Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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I'm Jon Favreau.
I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor.
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Chapter 2: What controversy did Trump create with Pope Leo?
He pulled out of the JCPOA and then we in Israel have bombed them the last time we've been having talks. So there's not a lot of goodwill there.
Literally kills the people that we talked to some literally killed the negotiators often That's not cool and using negotiation as a pretext to do a surprise to do more bombing Yeah And then the substance like Trump wants the straight or moves open the Iranians want to de facto control it and charge a fee And then the nuclear program the US position was reportedly end all nuclear enrichment dismantle enrichment facilities and hand over the highly enriched uranium stockpile and
And taking that position going into the talks was doomed to fail because Iran has repeatedly rejected those positions and asserted their right to peaceful civilian nuclear enrichment.
It sounds like they might have proposed a middle ground that was a 20-year halt on enrichment activities, which is interesting because we were always told the JCPOA was really awful because there was a 10-year sunset. Now they proposed a 20-year sunset.
Um, but obviously so if they took it they could say well we doubled the obama deal exactly But the iranians we've all seen their 10-point wish list It's like control the strait or hamoos sanctions relief get the us bases close them down in the middle east. So Um, I think the iranians think trump's going to get bored of this.
He's going to taco He's going to give up and meanwhile the iranians are like we literally have nowhere else to go. So see you next time Uh, love it.
Trump did say, um, right as the negotiations were about to happen The Iranians don't seem to realize they have no cards other than a short-term extortion of the world by using international waterways. The only reason they are alive today is to negotiate. Regardless of what happens, we win. We've totally defeated that country. Do you think that set the negotiations up for success?
Like, I was struggling with this, just, like, watching all this unfold, like, okay, so Vance is going to Islamabad for high-stakes negotiations. Oh, no, the negotiations have fallen apart, and now we're doing a blockade. But wait, you know, the negotiations are back on, and it's all in, like, we're allowing, like, Trump's attention span to, like, describe what's happening. And, like...
oh, you didn't resolve this intractable situation in 21 hours? Of course you didn't. Oh, people have walked away, but they're gonna maybe re-approach the negotiating table. Like, that's how these laws- It's like a Subaru dealer. Right, like- Two years to get the Obama- 18 to 20 months. Right, you're not trying to get to like a clean lease terms where you roll it all in on the front end.
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Chapter 3: What are Nithya Raman's main campaign focuses for LA mayor?
The New York Times helpfully reminded us of what Trump said during one of those Easter events a couple of weeks ago about J.D. Vance going. He said, if it doesn't happen, I'm blaming J.D. Vance. If it does happen, I'm taking full credit. Honestly, like that's where he's great.
Look, as I say to the team at Love It or Leave It, I cannot fail. I can only be failed. And I kind of respect that ethos from Trump.
A double fail, though, from J.D. Vance after after his little rally in Budapest. Yeah, it didn't go so well. And he said that on Fox News. He was like, look, we we can read polls. We didn't think that Victor was going to run away with it. He's on a first name basis with them.
But, you know, sometimes you just do what's right, which is stumping for an authoritarian in Eastern Europe, I guess, kleptocrat in Eastern Europe.
Also, remember a couple of weeks ago when I think it was Scott Besson said we were jujitsu in Iran by lifting sanctions on them to increase supply. Yeah. Now we're blockading the strait ourselves.
Well, let's talk about the blockade. Trump announced it shortly after Vance's bad news announcement, which the military then had to explain is not a blockade of all ships entering or leaving the Strait of Hormuz, as Trump initially said, but a blockade of Iranian ports.
Trump also said that other countries would be joining us, but once again, that hasn't happened yet either, though Israel approves. Tons of questions about what all of this actually means.
Thumbs up from Israel. That's two BBs.
Even Israel's like, are they helping with the blockade? No, but they're like, go for it. We like it. Keir Starmer's like, we're not getting dragged into that.
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Chapter 4: How did JD Vance's negotiations with Iran unfold?
No one believes that.
That's not possible.
So what is happening with the Strait of Hormuz right now and this naval blockade? Anything getting through? What's happening?
