And I think it's also notable that Trump's down in Florida today.

Yeah.

No, Trump's campaign schedule has been very illuminating.

You know, having to go to South Carolina, having to go to Kansas, you know, the fact that they're having to pay any attention.

And it's not just pay attention.

They're dumping money into red states.

They're dumping money into deep red districts.

Plus Trump's decision to enrich that land, brazilian meat packer guy and give him a a tariff exemption because he donated to his inaugural fund uh like the the those dynamics would indicate that democrats should make significant gains there i'm curious if you have an opinion on those races nebraska we can include in that as well with osborne running as an independent yeah

It's not what we expect from the U.S.,

Well, get to expecting it because here we are.

Yeah.

The crazy thing is you would think that a promise of free money would be appealing to people.

But Trump, because he has he is so hated and because he has so little credibility, everyone is still waiting for.

He had promised us checks for tariff refunds.

He promises checks from Doge cuts like we're still waiting on these checks.

Yeah.

That's what I'm saying

... for billionaires in the oligarch class.

They've never made more money or had more power or been deregulated.

They're getting everything they want, and that's part of why it was easier for Trump To take over the Republican Party than it has been for the left to take over the Democratic Party because the left-wing populism, that class dynamic you're talking about, that is the whole thing, right? It is, in, in populism, you're basically doing the people versus who is the villain.

For the left, the villain is, is the billionaires, it's the trillionaires, it's the Epstein class, it's the oligarchs.

For the right, it's typically, you know, to, to frame it, I th- I think you're right in your framing.

There's usually a lot of, you know, scapego- goating of various minority groups.

Yes.

Right

...

when it comes to Israel and the coexistence of Jewish and Arab Muslim people.

So, um, you know, when I went into this interview, Joy, I saw the votes that he, he's shifted, right? He's the one who originally introduced this provision to merge the Israeli and the US militaries, and then he flipped on his own, uh, provision here.

So I was like, "Okay.

Well, is this a genuine shift or is, or is this just like a cynical he can see the polls, he knows he needs to do something, he's got a primary he's facing? Like, what is going on here?" And I came away pretty clearly understanding [laughs] that his ide- ideology hasn't changed.

I also asked him, you know, "Do you have any regrets about all of the funds that you ship to Israel while they're committing a genocide under the Biden administration?" Absolutely not.

Yeah.

... troop deaths as well.

Yeah, they didn't want any of the, um, caskets coming home to be filmed because there were so many Americans who were being killed, and they d- th- they knew it would be devastating to public opinion and public sentiment, and that certainly was the case.

And no, I mean, it's, it's really disgusting.

I mean, you look at this 19-year-old girl who, you know, one year older than my daughter, I couldn't help but thinking about my daughter just graduated from high school, and at her graduation ceremony, they had all the kids who were signing up for the military stand up.

And, you know, this is, this is them.

This is their lives, and she's now dead for what? For what? Now you're not even gonna reflect it in the official s- statistics, and they've already been caught hiding the overall casualty numbers, which are, you know, well into the, the 400s that we know of.

Service members are complaining about the lack of medicar- medical care that they've been receiving.

That's untenable to a guy like Trump.

But anyway, sorry, go ahead.

Yeah.

Liberal Zionism is an untenable position.

It requires you to deny reality of what Israel is and frankly, you know, what it always has been at its core.

Because a lot of, you know, Bernie falls prey to this older lefties in the, you know, in the old days.

Israel was sort of coded as lefty because there were these sort of like, you know, hippie kibitzim and there was the scrappy underdog in the Middle East.

And there was a lot of sort of intentional ignorance and propaganda around how the state was actually settled, you know, acceptance of this idea that, oh, there was nobody even there.

So I'm curious, you know, do you think Americans are starting to connect those dots? And if they are, Does that point to maybe a deeper realignment that's bigger than, you know, just this Democratic Party change itself? Because you talk about this a lot on your show, but we also do see this happening, you know, kind of across the board throughout the country.

That doesn't seem like what the original goals of the operation were to me.

Well, yeah.

I mean, since we collapsed to the goal of the operation being to return the Strait of Hormuz to something approximating what it was prior to the war.

