Jason Needleman joins Nick Houselman to dissect Iran's rational tit-for-tat escalation against Trump's irrational "war crime of aggression" doctrine, exacerbated by Blinken's absence at a UFC match. They analyze the psychological profile of a narcissistic leader protected by enablers like the Supreme Court, warning that thin Republican margins could allow Democrats to tip the Senate and block impeachment. The discussion critically examines Eric Swalwell's resignation amid sexual misconduct allegations, contrasting his treatment with Republican impunity, and concludes that without upholding equality principles, the nation risks falling prey to anti-constitutional populism. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Concession Speech to Opposing Party00:10:40
Hey, everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I am Nick Houselman, your host, and Jared D. Sexton is not with us today, which allows me to bring on a good friend and friend of the pod, Jason Needleman, who is a political science professor at the University of Laverne.
And I'm sure you probably heard him on the conversation before.
So, Jason, thank you for making a return visit with us.
Thanks for having me.
We have lots to talk about, a big rundown today.
Obviously, we have to talk about the ceasefire negotiations breaking down after a very long 21 hours between the two sides.
We have Trump taking on the Pope.
Eric Swalwell is back in the news in the unfortunate way.
And probably lots more to talk about in between all of those different things.
So, Jason, let's start with what was going on with these ceasefire talks.
I think the first thing on my mind is who Donald Trump opted to send over to Pakistan to discuss this between Iran and the United States.
Was it strange to you that the Secretary of State is not involved in any of these kind of discussions.
Right.
Not only not involved, but instead attending a UFC match.
Can you remind us all of what that is?
The MMA fighting.
Okay.
So he wants to see a bloody bout between two men, you know, half naked in a ring instead of actually doing diplomacy.
But isn't that, I don't know, can you remind us what is the job of Secretary of State?
Oh my God.
Well, essentially, head up the foreign policy for the country as a whole.
So, obviously, war and peace would come directly under the purview of the Secretary of State.
If you divide the war into the war fighting side and the diplomatic negotiating side, the Secretary of State would be in charge of the negotiating side.
So, to just be absent, well, it sends a message, right?
Yeah, well, here's what doesn't make sense to me.
I was convinced, and this is seriously how deranged I feel Trump is, is that ever since Rubio tried to make fun of Trump's member size, he's been waiting to use that against him.
And I thought they were setting Rubio up the entire time to take the fall for any sort of foreign policy disaster, of which we now see was going to happen.
It's shocking to me that somehow JD Vance got slotted into that as well.
Because doesn't it just seem like they're setting Vance up now to.
Sort of take some sort of fall?
Yeah.
Well, there's a long history, right, of presidents giving their vice presidents the thankless job, the impossible job.
And who knows?
I mean, you have, you're obviously a proponent of the derangement theory of Trump.
But then on the other side, you've got the people who will argue that he's playing four, five, six dimensional chess.
So them sitting ringside at the MMA match is some kind of like super sophisticated message to the Iranian negotiating team that we could care less whether there's an agreement.
On the war.
And in some way, that's going to intimidate them, I don't know, into a realization that they have no choice but to surrender because Trump is so above it all that he's entirely absent from the negotiation and he's pulled his Secretary of State out.
But I think your derangement theory is the stronger one.
There's definitely more empirical evidence for it.
And he's just kind of casting about.
There's probably a part of him that realizes he messed this thing up.
He thought he's going to be in and out quickly, like he was in Venezuela.
It's clearly not the case.
You've now got.
A quagmire, you've now got an impossible problem.
So you do what presidents do you send the vice president to do the thankless task that has no chance of succeeding.
So you can kind of wash your hands of it.
You know, let's take a left turn really quickly because one thing we probably need to reference is that not only is he sending JD Vance, oh, you know, and, you know, this and Jared Kushner and Witkoff as well are there.
What are the odds, by the way, that Kushner is in the middle of these meetings pitching some sort of investment fund to the Iranians while he's there?
I'm sure that's always part of their negotiation that, you know, oh, I got this other thing I want to talk to you about.
Once we get this thing done, then let's talk about the other thing.
It's going to be good for both of us.
Yeah, right.
I'm sure Whitcoff and Kushner are doing that all the time.
We'll all make a lot of money out of this one day.
You know, we just got to get past this.
Yeah.
And by the way, another thing we can at some point maybe talk about is what the crypto, you know, the more and more of the crypto Sam's keep coming out.
So, you know what?
This episode's getting longer as we speak.
But, you know, JD Vance on the way over, or maybe on the way back, I can't even keep track of his geography.
Ended up stumping for Viktor Orban.
In another of a long list of endorsements that someone like Trump or Benz have made that ended up spectacularly failing, we actually did not work.
Surprise.
Don't fall off your chair.
Orban got beat in what seems to be a bit of a landslide.
Is there any precedent can you think of of a vice president stumping for a foreign leader, especially one as authoritarian as Viktor Orban?
Can't think of one.
Of course, the irony is that we bemoan foreign interference in our elections, and then we send JD Vance over there to campaign for Viktor Orban, who is a Putin ally, who basically follows the model of authoritarian democracy that Trump is trying to implement in the US.
Of course, the good news is he's a few years ahead of MAGA on dismantling the Hungarian democracy.
And the good news is that it didn't work.
Gerrymandered voting districts beyond even what the Republicans have been able to do here.
He's taken over the educational system, the courts, and it still didn't work.
So it is, I think, a good sign for us that if we truly do value the democracy above prevailing in any particular election, we can get together, you could call it like a pro democracy or a pro constitution coalition and still win in spite of all the efforts to dismantle.
Democracy here.
