time I looked for quite some time.
There is a lot of problems with that country.
And I'm going to start it with my best decision.
I agree.
You don't go around bombing the bad countries.
I know, but the situation is much more layered than that.
I mean, what happened?
I'm not going to go through the whole thing.
I did it at this top of the show yesterday, but the short version is the thumbnail version is Iran attacked Israel on 10-7 through its proxy, Hamas.
They funded Hamas.
I mean, Iran was funding al-Qaeda.
I mean, Iran has been funding a lot of deaths of Americans and people Americans love for a long, long time now.
So Iran funded that attack against Israel and through Hamas.
So Israel gets attacked and Israel spent the next two years taking down everyone who attacked it, you know, mob style, like everyone, you, the entire family, like the godfather style, like him, his entire family, dead, dead.
And they did it.
Both Hamas and then Hezbollah and then the Houthis, and then we helped with the Houthis and so on.
And then the Assad regime falls.
And then you have all these Iranian proxies that are now gone or their heads have been chopped off.
And at this point, there's some intel saying Iran is now accelerating its bomb because I think because it's like a cornered animal and it's starting to panic.
And I actually believe the reports that it was ramping up.
And I said yesterday, Bibi is not really, he has no credibility for me.
I mean, I just, I've watched him every year.
Say they're six weeks away.
They're six months away.
2012, I was on the air when he held up his little picture of the bomb that you'd see like in a Disney cartoon as like the round bomb with the little views at the top, trying to show us that they were about to have it within months.
That's 2012.
He is to the bomb claims what the leftist Greta Turnbergs are to the climate catastrophe claims.
That's true.
I'm sorry, but that's true with Netanyahu.
His defenders will say, oh, but Israel intervened to slow it all down.
Okay, I don't really believe that that's what stopped.
I think he overstated time and time again how close they were.
That's my point.
Megan.
Anyway, my point is, I'm just simply saying that it was more complicated than this because Israel had created conditions in fighting back that made this an ideal time to take it, to achieve the goal that all these other presidents agreed we needed to do.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Well, first off, I want to make sure that no matter how much you hate Benjamin Netanyahu, please don't compare anyone to Greta Thunberg because that's just like a slap in the face.
I mean, like, he's, I mean, he's going to give a speech to the Knesset that Megan Kelly in America compared me to Greta Thunberg.
Yeah, a couple of things.
Like, you know, to slightly disagree with my co-host here, Matt, I mean, the thing about the North Korea comparison, and I get the idea that there's different times for this when you say no one's done anything in the way that Matt Konetti wrote.
But if there is a moment in which the South Koreans were in an active war with the North Koreans and the North Koreans had lost all of its allies, couldn't do anything, was totally defanged.
And at the same time, you could actually liberate the people of North Korea who have been living under the most oppressive regime on earth, the last kind of Stalinist dictatorship.
It's a slightly different scenario, right?
I mean, the fact that Brett McGurk is saying this and some other people, Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, who's sending Donald Trump a signal message, which Trump then posts on True Social this morning, which might be the most hilarious thing he's ever done.
It was like this sycophantic message, like, we love you, President Trump.
But the reason they're saying this is that this is a moment to do it.
I mean, can you imagine this horrible regime that we've all been so afraid of, and rightfully so, too, can't even control its own skies, hasn't thrown up a single plane against not the B2s, but any American-made Israeli plane.
It's the time in which you do something like this or consider something like this, especially if the intelligence is saying, as I tend to believe, I don't have all the evidence of this.
I've talked to some people about it.
Megan, I'm sure you have too, that this was an actual serious point.
But when you do this, you have a thing that so many people, Matt says, I'm a half-peaceneck.
I think that's probably true.
Matt's about a half piecenick.
He sometimes loves war, but Matt, the peacenick, the people who say blowback, this is something that you hear from the Noam Chomsky's of the world, people used to be just on the left, but you hear it on the right too.
This is also blowback.
Blowback is bi-directional.
They have been doing this for so long, intimidating, attacking.
Look, you can think that America shouldn't have been involved in the war in Iraq.
I, unfortunately, and I criticize myself for this, took too long to get to that conclusion, but I did.
And it was a bad thought that I had, but I was much younger.
But regardless of whether or not we should have been there, we do understand that the Iranians killed 600, 650 Americans.
That's the kind of estimate through Iranian proxies that they were funding and arming roadside bombs that were built by the IRGC, IRGC people on the ground in Iraq, Suleimani, also killed by Trump, where?
In Iraq.
I mean, so they've been fighting a direct war against us.
Should we have been there?
No, we shouldn't have.
But do we say, because we shouldn't have been there, kill American troops with abandon hundreds of them?
This is blowback.
You guys got, you got, you know, overstretched and you left yourself open.
And the Trump administration responded not by killing Iranians, not by killing Iranian scientists.
The Israelis did that, blowing up your nuclear program in various places.
So you effed around and eventually you found out.
You found out.
And to quote Colonel Jessup, you effed with the wrong Marine.
You know, you had Donald Trump in there.
Joe Biden's gone, right?
We didn't have some feckless loser leader with no spine.
He tried.
He loves peace.
He what?
Gaziera.
You know, and he looked at you folks in Iran and said, let's have a great relationship and stop all the killing.
And then he started to realize, as any good deal maker does at some point, when he's getting stiffed, when somebody's slowrolling you and doesn't really mean to be there in good faith.
And then he dropped a bomb on their nuclear facilities.
That's how it went down.
Wanted to offer this.
I didn't get to it yesterday.
But a guy named Jamie Metzel posted this.
You mentioned Brett McGurk as follows, quote, I served, this is on X.
I served on the National Security Council under President Clinton.
I was Joe Biden's deputy staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
I voted for Kamala Harris and I've been a vocal critic of many dangerous and undemocratic actions taken by President Trump.
But I'm not a blind tribalist and am perfectly comfortable praising President Trump for bold and courageous actions in support of America's core national interests as he took Saturday night.
Iran has been at war with the United States for 46 years.
Its regime has murdered thousands of American citizens.
Its slogan, death to America, was not window dressing but core ideology.
It was racing towards a nuke with every intention of using it to threaten America, our allies, or the Middle East region as a whole, blah, And then he goes on to say, although I believe electing Kamala would have been better for our democracy, society, and economy, as well as for helping the most vulnerable people in the U.S. and around the world, I also believe VP Harris would not have had the courage or fortitude to take such an essential step as the president took last night.
Wow.
I mean, it's remarkable.
And a credit to him for saying it, Camille.
And he might be right.
And, you know, if I were trying to paint an alternative scenario here where Trump maybe achieves the same ends without necessarily having to carry out the military strike, it would have involved him going to Congress very formally and loudly and dramatically and theatrically, seeking authorization to use force and broadcasting to Iran very clearly.
If we don't get a deal, a deal where we get to come in, thoroughly inspect these sites with our personnel, then a strike is coming.
But get congressional approval, do things the right way, not literally.
I think that there's a possibility at least that you could have achieved a very similar outcome.
In fact, what would have been better is that you wouldn't have had to have the expense of the bombing, but you'd also have the knowledge of exactly what was in that facility and who was in the facility and be able to go in there and dismantle things in a very direct way.
I mean, that's at least a possibility, but that is definitely different and it's more complicated and it requires a lot of strategy that they might not have been able to pull off.
But at the same time, I do think that at least getting Congress involved in the decision is something that is worth flagging them for.
But the outcome does seem quite good overall.
Congress doesn't help with anything ever.
Congress is the problem.
Congress is not the solution to anything and certainly not military action.
Yes, if you're going to declare a war, you need them.
But the whole, go read John Yu's piece over at National Review today.
He's so smart.
This guy's been so brilliant.
Yes, he justified some of the torture under George W. Bush, but he was right about that too.
I'm sorry.
Anyway, no, I'm fine with it.
I defended the torture when it was happening too.
We thought we were going to get attacked every next week.
We wanted to do anything necessary to protect ourselves and our children.
It's like, fine, judge it now all these years later.
But okay.
Anyway, John Yoo has got a great piece up today about the founding fathers and about Alexander Hamilton and about why they created the structure they did with an emboldened executive who could make split second decisions, who could make in the moment decisions on how to protect the homeland and how Congress, of course, is a much more deliberative body.