No.

Look, we lost the war.

I mean, that's the, the bottom line.

We lost the war.

Yeah.

Why aren't we taking the car keys away?

Well, because he's built this authoritarian cult around him, and frankly, I think part of his display of dominance is acting in these clearly unhinged ways of taking the liberty to fall asleep.

I mean, he's not, like...

You know, he's not ashamed of it.

He just falls asleep in all these press conferences all the time, and all the people around him have to pretend like they don't see the obvious that anyone, like you said, with eyes and ears can see.

Not to mention, you know, these are all people in Trump 2.0 in particular he selected for one quality: loyalty.

These are all total, complete sycophants, most of whom are utterly idiotic and incompetent, would never sniff a high-level position in any functioning organization outside of their ties to Donald Trump.

Yeah.

Yeah

... a white collar criminal, you just can get away with anything right now, especially if you're a white collar criminal that has any connection to the Trump family or is willing to bribe them or has donated to the Trump campaign or whatever.

You c- there just is no law that really is being enforced against you at this point, to the point that white collar defense attorneys are like, "We don't have any clients because there's no work to do here." That's how much they have undermined the rule of law, where their entire administration is run around, um, around theft, around bribery, around corruption.

Even with this ballroom thing, I don't know if you saw this article.

The company that is building the ballroom was given a no-bid contract on this other unrelated park that happens to be close to the White House to, like, rehab the fountains.

When Bi- under the Biden administration, they estimated that this rehab project would cost about $3 million.

Already seems like a lot for a couple of fountains, but okay.

I agree

Of course

... to what Jeremy Scale was saying, you know, a month ago.

But in any case, Trump is indeed desperate for a deal and has been trying to find some sort of an off-ramp, and it's been the Iranians who have been resistant, and in fact, it was difficult for, um, for the, you know, the leadership, the political leadership to get the IRGC on board in order for them to even pursue these potential talks.

So that's how...

You know, 'cause there's a, a disagreement on whether or not the US and Israel have felt enough pain yet, whether enough of a deterrent has been established to make sure that we don't just go back again and wage war later on if the Iranians agree to something right now.

But this Lebanon piece is a really big deal.

Uh, Ghalibaf, who's the speaker of the Iranian parliament, he posted that negotiations are not going to start until that part of the original pretext for the negotiations, until that is settled and until attacks on Lebanon stop.

If I were them, I, I probably would do that, then what is Trump gonna do except escalate? Because everybody around him is gonna say, "We can't accept these terms."

It sure is

... for Trump, um, in all three elections.

And I went down to our No Kings protest.

And first of all, for our little tiny town, it was pretty sizable.

You had, I'm gonna say like 70, 80 people there.

But what impressed me even more was the amount of support you were getting from the cars driving by.

Again, very small town, very conservative area.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

But even with the people that got pushed out or decided to leave the government, they, it was the opposite of merit-based.

So it wasn't, by and large, the people who aren't doing a good job and, you know, are kind of acce- excessive or not really needed, superfluous in terms of their roles.

It was by and large the people who took the fork in the road and decided to go elsewhere were the ones who could go in the private sector and earn a different paycheck.

So it was the opposite of the merit-based approach.

A bulk of the people you lost were some of the top performers, some of the most important people in the government, as evidenced by the fact that they had multiple times where, you know, key functions were lost and they had to quick go back and hire people because it was just such a collapse in some function that was actually needed for the federal government.

But again, I think losing that talent from government, that's not necessarily a bad thing the, from the perspective of, for example, a Russ Vought who was, you know, the, spearheaded Project 2025, and he's the Office of Management and Budget, um, Director and is really the person who is the ideological architect of this attack on the federal government.

Mm

Yes, from the Iranians.

Well, and let me just say, I mean, if we take this at face value from Rubio, and I was hearing, you know, rumblings from various administration, people connected to the administration.

If you take this at face value, this is humiliating.

Like, this is him acknowledging that we don't have sovereignty, that Israel pulled us into war.

But I also think it's kind of BS because it pretends that we have no say, that, "Oh, well, Israel's gonna do this.

