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Chapter 1: What legal action is Kash Patel taking against The Atlantic?
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I'm Tommy Vitor. Wow, that was enthusiastic. Let's go. Well, on today's show, we're going to talk about Trump's premature victory lap on Iran, his attempts to win back Joe Rogan with psychedelics, and Kash Patel suing the Atlantic because over two dozen people basically said he's a paranoid idiot who drinks too much.
We'll also cover what was a big weekend for potential Democratic presidential contenders who are very much stepping up their public appearances and honing their stump speeches. Then, Ilan Goldenberg of J Street talks to Tommy about how pro-Israel progressives are trying to make their case.
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Chapter 2: How did Trump respond to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz?
I'm not pressured to end it soon, but I'm going to end it soon. But I don't care when I end it because we've already won. Then we're going to accomplish all this stuff. Do you see that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are being referred to as Wit-Kush? It's so embarrassing. In diplomatic circles. Wit-Kush. According to playbook. Kush-Wit. Kush-Wit sounds better. Kush-Goff. Jerk-Goff. Jerk-Goff.
Jerk-Off. Jer-Off. Jer-Off.
Jer-Off. That works for me. Anyway, there was also an incredible Wall Street Journal story over the weekend about how Trump has been, quote, grappling with his own fears about this war, namely that if too many American troops were killed or captured, his presidency could end up like Jimmy Carter's. That seemed to be the main takeaway for him.
I also found this part notable when a White House advisor asked Trump about his, I remember the Easter Sunday post that threatened war crimes and ended with, quote, open the fucking straight, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell. Praise be to Allah. Happy Easter. So Trump said about this post, quote, he came up with the Allah idea himself.
He said he wanted to seem as unstable and insulting as possible, believing it could bring the Iranians to the table, senior administration officials said. Nailed the first part, I guess. How did you guys make it the piece? I'd quibble with the analysis a bit. I don't think you needed the praise be to Allah tweet for the Iranians to think you're unstable and insulting to them.
That's pretty well established. I think with the crazy bastards part. Yeah, and all the bombing. Do you guys think that... telling people that you're just pretending to be a lunatic to get a deal kind of ruins the point of pretending to be a lunatic. Yeah, the madman theory. Well, yeah, you read the piece like, oh, he really was just, yeah, right. Well, all right, you are what you pretend to be.
But he's just sort of jerking everybody around. And I look back to like that concern, which I think was completely legitimate given what he was threatening. that day. And then you read the piece and he was also meeting about the ballroom and doing fundraisers and kind of doing normal business that day.
And there was a little bit of like the alarm that wasn't going off and the dog that wasn't barking. Like there was no, we weren't getting reportings that he was in the situation room laying out the final parts of the plan. And so it confirms what we were just talking about, which is what he is posting publicly is not coming out of a conversation with the negotiators.
It's not some part of some like public facing strategy and private facing strategy. It's just his separate stream of consciousness. He has a kind of whatever contractors mentality about negotiations. He, he clearly like as, as I think the Iranians have assumed is a lot of people have assumed does not want the, the, the economic pain that comes with a longterm conflict.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the administration's push for psychedelics?
We can have those honest conversations. I mean, it's one of the reasons now, like, I don't know if you've paid attention. We've taken a fair amount of flack for it. you know, a support for Israel and no blank check. Let's ask all the hard questions.
So last week we came out with a new position that's flared up a lot of interest, which is basically to say there's three pieces to the U.S.-Israel security relationship.
right the first piece is you know we you know we do operational cooperation on certain things when it's in our interest we should do that whether it's our militaries working together whether it's sharing intel which they do help us with with everything from isis to iran to all kinds of other challenges when it makes sense we can do that two basically they get four billion dollars a year from us right and have been for years and years and years and j street's position is
It's time for that to end. It's basically a financial subsidy, right? Yeah. And there's no reason that they don't need this financial subsidy for anything anymore. Israel at this point, it's a country with a per capita GDP similar to France or the UK or Germany or any of these very wealthy countries. They don't need this money. They have a $45 billion budget. So let's just ā
kind of phase that out relatively quickly. And by the way, I'm not the only guy saying that. Rahm Emanuel is saying that. Bibi Netanyahu is saying that. Lindsey Graham is saying that. AOC is saying that. It's one thing everybody agrees on. It's time for that money to go.
And then the third piece is when it comes to arms sales, there's some things that really do make sense, like Iron Dome, for example, right? Missile defense system that protects Israeli civilians from attacks.
There are some people who argue that the Iron Dome... It enables more militarism by the IDF because they know that they can repeatedly bomb a country like Iran and then just be protected from incoming fire. I'm just sort of laying out the other side of that debate for listeners.
No, for sure. And my argument on that is if you go back, for example, and imagine ā there are moments when that might be true. But if you really think about it in totality, imagine if on October 7th Israel didn't have those systems.
hundreds of more in the aftermath when when Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran started launch and the Houthis started launching missiles at Israel if Israel didn't have the capabilities to protect civilians first of all just on a human life perspective We're talking about somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 American citizens living in Israel That's a real issue but also
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