Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Dragon, can you get a hold of your employer.
iHeartMedia and tell them to switch up the commercials, especially
the one about the Philadelphia cream cheese scrambled eggs ones.
My gosh, I'm gonna go coca for Coca puffs, so
I don't hear any more new commercials.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Have a good one. That's interesting.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
I have very little control over the content on this show,
and I have even less control over the spots that
you're hearing. I'm assuming these are the online ones because
I don't recall any Philadelphia cream cheese and scrambled eggs.
Speaker 4 (00:34):
Yeah, I don't, because we don't listen to commercials during
the break most most of the time anyway. But I
think that one might have caught our caught our ears.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
But it does.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
It just leave me a little bit intrigued, though, Philipia
cream cheese and scrambled eggsbled eggs.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
I don't know. I never cried it. I don't. I
don't know.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Is there something else that goes into gets some cheese
Philadelphia cream cheese, eggs, chives?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
What now? I'm curious, But I tell you, I'll tell
you what does drive me nuts?
Speaker 5 (01:03):
Are?
Speaker 4 (01:04):
For example, you'll downloading podcasts in New York. I get
New York Advertising's right. Yeah here, there's nothing worse than
having to listen to the blonde chick next door doing
a spot on a podcast while I just want to
get to the content. Just give me the content. So
poor old blonde chick just gets fifteen seconds fast forward
(01:27):
fifteen seconds. But they do just I don't know why
I heart can't get its act together on don't just.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat repeat in.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
A like in a singular episode of a podcast, the
same damn commercial over and over and over and over
and over and over.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Something to do with the amount of inventory. They don't
have enough to fill, so they use the same ones
to fill. That's it's my best guess they don't have,
you know, like friend, let me.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
Raise my hand. I'll raise my hand, and we all
volunteer to do you know, if you like the inventory.
I got plenty of sponsors right here that would be
happy for me to voice something over on the podcast.
Just say it, Just say it, which goes to show
once again how centralization consolidation affects a lot of different
(02:20):
things that you and I have zero control over.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yep, yep.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
The critics were almost unanimous. When Trump bypassed the career diplomats.
Now I understand why he skipped over Marco Rubio. Marco
Rubio did not have the time to devote solely to
the Middle East. But when he bypassed the State Department
writ large and turned to Jared Kushner and Steve Whitcoff
(02:50):
with negotiating an end to the guys of war, all
of the DC establishment just, oh my god, how were
these two guys. They don't have any formal diplomatic training,
they don't have a foreign service pedigree, they don't even
have a graduate degree in international relations from Georgetown.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I mean, how good? How possibly can they do anything?
Speaker 4 (03:14):
Ah, in a place like DC that prizes credentials.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
What school did you go to, What degree do you have?
Who was your professor that taught you this? Who was
your professor taught you that? What did Trump do? Instead?
Speaker 4 (03:29):
Trump decided that he needed loyalty, pragmatism, and instinct. Now,
to the foreign policy establishment, that's blasphemous, that's heresy. To Trump,
it's pure unadulterated strategy. And now, at least as of
so far, checks TV cameras with the ceasefire holding every
(03:52):
living hostage returned and at least they're making somewhat of
a good faith effort to get the bodies of the deceased.
Hostage just returned the first phase, the first phase of
his twenty point piece plan that was signed in Egypt.
The strategy has been vindicated. Last night, I just happened.
(04:13):
I didn't just happen to. I try to watch sixty Minutes.
They had both wit Golf and Kushner on. It was
pretty I'll tell you how fascinating it was. So Tama
has to endure listening to sixty minutes while I watched that.
So she can't watch her movies. I gotta watch sixty
minutes for a minute.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
And she I forget.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
Leslie Stall said something, and Tama's response was something to
the effect, she doesn't know what she was talking about.
Those guys were genuinely trying to do the right thing.
They weren't in it for their business interest. Oh I
know what it was. Leslie Stall had repeated, which I'll
get to in a minute, some of the criticism that
(04:58):
they have business interests in the Middle East, and so
that must present a conflict of interest. And boy, they
were just instantaneously and calmly. Our business interests had nothing
to do with it. Other than our business interests means
that we have pre existing relationships with all of these
(05:24):
players in all of these countries, which means that when
we go knock on the door, they're going to open
it and let us in and we're going to sit
down and talk. It was pretty It was a I
think Leslie stall in sixty minutes were obviously trying to
(05:46):
pick them apart, and they would have nothing to do
with it.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
The story will continue.
Speaker 6 (05:52):
In a moment, I heard the President asked you what the.
Speaker 5 (05:58):
Chances were for SSS, Yes, and you said one hundred percent.
And he said why do you feel so confident? And
I said, well, we can't afford to fail.
Speaker 7 (06:08):
We just kept on thinking to ourselves, this finish line,
this finish line is about saving lives.