And they understood that and it's got its place, but it's not when it comes to warfare in the moment, like where actual decisions need to be made and they need to be made fast.
That's why you have an executive who's commander in chief too.
He did not need to go to Congress.
You can argue about whether he should have.
I still don't think he should have.
Like, if you want to, whatever.
Okay.
But no, Congress fucks things up.
They don't fix things.
Sorry, go ahead.
The Hamilton and Madison agreed on nothing.
They didn't agree on what color the sky was, but they both agreed that the power to declare war should rest in the Congress because they didn't want to declare war.
That's not what happened.
We're now in the Obama 2011, like, that's just a kinetic military action.
That's not a war.
And I don't think that's a good question.
You really think we started a war with Iran?
Is that what you think we did?
JD Ban said that we declared war on Iran's nuclear program, which is not on the Iranian people, not on the country of Iran.
It's different.
It's not, it's not, it is not the same.
I think it's not exactly the same.
It's narrower war.
You're doing a warlike.
Totally disagree.
I disagree with you.
Also, like the, of course, there is the power invested in the president to respond to attacks.
This isn't a response to an attack.
To prevent attacks.
This is a preventative attack.
Yes, it is.
That's okay.
That's not like, oh, gosh, 24 hours time to notify anybody.
It doesn't have to be imminent.
Constitutionally, it does not need to be imminent.
No, it doesn't, Matt.
What's your authority for that?
It's not my authority.
It is.
For me, I think that when you say that you should, I think the dropping of a bomb is an engagement in a warlike activity.
And if you're doing that, you should be doing that in defense and not.
So you're talking about should, not must.
I mean, I'm trying to defend the president's power to do what he did.
There's no question as these people talk about impeachment.
It's open to a legal challenge.
It's utter folly.
He 100% had the legal authority to do what he did.
My side would lose because successive Supreme Courts have given the president broad authority and the warm power, to be clear.
But I think to look honestly at the intention of the founders, including Alexander Hamilton, I don't think it was the president should have the ability to go out and wage preemptive war farther along.
They understood that having a president with that much warm power would be a temptation towards power and lead to more.
Israel Rocket Response Debate00:07:57
And I think we've lived through this over the last year.
What he did was try to prevent a war.
He tried to prevent a war.
That's what he did.
He dropped a bomb on a nuclear facility that could have killed us all with Intel that they were ramping up and getting ready to use it.
So, I mean, like we can go around and around on this all day.
But number one, the AOC calls for impeachment, which Trump and she are arguing back and forth on right now online are absurd.
There's zero grounds for impeachment.
He's challenging her now, saying, go ahead and do it.
Make my day.
He's giving her one of those.
And I also think now, you know, then we're spilling over into, okay, well, even if he had the power, should he have exercised it?
And we definitely have a disagreement on that, but people can make up their own minds.
I want to play you.
I said I'd play the longer soundbite of him dropping the F-bomb because he actually gets into a couple of other subjects and I want to do that now.
Here it is.
I'm not happy that Israel is going out now.
There was one rocket that I guess was fired overboard.
It was after the time limit and it missed its target.
And now Israel's going out.
These guys got to calm down.
Ridiculous.
I didn't like plenty of things I saw yesterday.
I didn't like the fact that Israel unloaded right after we made the deal.
They didn't have to unload.
And I didn't like the fact that the retaliation was very strong.
But in all fairness, Israel unloaded a lot.
And now I hear Israel just went out because they felt it was violated by one rocket that didn't land anywhere.
That's not what we want.
I'll tell you.
And I'm telling you, I'm not happy about that, Israel, either.
I think they both violated it.
I don't think they, I'm not sure they did it intentionally.
They couldn't rein people back.
I don't like the fact that Israel went out this morning at all.
And I'm going to see if I can stop it.
Yeah, no, they violated it, but Israel violated it too.
Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I've never seen before.
The biggest load that we've seen.
I'm not happy with Israel, so I'm not happy with them.
I'm not happy with Iran either.
But I'm really unhappy of Israel's going out this morning because of one rocket that didn't land, that was shot, perhaps by mistake, that didn't land.
I'm not happy about that.
You know what?
We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing.
Do you understand that?
Never gets a ball in the voice.
It's always a good tell for him.
You're going to miss him when he's gone.
I know this.
I love the classic Trump overstatement that the response was the biggest response.
I've never seen anything like it.
It's like, well, it was just a kind of response.
I'm not sure about that.
Can we just be clear on that, Moynihan?
I just want to, because like my information, this is what I think happened via Fox News and the New York Times.
The ceasefire was about to take hold.
Five waves of missiles came at Israel before it had kicked in.
One got through the Israeli defenses and hit a target in an Israeli town called Bereshiva.
Then that's the one that killed four people at least and injured 26 Israelis.
After that missile strike, Israeli fighter jets located the launchers that had launched those missiles over Iran and fired on them.
Now, so far, the ceasefire hasn't kicked in, so no one's violated it, though.
Not a classy move by Iran.
Okay, later, the ceasefire is four hours old, and the IDF says two Iranian missiles flew into the north of Israel, but that they were intercepted with no injuries.
Iran is denying that they were the ones who launched those missiles.
But Israeli intel is usually pretty good on who's firing the rockets at them.
Okay, so I think when Trump's, when Trump says they, they, and they dropped a bunch of bombs, I think he's talking, I don't know what he's talking about, to be honest, because what then happened was Israel was flying a bunch of planes, according to the Trump tweets, uh, in retaliation.
I think they were about to drop bombs, and Trump sent out a bunch of tweets saying, you better not do that.
I don't want to see that.
Um, he from Air Force One, he said he spoke to Netanyahu and he said he told Netanyahu, bring back those military aircraft that Trump indicated were on the verge of attacking Iran.
He also declared that the last thing on Iran's mind now is a nuclear weapon.
And then you had a Trump tweet at 7.28 a.m. today saying Israel is not going to attack Iran.
All planes will turn around and head home while doing a friendly plane wave to Iran.
Nobody will be hurt.
The ceasefire is in effect.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States.
Go ahead, Moynea.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
It's the greatest punctuation of that ever.
Yeah, look, we were saying before, there's obviously some serious telegraphing going on here.
God knows what was said on that call between Trump and Netanyahu.
we all know the relationship that Obama and Netanyahu had, which was incredibly bad, particularly when Netanyahu came and addressed Congress.
It all sort of fell apart after that.
It had already been tattered before.
But the relationship that the two of these guys have, we're going to wait for the reporting and for the historians in a couple of years on this because it seems, you know, not the easiest one.
It seems contentious because Trump is a huge personality and knows what he wants and usually gets it, and particularly in foreign affairs.
And so you see these people out there that drive me absolutely bananas and say, oh, look, America's B2s are in the air.
Israel controls American foreign policy.
Israel does not control American foreign policy.
And this is, you know, I think not proof of that in Trump saying, go turn around.
If that happened, I imagine it's very likely that it did.
I do, though, very much disagree with the idea that, well, Iran did this, but Israel shouldn't have responded.
What the Israelis do is when they launch those missiles and, you know, four people killed in Beersheba and, you know, buildings destroyed and lots of people grievously injured too, is that they respond because they can very quickly target where those are coming from.
And then they blow up those missile launchers, which I think is a clearly fair thing to do.
So I think that what's happening here is Trump is rounding on the Israelis when it seems to me, and to any observer, as you said, Fox, I read both the Fox and the New York Times account, Wall Street Journal account of this too, which seems like your telling of this from multiple sources seems to be what happened.
That I think he's being not very charitable to the Israelis, but I suspect there's something else going on here that we don't know about, that he's trying to put Netanyahu in a very particular position.
Maybe it's a broader thing.
Again, this is total speculation, a broader thing that like, you know, because they were resistance, both sides were resistant to the ceasefire.
It wasn't as if everybody came to the table.
They had a round of negotiations and, you know, UAE or Oman or something.
This was kind of a diktat from Trump.
So there might be some sort of difficulty about what this entails.
And this is him firing a warning shot at the Israelis because when it comes to how they responded, I don't think they responded in an unreasonable way at all.