But the other thing we should always say this guy, Peter Mugyar, who beat him, is even more right wing than Viktor Orban.
So, yes, he's running kind of against Orban's corruption, but not against that right wing populist ideology that Orban believes in.
Greg, can you give us an example of what leads you to believe that he'll be?
Well, like recently it came out Mugyar's historical statements on immigration.
They're further to the right than Orban's.
So, he ran on this.
Nationalist platform.
He's a cause celebrity in the West now because of what I said earlier that he's the proof that you can get a kind of pro democracy coalition together.
But I don't think we should jump up and down and think that we've defeated right wing populism in Hungary because we've elected an even more right wing leader.
It's very likely that there'll be some kind of back and forth before Hungarian democracy kind of settles down and we can decide, okay, they probably did salvage it.
We'll see.
I mean, this is like a personal interest to me because I'm trying to get Hungarian citizenship right now.
My mother's born in Hungary.
And so I just missed my chance to vote in this election.
But that would have been a tough one for me because, of course, I would have voted for Magyar, but I'm voting for a guy who's even more right wing than Viktor Orban.
Yeah.
I mean, it's confusing.
And I mean, it's vaguely reminiscent of things like when we saw Dick Cheney come out against Trump and we want to embrace him now or even Liz Cheney and have them be part of some sort of coalition.
And you have to remember, though, of what side they're really on.
And this is, it gets to be confusing.
But I do feel like he's conceded, Orban has.
And so I just kind of looking out of the side of my eye, waiting for whatever it is that he's still going to try and pull.
Right.
It doesn't, you know, maybe that won't happen.
But it just seems too easy at that point for him to not declare that it was rigged and all the things that we hear from Trump that it's the same blueprint.
So do you feel like that's a sincere concession from him?
It seems like it.
Isn't that fascinating, though, that this guy who's further down the road of dismantling Hungarian democracy still had the decency to acknowledge?
I mean, I guess he's living enough in reality that he was able to acknowledge that he lost the election.
And it's very unlikely that Trump would do the same, right?
No one thinks Trump would do the same.
Well, do you remember when Putin decided to pretend that it looked more like democracy and sort of like step down and let somebody else be president?
And did you ever?
Oh, that's a great point.
Like, you know, that turned out the same way where Putin never really, I think he got a, did he become prime minister?
He like, they gave him another title.
Right.
And then he went off to be president again and took over.
So I, this is an actual, yeah.
Yeah, but this is an actual shift of power away to the opposition party, right?
So Putin didn't do that.
He appointed his kind of deputy on an interim basis, still ran the government through, Why is his name escaping my mind?
But anyway, through the Dimitri, anyway.
And then came back.
But this is different.
This is a concession speech to an opposing party.
Yeah.
Okay, fair enough.
And then, you know, so maybe don't be surprised if he says, in the spirit of unity, you know, we're going to give him something.
Yeah, I can't see it.
This is a transfer of power to an opposing political party who ran explicitly against Orbán, is accusing him of corruption.
In that sense, this is a real victory for democracy.
I just don't want to get too excited because the guy himself is a right wing populist.
And as we know, they don't have a good history of respecting constitutional norms.
Yeah.
And as I always say, authoritarianism tends to take over democratically.
Escalating Threats and Blockades00:03:34
Exactly.
Exactly.
So, you know, I think that there's an old adage, you know, never root for a new king because, you know, the new one's going to be worse.
But let's get back to.
What we were talking about in terms of discussions in Iran.
I know we've talked about this and I've asked you.
You know, it seems to me that the Trump doctrine here is that under the threat of murder, and we'll just destroy you, you will have to accede to everything we demand.
And perhaps they're surprised that they didn't, or this is part of their plan.
Like they were always going to ultimately bomb, you know, Iran into the Stone Age, and that's what they're going to do.
Where do you think that we are on that graph?
Do they?
Are they surprised by this or are they just simply using this as a way to then ultimately unleash what Trump has been threatening?
I just think it's pretty clear that Iran has a strategy here, maybe unlike us, but Iran seems to have a strategy.
The latest thing is that Trump is escalating this blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, where he's decided, oh, okay, you're going to restrict the travel through the Strait.
We're just going to blockade the entire thing.
And apparently, from the news today, it looks like Iran is escalating proportionately.
So this is called tit for tat in political science.
That's their strategy.
They've already proven that they can take our worst.
So they're Going to be perfectly content to let us suffer the consequences of closing the Strait of Hormuz.
And yeah, they're going to have to like hunker down.
It's not in their interest either, but it hurts us more than it hurts them.
They don't have a responsibility to the global marketplace in petroleum.
We do, or at least we claim to.
It's probably the end of that, this whole debacle.
But, you know, the thing I always want to say first, before we even get into all this talk of bombing Iran, is that this is the international war crime of aggression when we attack.
Because there was no imminent threat.
So there's absolutely no justification for the original attack coordinated with Israel.
And then along the way, there have been war crimes committed.
This threat to bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages is, of course, a war crime.
Even just the threat of bombing civilians and non military infrastructure, all of that constitutes a war crime.
And there's a good reason for respecting these rules of war and these laws of war.
So I always want to say that first because.
when we look at the coverage in the American press, it's often framed in terms of, you know, the regime in Iran and what do we do to stop it?
And it's almost like the conversation as to whether we should commit this basic international crime of aggression is just bracketed and kind of left out.
So I always like to say that first.
But once we say, okay, we've decided that we're going to violate all principles of international law, then what?
Well, it looks to me as though it's a clear victory for Iran.
And the only way we benefit is if Trump decides to de escalate.
The strategy of escalation works to their advantage.
