Jared Eat Sexton and Nick Houseman dissect President Trump's April 2nd address on Iran, exposing claims of sufficient U.S. oil reserves as lies that failed to halt rising prices or a looming global energy crisis. They argue Trump stalling between withdrawing without reopening the Strait of Hormuz or deploying troops, while leveraging allies like Anthony Albanese and Keir Starmer to solve problems he cannot fix, potentially as a pretext for abandoning NATO. Ultimately, the hosts suggest this rhetoric masks an unwillingness to make catastrophic decisions, threatening the petrodollar and benefiting BRICS nations instead. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Classic Weekender Edition Opening00:09:01
All right, that was a classic one.
Hey, everybody, welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Eat Sexton here at Nick Houseman.
Nick, how are you doing, man?
Good, good.
A classic opening of a beverage, in case anyone's wondering.
Yeah, that worked well.
Sometimes it doesn't do it.
That was almost like a stock sound.
Yeah, exactly.
That would be one you'd pay for.
I'm very happy with that.
I'm very happy to be here with everybody.
Also, by the way, Nick, just a preview, and we'll get to it later in the show.
Pam Bondi, gone.
Bye bye, Bondi, as you put it.
Couldn't have happened to a nicer lady, Jared.
Couldn't have happened to a nicer lady.
We're going to talk about that here in just a little bit.
We've got an absolutely jam packed show.
The news, the news that don't stop.
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Nick, we're recording this on Thursday, April 2nd, which means that last night on Wednesday, President Donald Trump gave a national address talking about the situation in Iran.
And, Nick, we got a lot of new information here.
He's saying two to three weeks left that he is going to, quote, bomb them back to the Stone Age.
He also informed the world that the United States of America has more than enough oil.
We're not worried about any other oil.
We don't need any of it.
Everything's totally fine.
He also suggested that our European allies who need oil should go in and take care of the Strait of Hormuz.
But also, Nick, he said that somehow or another, the straight would just open up naturally when all of this stuff was done.
Here is the president looking really good and sounding even better.
They're the bully no longer.
This is a true investment in your children and your grandchildren's future.
The whole world is watching, and they can't leave the power, strength, and brilliance.
They just can't believe what they're seeing.
They leave it to your imagination, but they can't believe what they're seeing, the brilliance of the United States military.
Tonight, every American can look forward to a day when we are finally free from the wickedness of Iranian aggression and the specter of nuclear blackmail.
Because of the actions we have taken, we are on the cusp of ending Iran's sinister threat to America and the world.
And I'll tell you, the world is watching.
And when we do, when it's all over, the United States will be safer, stronger, more prosperous, and greater than it has ever been before.
May God bless the men and women of the United States Armed Forces, and may God bless the United States of America.
Thank you very much, and good night.
Nailed it, Mr. President.
Nick, the speech went over so well that stock market futures immediately dropped and the oil markets increased exponentially.
This is, I look at this for a variety of signals and a variety of ways to analyze this.
Am I wrong, Nick?
You've taught, you've been in the classroom before.
This felt like someone giving a report for a book.
Or an article that they had not read and trying to pad out the time.
Am I incorrect?
That sounds good.
That's pretty accurate.
I mean, not to be overlooked was the date of this speech.
Perhaps there was some notion of April 1st going on in the joke.
I don't know.
We were not in on it.
We interrupted Survivor for this.
I don't understand if that was really what we needed.
But here's my theory because it was a litany of lies, right?
And it's just typical lies.
It's regurgitating the stuff about, I mean, When he goes into $19 trillion of foreign investment since he became president, it just makes me really, really upset.
Or he even tried to say how much there was $18 billion of fraud in Minnesota in the Middle East.
He gets these weird numbers.
By the way, you know how much fraud has been detected in Minnesota?
You know what the number is?
I want to say it's a couple hundred thousand.
Well, a million, 250 million, right?
Not $18 billion.
Now, here's my thing I think that they had a bigger announcement.