He says they came out, Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I've never seen before, the biggest load we've seen.
I'm not happy with Israel.
I don't know what he's talking about because what Israel did is they responded to the one that had been launched in Beir Sheva and in the way that we just discussed.
And then they were about to respond to the possibly errant, being very charitable, two missiles that had been intercepted post-ceasefire.
But then Trump said they didn't actually do it.
He got the planes to turn around after his conversation with Bibi.
So, I mean, I don't exactly know what Trump is referring to there, but I'll say this.
Tucker Cruz Echo Chamber00:14:34
I have 28 seconds till the break.
Last night, you know, we do AM Update, the morning podcast that we drop.
It's just news headlines for the audience.
And we, I mean, we went back and forth hour after hour.
We met again to update AM update because it was like the Iranians agree there's a ceasefire.
The Iranians just told CNN there is no ceasefire.
Oh, wait, no, they say there is a ceasefire.
Oh, the Iranian TV is reporting there's no ceasefire.
It was like, oh my God, that we put, we put it to bed, there is a ceasefire.
When you wake up, of course, it's like, everyone's violated the ceasefire.
Okay.
So it's not going that well.
All right, stand by.
Got to take a quick break.
The guys are with us for the full show.
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So guys, Emily Jashinsky launched her MK Media show last night after party with Emily, which has like a fun bonus of sounding kind of naughty, but it's totally above board.
Anyway, she launched it last night.
It's live on YouTube at 10 p.m., two nights a week.
And her inaugural guest was Tucker Carlson.
And it's a great time to get Tucker Carlson.
Of course, he's in the news every day because he's in the interesting position of being one of Trump's main supporters and yet very, very critical of really all war, but this one, yes, including, and had tried to talk Trump out of it to the point where Trump, when I was on vacation last week, referred to him as kooky Tucker Carlson and then made a shot of like, well, if he's going to credit, something like, what does he have to say?
He should, he should go buy a television network so somebody would listen to him.
Maybe somebody would listen to him.
Something like very cutting.
I was like, whoa.
And then they talked and Trump says Tucker apologized to him for going a little hard on him.
And so I don't know what exactly happened.
I haven't spoken to either one of them.
But Tucker's been under a lot of fire from people who now say, and on top of all that, you were wrong because Trump nailed it.
And so all your doom and gloom predictions were wrong.
But again, like, just don't make predictions either way in the Middle East.
Like, don't say his doom and gloom predictions were wrong.
It's only been about two minutes.
And don't, don't say they were right.
Like, let's just don't predict anything in the Middle East.
Like, that's, that's a golden rule.
Anyway, he went on with Emily and they had a couple of interesting discussions.
Let me give you the overall in which he responded to some of the attacks he's been facing from guys like he had an extraordinary interview with Ted Cruz, which I highly recommend you listen to.
Very entertaining on a number of levels.
And he's been fighting with Mark Levin of Fox News.
Anyway, take a listen to SOT 11.
I don't really care what people think of me at this point.
I'm 56.
You were wrong.
Well, yeah, I've been wrong many, many times.
I'll be wrong many, many more times.
But the one thing I am is sincere.
I really mean it.
I don't care about the effect on me.
I just, I don't want to relive Iraq.
And I know the people who did it.
I've lived among them.
I defended it.
I repeated their talking points.
Not doing that again.
And we came really close to doing that again because of Mark Levin and Laura Loomer and the rest of these morons who've never even left New Jersey.
Like they don't know anything about the world.
That's the other thing.
They're dumb.
They don't know.
They don't know the population of Iran.
They don't know anything.
They don't know the nations that border it.
They just don't know anything.
And I'm not making an argument for expertise or having been there, but I am making an argument for being responsible when you demand that the U.S. military do certain things because we were just in a crisis for a week.
We saw who people are.
We saw what they cared about.
And I've got nothing against Ted Cruz personally.
I feel sorry for Ted Cruz, obviously a totally hollow person taking instructions, but I do think we learned this is not someone who should be influencing wars because he just doesn't know anything.
He doesn't care.
And he's not putting America's interests anywhere near the top of his priorities.
Okay.
So that's Tucker.
Ted Cruz.
By the way, she's on at 10 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays.
So you can check her out tomorrow night.
She's got Rand Paul, who's one of the detractors that the president's seeing on this front in the U.S. Senate.
So what do you make of what's unfolded within the Republican Party over the past 10 days or so?
I just think it's really, you know, it's kind of a low blow from Tucker to assume that Ted Cruz has dual loyalty with Canada just because a guy is born there doesn't really mean taking instructions to the great white north.
I'm 56 too, Tucker, and I don't care that anybody thinks either.
And also, if I had done what he did in Moscow, I wouldn't be telling people, like accusing people of not having been to a place in a very, very grocery store.
Moynihan will point, yeah, the grocery store, that the subway is the cleanest in the world, makes you feel like America is dirty and bad.
Russia is bigger than the nicest grocery store in Moscow.
And also this comparative dollar.
There's just a whole bunch of stone obvious things that he could have learned from his father.
I do.
I've got to just say quickly, I'm going to give you back.
Just flying in the JFK on the way home.
It's Calcutta.
It's disgusting.
It does make you want to say like Calcutta.
Why are we so bad at this?
Sorry, go ahead.
No, Moynihan will tell a story about Steve Bannon that I think is interesting.
I think the bottom line is that Trump is correct when he says, at least as a matter of politics, that MAGA is whatever he says it is.
It's not whatever Tucker Carlson says.
I'm actually heartened that some people like Tucker, even though I disagree with him about many, many things.
I enjoyed his Ted Cruz interview.
You're right.
People should seek it out.
Like the exchanges were valuable, as was just the spirit of them from both sides, like just going at each other.
There should be more exchanges like that.
I think it was a useful thing.
But I'm heartened that there are people who have been MAGA who are who are bummed out by this use of U.S. military force.
At least they're adhereing to some amount of principle.
I think among the broader pro-Trump and also Republican electorate, I think Trump will be broadly correct as a matter of politics.
But I know Moynihan's been following Steve Bannon on this, among other things, for a while.
Well, I like what you said.
I think that's right too.
I think it's to Tucker's credit that he didn't abandon what appears to be a sincerely held belief of his just because his friend got elected.
He voted for him.
He wanted it and disagrees with him on this.
Like it would be worse if he just suddenly said, okay, all that stuff I was saying, forget about it.
Like that would be, that would be odd.
I've seen a lot of this week as well.
Yeah, we absolutely have.
I mean, look, I can, I understand the Tulsis of the world and the JD Vance's of the world, who I think probably secretly share Tucker's beliefs going along because they're in the administration.
Like there's no option.
You can't be out there as the vice president being like, this is so wrong.
God, this is Jet.
Like that would be absolutely foolheaded.
But anyway, go ahead.
Go ahead, Moynihan.
I want to hear your steam.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I think that JD Vance probably is much closer to Tucker than he's letting on.
I think that also those people in the MAGA universe as commentators and people who make a good deal of money off of it, a lot of them, no naming any names, have softened their very isolationist rhetoric when Trump did this and said, well, I guess he must be right.
I think a lot of it's about audience capture.
But I will agree with Matt, and I disagree with Tucker on a lot of things, almost everything these days.
But I do appreciate the fact that he doesn't back down and say, well, you know, MAGA is MAGA and he's the one, as he said, who decides MAGA.
So I'm going to carry water for whatever he does.
I think he's wrong.
I love the fact that Tucker's always like, Ted Cruz is, and it doesn't matter who it is.
Like Ted Cruz is a nice guy.
He's a hollow-eyed devil who's an idiot.
But he does all he talks about, which I think is.
Totally.
And then it'll be like, he's a friend of mine.
Is he actually a friend of mine?
He's a friend of mine.
He's like Jeffrey Epstein and probably a Nazi, but whatever.
No, he didn't say that.
I said that.
But like, and also, like Matt, I think that it was a good interview because when Tucker's, the problem with Tucker's show has been, it's been so many people since he left Fox.
It's just been kind of an echo chamber of this is what I think MAGA should be.
This is kind of my version of the MAGA ideology.
