Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Motivation included. Once upon a time, pessimists, optimists and solidists were grilling. And so it happened that the solidist succeeded. The solidist succeeds! It is Monday, which means we are answering your questions with Matt Chorley on Five Live.
Today, you've been asking us about Iran, of course, also about insider trading, though, and the BBC's done some work looking at trading spikes before some of the announcements that have been made by the Trump administration about Iran. We also are going to talk about allegations of alcoholism against the head of the FBI, Kash Patel. Those allegations made in The Atlantic magazine. He denies them.
Plus, there's quite a lot of outrage about the Football World Cup, soccer as the Americans call it, which seems to be oddly expensive. Now, it's not just the price of the tickets to get into the matches. It's also the train journeys that you're apparently going to be forced to make. if you're going to one of those matches, and all about whether that is fair or not fair.
So, welcome to American Answers.
I have four words for you. Turn the volume up.
Right, we've got absolutely loads of questions, so we'll try and get through as many as we can. Let's start with Iran and an email from Jonathan in Oxford. He writes, Anthony.
Well, you don't need a navy, a traditional navy, to attack tankers in the Strait of Hormuz because it's so narrow. The Iranians can launch drones from their own territory. They can fire missiles, which is what they've done. They even have threatened shipping, not just in the Strait, but around it, in the Gulf and then outside of the Gulf.
And when we say the Iranian navy, we're thinking about the big ships like that frigate that was sunk in the Indian Ocean and others. But Iran still has a bunch of speedboats, basically little zodiac boats, which are in theory, could be armed with people with machine guns or mines or their own drones. And that could present as much of a threat to shipping as a big traditional Navy ship.
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Chapter 2: What insider trading claims are being made against Trump's White House?
You won't see price rises here in the United States ahead of elections later next year. This is not doing him any political good at all. The hostility is continuing, but... As this kind of thing happens, and as Iran is able to block ships in the Strait of Hormuz, he can't say that it's a total victory and walk away because it's no kind of victory yet.
So I think that illustrates for you the political mess he's got himself into because of the military mess that there is in the Strait.
We've just had a text, actually, literally while you were speaking there. So maybe this is one that Mariella can pick up. If America has the equivalent of the man on the Clapham omnibus, does he think what is happening with Iran is reasonable? Anthony, is there an equivalent of a man on the Clapham omnibus?
What? I have no idea what that means. You're going to have to translate that for me.
It's basically like, you know, it's often used in a sort of like, well, it's what they're really talking about down the dog and duck or what's a normal person who's on a bus in Clapham, basically, rather than somebody in the Westminster bubble or whatever. What would be the American equivalent of that? A person on the street. What are the man on the Clapham omnibus looking at social media?
What are they thinking, Mariana?
well, some of the most viral content about the war has tended to be the rage bait style content, often coming from government accounts themselves, whether that's from the US, you know, White House accounts and otherwise, or whether that's coming from Iran, official accounts in Iran.
And it's, I mean, particularly the Iranian content recently, like people might have seen those Lego videos where you've got like versions of what's going on in the war and in the US cabinet and various other places in the form of Lego characters. I think that the thing that's interesting is
You've got quite a lot of left wing American accounts sharing the rage bait content saying this is actually quite funny and I'm not very keen on Donald Trump and the people in his team and I'm critical of the war. And or you've got people from who are supportive of Donald Trump and MAGA who are kind of trying to share the US equivalent of that rage bait.
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Chapter 3: How is the FBI Director Kash Patel being criticized?
Not just from people who don't like him, which is what he usually gets.
In fact, one of the people who told him to take it down was his pastor, Mark Burns, who was on the show. I spoke to him last week. And this is what he had to say.
I know that Donald Trump, Mark Burns, you, the presenter, every person that was watching this have the same struggle. But just because he's the president doesn't mean God holds him at a higher standard. No, he is a still a man and still has to bow down to Master Jesus, just like the janitor who's not the president, but he still owes his allegiance to the living God.
I think that was after I was trying to get him to explain if he felt that the president always acted in accordance with the Bible. Let's move on. John in Yorkshire has WhatsAppped, if and when... Insider trading is proven in the Trump administration. Will anyone actually suffer the consequences? Would it prove another nail in the coffin of Trump's political career? Sarah?
Fascinating question, especially as there's a BBC investigation online today showing the spikes in various trading just before different announcements about the Iran war. from Donald Trump then caused a major move in the price of oil or sent the stock market up or down. It seemed as though people knew a few minutes in advance, a crucial few minutes in advance what was going to happen.
Or certainly they made a lot of very astute bets immediately before an announcement. So that's one more instance in which people could look at that and say, here is a way that people are either doing insider trading or some form of corruption, making money out of the Trump administration. Will there be some kind of backlash and the administration suffer? To be honest, I doubt it.
I think people expect this of the Trump administration. It's pretty naked the way in which the president and his family are doing deals for the Trump organization around about the same time as diplomatic deals are being done. It's absolutely blatant the way the president is fundraising for various of the things he wants to build around Washington and that there seems to be surplus funds.
Nobody quite knows what happens to them. It's out there that he wants to make money from the presidency, that the people around him are trying to do the same thing. And I think it's baked in already to people's understanding of what the Trump administration is about.
What can be done about it, though, Anthony?
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