Ben Rhodes

It is not just weird Tulsi Gabbard lurking in the wings while the FBI is doing stuff.

He is also using the Department of Homeland Security.

His scandal-ridden, utterly incompetent, controversial, fear-inducing, flush-with-cash Department of Everything and Anything,

is being applied to the elections too.

Watch this space, please.

Watch this space.

Every small d democratic muscle that we have is flexing.

We got a little taste of what it's like to have a compliant state media with a Fox & Friends weekend anchor as your secretary of defense.

The convergence of those threads was not very reassuring, Tommy.

I think the initial reaction is that all of our concerns about this war are playing out in the sense that there's a total lack of coherence from the US, from what Trump's saying, what Hegseth is saying about what the objectives are.

And there just seems to be a lot of momentum to keep doing stuff.

that the Iranian response is chaotic but widespread.

It's like a machine gun being dropped on the floor, firing in all directions, and that nobody knows where this is going, which is what happens when you decapitate a regime with no plan for what comes next, and that regime is much deeper and more heavily armed than, say, the Venezuelan government was.

It's a very unsettling moment right now, Tommy.

Well, I think the message is that is that so long as violence and chaos is being rained on us, we're going to bring violence and chaos to everybody, including all these Gulf countries, nearly all of whom have some U.S.

military presence in them.

I'm not saying it's a good strategy.

It's certainly reprehensible in terms of the indiscriminate targets that they're shooting at.

But if there is a logic, it's that it's that we need to make this war so destabilizing to the region, to global energy markets, that there's just a pressure to make it stop.

And look, they may not be inflicting tremendous damage.