And it's a bit of an echo chamber.
So to see him in that combative role, I don't want to ever agree with Ted Cruz.
I'm not a fan of his at all.
But also, I think that it was actually people had that interview a bit wrong because the clip that was played and they put it out before where Ted Cruz didn't know the exact pop, or he didn't offer any population number.
I think you, by the way, you can say that Iran shouldn't have a nuclear bomb and think they have 50 million people rather than 92 million people.
I don't think it's the real knockout punch that people thought it was.
But the entire interview was actually quite good.
I mean, they gave it as good to each other.
It was very hostile in certain places.
It was certainly very enlightening.
And I encourage Tucker to do more of those and fewer people he agrees with because I get kind of bored by the echo chamber stuff.
And I think he's very, very good when he's debating people.
So, but it's very funny to listen to him be like, you know, oh, oh, really?
That's what you're thinking.
And then Ted Cruz goes, a little less snark.
And Tucker was bad habit.
So it's kind of charming on both ends.
Yeah, it was like sitting across from somebody like fighting in a restaurant.
I was like, oh, this is getting interesting now.
Listen.
But the thing about it, I think, is also this fracturing of the MAGA movement is that if you look at Donald Trump's true social feed in the past 24 hours, you would see somebody who most of people, these people, including Tucker, would probably call a neocon.
I mean, he's like, Moynihan, did you see what just my producers just sent this to me, including Jeb Bush?
Yes.
Jeb Bush put out a tweet saying President Trump's decision to neutralize Iran's regime's nuclear program is a watershed moment.
It reasserts U.S. strength, restores deterrence, sends an unmistakable message to rogue regimes.
The era of impunity is over.
My full statement here.
And then Trump retweeted it saying, thank you to Jeb Bush.
Very much appreciated, which is like if some of you out there listening and Megan Kellyland are getting your political education out and don't remember 2016, go watch those exchanges between Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, where he is absolutely hammering him, particularly on the Iraq war and his brother.
But this is the interesting thing about Trump.
No one should be surprised by this.
Who in Trump's cabinet, first time around, this time around, has not, including JD Vance, called him like Hitler?
And he does not care.
He's like, if you're on my side now, great.
He does not.
I mean, one of his great qualities is that he doesn't hold these endless grudges, which I think is pretty, pretty fascinating.
But he also tweeted this guy, this young American Jewish Instagram star is like a pro-Israel guy, like humiliating this woman in a kefia at like a pro-Palestine protest.
That's something that you would be like, you know, I know, Megan, you, you listen to, skeptically listen to, and like the guys at the commentary podcast.
That's something that those guys would retweet.
And I saw that on Trump's Truth Social today.
There's a lot of stuff there that if you took that from all the people who have been trying to direct MAGA, like this, I think, and one final thing, not to go on too long, but there's two types of this.
There's people who believe this is what MAGA is, and there are people who are trying to direct MAGA.
I think that's what Trump, that's what Tucker does.
But there's a lot of people that say, like, oh, he never, you know, no foreign wars.
That's not what he's interested in.
It's like, I think that's a fundamental misunderstanding of Trump and how Trump views American power.
He does not want to start new foreign wars.
He does not want an Iraq situation, but that does not mean that he's going to, you know, let's dismantle the B2s.
Let's put all this stuff away.
We don't need it.
We have no business anywhere in the world.
That's not how he sees the world.
In the first administration, they went after Syria.
They 75 Tomahawk missiles into Syria.
Yeah, it wasn't a huge war, but this was not, this was not some, you know, peacenick.
They killed Sulamani.
And that was at the same time going to usher in the hell that all these people expected.
I mean, Tucker said that this might, and again, we have to wait.
And they said this will probably result in thousands of American deaths.
So, I mean, I think Tucker is trying to directionally push MAGA somewhere.
And I think he's had some success at that, but it kind of falling apart at the moment.
And I think that there's other people who believe that MAGA has always been a kind of Lindbergh Taft old school Republican isolationism, which it isn't.
It just simply isn't.
The evidence doesn't show that.
I have to say, I know Tucker's against what's happening in the Middle East right now.
And I understand it.
He was right about Ukraine.
Tucker was right about Ukraine.
He took a lot of heat.
That war has been lost for a long time.
It's been stuck in this unsolvable intransigence and it needs to be ended.
Trump's not wrong.
There's just so much death on both sides.
It just, we need to admit reality.
I know you guys may feel differently, but I think Tucker was right about Ukraine and deserves.
Yeah, but I think he deserves a fair listen on his predictions, though.
Again, don't make predictions about the Middle East because it's just folly for anybody.
Neocons and Polling Data00:13:56
What do you guys make of it?
Because it's not just Tucker.
He's now warring with Laura Loomer, who's, you know, she's been out there attacking him.
And he fought back, but Tucker and Levin are really, really going at it.
He's both as good as they get it.
And that is like, and then they both, not only did they argue their points when it comes to Israel, then they both one-up each other on whether they actually love Trump.
You know, like Levin's bringing up those texts that were unearthed from Tucker that he sent somebody within Fox News after the election last in 2020 when he lost saying, I can't stand Trump and I can't wait until we can't, we don't have to talk about him every night.
Something for which I think Tucker did apologize to Trump.
They made up.
They definitely talked about those texts and Tucker explained them and Trump was fine with everything.
Anyway, you know, you can see these two factions of the Republican Party, Matt, really fighting.
And the one that thought it had Trump is not winning.
And the ones who hated Trump and were brought along kicking and screaming to vote for him over Kamala Harris are doing okay.
They've had a couple setbacks.
They'd like regime change, but they're, I mean, I heard my friends over at National Review praising Trump in a way I and commentary too.
I, I try to get my news from everybody.
So I have all sides represented.
And it's been amazing to hear like the more dejected side that thought they had Trump as their isolationist buddy in their tone.
And then like the guys at commentary, like Cotton Eddie, he's on commentary.
Like there's, they're elated.
Rich Lowry, who I love, he's actually been fair to Trump, but he, he has a piece right now up on National Review called President Badass.
I mean, it's like something's happening.
Let's remember, though, that, you know, this is the same Trump who, was it two months ago?
We certainly talked about on the show with you, Megan, was in Saudi Arabia.
And he gave a speech that that exact same crew, the Continenti wing, was not so happy with, where he called neocons out by name on foreign soil in Saudi Arabia, which I think last time I looked was the country from which 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9-11 came from.
And he used that as an opportunity to denounce the Bush family and the neocon wars and the nation building and all of this and saying that we are not sitting in judgment of all of you.
We just want peace and et cetera.
So there is always, you know, it's the whims of one very politically talented and interesting person.
But when you, when you, when you do what you kind of understandably want, Megan, which is to tell Congress to go take a long walk off a short pier, you end up with one man deciding what things are.
And that depend on, depending on who he last talked to.
So yes, it's a good day to be a artist formerly known as a neocon.
But I predict that in the sooner rather than later future, that group of people, there's not going to be a lot of Jeb exclamation point tweets in favor of Trump as he drops more F-bombs at Bibi Netanyahu, as he says, look, this ceasefire is the most important thing, which is not what the most important thing is for Israel at all.
As they figure out who gets to control the airspace under what terms, what America is going to allow and not allow in terms of the use of the American supplied weapons and network systems, which Israel needs American tacit support for.
I think we're going to be seeing a lot of different versions of what Trump's Middle East foreign policy is going to be and pushing for expanding the Abraham Accords into countries and doing, you know, making deals with countries in order to do that.
And I think the Abraham Accords was a great triumph in his first administration among the handful of the best things that happened under him.
So what does it mean now?
Who gets next?
And under what conditions?
What kind of deals is America going to do with Saudi Arabia to get them into the Abraham Accords?
I think Commentary Magazine might not be as stoked a couple of months ago.
They might not love that.
Yeah.
So you say they're going to be upset as he drops more F bombs on Netanyahu and the corollary is fewer actual bombs on Iran.
So that's probably the future.
Camille, what do you make of it?
Because I do think the internal war on the right is interesting.
Of course, the left is loving it.
They're bathing in it.
They're rubbing it all over themselves.
They love the war.
I don't know.
I think it's healthy to have these debates.