Speaker 6 (06:14):
Yes, Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner got to that finish line,
I say, using the intensely personal techniques of real estate
deal makers, dangling presidential promises, protections or punishments to get
Israel and Hamas to agree.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
A little alliteration there, presidential protections, promises and punishments.
Speaker 5 (06:38):
We wanted the hostages to come out. We wanted a
real cease fire that both sides would respect. We needed
a way to bring humanitarian aid into the people, and
then we had to write all these complex words to
deal with the fifty years of stupid word games that
everyone in that region is so used to playing. Both
sides wanted the objective, and we just need to find
a way to help everyone get there.
Speaker 6 (07:00):
September, Kushner, Witkoff and negotiators from the Middle East were
making headway on a ceasefire hostage deal when suddenly things
went up in smoke. Israel fired missiles into Cutter to
assassinate Hamas leadership.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Again.
Speaker 6 (07:18):
Six people were killed, including the son of Khalil al Haya,
Hamas's top negotiator.
Speaker 7 (07:25):
We woke up the next morning to find out that
there had been this attack, and of course I was
called by the President.
Speaker 6 (07:30):
You had no idea, obviously.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
None whatsoever.
Speaker 8 (07:33):
You know.
Speaker 7 (07:34):
I think both Jared and I felt I just feel
we felt a little bit betrayed.
Speaker 6 (07:42):
Now. I had heard that the President that he was furious.
Speaker 5 (07:47):
I think he felt like the Israelis were getting a
little bit out of control in what they were doing,
and that it was time to it was time to
be very strong and stop them from doing things that
he felt were not in their long term interests.
Speaker 6 (08:05):
People should understand that Netanyaho, the Israelis bombed the peacemakers,
bomb the negotiating team, and.
Speaker 7 (08:13):
By the way Leslie, it had a metastasizing effect because
the Kataris were critical to the negotiation, as were the
Egyptians and the Turks, and we had lost the confidence
of the Kataris, and so Hamas went underground and it
was very, very difficult to get to them, and.
Speaker 6 (08:32):
They were You're a link to Hamas.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Absolutely, we were dealing.
Speaker 6 (08:35):
Through the Kataris to make your proposals to Hamas.
Speaker 7 (08:39):
And it became very very evident as to how important
and how critical that role was.
Speaker 6 (08:44):
But there was something that happened that brought the Kataris
back in, and that was this phone call that I
think President Trump actually forced net Nyahu to make to
the Qataris.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
I wouldn't call it force, you wouldn't.
Speaker 6 (09:01):
No.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
I would say that I.
Speaker 5 (09:03):
Was becoming a diplomatic.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Really.
Speaker 6 (09:06):
Whether the President himself knew of the attack in advance
or not, he wanted NETNYAHUO to apologize to the Kataris.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
The apology needed to happen. It just did.
Speaker 7 (09:17):
We were not moving forward without that apology. And the
President said to him, people apologize.
Speaker 6 (09:23):
And so on September twenty ninth, the President held the
phone while Netnyah, who read a scripted apology.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
From the Oval office.
Speaker 6 (09:32):
It's time, mister Trump was now directly engaged. He gave
Cutter a new security guarantee.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
So today is a historic day for bees.
Speaker 6 (09:42):
And introduced his own peace plan calling for an immediate
cease fire and release of all remaining Israeli hostages all
at once.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
And that's what happened. But the.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
Establishment inside the Beltway, it was absolutely convinced that there
was no way that this would work. Now, don't get
me wrong, I'm not naive about it. This he could
fall apart at any moment. But the fact that you've
established a baseline, the fact that these two gentlemen, not
part of Foggy Bottom, not part of the State Department,
(10:19):
but because of their personal relationships, were able to go
in and sit down and get all of those Arab
countries together on the same page, and get Israel on
the same page. I think it's absolutely amazing. Even if
it falls apart. I still think it's amazing because for decades,
(10:41):
professional diplomats have promised peace, but they've delivered process.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Just process.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
We're just going to keep doing this same stuff over
and over and over again. So they flew between Jerusalem
and Ramala. They kept drafting frameworks and communication that gathered dust.
And I don't think that the failure of the professional
diplomats was for It wasn't because of a lack of
intelligence or effort. It was for a lack of a
(11:11):
will because too many in Foggy Bottom believed that they
knew better than the presidents that they were serving, treating
directives from presidents as suggestions and objectives as mere abstructions.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Trump saw through all of that.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
This is once again, I think at a huge difference
between Trump one point on Trump two point zero four years.