So it sounds like where the U.S. is going to blockade all Iranian ports and then Iranian linked ships, not just flagged ships, but ones that U.S. Intel says are Iranian ships. I think ships going to non-Iranian ports will not be stopped. So basically the way this works is there's like 15 U.S. warships in place. The U.S. Abraham Lincoln is the aircraft carrier.
That's kind of like the base of operations. They have these Navy amphibious assault ships that will deal like with interdictions and boarding along with helicopter assets. And then you got the big ass guided missile destroyers, which will like, you know, block things and push them in one direction or the other and also do missile defense because they have all the missile defense systems on them.
Then there's some sort of like mind sweeping and mind hunting operations that'll happen. And so the question I have is. Is the US going to be providing escorts to all the friendly ships? Because the average number of ships through the strait before this was 130 a day. That's a lot of ships. That's a lot of escorts.
And this is risky even during the ceasefire because apparently the Iranians have lost contact with all their sea-based landmines, not landmines, their naval mines that are in the Strait of Hormuz. They can't account for them.
We don't know where we put them.
You don't know where they put them. You never know.
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Chapter 5: What scandal impacted the California governor's race?
He was talking about the small attack ships. He also made a separate point about going after any ships that try to violate the blockade, which I look, I hope that, I have no, he's completely unclear and the military has been clarifying it. We have no idea what he fucking means. We don't know how this is gonna be implemented.
I hope that that's what he means, but it's not clear that if a ship is not listening to a US- Killing everybody. Right, like who knows? And then the other part of it is- Are we now saying that we're going to have the US military board ships that may be hostile?
This is also something that sets up a possibility of a whole bunch of horrible contingencies, troops being grabbed, people getting hurt, people dying in accidents because boarding a ship in the fucking sea that doesn't want to be boarded is a complicated endeavor. Who knows where this is going? It all puts him in a position, if he wants, to escalate and resume bombing and claim it's because of
Some incident that took place on the seas like it just said it's a dangerous thing to be pursuing without really understand why yeah He's known to be a bit imprecise in his language.
The military said it was what the latter thing you said, which is that For the blockade. It's about them stopping and trying to board any vessel Of course that does raise the question like what happens when it's a Chinese vessel That's trying to bring oil to Iran or an Indian vessel. Like what are what?
And the Chinese said, we're coming. We have contracts, and we're going to go get that oil. And by the way, the problem is once you start operating the Strait of Hormuz, it's 21 miles that it's sort of the narrowest choke point. But the Iranians can fire missiles and drones from anywhere along their coast. And your reaction time to respond to that with missile defense is nothing.
So this is getting real risky.
And just so people understand the purpose of the blockade, because I don't know if I explained it. By having a blockade of all Iranian ports, the idea is Iran has to get its oil exported out to people who are buying it through all of its ports. And if it can't do that, then Iran's going to lose billions and billions of dollars. And obviously, that is how they get most of their money.
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Chapter 6: What signs of life are emerging for Democrats' Senate hopes?
It's like half their, I think, oil and gas revenues through those ports. Straits. It's through the straits. And so if you're blocking all the Iranian ports, they can't get anything in, can't get anything out. And that's how it also, by the way, like it could continue to squeeze the Iranian economy, but it's also going to raise oil prices everywhere else because...
the, you know, the rest of the world and the oil prices around the rest of the world depend on Iranian oil to some extent. So in the short term, it's also going to raise oil prices for everyone else as well as squeezing Iran itself.
And the question is like, will, can the Iranians take the pain more than the rest of the world and us here in the United States who are very sensitive to higher gas prices? And so far they've shown yes.
What are you trying to get out of a deal that Iran is not currently willing to give you, but that they will give you after two to three to four to five weeks of pressure from a blockade? And we just don't know. Maybe that is known to them.
Maybe they have some sense of what they're trying to achieve, but nothing public has made clear what the point of this pressure is other than just to get to some sort of a deal, I guess.