I don't think they need to get super personal and nasty.
I'm not sure why they always have a tendency to do that, but I find it really fascinating to listen to the different positions.
And I would look, there's always a few exceptions who are just nutcases who are out there saying like, you should be impeached over this.
And then there's the people who always go to how evil the Jews are.
Like those people I just write off and I try not to even mention them.
It's not worth it.
But like mainstream, smart, invested, America-loving commentators are interesting to me.
You know, they're interesting to me.
And I think we're learning from like the Tucker Ted debate, the Tucker Levin debate now, and some of the back and forth we've seen on X from lesser known players, but probably everybody who, you know, everybody on this screen knows.
Yeah, I think since the beginning of this administration, there's always been a lot of questions about how this very diverse cast of characters manages to get along with each other over the long run.
And we certainly saw a lot of this consternation around the Elon Musk fallout and the just broader kind of tech bro faction of MAGA, which is a third kind of element of this story that a moment ago, we were talking a lot about that things quieted down.
And now we have the kind of foreign policy tensions that have come to the forefront.
As Welch pointed out, the fact that the president can give a speech that seems to point in one clear direction and then take an action that points in what seems to be the polar opposite direction makes it hard for any of these factions to think that they own him completely.
It probably does, I think, make people a little more reluctant to imagine that they can push the cart in one direction or another.
So it'll be interesting to see if there's another opportunity for, say, Tucker Carlson to have to take a position publicly that is in sort of strident opposition to the president.
I think a lot of Republicans have kind of had to hold their nose while supporting certain things like the Great Big Beautiful Bill, which is supposed to curtail spending, but also contains a hell of a lot of spending and doesn't really seem to be curtailing it.
It's been interesting to see how they've had to navigate all of these different tensions and how they've managed to survive them unscathed.
Certainly, if the current circumstance with Iran and Israel, if that manages to hold, that's great.
It certainly seems like we've kind of insulated ourselves from any kind of potential fallout from the strike, at least in the short run.
But had things been protracted a bit longer, had there been more kind of looming questions about whether or not the United States would get deep, more deeply involved, then perhaps there'd be even more tension.
But at the moment, they seem to be weathering this storm and the folks are falling back in line.
And I suspect that'll probably continue to be the case, irrespective of what happens going forward.
Well, we'll see.
I'm sure they'll be polling out any day now on how Trump's doing.
Going into this, you know, like last Friday, he was, I think, at 56%.
He's crushing it in the polls right now, higher than Obama was at this point in his term, definitely higher than Biden.
Like his approval ratings have been extremely strong, higher than they ever were for Trump.
We'll see whether this has increased or decreased the numbers.
I think it's going to increase.
Even though people are not in favor of war with Iran and in advance of the dropping of the bomb, we're not in favor of dropping the bomb.
So, but Trump is so transparent about everything.
And I think it's going to go well.
I just want to say one other thing.
The Jeb Bush thing is, I have a personal connection to this because when he was running for president against Trump in 15, 16, he gave me his first interview.
I believe we were at Liberty University.
And we sat down and I asked him, knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion of Iraq like your brother did?
And he said yes and didn't say that, you know, it was a mistake.
And I mean, many people would later say at that point, his, his candidacy was killed in its crib because that was the wrong answer by 2016.
It was very clear to most Americans by 2016 that the Iraq war was a mistake and that it shouldn't have been undertaken.
Anyway, so then he went out on the presidential debate stage and Trump, you know, this outsider comes in from nowhere and starts hammering him on it.
You should have, you couldn't say it was a mistake.
It was an obvious mistake.
And Jeb Bush was really caught there because he'd given me that terrible answer, which he tried to clarify a couple of days later saying he'd misunderstood me, even though the question was super clear.
And it's his brother's war, so he doesn't want to throw him under the bus.
And it's Trump, so no one wanted to bend the knee to him and say this outside weird guy with the weird hair.
He's right and I'm wrong and my brother was wrong.
So it was like, it was totally fraught.
Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake.
All right.
Now, you can take it any way you want.
And it took Jeb Bush.
If you remember at the beginning of his announcement, when he announced for president, took him five days.
He went back.
It was a mistake.
It wasn't a mistake.
Took him five days before his people told him what to say.
And he ultimately said, it was a mistake.
The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives.
We don't even have it.
Iran is taking over Iraq with the second largest oil reserves in the world.
Obviously, it was a mistake.
I could care less about the insults that Donald Trump gives to me.
It's blood sport for him.
He enjoys it, and I'm glad he's happy about it.
But I have $22 million.
I am sick and tired of him going after my family.
While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe.
And I'm proud of what he did.
And he's had the gall to go after my...
The World Trade Center came to the bottom.
He had the gallery to go after my mother.
He's had the gall to go after my mother.
That's not keeping me.
I won the lottery.
And that really helped propel Donald Trump, that debate and him hammering Jeb Bush straight to the nomination and then the presidency.
So it is kind of a remarkable full circle moment now to see Jeb Bush praising Trump for an aggressive military action in the Middle East and Trump accepting the compliment and, you know, sort of gladhanding with now what is clearly a high energy Jeb.
And where was that debate?
It's important to point out.
It was in South Carolina, a big military state of all places to go after the Bush family, to go after John McCain.
You're going to do it in South Carolina.
And Trump said, yes, F yes.
I think that one of the things that annoys me most about some of these debates is the endless, stupid use of the word neocon, which suggests that anyone who wants to have any military action or any military response to anything is a neocon.
So I don't think there's actually, yeah, or like a warmonger or the, you know, when Tucker says, I really disagree with him, that, you know, Mark Levin enjoys when people blow up.
That's what his like, you know, guiding ideology is watching people die in the battlefield.
I think that this is both crazy and wrong.
And I also think that Trump like acknowledges that he can go to Saudi Arabia and denounce neocons and neoconservatives and do what he did in Iran and actually, you know, keep those two thoughts in his head at the same time.
Mostly because when Tucker is on Emily's show, and congratulations to Emily, who's great on her new show, and everyone should watch and listen.
I think that the thing that's when he brings up Iraq, much in the way Matt did earlier and I did too, is that, yeah, there's lessons to be learned from that, a million lessons to be learned from that.
But I think that what how Trump sees foreign policy as a neocon thing or not a neocon thing, the specific thing, and again, we don't want to get into a boring definitional argument about what a neoconservative is, but it's that we can come in and create democracy.
We can install things that people are just desperate in waiting for democratic institutions to be created by the Americans.
What Donald Trump is saying in Iran is that we're going to blow up your nuclear facilities that are in Fordo under a mountain.
We're not going to go in there and try to create a new parliament.
We're not going to try to come in and create elections.
I think that's a very, very At all.
I mean, so the boots on the ground is the thing that Iraq is all about.
There's no threat.
I think there's a 0% chance of boots on the ground in Iran-American.
Totally agree.
Nobody, no Americans would.
I mean, as you pointed out, it's such an important thing to point out.
The polling suggests that people weren't psyched about this, mostly because there are a lot of people that aren't psyched about Trump in certain ways, particularly amongst Democrats.
But if you look at the polling, and our pal Harry Anton was breaking this down the other day, amongst, and this shows you something about the supposed split between the kind of isolationists and the more traditional Republicans or so-called neocons.
That's a kind of Twitter debate in a lot of ways, because if you look at the polling that Harry showed, it was like 75% of Republicans were on board with the strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.
I don't know if those polls, how accurate they are, if they'll stay, but it suggests that the people that are not interested in neoconservatism, not interested in American adventures and abroad, or installing new governments are okay with what Trump did because Trump isn't acting like a neoconservative in that traditional sense that we can't.
City Debt and Taxes00:15:31
And he doesn't sound like one.
Like you'd know if he were, you know, you'd have a different feel.
He's just so direct on everything.
He doesn't try to hide anything.
Is like Hannity said to me many years ago, the problem with Trump is not that he lies too much.
It's that he tells the truth.
Like it's all out there, just good, bad, or ugly for the beholder.
And he's been retweeting Hannity all day.
And Hannity is the one in the kind of Tucker universe who's one of the bad guys at Fox who's pushing for war.