I think he studied, studied, studied. I don't mean he
sat down and you know, read books. I mean he
thought a lot about why was I, you know, obviously
(11:49):
got law fair, I've got impeachment, But why could I
not get the people around me to do what I
told them to do. He began to understand that the
State Department was built for a singular purpose to preserve
its own worldview, not to advance a president's worldview. So
(12:12):
in that light, Trump's decision to outsource, to literally outsource,
one of the most delicate negotiations in modern history, one
that's been tried and tried and tried and tried, was
not reckless.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
It was deliberate.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
Now, Jared Kushner's success in Trump two point zero stem
from precisely what his critics derided. He didn't have any
formal diplomatic background, so he's free from all the institutional bias,
all the institutional inertia of the State Department. So he
approached Kushner did, and I think with Koff two, they
(12:52):
approached the gods a peace process like a deal maker,
not a bureaucrat. Here's a huge difference. Bureaucrats really don't
know how to make deals. Oh, they know how to
negotiate a contract, but they're using other people's money when
they negotiate a contract, so they're not even really very
good at negotiating contracts. Look over your shoulder. Decades of
(13:18):
professional diplomats failed to secure peace in the Middle East
because they were again prioritizing process over results. They'd sit
in meetings, you know. In fact, I remember sitting with
Colon Pale in Indonesia, most Muslim populated country in the world,
(13:39):
and watching the staff just nod their heads. And then
once we left, i'd hear the staff because I was
an outsider, I wasn't part of the State Department staff.
I was there as a liaison for Bush on behalf
of when the tsunami occurred. I was there on behalf
(14:00):
of the President about what we could do just to
help them logistically respond.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
To that natural disaster. Powell and his.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
Staff were there trying to negotiate different deals with them.
So Kushner was the perfect foil to that State Department
culture of just nodding heads and engaging in a process.
He executed his father in law's vision directly, without translation,
without hesitation, and he had the authenticity. In fact, that's
(14:31):
one of the things that Timer mentioned last night. Those
two guys seem very sincere in what they were in
their answers. Now, I think that's from negotiating at the
highest level of business across the table from people that
you're trying to get a business deal done with. You
have to be sincere, and you have to be diplomatic
(14:53):
and that authenticity and that sincerity earned him credibility with
all those leaders in the Middle East who do what
they value strength, they value decisiveness, and they despise the
diplomatic formality. And you partners Cushner up with Whitcoff that
(15:15):
produced results that no committee of experts could have ever done. Now,
whit cough take think about him for a moment. His
success is a case study and why loyalty, clarity, and
private sector discipline outperform bureau bureaucratic diplomacy. Trump knew that
(15:36):
Whitcoff was a straight shooter, a builder, a man that
treated deals as a moral covenant rather than some sort
of academic puzzle, rather than a process. Yes, you have
to go through a process, but the process has got
the result in a deal, not just more process. Whitcoff
understands leverage, credibility, trust. He had spent his entire career
(16:00):
broke rey multi billion dollar real estate projects where reputations
and fortunes turned on actually keeping your word. Now take
that and parachute those two in the chaos of Middle
Eastern politics, those instincts actually mattered, so they weren't speaking
in platitudes about frameworks or confidence building measures. He spoke
(16:23):
in terms of value, deliverables, metrics, and consequences. Those words
are alien to d C. Do you think that the
bureaucrats think about Well, they may think about deliverables, do
they ever think about consequences? No, because they know the
presidents come and go, Secretaries of state come and go,
(16:47):
but they'll be there forever. That language is alien to DC.
But you know what, it resonates in the Middle East.
It resonates in countries where whatever you may think about
them as individuals, and whether it's in Doha, Cairo, or
Tel Aviv, whether it's Muslims or Jews, they actually believe
(17:09):
in strength and keeping one's words. Now, the critics said
that these two guys are unqualified to lead these peace talks. Well,
guess what I think the critics were right about that
they were qualified. They were unqualified, and that's precisely the point.
Diplomatic qualification often means immersion in an elite culture of failure,
(17:37):
a mindset that sees complexity as being virtuous and risk
and risk taking. Well, that's when you do action, when
you when you do things, when you take action, that's
risk taking and I can tell you from personal experience
that bureaucrats are absolutely risk averse. They don't want to
(17:57):
do anything that might cause blowback. These guys went in
knowing that what they do could calls blowback, but they
were going to use their word, their deal making, to say,
you got to trust this on this. This is what
the president wants, this is what we're gonna do. Presidential
promises and punishment things not very diplomatic to me, that's
(18:23):
how you get a deal done.
Speaker 8 (18:25):
Hey, Mike found it kind of ironic that London has
fallen about killing a president and then Olympus or sorry
Olympus has fallen about the White House getting invaded and
(18:46):
torn up and I never got to see the end.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Did the President die in? That was all at the
time of the note Olympus. Is he referring it to
a movie.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
I'm not exactly sure where he was going with all
of the but yes, there are several movies out there
that Olympus is falling and London is falling. It's the
whole movie series about, yeah, somebody kidnapping the President.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
I just can't place Olympus for some reason, I can't
place that one. Do you want to talk about the talkbacks.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
For a second.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Yeah, I'm not able to access the talkback screen anymore.