There's nothing we can do about that." That is insane, and that's where I have...

think you have to look at this and from a couple of perspectives.

Jasper.

But what's that? How's it been navigating those tensions or those differences, which are usually so productive and so much a part of your brand, frankly, and what makes the show valuable in the past couple of years?

Yeah, I think it's I mean, I do think it's one of the things that people like about the show is that, you know, there are certainly moments of agreement, but there are also moments of like deep philosophical disagreement.

Fortunately, on Israel, we do look at the world differently, but there is enough sort of of a shared understanding of reality that.

that that topic was not so difficult for us to cover together.

And we had our moments because he's very like, you know, he doesn't really believe that international law even should be a thing.

He comes much from the more like realist perspective of we just shouldn't have anything to do with this.

I come obviously with more of a like, international left human rights perspective.

The real threat is inviting you to a restaurant.

It needs to be on the same platform, 'cause all of these human rights are interconnected.

Yeah, and I mean, think through what their actual position is.

So they're like, "Okay, you need to be at home, like, with your kids, okay?" Then if I'm doing that and I'm not working [laughs] you certainly don't wanna help out with, like, you're cutting food stamps and you're cutting Medicaid and making it so we can't survive.

I mean, those are gender issues as well, because it's mostly single moms who are struggling, who are suffering when those sorts of programs are cut as well.

So they want you to work and have personal responsibility and take care of yourself, but then they also want you at home with the kids.

I mean, basically they wanna use us as scapegoats because that's what their whole politics is, and the one group that they can never point the finger at is the billionaire class, who are the ones who are actually the ones rigging the system and making everybody's life miserable and sucking up all the water and jacking up our electric bills and trying to replace all the workers with robots.

Those are...

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And it just- you know, this was key lore in terms of him positioning himself as a phony outsider, you know, and so when you take that away, it makes it harder to maintain, like, you're this punk rock figure going after the system when you're the one now actively, like, both in the- in the files and engaged in the coverup.

So, I think it has some salience there.

I also have to say that our friends in the Democratic Party, many of them are like, "Oh, this is slot can- oh, it's just a distraction and we really need to get back to talking about the one big beautiful bill." And, like, yes, that's very politically salient and we need to be talking about that, but you could do both.

This is the sort of thing where if the roles were res- reversed, Republicans would never let this fricking thing go.

And yet Democratic leadership finds it kind of icky or they're implicated or they don't like the il- intel connections or whatever it is, they don't go for the jugular in the same way and maybe just aren't really capable of going for the jugular in any sort of circumstance even when they want to.

So unfortunately, I do think that sort of lessens some of the impact.

Yeah.

Well, Krista, what, what grade would you give Donald Trump?

So, let me just clear up for your audience, I am not some liberal Democratic sycophant who capes for ... ...

the Democratic Party and can never give Trump credit.

In fact, in his first term, I actually supported the tariffs that he put in place, because I thought they made some sort of sense.

This term, there is virtually nothing, maybe changing, like, the pressure on the sh- shower heads, that executive order, that I can get behind, and I'll tell you why, Piers.

First of all, his major, uh, quote/unquote accomplishment at this point is the Big Beautiful Bill, which will strip healthcare away from millions of people in order to fund a tax cut for the people who need it the least.

Second of all, the level of fascistic cruelty with regard to the immigrant population here is more horrifying than I ever could have even anticipated.

Yeah, Krystal, yeah, answer that.

Saagar and Crystal here.

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Yes.

They're like, "Oh, shit." Like, "China cut those off." That was the most obvious (laughs), the most obvious tactic China would take.

And it's like, you didn't think about this? This didn't occur to you before now? Uh, I mean, not that that surprises me, because-All of this attempt to sane wash him or, "Oh, actually you don't understand the grand plan and the 4D chess and the treasury bonds and the de-dollarization.

We're going to use a stable coin to, you know, be able to prop up the dollar," whatever, that was not what was going on.

Trump likes tariffs because he likes power.

He likes to be put in the position of having these people come to him and have to ask for what they want and him being able to bully him.

He, he likes that.

Right.