And Trump has been retweeting, retruthing, whatever you say, his stuff in the past 24 hours.
So it tells you something.
Okay.
We have to talk about the mayoral race.
And there's another thing we have to talk about what's happened with the Supreme Court.
I really hope I can get this in there as this crazy ass Boston judge tries to defy the U.S. Supreme Court.
He's about to get his ass handed to him.
So I'll do them in that order because I really want to get to the mayoral thing and the other one can hold if we needed to.
First of all, is it 110 degrees in New York City today?
It is 170 degrees.
And I want them to be happy and I don't want them to hear the zooming and the buzzing of the air conditioner.
So I am literally in like a Finnish hot, like it's the, I've never been as hot as I am right now.
So if I say that we should bomb, you know, Alaska, just take it because it's 110 degrees in New York, it's unbelievable.
It's so hot.
I mean, here down at the beach, it's a lot, it's like 10 degrees cooler and it's, I don't know, low 80s here, but in New York, in New York, what is it today?
It says it's going to be 100 degrees.
Go ahead, Matt.
Yeah.
And no, I'm just Albert Brooks in broadcast news, you know, when he goes on shopping.
Yes, the whole continent map is going to start to wave behind us.
And it's a great day to go out and vote for people who belong to the Democratic Party.
Thank God that's not me.
But yeah, it's the Democratic primary today.
I've seen pictures, actual pictures of people lining up enthusiastically ahead of time to vote.
What people need to understand about New York, too, is those concrete buildings hold the heat, right?
It's like walking next to an oven.
You know, it gives off heat.
And so to be standing there waiting to vote.
And for what?
For this Democratic socialist, which is a nice way of softening socialist who looks like he's going to win.
We have to talk about this crazy guy.
His name is Zoran Modani.
I keep messing up his last name.
I don't know.
Mamdani.
Mamdani.
And he is a strange man who wants a $30 minimum wage.
It's just over half that right now.
He wants a $30 minimum wage.
He wants no more police.
He wants social workers instead.
He wants free bus rides, which would cost almost a billion dollars for New Yorkers or somebody.
I don't know who's going to pay that.
He wants to make sure rent stabilized apartments can't have any increase in their rent.
Not sure who's going to pay for that either.
He wants a lot of government handouts.
He basically, when it comes to police and law and justice, looks like Chesa Boudin, the booted out of office DA in San Francisco.
And when it comes to his philosophy on running a city, when it comes to cops and social safety net and also just giveaways, he looks like just like Brandon Johnson in Chicago.
He's terrifying.
And the New York community, pathetic as it is, just rolled over and let it happen.
They rolled over.
Charles Gasparino has a great piece in the post today, New York Post, about how these feckless MFers who run New York business, you know, what a town.
They're too afraid.
They're like, you know what?
He's probably going to win.
So I have to keep my mouth shut because I need to kiss the ring and have favors done for me.
And this guy, according to the latest polls, is steamrolling toward the W today, because if somebody doesn't get over 50% of the vote and it's between him and Cuomo, then they go, it's ranked choice.
So they eliminate the lowest person on the list in terms of vote getters.
And all those people who vote for that person, their second choice gets their votes, which could put and is predicted to put this guy over the top, this Mamdani.
And Mamdani is such an odd duck.
He wasn't born here.
I think he was born in Uganda and lived there for the first seven years and then came here.
But I mean, you come to a country at age seven and now you're 33.
You sound like American.
You don't sound like a Ugandan at that point.
I mean, it's been 25 years plus.
But listen to him.
This hit today as he was doing an interview with, forgive me, I don't know who it was.
Looked like local news to me.
And listen to what a faker this dude is with his, he Kamala Harris in his switcheroos, NBC4 is Melissa Russo.
Listen to this.
Because I think that New Yorkers, more than they hate a politician they disagree with, they hate a politician they can't trust.
On the subject of trust, you've adopted different speaking accents in different scenarios.
But they go to their local bodega.
Is there one that's real and one that's affected?
What I would say is, as any immigrant knows, having been born in Kampala, Uganda and then raised in South Africa and moving here when I'm seven years old, is there different parts of my life?
Worldwide tour, is it worldwide?
Is it worldwide?
Mamdani was talking about a worldwide press tour back when he was a rapper.
Bring the flavor to the fish, bring the flavor to the rice.
Goes a long way here in New York City.
This is how I speak.
This is how I am.
Oh my God.
If I did that accent, that is a real thing.
Do you think I'd get in trouble if I did his accent?
Like if I was like in different shows.
I do it on the fifth column, actually.
That's true.
Another reason to tune in.
The best detail of that is like in the rap video directed by his mother, which is really hot tracks that are dropping.
I know Matt has a lot of things.
I'll just say quickly that it is interesting today, as you point out, Megan, it's 40,000 degrees in New York and it feels like Cuba and people are going to go vote to make it more like Cuba in almost every way.
And it's like super, it's super depressing.
But yeah, there's, you missed a few ones, like where he was, he suggested using empty spaces and disused train stations.
And I actually think some that are actually used transition to house the homeless, which if you know anything about New York and you ride the subway in New York as I do, know that that's not a problem.
That's already happening.
And also the same thing is true about the about the free buses, because we have to make the buses are already free.
Nobody pays for the bus in New York and nobody pays for the subway.
And one of the great things is like how incompetent and feckless the government in New York is.
They've now spent billions of dollars to have this allied international, whatever the company is, that provides guards there who don't do anything.
They're just a guy getting paid to watch people go through the subway and not pay for it every day.
So I don't know where they think this stuff is going to come from, where the money is going to come from, who's going to pay for it.
Free childcare, rent freezes.
Like this is a collection of voodoo economics that every economist on earth knows doesn't work.
So yeah, I mean, I have another objection.
I don't think that's a Ugandan accent anyway.
That sounds like an Indian accent to me.
So it's cultural appropriation.
Watch out.
All the other problems.
He's also an exploiter because remember that the Indians in Uganda, many Indians came from Uganda because in 1971 or 72, Idi Amin, the dictator, when he took over Uganda, kicked all the Indians out.
And the reason being is they were about 1% of the population.
They controlled like 60% of the wealth because there was a huge population of Indian doctors, et cetera.
So that's why he is Indian and he was actually born in Uganda because in the sort of DSA democratic socialist view of the world, he was a horrible exploiter.
So yeah, that's that's so do we have to give him a pass on?
Maybe we have to give him a pass on that.
But I don't give him a pass on that because he's an American who sounds like an American in every other interview he gives, right?
It's only when he needs it.
Like Kamala Harris, have you no empathy, man?
Camille, you know how that's for having.
Well, it happens, but it doesn't usually happen in contexts where I'm doing media.
If I'm around family and everyone has the heavy patois, I might slip into it a little bit.
But for the most part, because they will ridicule me because I don't do it well, I try my best to police it.
Camille, I'm usually aware of it when it's happening.
I don't make a conscious choice, but I at least know that I'm doing it.
And I don't know.
I think for both him and Kamala, you can kind of see the switch almost take place.
You know the context in which they're about to go into this particular style of oration for persuasive purposes.
Camille, can I interrupt you?
I frown on that.
I can't deal with this lying on one of the greatest podcasts in America.
It might be true that when you are amongst your Jamaican family, you're like, oh, you liise blood clot.
And you do stuff like that.
Fine.
But I have seen you on the New York subway in a different situation, code switch into a different accent.
Is that not true, Camille Foster?
Let's hear it.
Where you don't.
Yeah.
So if someone steps on your brand new Yeezy.
Well, yeah.
Well, no.
What are you going to say, Camille?
Well, yeah, you want me to slip into my urban vernacular.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Let's hear that.
And I do, I do has to do that sometimes, but that is under particular circumstances.
And it is not usually to confront someone who stepped on my shoes.
Sometimes it's to evade detection in circumstances where I would rather you not know that I'm very clean and articulate.
Yes.
Yes.
For people to call you like you are, you look like my uncle, my uncle Thomas.
Like, for instance, when I've heard people say, I've heard that, I've heard that before.
I've never met the man, but I've never met the man.
Yeah, but there's a lot of people.
So you remind your hind voting.
Yeah.
We're cross-examining Camille.