They've already shown that they're not going to back down in the face of a threat to destroy their entire civilization.
So, where do you go from there?
Once the other side has called that bluff, how do you escalate from there?
Strategic Use of Proxy Forces00:16:02
There's no way to go from there.
That's why I don't accept the five dimensional chess theory of.
Of Donald Trump, because, well, if he's playing chess, he's the worst chess player of all time because he revealed at the beginning his strongest move, I guess, if you want to call the extermination of a 5,000, 6,000 year old civilization a chess move, if you want to give it that kind of dignity.
But he's revealed it already.
So he has nowhere to go.
And Iran has shown that they're not going to back down in the face of that kind of threat.
So I don't see where we go from here other than to cut and run, like we've done in other places.
It's sad to say that the most powerful nation on earth, maybe ever, is going to have to cut and run again.
But that is probably our best option right now because of the choices that Donald Trump has made.
Sure.
I mean, short of him launching nuclear weapons, which, you know, it sounded like in the first administration there was a daily coup.
Where they're like, yeah, we're not going to do that.
You know, whatever Trump was trying to demand and say, right, in the normal situation, you have to do what the president tells you to do.
It sounded like Millie and that whole coterie were saying, yeah, we're not doing that.
That doesn't exist now.
And in his addled state, I guess, is the worry that eventually he's, you know, remember the Jesse Jackson sketch on Siren Live when he was running for president and they're bombarding him with different opinions, whatever.
And he's like, no, just everyone be quiet.
And he bangs his fist on the thing and it ends up hitting the button for the For the nuclear weapon.
I don't remember that one.
Anyway, they were trying to make it seem like that would be what it would be like.
And that's what my worry is, because again, you're right, there isn't anywhere to go other than what his, you know, in his the power of positive thinking method, he will simply declare victory no matter what the situation is.
And that's what it looked like.
He was never going to put boots on the ground.
He knows, I think he knows that.
I think he knows that would be an absolute catastrophe of tens of thousands of deaths of American troops.
And so, um, I never thought he would ever do that.
And so, I think whether or not he's mobilizing or moving troops around or whatever, we have evidence that troops are like sabotaging ships because they don't want to fight, which does lend credence to the notion of someone's not going to press that button when he orders it, right?
A lot of people stepping down, trying to retire early, a lot of people trying to get themselves out of this predicament where they're ordered to commit a war crime and they have to decide whether they follow orders or not, exactly.
Exactly.
So, now we're starting to really understand why.
Um, that group of senators with Mark Kelly leading them did this video that would just people to say, Don't violate the law.
Um, I'm sure all these plans were in the works back then when they made this video, so um, that's what they were referring to.
So, I would find it really easy to believe that yes, we're going to eventually come up with some agreement.
And this might sound familiar, you might have seen this movie before, or we have some sort of agreement with Iran, we'll give them some release from sanctions, they'll probably make even less of a promise than the first version of this with Obama about nuclear weapons.
But I just don't see any other way out of that other than, you know, Iran will, I think, be willing to be destroyed versus now giving up the opportunity to have nuclear weapons.
And what we were texting with earlier, you know, maybe a month ago, was whether or not they ever really intended to create nuclear weapons.
I know there was a fatwa against it, which I would have to imagine a lot of people who are Muslim take that pretty seriously.
And I think you had a slightly different take on why they would enrich to 60% or something, you know, before.
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear what their strategy is.
I mean, a big mistake we make with Iran is that we don't impute rational motives.
We say, oh, there's the evil, the sinister, irrational.
And I mean, of course, there might be elements in their society, just like there are in ours, that aren't strategic and that aren't rational.
But you can discern a pattern of rational action based on their strategy over the last decades.
And And by the way, the new Supreme Leader rejects that fatwa.
He wants to pursue a nuclear program, a nuclear weapons program.
But no, I think it's pretty clear from the way they were behaving that they understood that their leverage came from refining uranium up to the point where they could threaten to develop nuclear weapons, but not ever develop them.
And it brought the United States to the table.
We got the JCPOA, which was the Obama nuclear agreement.
Trump comes in, he tears that up, they resume enriching after that, but not up to the level, not weapons grade uranium.
Well, it's a conscious choice.
You know how the United States keeps saying, oh, two weeks away from a weapon.
They have enriched up to the level where they could.
I don't know if it's two weeks or two months or six months, but where they could develop nuclear weapons.
So you have to ask, well, why didn't they if they could have all along?
It's because they recognize there's leverage in coming to the brink of that level of enrichment, but not ever pushing all the way there.
That's what brought the U.S. to the table in the first place.
That's what they hope.
Will get the US and the rest of the world to lift these economic sanctions.
Whereas, if they were to just completely relinquish the nuclear program, what leverage do they have to get the sanctions lifted?
So, it's pretty strategic behavior on their part.
And I think everyone at the upper echelons of the US government probably knows that and recognizes that.
But you've got the war hungry crowd who prefers to tell the story of two weeks until they have a nuclear weapon.
Someone put on Twitter today to connect to something else you wanted to talk about.
Trump administration announces Vatican two weeks from a nuclear weapon.
It's like a strategic choice, right?
To conjure a monster that you must eliminate immediately or you'll be destroyed.
But again, if you look at their behavior over the decades, they pushed their enrichment program up to a certain level so they can get leverage over principally the U.S., but the broader international.
Community and they don't go beyond it.
So that's what was happening.
And from everything we understand, even Witkoff and Kushner were engaged in something close to the old terms, like you said, of the old Obama JCPOA agreement.
And for whatever reason, Trump decided, no, we're just going to attack.
Right.