It just says, you know, the spinning wheel of death.
And so I'm assuming if you're trying to leave a
talkback it might not be working because I can't access
the other end too. So I'm playing what I have,
and that's what I have. So enjoy that that talk
(19:40):
back there.
Speaker 4 (19:41):
Well, I'm only laughing because as I look, I'm not
obviously I'm notshing. I'm not wishing ill will on the company.
But for all of the lectures we get about doing
everything to make certain that we don't ever click on
the link, or we don't answer a f fishing email
or anything else. There's the story about Overnight.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Is it still up on drugs?
Speaker 4 (20:06):
Let's see, Yeah, Internet metdown, Amazon and cloud A hits, airlines,
major sites hits iHeart.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Oh no, I didn't say that.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Now, I see it may not have hit us, and
maybe somebody's just rebooting it, or it hit us now
or something. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
I just didn't.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
I don't have access to any new talkbacks, So if
you seem to be frustrated and can't leave one, that
might be why, and.
Speaker 4 (20:31):
Dragon's frustrated because he's just getting the spinning wheel of death.
Site cannot be access site cannot be reached, and neither
can the support team. So there, I think we have
been hacked back to sixty minutes.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Now.
Speaker 4 (20:50):
Stall asks, I think a very legitimate question about wait
a minute, during all of this time period, while you know,
they they had seventy two hours to get the bodies back,
and then we still have to establish a you know,
an administrative governing body. All of this is going on.
HAMAS is rearming.
Speaker 6 (21:11):
Issues that were kicked down the road, left unresolved, like
the extent of Israeli true withdrawal, the need to establish
an international peacekeeping mechanism, a functional government in Gaza, and
most urgently, when and how HAMAS will disarm.
Speaker 4 (21:30):
Those are good questions, and those are legitimately good questions
about the curren cease fire.
Speaker 6 (21:38):
US now is using weapons to execute people that they
perceive as their enemies in Gaza, and they're also using
their weapons to re establish themselves as the entity that
is governing Gaza. They're moving into the vacuum.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
I'm as, right now, how.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
Would you answer that question? Because I didn't have an
answer to that question. When I heard it last night,
I thought, that's pretty tough. What is the answer selves?
Speaker 6 (22:09):
As the entity that is governing Gaza, they're moving into
the vacuum.
Speaker 5 (22:15):
Hamas right now is doing exactly what you would expect
a terrorist organization to do, which is to try to
reconstitute and take back their positions. Right the success or
failure of this will be if Israel and this international
mechanism is able to create a viable alternative. If they
are successful, Hamas will fail and Gaza will not be
a threat to Israel in the future.
Speaker 6 (22:36):
The eventual rebuilding of Gaza will be.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
Now, that's actually a pretty good answer. We have to
give those gosins a viable alternative, and that's the next step.
And if we're able to successfully do that create a
viable governing authority absent sans Hamas, then HAMAS will fail,
(23:03):
not perfect, but absent the obliteration of Gaza, which pretty
much looks obliterated to me anyway, That probably is the
correct answer. Go back to Whitko for a moment. He
did an interview with Lex Friedman. Friedman and he offered
(23:27):
a window into his mindset. When he did so, he
described reading the Arab Peace Initiative just ten lines long,
full of a bunch of abstractions, but there was no
detail in it. He said, quote they liked that concept,
they meaning the Hamas, the Palsonian, the Pla, and of
(23:48):
course the State Department liked it. Why because quote they
liked that concept because it allowed them to reject everything.
The incentives were perverse. Mark moved a boss. The head
of the Palistini lived like royalty, flying in a sixty
million dollar private jet while governing a refugee population that
was receiving billions in global aid.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
And being siphoned often, I might add parenthetically.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
Meanwhile, Benjamin Nett and Yahoo, leading one of the world's
most dynamic economies, flew commercial. To Kushner, that contrast revealed everything.
The problem is not a lack of proposals. We've had
proposals since I was, you know, a kid. It was
a lack of incentives. Hamas and the Palsinian leadership they
(24:37):
had no reason to make peace because why because perpetual
conflict sustained their power and kept making them wealthier and
wealthy and wealthier. Kushner wit cough changed that, and they're
still in the process of changing that. So they did
that by reframing the deal not as some moral crusade,
(25:00):
but simply as a transaction. They approached it as a transaction.
Hamas's leaders were obviously not theologians. They were businessmen in camouflage.