Can we get a vote, Camille, on Mamdani's rapism?
How's this?
How is his rhyming?
Well, Matt, I was watching your face.
Had you not seen the clips of him rapping before?
No, it's it's so bad.
It's so bad.
But also, I will say this: Afro beats is kind of a big thing and it is, it is interesting.
And there are great Afro beats artists, but he is not one of them.
So it's good that he gave that career up.
It's unfortunate that he's decided to run for mayor.
So yeah, exactly.
Wait, Steve Krakauer wants us to, he wants us to take a look at another clip.
I don't know what it is.
Just roll it.
Let's see.
Oh, no.
Damn.
Our future will not be different until we make a different choice.
We have to fill out the entire ballot and do not rank Andrew Cuomo.
New York City.
We need a new day.
We deserve a chance.
A New York City that centers working people.
All concepts are just ideas in the clouds if we do not bring them home.
Elect Sofran for mayor.
Leave it in the clouds.
Did you hear her doing the Obama thing?
Like she does.
She's another code switcher.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was waiting to see which one of those affects she was going to bring.
I expected the wise Latina, but we didn't get that in that particular ad.
But you know what?
I hate this idea of working people.
Like the only people who work just do like jobs that don't pay very well.
And it's like manual labor.
The rest of us don't work.
We're not working people.
But one of the things that the reason I don't know about the rapism in his code switching is that I've been paying attention to his outrageously shitty ideas.
And one of them.
Yeah, I don't.
Well, clearly, because I don't want to give my money to the MTA to set on fire, which they already do.
But you see guys like John Katz and Matides, who's like a perennial candidate in New York.
He has a show on, I think he owns WABC.
And he owns, yeah, he owns Gristidi's supermarket.
He had a comment the other day, which is true.
He's been talking to his fellow rich people who definitely don't work because they're not working people.
And about particularly in like the financial services industry, this stuff is portable, man.
They don't have, they don't have shops.
They don't have like, you know, we have a store on the corner.
Can we move it?
Like they can move to Miami as so many people during very easily.
So I know you hate those guys, but it's your tax base and the number of people who say, well, they got to pay their fair share.
Look who pays the taxes in New York City.
And on top of it, people should know this who don't live in this, as you point out, Megan, the best city on earth, but also the worst at times too, is that we don't pay federal tax only.
We don't pay state tax only.
There's a city tax in New York, which is also punishing.
And you increase that on people.
No, when I was there, we paid over 50% taxes easily for the federal state city.
Then they lob on extra taxes, like just if you're rich enough, just like extra random fees that you have to pay.
That's an additional, like your rent tax and all that.
Like they, there is so much taxation already in New York.
So much.
And people are fleeing.
They've already been fleeing.
There's only so many people Ron DeSantis can house.
I just, I'm not sure what the plan is here because we'll watch.
He has to house.
We'll see.
How about the center?
You know how we hate platform?
Isn't centering also equally annoying?
First verb.
It's not a verb.
They make fun of rich people for saying they summer places.
Yes.
Centering is worse than summering.
Okay.
Years ago, we knew this family and the woman who was like, we saw these boats lined up and we're like, oh, wow, that's really cool.
It's like this big motorboat.
And she goes, I prefer a sailing vessel.
That's the same kind of person who uses the term center.
I'm glad you mentioned Brandon Johnson in Chicago, Megan, because it's a good example.
I think that Mamdani is trying to Chicago, New York, where really, really awful Democratic and Democratic socialist governance treats an existing great city.
Chicago is a wonderful city that still throws off a lot of wealth.
They just treat it as something to act as a predator on.
Like, okay, cool.
We've got a guaranteed revenue stream.
I'm going to get more of it, use it to accumulate power and use it to enrich my buddies in usually in some kind of public sector union context.
And in the process, you're going to have levels of debt and obligations to pensions.
People are going to run fleeing because the combined taxation of the place is just insane.
That's what's happening here.
It's what's happening to way, way, way too many large cities in this country.
I know there's a couple of guys out with a book called The Abundance Agenda, you know, trying to convince Democrats to be more, I don't know, useful on like have public policy heathered to results.
And they're getting tons of pushback, by the way, from the left.
Insane Urban Taxation Costs00:06:44
Like, how dare you?
How dare you say the government work?
It's a really bad sign that there is a large number of people in New York who look at a guy who's never worked a day in his life, as far as I can tell, in the private sector.
He's been working for his mother.
Rapping his heart.
Come on, Matt.
My kids do that in front of me all the time.
I had no idea it was an actual job.
I want to say this.
Back to the Tucker-Ted Cruz debate.
Tucker said, and he said this many times, like, I want my country to be nice.
And he was talking with him about how disgusting Washington, D.C. is.
Back to my JFK thing.
You know, like, it is true.
You have a lot of moments, sadly, if you live in a blue state in particular, where you look around and you're like, ew, this is disgusting.
How is there this much trash on the way to the airport?
Where are the sanitation workers?
You know, it's, it's like a slow crumble that we're seeing in blue controlled cities in often blue controlled states, but it can happen in red-controlled states too.
Usually it happens in the blue-controlled cities of those states.
And this is why, like, Tucker wants us to take the money we gave to Ukraine and spend it on, you know, America.
I just don't believe that.
If the federal Congress kept the money that we gave to Ukraine, I don't believe they'd well spend it.
I don't believe they'd clean anything up.
I feel like it'd be somehow it'd wind up in Nancy Pelosi's next mansion.
However, I do think local leaders are to blame.
And that's why it's so upsetting to see this happen in New York City.
Like we just keep electing far left Democrats who are ruining the country.
They're ruining the country with their terrible open border policies and leftist economic policies.
Mayor Bill de Blasio ruined New York.
He ruined it.
We were thriving under Giuliani and then Bloomberg, who was a Republican slash independent.
And then, you know, he called himself an independent and eventually happened.
But my point is they were right-leaning.
And that's really the solution to Tucker's problem and our problem.
We need responsible fiscal leadership in there.
We need people who understand what that kind of taxation will do to the actual money earners.
They will flee.
It's a free country.
You can go to other states.
And this guy, Momdani, is exactly the opposite of what we need, who has a very good shot of taking over as the mayor of our biggest and one of our best cities.
Go ahead.
This is why the bannons of the world drive me crazy when you can, I like debates within the Republican Party, as we were talking about, particularly when it comes to foreign policy.
But people like Steve Bannon, who are Democratic socialists in their own way, they hate the financial industry.
That's fine.
Trump has been skeptical of them too.
But the idea that New York City needs more money is insane.
It's completely ridiculous.
All you have to look at is focus in on the MTA, which is the transit authority that runs the buses and the subways and the trains, and then go to a place that has insanely high taxation like Sweden and ride those subways and trains and be like, wow, this is amazing.
You do not get that feeling flying into Arlanda Airport in Stockholm that you got Megan flying into JFK.
It's like we are, we have these like strangleholds of the MTA union.
And, you know, you look at these people.
There's a story the New York Times did like five or six years ago, maybe longer, that was really good reporting about the insanely inflated salaries of everybody who works at the entry.
I mean, they're like a couple hundred thousand dollar salaries for just like these, these not very impressive jobs.
Look at the Second Avenue subway.
How long has it taken to try to build the Second Avenue subway?
What are we on?
50 years now?
I'm not even joking.
It's like insane.
It's not as if the money is not there.
There is bureaucracy.
There is union, truculent union members and union bosses.
It's impossible to get anything done in the city.
Buy an apartment.
I've never bought an apartment in the city.
Camille has.
And try to get anything done because there's layers and layers and layers of red tape.
God forbid.
God forbid.
You need to rent out.
Government's the problem here.
It's not money.
My recommendation to anyone, if you want an easy comp, is first look at a chart of the average level of taxation or government expenditure in Florida and in New York State.
Don't even like use New York City, although they have the extra income tax.
Florida and New York State, it's completely lopsided.
Next, get into your car in both places and drive for two hours.
Starting in New York City and you can take it upstate, starting in Miami, take it anywhere.
The roads in Florida are great.
Highways are fantastic.
You can take high-speed train in Florida, believe it or not.
And in New York, soon, especially when you cross into the border of New York City, your tires are going to be shredded after driving for like 30 minutes.