I mean, I think he's been, you know, he's had a hard on for this for a long, long time.
And I was even thinking that in the first administration, there were rumors that Iran had tried to plan like an assassination attempt of him, which, you know, just throws me back into some spiral of like, The you know, W. Bush and then his father being you know, the plan of attack with Iraq and all these things are all it's it's kind of like you know, when you watch like the Star Wars movies, it's hard to imagine the entire fate of the universe is resting on like one family, right?
Or like two families, it's it, you know, every for over 60, 80, 100 years, it's the same families the whole time, and it feels that way with this as well.
It's like, oh, we're gonna do the same, we're like, oh, and me, I'm now gonna have to go.
The most important family in this one might be the Netanyahu family.
I think it's Benjamin Netanyahu that got in his ear and said, look, for decades, presidents have vowed to destroy Iran, and none of them have been willing to do it.
Well, if you listen to the foreign policy experts, the military strategists, they'll tell you that, yeah, for good reason, they decided that they shouldn't launch a military attack on Iran.
But Netanyahu was able to get in his ear.
He said, oh, you weren't awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that you so deserve.
So why don't you take this other route and eliminate one of the regions?
one of the world's principal enemies.
And you'll go down in history, Donald.
You'll go down in history as the one who did what none of your predecessors had the courage to do.
And you could just see Trump being persuaded by that kind of speech.
Oh, sure.
Well, we already know Netanyahu was able to dissuade any kind of agreement between Iran, I mean, Israel, and Gaza before the election that might have helped Biden and then Harris.
And there's no question that there was reporting that Netanyahu met with them on this as well.
And I think he said, well, we're going in.
And I think he preyed on Trump's narcissism and was like, we're going to go in.
And so, do you want part of this or not?
Do you want to have your name associated with this?
Because if you're not, then we'll be happy to take all the credit for dismantling Iran.
And I think that's all it took.
Now, one of the.
By the way, we're the senior partner in that military alliance.
So, if they said that at any point, Trump could say, no, you're not.
You're not going in.
I'm telling you right now, you're not going in.
And they can't do anything.
They'll even concede that if we put our foot down and say, you're not doing X, they can't do X.
Now, as you suggested, Trump maybe doesn't understand that or he wanted to be persuaded.
But I just, I don't, I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to remove the responsibility from the American government because we are the senior partner.
We decide what happens.
And anytime we tell Israel you can't do something, they can do it.
And they know that.
They know that without our, our aid and our backstopping anything they do that they're, they're, they're going to lose.
So ultimately, so that was a decision by Trump to, you know, to, to, to allow Netanyahu's logic to, to prevail.
Well, but I think it's his narcissism, right?
I think Netanyahu played him because he knew he would never be able to accept, oh, we cannot let them do that.
I guess you're right in the sense that, right, the option would have just simply been, yeah, no, what are you doing?
Now, I had asked you on a text the other day where I'm like, is the only reason why Israel hasn't slaughtered everybody in the region?
And here's the other thing I want to make clear Iran is a state sponsor of terror, and they've been this way for a long time, right?
Like Hezbollah has been sponsored by Iran.
It's pretty clear.
Like, I don't think you can credibly argue that they haven't been involved in a lot of problems that would, you know, and a lot of death.
So, no one's necessarily crying that Khomeini was murdered or about the missile to his house or wherever he was.
So, it's a little bit interesting because it feels to me like as if Israel is looking at this as their, this is our once and final chance to just like clear the region of all the hornet's nest, I suppose is what they would probably describe it as.
And part of me is wondering, like, well, shit, like, First of all, one of the questions was, what did Iran learn from the first attack of their nuclear facility?
And then, you know, second of all, does that tie into this notion that Israel has any kind of fantasy that they could actually create Western friendly governments in every government around there in the territories that would be, you know, peaceful to them?
Is that even a reality?
Well, first of all, on the strategy of, oh, we're going to clear out our enemies and then we're going to have like everlasting peace, Israel should already know that that doesn't work.
When they went into Lebanon and cleared out the PLO in the early 80s, that creates a breeding ground for Hezbollah to emerge.
We know that's the case, right?
There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq prior to our intervention in 2003.
But when you collapse a state, you create a kind of breeding ground for extremism.
So let's not fool ourselves into the delusion that by, as you say, clearing out these enemies, that that's the end of the story because we see extremists will emerge in the.
That's the environment in which those non governmental actors can really.
Thrive when there isn't the rule of law to control their emergence.
But yeah, I think you're right that in the sense that Iran was probably at the weakest it's been in a long time.
You saw what they did in Syria when the government there collapsed.
They essentially went in, and I don't know what percentage, a huge percentage of southern Syria is now controlled by.
By Israel, you see them using, and as you say, it's not a fake provocation.
The Hezbollah attacks on Israel are real attacks.
And I think Iran was maybe of two minds about that, whether that served their interest for Hezbollah to do that.
But so Israel uses this pretext of the Hezbollah attacks to go conquer southern Lebanon up to the Latani River.
And they launch this attack on Iran in the hopes of collapsing that regime.
But what I think is clear, just like you can kind of discern.
The Iranian strategy based on their actions.
I think you can discern the Israeli strategy based on their actions.
And at least there is a strategy there.
I don't know that the US even has one beyond, as you say, like Trump's narcissism, delusions of grandeur.
But the Israeli strategy is discernible.
And it's not to create friendly states around them, it's to collapse the states around them so that they can't, they're incapable of posing any threat to Israel.
So it's clear that they don't want.
Any antagonist to even have missile capability.
And though they're indifferent as to whether the state is friendly or just collapse, I think they prefer a collapsed state in a place like Iran because they don't want to take the risk that the government may or may not be friendly to their interests.