They were businessmen. They were terrorists seeking to wipe out
another country, but at the same time, the leadership of
a mosque, they were just businessmen. They didn't care what
(25:20):
happened in Gaza. They didn't care what happened to the
people that were getting killed. They didn't care about any
of that. They were just trying to preserve their own status,
their own safety, their own luxury. Now, the diplomats would
never admit this, much less negotiating on that basis, but
Kushner and Whitcoff did. Trump understood that peace would only
(25:40):
come when the financial and the personal calculus shifted.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Now, both Kushner and Witkoff.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
Say that Hamas's leadership was assured that under the new
arrangement they could retain their personal security and lifestyle, but
it would be in a demilitarized Gaza, funded by the
Arab States, not through terror, and not through extortion, so
that for the first time those leaders of Hamas could
(26:16):
keep their palaces, but they couldn't keep the rockets. It
was pragmatic, transactional, and obviously going to be offensive to
moral purists, which is to say it probably is going
to work. That's the realism that defined a twenty point
peace plan that Trump had unveiled. Its first phase, now implemented, secures,
(26:39):
the ceasefire, the hostage exchange. Every living Israeli hostage has
been returned, roughly two thousand Palestinian detainees have been released.
Israeli troops had withdrawn to the pre agreed lines. The
next phase in visions Gaza governed by a technocratic Palasinian
committee under international oversight, Hamas disarmed, excluded from any governing
(27:06):
and the reconstruction funded by Arab investment.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Now think about that alone.
Speaker 4 (27:15):
If the Arabs are going to put their wealth into
the reconstruction of Gaza, do you think that they're going
to want Hamas to be militarized and be able to
do anything which would rightfully and legitimately cause Israel to say, seriously,
here come the bombs again.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
That's not gonna happen.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
I mean, could it happen, yes, But they've set up
a framework where it's unlikely to happen because the Arabs
don't want their investment destroyed, and Israel is still willing
and capable of destroying that investment. If Hamas is allowed
to reconstitute and rearm and re goovern, they've taken that away.
(27:58):
So the plan in essence, replaces ideology with incentives, economic zones, aid, transparency,
the promise of prosperity. Think about just that, the promise
of prosperity in place of perpetual, ongoing, infinite resistance. So
where the diplomats typical foggy bottom sees endless cycles, Trump
(28:23):
saw an equation, how do I solve the equation? He
saw a transaction? How do I do the transaction? When
people say that you know now, I think in personal relationships,
being transaction, being transactional is pretty awful. But in terms
of diplomacy, in terms of trying to solve an interminable conflict,
(28:47):
being transactional seems to be quite workable. Think about how
in his first four years Trump one point zero Trump
rebalanced the region by confronting Iran, not appeasing the Iranians,
by recognizing Jerusalem, Israel's capital, cutting off the cash that
(29:08):
fueled terror.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
He proved.
Speaker 4 (29:11):
Trump proved that stability flows from strength, terror flows from appeasement.
The Abraham Accords, which were obviously dismissed by the Democrats,
dismissed by liberals and seemed impossible, actually normalized Israel's relations
with multiple Arab states. And I think, like I think,
(29:33):
the Saudis will eventually sign on to it. Now that
success created the economic and the diplomatic architecture that now
underpins this Godsen deal. Trump, Kushner, and Wittkoff.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
What they do.
Speaker 4 (29:48):
They simply applied the same principles to the hardest case,
the Washington establishment. They won't learn this lesson at all,
and they they will. And and it is Look, this
piece is temporary. This depends upon the transaction actually being completed.
But the incentives are in place. Israel they can bomb
(30:13):
if Ams rearms, and if the technocrats and Tony Blair
aren't able to put together a governing organization, yeah, it
won't work, but it's the principles and the steps necessary,
the transactions necessary to make it work have been put
in place.
Speaker 9 (30:34):
Michael, I guess you were watching the same table channels
I was. I was assured that there were millions of
people on the street and there was no kind of
violence or vandalism. There were a couple peripheral arrest made,
but it wasn't from the no King rally.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Interesting, maybe they've learned their lesson.
Speaker 4 (31:01):
Isn't it interesting that members of the State Department have
conflicts of interests because they have wives they're involved wives
or spouses, husbands they're involved in in g os. We
have US senators whose husbands or wives are you know,
in a c suite or executive director or whatever of
an NGO, and they get paid millions of dollars. So
(31:25):
of course Leslie Stall has to ask, wait a minute,
you have business interests in the Middle East? Isn't that
a conflict?
Speaker 6 (31:31):
I mean, some blurring of a line between you know,
what you're doing in terms of foreign policy and benefiting
financially from what's going on.
Speaker 5 (31:42):
So, first of all, Leslie, nobody's pointed out any instances
where Steve or I have pursued any policies or done
anything that have not been in the interests of America.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Number Two perception.
Speaker 5 (31:54):
But we can't spend our time focused on perception as
much as we have to focus on the facts.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
We're here to do good.
Speaker 5 (31:59):
These are impossible tasks, and because this is important, I've
volunteered my time to help the President and Steve try
to make progress. But Steve nor I will be involved
in awarding contracts or figuring out who does business, you know,
in Gaza.