Yeah, it seems like their idea is squeeze the Iranian economy even more so that either suddenly there is a popular uprising because now we're not bombing them anymore and people are so upset. It's crazy. Right, it's crazy. And then the leadership will say, okay, let's just make the deal and let's give up the dust.
and make the promises and give them what they want on nukes and, I guess, reopen the strait and then maybe lift economic sanctions for the Iranians as well. And that's the J.D. Vance, Donald Trump view of this. The dust is what he gave Justin Trudeau before he went off to burning this. Sorry, Coachella. Do you hear J.D. Vance? Hey, he's talking about the nuclear material on Brett Baier.
And he knows, of course, that it's called enriched uranium. He understands all this, but he has to As some people call it, dust. One person calls it dust.
You fucking idiot. There is a question of what does a blockade do? I guess it chokes off the ability to have revenue to run the government. But yeah, the idea that people are going to rise up again. The IRGC has all the weapons. The besieged militia has all the weapons. The Iranian people have nothing. And you're bombing them.
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Chapter 7: How does Nithya Raman plan to tackle housing and homelessness?
So that's a nice little cushion for them.
You know what's funny about that is that they prepared for this. But the United States, which is the one that launched the war on its own timetable – and his own decision-making did not refill the strategic petroleum reserve ahead of Trump launching. It was only 60% full.
It's almost as if Beebe and Pete Hegseth persuaded Trump that this would be faster and easier than it actually was. was, yeah, we were watching Vance right before we came in here and he said, look, obviously gas prices being up is bad, but we had such a low benchmark and we were doing so good and it's not nearly as bad as it was under Biden.
And it is true, there was a moment during the Biden administration where gas prices shot up to higher than they are now, I think $5 on average, higher in more expensive places. And that I think actually was the rising of prices, including gas prices into the Afghan withdrawal that probably were the one-two punch that kept Biden below in the low approval for the rest of his presidency.
But right now, today, gas prices are higher than they ever were after that peak, right now. And there's no hope that they're gonna, or at least we don't expect them to go down between now and the election. So it's just not true.
Voters, historically, more sensitive to price increases than they are even to job losses. And within the realm of price increases, there is nothing that people are more sensitive to than gas. And they have eyeballs and they see them everywhere.
They are posted.
Pod Save America is brought to you by Uplift Desk. You know, John, Tommy and I share an office and we all switched to Uplift Desk. And I'll be honest, I was skeptical. I thought, oh, are we going to use this standing up, sitting down? It seems so silly. It's not. It's great. We genuinely love it. We use it all the time. We're always in and out of the studio. We're up and down and up and down.
But, you know, look, if you're going to be working at a desk, you're going to be sitting still. And sure, we're getting up and running into the studio and going to meetings. But there's plenty of time where we're just all, you know, cranking away, grinding in the content minds at our desks. And being able to just say, like, you know what? I'm standing up. Or, you know what? I just ate lunch.
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Chapter 8: What challenges does LA face regarding housing production?
The WFI ensures America's forests remain a vibrant resource for our economy and a vital sanctuary for our environment for generations to come. So Trump was also asked, with DoorDash grandma by his side, whether he regretted the holy war he's decided to launch against the Catholic Church, the world's largest Christian denomination that includes more than 50 million Americans.
The background here is that Pope Leo has been speaking out with increasing frequency about the church's opposition to Trump's brutal treatment of immigrants and his war of choice in Iran. which reportedly led to a meeting where a Pentagon official allegedly berated the Pope's outgoing ambassador to the U.S. Always a good thing.
It also led to a 60-minute segment Sunday night where the three most powerful American cardinals, who were close with the American Pope, spoke bluntly about the church's issues with Trump on war and immigration. The president... was watching 60 Minutes because right afterwards, he posted a lengthy tirade that read in part, quote, Pope Leo is weak on crime is a sentence that I will think about.
It was like, I was shocked, but I also couldn't stop laughing thinking about it.
Me too. It's like they're on some debate stage in Iowa and he's like, you are soft on crime. You are soft on nukes. Also, you met with David Axelrod.
Pope Leo, weak on crime, weak on nuclear weapons, and wrong for America. And friends with David Axelrod.
I sort of mentioned my name.
I just talked to Axe today about it. It was wild.
You meet with the Pope and then suddenly... Like a rabbi and a priest walk into a bar in Chicago, you know? Have you ever had ham? No. Have you ever had sex? No. Oh, you gotta try ham.
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