Whereas if you collapse the state, have it descend into kind of civil conflict, there's no capacity at all to pose a threat.
And it's like very cynical.
But keep in mind, Israel is now to the point where.
they basically don't care how they're perceived globally.
The US does.
So we can't afford to become the kind of handmaiden to this Israeli strategy of state collapse.
That doesn't work for us, even in the most cynical terms where, as I say, you decided you're not going to worry about committing war crimes.
Even on those terms, it just doesn't work for us.
It's not in our strategic interest.
Absolutely.
And even with, but here's the thing that's scary about that is by collapsing a country like that, you'll probably end up being more of a breeding ground for all the smaller things.
Because then we're going to probably find out just how much control the Iranian government itself has over an entity like Hezbollah, right?
And it always felt that way where, you know, like even with Hamas in Gaza, like the Gazan authority probably didn't have any control over Hamas.
And so when you want to deal with them and you're trying to get peace and you're like, well, we, you know, Hamas is going to do whatever they're going to do.
So we're sorry here.
I don't know.
I mean, there's levels to that, and it's more complicated.
But I also feel like there's probably a lot of autonomy amongst those smaller terrorist groups where the government themselves don't really have control.
They can't completely create a ceasefire because someone's going to lob a rocket, you know, and who knows what's going to happen.
And I was reading an Iranian expert talking about how, yeah, Hamas is an Iranian proxy, Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy.
But Iran was actually unhappy about 10-7 because, according to this expert, Iran doesn't support Hamas because they're passionate about Palestinian sovereignty over their ancient homeland.
They support Hamas so that they can have a kind of point of a spear to push back against Israel and the U.S. when they're being pressured.
Same with Hezbollah, same with the Houthis.
So it's not that they're passionate about a Houthi victory.
In Yemen, or that the Palestinians reclaim their ancient homeland.
Iran's Military Strategy Explained00:02:20
It's that they want proxy forces so that they can keep the fight there so that they stay alive in Iran, the same way we want proxy forces around the world.
That's how I think it's that's how I would recommend people try to understand Iran's military strategy.
They use proxy forces to defend their interests in the same way that we do or any great power does.
Now, the other question I think is interesting is that you know.
Whether or not Israel had been prevented from all this in the past from just simply having sane presidents who would put their foot down versus what we have now.
I mean, I think that sort of speaks to that as well, which is really troubling because Israel.
I think the thing, if you talk to people who live in Israel and have been there for a long time, what they'll tell me is try and imagine being in a country where every day you are worried and having to run to a bomb shelter because someone's lobbying rockets that could kill you.
For and then multiply that by decade upon decade, and it will put you in a certain mind frame that Americans cannot understand.
And that's what a lot of Israelis will probably tell you, right?
And so, this is sort of the result of that.
Although, in my mind, Netanyahu isn't acting out of some sort of like multi decade trauma of being under the threat of, you know, rockets lying in his head.
He is under the threat of being arrested and thrown in jail, which sounds familiar to what's going on here.
And so, that's where it really becomes problematic, where it just feels like, um, You know, it's an intractable situation as long as the government is in place.
And I think the overall thing is Iran is now emboldened because they realize that the missile strikes that they did earlier last year had no effect on their nuclear capabilities.
And then it feels like, what do you think about this theory?
Jared was pushing it, I think, more than I was in terms of the rescue of this pilot, of which I still don't think we've ever been identified.
But it was really a different operation that was designed to go and get nuclear material.
nearby.
Do you think there's any credence to that theory?
Yeah, I don't know about the nuclear material theory, but I agree with you that we don't know everything about what happened there.
That something probably was happening there that we don't completely understand.
I think it's extremely unlikely that these guys fell.
NATO Involvement in Aggression00:04:54
Iran didn't know where they were.
We were able to get in and out, get them without Iran detecting our presence at all.
Seems extremely unlikely to me that probably there's something a little more complicated there, and we'll find out the details one day.
I wouldn't speculate that it.
I doubt they sent two guys in to try to get Iran's enriched uranium.
But yeah, there's going to be more to that story that we're going to learn one day.
Okay, fair enough, fair enough.
I mean, that's a very diplomatic way of putting it.
I am a professor, yeah.
There's no question that there was something more.
I mean, there were hundreds of people involved on the ground in Iran.
Remarkable that it wasn't worse, I suppose, than what it is.
And I think there's a brain drain here because it doesn't take much to look into the history of this region to figure out why.
It would be almost impossible to attack it and conquer it with boots on the ground.
I mean, as far as I could tell, Alexander the Great might have been the last guy to really attack this region and successfully take it over.
And that was, oh, 300 and something BC.
So I just don't know.
I can't figure that out just even strategically how they would even go about doing that.
And especially without anyone like NATO being involved to help.
Just remind me do you remember when NATO was founded?
Was it supposed to be some sort of, you know, Aggressive attack force?
It's a defensive pact.
An attack on one is an attack on all.
So, yeah, it's total historical illiteracy for Trump to suggest that somehow they're duty bound or treaty bound to support us.
Again, this is a war of aggression.
In a sense, aggression is the original war crime.
I mean, that is the crime that we organized international law to prevent.
A country's attacking their neighbors unprovoked.
So, yeah, the idea that NATO somehow Binds the NATO partners to participate in a war crime is obviously the height of nonsense.
I hear you.
And it's funny because I would get in conversations with people about NATO itself and how, well, Putin obviously is really concerned.
They can't have NATO on their doorstep.
And I said, well, tell me when NATO was ever an aggressive force preemptively attacking anybody.
And they made it sound like I was insane for asking that question.