Speaker 4 (32:14):
After I think it's an incredibly important point to make. Now,
we're just here to get this deal done. We're not
going to We're not going to do any contracts. We're
not involved in that. We're not going to oversee it
or anything else. Woodkoff makes an astonishing admission from.
Speaker 7 (32:29):
My standpoint, Leslie, I'm not in business anymore what your
family is. But I've divested like Jared, I receive no
salary and I pay all my own expenses.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
I didn't know that he's flying around the country on
his own doing this. Wow, there are uh good for him?
Speaker 4 (32:53):
Good for him? I'm done that he's wealthy enough to
afford to do it, and he's serving us. So this
whole thing about a conflict of interest another attempt at
a gotcha that I think utterly fails. And the proof
will be if this piece deal holds and they really
(33:15):
do start rebuilding Gaza. I don't expect to see Jared
Kushner or Steve Whitcoff, or their families for that matter,
anywhere near that. Trump can talk about a new riviera
on the Mediterranean all he wants to, but they won't
have anything to do with that, and nor should they.
Nor should they. Leslie Stall proves herself once again just
(33:39):
to be another member of the cabal. But if they
conducted the diplomacy the way they conducted the interview, they
have at least a fifty to fifty chances succeeding, which
I wish them well.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
I hope it does
Hey, Dragon, can you get a hold of your employer.
iHeartMedia and tell them to switch up the commercials, especially
the one about the Philadelphia cream cheese scrambled eggs ones.
My gosh, I'm gonna go coca for Coca puffs, so
I don't hear any more new commercials.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Have a good one. That's interesting.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
I have very little control over the content on this show,
and I have even less control over the spots that
you're hearing. I'm assuming these are the online ones because
I don't recall any Philadelphia cream cheese and scrambled eggs.
Speaker 4 (00:34):
Yeah, I don't, because we don't listen to commercials during
the break most most of the time anyway. But I
think that one might have caught our caught our ears.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
But it does.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
It just leave me a little bit intrigued, though, Philipia
cream cheese and scrambled eggsbled eggs.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
I don't know. I never cried it. I don't. I
don't know.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Is there something else that goes into gets some cheese
Philadelphia cream cheese, eggs, chives?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
What now? I'm curious, But I tell you, I'll tell
you what does drive me nuts?
Speaker 5 (01:03):
Are?
Speaker 4 (01:04):
For example, you'll downloading podcasts in New York. I get
New York Advertising's right. Yeah here, there's nothing worse than
having to listen to the blonde chick next door doing
a spot on a podcast while I just want to
get to the content. Just give me the content. So
poor old blonde chick just gets fifteen seconds fast forward
(01:27):
fifteen seconds. But they do just I don't know why
I heart can't get its act together on don't just.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat repeat in.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
A like in a singular episode of a podcast, the
same damn commercial over and over and over and over
and over and over.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Something to do with the amount of inventory. They don't
have enough to fill, so they use the same ones
to fill. That's it's my best guess they don't have,
you know, like friend, let me.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
Raise my hand. I'll raise my hand, and we all
volunteer to do you know, if you like the inventory.
I got plenty of sponsors right here that would be
happy for me to voice something over on the podcast.
Just say it, Just say it, which goes to show
once again how centralization consolidation affects a lot of different
(02:20):
things that you and I have zero control over.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yep, yep.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
The critics were almost unanimous. When Trump bypassed the career diplomats.
Now I understand why he skipped over Marco Rubio. Marco
Rubio did not have the time to devote solely to
the Middle East. But when he bypassed the State Department
writ large and turned to Jared Kushner and Steve Whitcoff
(02:50):
with negotiating an end to the guys of war, all
of the DC establishment just, oh my god, how were
these two guys. They don't have any formal diplomatic training,
they don't have a foreign service pedigree, they don't even
have a graduate degree in international relations from Georgetown.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I mean, how good? How possibly can they do anything?
Speaker 4 (03:14):
Ah, in a place like DC that prizes credentials.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
What school did you go to, What degree do you have?
Who was your professor that taught you this? Who was
your professor taught you that? What did Trump do? Instead?
Speaker 4 (03:29):
Trump decided that he needed loyalty, pragmatism, and instinct. Now,
to the foreign policy establishment, that's blasphemous, that's heresy. To Trump,
it's pure unadulterated strategy. And now, at least as of
so far, checks TV cameras with the ceasefire holding every
(03:52):
living hostage returned and at least they're making somewhat of
a good faith effort to get the bodies of the deceased.
Hostage just returned the first phase, the first phase of
his twenty point piece plan that was signed in Egypt.
The strategy has been vindicated. Last night, I just happened.
(04:13):
I didn't just happen to. I try to watch sixty Minutes.
They had both wit Golf and Kushner on. It was
pretty I'll tell you how fascinating it was. So Tama
has to endure listening to sixty minutes while I watched that.