I think that there was something big they were going to go and go with, and they had to sort of cancel it at the last second.
Then this is what they were left.
This is the book ending of whatever he was going to say in the middle.
What do you think?
I mean, if you think about it in that terms, it would have had to have been boots on the ground or something else like that, or maybe just victory in Iran were pulling out tomorrow, something like that that they ended up having to yank.
What do you think?
Well, I want to start.
So, yesterday, again, which was Wednesday, April 1st, I woke up, I was grabbing my coffee, Nick, and I was greeted almost immediately.
By remarks by Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister of Australia, and Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
And both of them were addressing their people saying, Hey, there is a massive energy crisis that is getting ready to hit.
I need to let you know where it's coming from.
I need you to get prepared for it.
And we are working around the clock trying to figure out how to mitigate this.
You look around the world, Nick, specifically in Asia, where this thing is going to hit first.
They're already creating alternating travel days, four day work weeks, mandatory carpools, telework.
They're already putting in emergency measures.
So, if Donald Trump was an actual serious leader, he would be talking to us about the upcoming energy crisis.
But guess what, Nick?
This is the first time since COVID that he has reached a problem that he can't bullshit his way out of and that no one will fix for him.
He has no good solutions on the table.
And what I think happened here, and I think what you just picked up on was this.
We have reached the point where Trump has two choices.
Pull out without reopening the Strait of Hormuz and then destroying the petrodollar and creating a possible economic depression.
The second is sending boots on the ground and having a giant tragedy that we can't even really wrap our heads around right now.
He's trying to stall for time and throwing things out there.
His latest move, I think, is to try and get American allies to go in and take care of the problem for him by leveraging this thing so he doesn't have to make a choice there.
But again, I think it's stalling.
And I think what you said is correct, which is I think that it was probably about time for him to send in troops, and we might even see it.
There might even be troops on the ground by the time Good Friday rolls around and people are listening to this.
But I think it was one last Hail Mary to try and get some American allies in to do this for him so that he doesn't have to make the hard decision that he has no desire to fucking make.
Okay, interesting.
I also started to wonder if.
You know, he knew the way that we've been treating NATO countries, what the result would be by asking them to join, right?
After this unilateral movement into Iran.
And so the whispers are also going on about that in terms of, well, you know, if NATO isn't around, what good is it?
It's a one way street.
We're hearing, I mean, it's a lot of the same stuff we'd heard before.
And it also made me wonder if you mix all this in together, if part of this is the pretext of pulling out of NATO, right?
They knew they were going to leave us in the lurch.
And so now we finally have a much better argument about, you know, Pulling out or abandoning them.
This is what he's wanted to do because Putin has told him to do that.
So all of these things, I think, are getting to be very complicated, right?
A lot of layers, which make it really hard to figure out what the hell he's going to do, I think.
But then again, he's so predictable and so idiotic that, again, I had always just said that they were just going to pull out and shrug and be like, oh, he won, right?
But I think your worry is, or the only thing that's different about my scenario would be that if they do that, then you think the Strait of Hormuz will continue to be closed and that will do a chokehold on the world economy.
Yeah.
And why would they reopen it?
I mean, Iran has now gained a significant political and economic advantage, which is they can basically hold the straight hostage and people will pay a ransom, in some cases, millions of dollars, which will allow them to make an incredible amount of money, which will also translate into the BRICS countries basically starting to take over the economic infrastructure.
So, no, it can't.
And the thing is, Nick, I talked about this a little bit on Tuesday's episode.
There's a certain point in all of this that the economic elite, The oligarchs in the country, they're looking at this and they're like, oh shit, if he just cuts and runs, we're fucked.
Strait of Hormuz Chokehold00:00:40
And these people have bought and sold Trump multiple times over.
So all of a sudden, every single day, here, like, I've always described Donald Trump as Ronald McDonald, right?
He's the clown giving the oversized check at the golf course, right?
He doesn't actually run McDonald's.
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