But it's clear to me, as far as the history of NATO, that they've never done that.
It's always have to be a defense force.
And by the way, remind me, but since NATO was founded, it seemed like it was working.
It was a good entity.
Absolutely.
If you accept the doctrine of North Atlantic dominance, it was working really well, the most successful military alliance in history.
That's the part that's tough.
I mean, I'm a critic of the American empire, but from the perspective of a traditional understanding of, let's say, the post war order, NATO was this incredible success.
And Donald Trump had no capacity to understand why it was successful.
He thought that everyone was taking us for a ride because we were providing this umbrella of security.
For Western Europe, and they weren't paying their fair share.
He didn't understand that, okay, it was costing us something, but the benefits that we were deriving from that were so much greater than whatever we were putting into it.
And he just had no ability to understand that.
Now, in some sense, his failure to understand that helped European countries become more aware of how important NATO was.
And they did vow to increase their defense spending.
And so, in a sense, sometimes this happens with Trump, right?
And his kind of like, Perversity, he ends up generating what might seem like in the short term to be a positive outcome.
And that was an example of that.
But now, you know, threatening to attack NATO, that's what annexing, seizing Greenland is, that's an attack on a NATO country, and threatening to pull out of NATO, you know, and so he does that over and over.
And then he still expects NATO countries to come participate in this aggressive, you know, A war crime of adventurism.
It's Yeah, it's, as we say in the Jewish tradition, it's the height of chutzpah.
Yeah, it certainly is.
And I think that's a nice transition to talk a little bit more about the religion in our world, because we also have Trump deciding to take on the Vatican.
And he had a post in the middle of the night that said, actually, it was not the middle night, it was actually in normal hours, but he said, quote, Pope Leo is all caps weak.
On crime and terrible for foreign policy.
Vatican Record on Human Rights00:08:23
When reached for comment, the Pope was busy.
He was too busy prepping for his run in California's 14th.
I think there's a big over revelation.
So, how is this possible that Trump is trying to criticize the Pope as if he is some sort of political officer here?
Yeah, well, you know how people say no one has more contempt for his voters than Donald Trump?
I guess they'll believe that the Pope is in charge of, I don't know, law and order somehow or has authority over that is pursuing a kind of a, you know, somehow, I don't know, some, yeah, like running for office and has to have a policy on the American, Empire and policing crime.
It just makes no sense.
But how little do you have to think of your supporters to talk to them that way?
Because obviously, that tweet's not for you or me.
That's for his people.
And he's, I guess, he knows them well enough to know that they'll swallow even that.
Well, that's possible.
I also feel like, so the Pope has been pretty adamant, you know, and by the way, he's not great on his record in terms of like when the Iranian government was murdering protesters not long ago.
Nothing very specific that condemned that, unfortunately.
But, and the Pope has been pretty good as far as parsing his words and not necessarily calling out Trump directly.
But when you, a perceived criticism of Trump means he must fight back, no matter who it is.
Like if Mother Teresa had said something like, gosh, it'd be nice if the United States would treat their homeless people a little bit nicer, that would be, he would attack her.
Without question, he would have attacked her and called her weak on crime.
Well, the perfect, and this is maybe the most dismal thing that happened in the last couple of days, but the perfect example of that.
Is that Trump was fine with Alex Jones.
He didn't call him out for the insane, demented Sandy Hook conspiracy theory ever, as long as Alex Jones was supporting him.
And then I don't know if you saw, I don't know if it was in the same tweet or truth, but he now says, oh, Alex Jones, this is the guy that pushed the deranged Sandy Hook conspiracy theories.
And that is just so depressing that this is a guy who was content to benefit from that kind of conspiracy theory.
And now, when Alex Jones is critical of the war in Iran, he decides that suddenly he has religion and that Alex Jones is a conspiracy theorist and is dangerous.
And that just shows that, as you say, that this man is loyal to nothing.
I was thinking, I knew we were going to talk, so I was thinking about Plato and pleonexia is the term he gives to people who, like the kind of the The definition that he gives of it is people who take more than their share, people who are just insatiable for power and have an unending appetite and recognize no boundaries.
And that's this guy.
He'll use anything and he'll toss away anything.
We just gave an example, right?
He'll toss away the greatest military alliance that the world's ever seen in NATO and he'll exploit the killing of children at Sandy Hook.
He'll attack the Pope.
He'll attack the leader of the Longest standing institution, maybe on earth, or one of them, you know, and embrace the absolute worst people in the world.
So, we know what we're dealing with here.
We elected him twice.
That's something that we have to think about.
We knew what he was, he didn't really hide it.
The early attacks in 2015 on people like John McCain, a disabled reporter.
He didn't hide who he was, and we elected him twice.
So that's something, that's kind of my work.
How do we repair this democracy?
That's what I'm working on.
But we got to look at ourselves how we could elect someone like that twice.
Yeah.
Well, I think it's really worth listening to a little more of the post because he says, quote, he talks about fear of the Trump administration, but doesn't mention the fear that the Catholic Church and all other Christian organizations had during COVID.
When they were arresting priests, ministers, and everybody else for holding church services, even when going outside and being 10 and every 20 feet apart.
I like his brother Louis much better than I like him because Louis is all MAGA.
Fascinating, by the way, of this.
Now, here's what was interesting because he goes on and on.
It's a very long post and he's just ripping him apart, which, by the way, has to have an effect, even if it's marginal, on the Catholic supporters that he already has from abortion, right?
And we've known that people who are Devoted to the Pope and to Catholicism, they would hold their nose and vote for Trump, knowing that he was going to get rid of abortion, right?