So she can't watch her movies. I gotta watch sixty
minutes for a minute.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
And she I forget.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
Leslie Stall said something, and Tama's response was something to
the effect, she doesn't know what she was talking about.
Those guys were genuinely trying to do the right thing.
They weren't in it for their business interest. Oh I
know what it was. Leslie Stall had repeated, which I'll
get to in a minute, some of the criticism that
(04:58):
they have business interests in the Middle East, and so
that must present a conflict of interest. And boy, they
were just instantaneously and calmly. Our business interests had nothing
to do with it. Other than our business interests means
that we have pre existing relationships with all of these
(05:24):
players in all of these countries, which means that when
we go knock on the door, they're going to open
it and let us in and we're going to sit
down and talk. It was pretty It was a I
think Leslie stall in sixty minutes were obviously trying to
(05:46):
pick them apart, and they would have nothing to do
with it.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
The story will continue.
Speaker 6 (05:52):
In a moment, I heard the President asked you what the.
Speaker 5 (05:58):
Chances were for SSS, Yes, and you said one hundred percent.
And he said why do you feel so confident? And
I said, well, we can't afford to fail.
Speaker 7 (06:08):
We just kept on thinking to ourselves, this finish line,
this finish line is about saving lives.
Speaker 6 (06:14):
Yes, Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner got to that finish line,
I say, using the intensely personal techniques of real estate
deal makers, dangling presidential promises, protections or punishments to get
Israel and Hamas to agree.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
A little alliteration there, presidential protections, promises and punishments.
Speaker 5 (06:38):
We wanted the hostages to come out. We wanted a
real cease fire that both sides would respect. We needed
a way to bring humanitarian aid into the people, and
then we had to write all these complex words to
deal with the fifty years of stupid word games that
everyone in that region is so used to playing. Both
sides wanted the objective, and we just need to find
a way to help everyone get there.
Speaker 6 (07:00):
September, Kushner, Witkoff and negotiators from the Middle East were
making headway on a ceasefire hostage deal when suddenly things
went up in smoke. Israel fired missiles into Cutter to
assassinate Hamas leadership.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Again.
Speaker 6 (07:18):
Six people were killed, including the son of Khalil al Haya,
Hamas's top negotiator.
Speaker 7 (07:25):
We woke up the next morning to find out that
there had been this attack, and of course I was
called by the President.
Speaker 6 (07:30):
You had no idea, obviously.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
None whatsoever.
Speaker 8 (07:33):
You know.
Speaker 7 (07:34):
I think both Jared and I felt I just feel
we felt a little bit betrayed.
Speaker 6 (07:42):
Now. I had heard that the President that he was furious.
Speaker 5 (07:47):
I think he felt like the Israelis were getting a
little bit out of control in what they were doing,
and that it was time to it was time to
be very strong and stop them from doing things that
he felt were not in their long term interests.
Speaker 6 (08:05):
People should understand that Netanyaho, the Israelis bombed the peacemakers,
bomb the negotiating team, and.
Speaker 7 (08:13):
By the way Leslie, it had a metastasizing effect because
the Kataris were critical to the negotiation, as were the
Egyptians and the Turks, and we had lost the confidence
of the Kataris, and so Hamas went underground and it
was very, very difficult to get to them, and.
Speaker 6 (08:32):
They were You're a link to Hamas.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Absolutely, we were dealing.
Speaker 6 (08:35):
Through the Kataris to make your proposals to Hamas.
Speaker 7 (08:39):
And it became very very evident as to how important
and how critical that role was.
Speaker 6 (08:44):
But there was something that happened that brought the Kataris
back in, and that was this phone call that I
think President Trump actually forced net Nyahu to make to
the Qataris.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
I wouldn't call it force, you wouldn't.
Speaker 6 (09:01):
No.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
I would say that I.
Speaker 5 (09:03):
Was becoming a diplomatic.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Really.
Speaker 6 (09:06):
Whether the President himself knew of the attack in advance
or not, he wanted NETNYAHUO to apologize to the Kataris.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
The apology needed to happen. It just did.
Speaker 7 (09:17):
We were not moving forward without that apology. And the
President said to him, people apologize.
Speaker 6 (09:23):
And so on September twenty ninth, the President held the
phone while Netnyah, who read a scripted apology.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
From the Oval office.
Speaker 6 (09:32):
It's time, mister Trump was now directly engaged. He gave
Cutter a new security guarantee.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
So today is a historic day for bees.