They haven't fixed any road as far as I can tell.
They've just done construction forever, but they haven't fixed anything.
And you know what's so annoying too?
It wasn't always like this.
Like when I lived in Chicago in the mid-1990s, they were under Democrat rule.
It was Bill Daly and he was a very famous, well-known mayor.
You know, Daly was like responsible for Chicago.
And it was, you could eat off the sidewalks.
It was so clean.
But the Democrat Party has lost its mind and doesn't understand what to prioritize anymore.
They're much more worried about pronouns and putting the homeless people, taking them out of the subway car and putting them on the subway platform as a real solution than they are about real, real solving real people's problems.
So that's, that's what needs to happen.
Better leadership in the cities in the states.
Stand by.
I'm going to take a break.
And then I have one subject I need to discuss with you guys.
And it's not the Supreme Court thing.
I'll get to that tomorrow.
It's a tweet I sent out this morning.
Stand by.
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I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM.
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Are you guys practicing your accents without me?
What are you talking?
Don't talk, Megan.
Are we on the air?
I can't do accents.
The only accent I can do well is just a drunk accent.
I hate to say drunk accents because you're an alcoholic.
It's because I spent so many years covering Kamala Harris, so I nailed it.
I don't know if we're on the air because if we were, I would do a lot of accents, but I can't.
We are.
Let's hear it.
Yeah, you must be one with two and the best.
Back on.
Let's go.
You have to subscribe to the fifth column because they're free episodes.
I don't even do them.
You have to pay to get me canceled.
I feel like you did one.
What was your, do you have like a favor that you've done?
Because you've definitely done one for me that I liked.
I can't remember what it was.
Jesse Jackson is a fan favorite.
Jesse Jackson's a fan favorite.
My daughter always asked me to do an Indian accent, but she once did an Indian accent because she loves The Simpsons and she was like seven years old.
And I said, darling, you cannot do that accent.
In her response, I swear to God, one of the funniest when I knew that my daughter was the best, she looked at me and she said, Papa, why?
That's how they talk.
I said, well, yes, that is true.
But you just can't.
I don't know why.
I don't make the rules.
I'm just trying to get text.
No.
But you did a good job.
Very good job.
The Morning Hans Melania accent is a Melania.
Let's hear a little of that.
That's my favorite.
The Melania accent is not a real accent.
It is always like, if there's like Melania is doing some, you know, fundraiser and she'd be like, I love the children.
They're so cute.
And it's not based on Melania.
It's just a totally.
No, it doesn't sound anything like her.
Nothing.
Well, but the best one has been Baron, the video of him as a child where he sounds slovenly.
Exactly like her.
The Melania Accent Joke00:06:34
Because his father clearly has never talked to him.
I apologize when he's saying like, mommy, where is my suitcase?
I love this video so much.
So great.
It's so fantastic.
Yeah.
Milani obviously was very, very attached to Baron and was a great is a great mom.
We quote her all the time with our kids.
This is from some interview they gave and how they talked to Baron.
But we quote them all the time at the dinner table.
It happens almost once a night.
Small bites, Baron.
Small bites.
Baron.
This is Trump and Milani.
I guess kept saying that to him.
Like most teenage boys or young boys, he's like trying to shovel the whole thing in his face.
Small bites, Baron.
I say it to all three of my kids because they're also big biters of food.
Okay.
I needed to discuss this very important tweet I sent out that has gotten some hilarious responses.
So I'm at the beach for the summer and we're in a rental.
It's a long story, but our house had to have some renovations.
And this is now the second summer that we had to be in a rent, a rental because this reno is taking forever.
So we're in a rental and the rental doesn't come with any linens.
So you get here, there's nothing.
There's no sheets.
We're here for two months.
There's no sheets.
There's no beds.
There's beds, but there's no comforters and there's no towels, which I'm sure somebody told me in advance and then I just forgot.
It's been Mom Ghani's house.
So I'm running around getting linens, getting like, you know, all the stuff that you need.
And I go to Target.
Thankfully, there's a Target.
So I go to the Target and I decided to get a little rug for the bathroom because the bathroom floor is too cold.
And I like the bathroom floor to have a little heat on it.
And so I bought a little area rug.
I went a little crazy at Target.
I'm not going to lie.
It's not the prettiest rug I've ever seen.
I'm going to show you a picture of it, but it's fine.
It's a rental and it was cheap.
It was like 25.
No, not this.
Show the picture of the actual rug.
Stand by.
It was like $25.
It was relatively inexpensive for a big rug.
Okay, there it is.
Can you see it?
It's fine.
It's not terrible.
Right.
It's not terrible.
Sure.
It's fine for a few months.
Then I'm sure we can find a place for it after that.
But I get it home and I'm pulling all the tags off of it.
And I take a look at the one tag and it caused me some alarm, fellas, because it reads as follows.
Fiber colon made of miscellaneous scraps of undetermined fiber content.
What's that?
Miscellaneous scraps of undetermined fiber fiber content.
What are you hiding?
What's in there?
Where is it made?
In India.
Oh.
It says made in India.
Slum dog millionaire.
I have.
I'm concerned.
Then it says, vacuum regularly.
Do not use beater brush.
Blot spills promptly.
Spot clean with mild cleaning solution.
Do not bleach.
Professional rug cleaning.
Now, what does that mean?
Do have a professional rug cleaning or vacuum regularly.
I don't understand.
What is in the scraps that makes you a beater brush?
And I have to tell you.
It's just because it will fall apart.
Is that if you hit it with a stick?
Will it just come?
But I have to tell you something very bad.
Very bad.
I was standing on it doing my makeup and my feet started to itch.
Something's in the rug.
Yes.
Do you know why they use the word undetermined?
Because they don't know what it is.
So maybe put it out on, you're in New Jersey, right?
Just put it out on the beach.
Just put it out somewhere.
I don't think I can get it on a rug.
Do you?
No, get me.
$25.
No, but it's like, buy, like a nice, you can.
By the way, when the reno is done Megan, you can take the nice one and bring it to the new one.
You don't have to buy a new garbage one.
That occurred to me too late.
I did, I think.
I think there's a possibility.
There's a possibility though, that what's going on is that it's recycled fibers, in which case they would actually combine a bunch of stuff, and you don't see that warning anywhere else.
Where you get recycled stuff.
Well, maybe it's the tariffs.
They have to label this stuff as what it is, because it's, i'm telling you clearly.
They're like Indian fingers and toes are in my rug.
Well, that's something dark possibility.
Yeah, I know, I bet the rug's got to go.
I like.
Not only am I having an allergic reaction, i'm allergic to penicillin.
Do you think there's penicillin in there?
Why are my feet itching when i'm standing on it with naked feet?
I think very wrong.
Craziest things Megan, is that you're still questioning whether you should get rid of the rugby cost fallacy.
Don't, don't breathe close to a rug, and that's.
You don't want that.
Maybe i'll send it to you guys.
You could, we could have a rotation, it could.
It could be like on a visiting.
You know how a museum sends out a museum piece.
We could say everybody could have a week with it and then the next time you're on, we could, we could debrief you.
Think about how it's more than two weeks.
I no no, we would.
We would, we would frame it, we would mount it, frame it and we would put it up in the new studio.
That is why don't you have an auction for this?
Let's do an auction for this rug and whoever get you gave the money to charity or buy it.
That's a great idea, though do not mount it.
Don't mount it.
There's probably another tag that says don't send through the mail, so maybe don't have a.
I don't feel like i'd get through TSA.
I don't.
I'm not sure, but there's something deeply wrong with my rug.
I just thought you guys could help me.
Diagnosis and I.
I think we've come to a conclusion, it needs to go.
It needs to go, guys.
Thank you, it was a pleasure, as it always is, and we'll see you after we know which terrible person is running.
New York.
Right, sounds good, stay cool, all right.
Thanks, Megan.
Bye, thank you, and thanks to all of you for listening today.
The guys from the fifth column never disappoint.
Tomorrow, tune in, we've got Charlie Kirk.
That'll be fun too, right?
He's uh, one of the MAGA faithful.
What does he think of the whole civil war inside of the Republican Party?