I've seen it in their faces, how pale they get when they realize the deal they had to make to put him in office.
But this has to go, this has to be on the margin of 5%, 6%.
It's going to take, right, a little chunk.
But I'm a little bit surprised, are you, that he didn't go after the easiest way to attack the Catholic Church, if you know what I'm talking about?
Well, he probably is starting to get away from the Epstein files, right?
Not give people a reason to think about them.
No, by the way, how sad is it that we now have to parse what you mean on that with the absentee files versus what the Catholic Church stands for?
But again, are you surprised that he didn't invoke anything like that?
We're talking about the child abuse scandal in the church.
Yeah, he probably doesn't want to talk about child abuse scandals because that comes back to him.
That'd be my guess.
But I mean, well, I mean, you want to get into real perversity.
I mean, what does he even.
Yeah, I don't even want to go there, but wait, wait, what, you know, he probably just doesn't want that issue prominent based on, I mean, he's been saying, you know, it's a, what does he say?
It's a fraud or stop talking about Epstein.
Well, you start talking about child abuse.
People right away are going to start thinking about his, how he's implicated in the abuse of young girls.
But, you know, it goes beyond that with the Catholics because I'm not Catholic, but I think one of like the principal tenets of faith is the infallibility of the Pope.
So, in some sense, like, You aren't a Catholic if you don't accept the statements of the Pope on Christianity.
And so I saw people saying that Catholic members of the administration need to either step down or risk being expelled from the Catholic Church, excommunicated, because you can't be both a Catholic and speak that way or endorse that kind of statement about the head of the religion.
I mean, it's a particular.
Religious practice, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
And the infallibility of the Pope is, I think, something that's not disputable.
It gets worse, Jason.
Let me tell you what was in that later on in this post.
He said, and I'm assuming you read this post already, right?
I didn't parse it.
I didn't read it as closely as I do Plato or Rousseau, but I did see it, yes.
Well, he says, referring to the Pope, he wasn't on any list to be Pope and was only put there by the church because he was an American and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.
If I wasn't in the White House, Leo wouldn't be in the Vatican.
Unfortunately, Leo's weak on crime, weak on nuclear weapons does not sit well with me, or nor does the fact that he meets with Obama sympathizers like David Axelrod.
I mean, this just goes to show you the depth of his it's not depravity, it's dementia.
But like the mind seemed to stick on one kind of thing or other.
But the idea that the conclave had to somehow took into account the nationality of this guy and how that would help them deal with Trump, you know, is insane to me.
Only an insane person would think something like that, I would imagine.
I saw a movie.
Litmus Test for Democratic Changes00:02:42
I know how it works.
I didn't see the movie, but it's classic narcissism that you think that somehow you're the center of the universe.
Everything is done.
Everything matters only insofar as it relates to you.
And that also explains why he treats people the way he does, because for narcissists, as long as you're of some use to them, they love you.
The moment you're no longer of any use to them, they discard you.
You're worthless.
You're nothing.
You're a victim of one of these truths.
And you're supposed to ultimately self implode and leave everybody in your wake.
We're kind of still waiting for that.
And it's been remarkable there's been enough enablers around him to protect him, particularly even the Supreme Court.
So that is the concern here.
And I would be very concerned, especially looking at all these special elections going through and with Orban.
At some point, you wear out your welcome.
And in margins as thin as this, where in the congressional races, there's going to be very little margin for error on the Republican side.
It just you have to imagine they're going to lose the house.
You have to, I mean, at this point, the senate seems to be up in the air.
I don't know if you've looked at that more closely, but um, you know, it can you imagine if they, you know, if the senate tipped in the favor of the democrats by you know three or four votes, it would be that much harder to find five or six more uh for the for an impeachment conviction?
Oh, wow, um, I don't even, I seriously doubt it.
I doubt you could get to that, but who knows?
I mean, anything's possible.
The thing I, yeah, I mean.
Okay, forget impeachment.
Could we even just get to the 51 votes in the Senate to abolish the filibuster?
And the thing is, if you get that kind of wave election where you get Democrats winning in some of these purple states, the way they might win is by making some concessions to kind of the middle, as we say.
And then I would worry that we're back in the kind of cinema mansion situation that we were in before, where we just fall a few votes short.
Of making the needed changes to prevent the reemergence of this kind of anti constitutional populist.
And those are urgent, right?
I mean, it almost has to be a litmus test that if you're not willing to make these changes so that we can finally pass what was called HR1 when Biden got elected and really secure democracy in a way that you can't get these minoritarian movements in the future.
That then, you know, how much help are you?
But I mean, it's certainly better than a Republican majority.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
Substantive Issues vs Election Distractions00:08:21
It would be nice to be able to slow this down a little bit and have, you know, some version of accountability to everybody.
I mean, you know, but again, we'll have to find out.
It's been remarkable how ineffective the Democratic leadership has been.
And speaking of which, you know, in our home state here, we have a guy who was leading the PAC, although it might not be clear to everybody in the country that the way we do our elections for governor.
The top two get to move on.
And because of the fractured nation or state of the Democratic side, it was conceivable that the two top guys would have been Republicans instead of the Democrats moving on to governorship.
So the leader in that on the Democratic side, Eric Swalwell, revelations come out that a staffer of his said there was sexual assault that happened in the past.
What do you make of that, real quickly, as we move on to the end of the show, in terms of?
Is this some sort of political hit job on him to kind of clear the whole slate to make it clear that the Democrats can win this thing?
Or is this something that's real?
Well, it seems like it's more than one accusation.
I don't know if it was assault, was it?
I'm not sure.
But yeah, misconduct and harassment, and worse, maybe.
It seems like it's more than one or two people.
But either way, it was going to be a distraction.
And.
I prefer Katie Porter myself.
I think she's a more substantive candidate.
I think the Democratic Party has to kind of decide.
Well, they have several decisions to make, but one of them is how much do they foreground these candidates that have for them their identity is tied mostly with the kind of anti Trump movement and less with a kind of substantive policy agenda of their own.
And I know if Swalwell were here, he'd get very angry at hearing me say that and he would list all the policies that he supports.
But his political persona and he's been effective is is really oriented around stopping trump Whereas someone like Katie Porter, who's maybe now gonna be the frontrunner among Democrats, came up with like a substantive economic agenda.
I mean, she's known for these whiteboards where she would question people from major industries and advocate for working class people, consumers and so forth.
So I prefer a candidate like that because I think in the long run, the way we defeat Trumpism is not only by talking about the specific threat that Trump poses to democracy, but rather with a policy agenda that will be appealing to people who might otherwise have voted for Trump.
I prefer her.
She's got her own problems too, her own scandals, but I prefer her and candidates like her who kind of come up with more of a substantive agenda.
As for Swalwell, I think he made the right choice.
And I think he said it well, which is that, like, whether these accusations are true or not, and they're definitely not from his perspective, that's for me to resolve, is what I heard him say, and not the campaign.
And the campaign would end up being a distraction so that he said the right things.
And, you know, He claims that there's nothing to the charges.
We don't know, but there's several.
And, you know, I'm definitely on the side of giving credence to the victims for sure.
He'll get his chance to defend himself.
Sure.
I mean, at the surface level, it seems clear that he's willing to acknowledge that he had a relationship with a staffer.
And that's the big one that would kind of get you out of office either way.
I mean, ethically, you're supposed to not.
That's supposed to be a bar, right?
You're not supposed to cross.
And, you know, it sounds like, you know, his wife knew about these things and they had gotten past that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's okay.
Now, what's shocking to me, though, is that he was willing to step down in this age where it kind of felt like we were past that now, where anybody can just deny, attack the victim, and just move on.
And it might have worked.
He might have been able to sort of have his little moment to the camera, move on.
And then next week, we would, you know, maybe it just goes away, or that's what the hope would be.
So I wonder if he was Republican, it would work.
And I think I understand why Democrats feel like this is a double standard because if you're Republican, you just deny it and push through.
Look at Ken Paxton.
Oh my God, this guy is a front runner for the Senate.
But I mean, politics is dismal, right?
Politics is not fair.
And the Democratic, the constituency that votes Democrat is very different from the constituency that votes Republican.
And, you know, Swalwell knows that.
And that's why he stepped down.
Yeah, he could push through it if he was running as a Republican.
But as a Democrat, you have to appeal to different voters.
And yeah, the standards are different.
And we also can't have it both ways, right?
If we want to say we're the principled side that believes in norms and practices and democracy and equality and feminism and so forth, and we want to win votes based on our loyalty to those principles, we're going to actually have to live by them ourselves.
If we want to do what they do, you know, and just run against elites and immigrants and women and then that yeah then i guess your leeway is is is greater if you want to um be a philanderer Right.
And making a mistake, I did not want to diminish the charges at all, and they didn't deserve to be investigated.
I will say that at first glance at some of the stories, it felt a little bit more like a political hit job.
Like this is the kind of thing that you dump on somebody as you're approaching the election.
And so I hope I get to the bottom of this, and I hope he figures out what his deal is.
Because if you talk to, I was reading one of the local reporters from his district, was like, we have been talking about this.
For years, and nobody wanted to listen.
Like, this was an issue that he had, whether you want to call it philandering or assault or anything else in between, this was a thing that he seemed to not be able to control.
And that's a problem.
And now, again, here we are with someone like Trump in the White House, where it doesn't seem to matter to a vast amount of people as long as you say the right things that trigger their emotional responses.
So it's interesting to see how that sort of, again, the only thing I'm going to say in this very cynical way is that I'm surprised, you know, I suppose to some degree that.
In this day and age, you're still going to have politicians who step down so quickly off of a sexual scandal.
Really, it just seems, you know, but that's good.
I mean, that's that.
I think what, right?
That maybe your point would be it's a good thing that there are still standards that somebody's trying to uphold.
It depends on what we're talking about.
When it's like you said, when it's a staffer, that's something different from just adultery, right?
So that's a kind of abuse, an abusive relationship.
You're taking advantage of the power that you have over an employee.
So, yeah, it would depend on the scandal itself.
But just one point about, you know, oh, This idea that it's a hit job that, you know, at the moment that everyone's about to vote, it happens like that.
If you're not that I've been a victim of sexual abuse, but it happens when you see others get the courage to speak out that you then will, at that moment, be willing to do it.
And I saw that reporter as well.
And he said, I tried to get people to go on the record and they wouldn't.
And we know from all the Epstein stuff why people are reluctant to go on the record.
They're threatened with lawsuits.
They don't want to go public.
They're dealing with their own trauma.
And so it takes a lot for victims.
To come out.
And so I guess I don't think it's surprising that it would kind of seem like a snowball at these particular moments.
It's because you see someone else has the courage to do it.
And that gives you that little bit of courage that maybe you need to feel supported.
Absolutely.
A great point.
Well, I think we got to the end of our show.
We got a lot of things covered.
And I really appreciate you being able to come on here and help me out while it is out of pocket.
So thank you, Jason.
I really appreciate it.
No problem.
You're welcome.
Good to see you.
And everybody else, please be safe out there.
I think we'll be back with our regularly scheduled program on the weekender at the end of the week.