Speaker 6 (09:42):
And introduced his own peace plan calling for an immediate
cease fire and release of all remaining Israeli hostages all
at once.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
And that's what happened. But the.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
Establishment inside the Beltway, it was absolutely convinced that there
was no way that this would work. Now, don't get
me wrong, I'm not naive about it. This he could
fall apart at any moment. But the fact that you've
established a baseline, the fact that these two gentlemen, not
part of Foggy Bottom, not part of the State Department,
(10:19):
but because of their personal relationships, were able to go
in and sit down and get all of those Arab
countries together on the same page, and get Israel on
the same page. I think it's absolutely amazing. Even if
it falls apart. I still think it's amazing because for decades,
(10:41):
professional diplomats have promised peace, but they've delivered process.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Just process.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
We're just going to keep doing this same stuff over
and over and over again. So they flew between Jerusalem
and Ramala. They kept drafting frameworks and communication that gathered dust.
And I don't think that the failure of the professional
diplomats was for It wasn't because of a lack of
intelligence or effort. It was for a lack of a
(11:11):
will because too many in Foggy Bottom believed that they
knew better than the presidents that they were serving, treating
directives from presidents as suggestions and objectives as mere abstructions.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Trump saw through all of that.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
This is once again, I think at a huge difference
between Trump one point on Trump two point zero four years.
I think he studied, studied, studied. I don't mean he
sat down and you know, read books. I mean he
thought a lot about why was I, you know, obviously
(11:49):
got law fair, I've got impeachment, But why could I
not get the people around me to do what I
told them to do. He began to understand that the
State Department was built for a singular purpose to preserve
its own worldview, not to advance a president's worldview. So
(12:12):
in that light, Trump's decision to outsource, to literally outsource,
one of the most delicate negotiations in modern history, one
that's been tried and tried and tried and tried, was
not reckless.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
It was deliberate.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
Now, Jared Kushner's success in Trump two point zero stem
from precisely what his critics derided. He didn't have any
formal diplomatic background, so he's free from all the institutional bias,
all the institutional inertia of the State Department. So he
approached Kushner did, and I think with Koff two, they
(12:52):
approached the gods a peace process like a deal maker,
not a bureaucrat. Here's a huge difference. Bureaucrats really don't
know how to make deals. Oh, they know how to
negotiate a contract, but they're using other people's money when
they negotiate a contract, so they're not even really very
good at negotiating contracts. Look over your shoulder. Decades of
(13:18):
professional diplomats failed to secure peace in the Middle East
because they were again prioritizing process over results. They'd sit
in meetings, you know. In fact, I remember sitting with
Colon Pale in Indonesia, most Muslim populated country in the world,
(13:39):
and watching the staff just nod their heads. And then
once we left, i'd hear the staff because I was
an outsider, I wasn't part of the State Department staff.
I was there as a liaison for Bush on behalf
of when the tsunami occurred. I was there on behalf
(14:00):
of the President about what we could do just to
help them logistically respond.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
To that natural disaster. Powell and his.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
Staff were there trying to negotiate different deals with them.
So Kushner was the perfect foil to that State Department
culture of just nodding heads and engaging in a process.
He executed his father in law's vision directly, without translation,
without hesitation, and he had the authenticity. In fact, that's
(14:31):
one of the things that Timer mentioned last night. Those
two guys seem very sincere in what they were in
their answers. Now, I think that's from negotiating at the
highest level of business across the table from people that
you're trying to get a business deal done with. You
have to be sincere, and you have to be diplomatic
(14:53):
and that authenticity and that sincerity earned him credibility with
all those leaders in the Middle East who do what
they value strength, they value decisiveness, and they despise the
diplomatic formality. And you partners Cushner up with Whitcoff that
(15:15):
produced results that no committee of experts could have ever done. Now,
whit cough take think about him for a moment. His
success is a case study and why loyalty, clarity, and
private sector discipline outperform bureau bureaucratic diplomacy. Trump knew that
(15:36):
Whitcoff was a straight shooter, a builder, a man that
treated deals as a moral covenant rather than some sort
of academic puzzle, rather than a process. Yes, you have
to go through a process, but the process has got
the result in a deal, not just more process. Whitcoff
understands leverage, credibility, trust. He had spent his entire career
(16:00):
broke rey multi billion dollar real estate projects where reputations
and fortunes turned on actually keeping your word. Now take
that and parachute those two in the chaos of Middle
Eastern politics, those instincts actually mattered, so they weren't speaking
in platitudes about frameworks or confidence building measures. He spoke
(16:23):
in terms of value, deliverables, metrics, and consequences. Those words
are alien to d C. Do you think that the
bureaucrats think about Well, they may think about deliverables, do
they ever think about consequences? No, because they know the
presidents come and go, Secretaries of state come and go,
(16:47):
but they'll be there forever. That language is alien to DC.
But you know what, it resonates in the Middle East.
It resonates in countries where whatever you may think about
them as individuals, and whether it's in Doha, Cairo, or
Tel Aviv, whether it's Muslims or Jews, they actually believe
(17:09):
in strength and keeping one's words. Now, the critics said
that these two guys are unqualified to lead these peace talks. Well,
guess what I think the critics were right about that
they were qualified. They were unqualified, and that's precisely the point.
Diplomatic qualification often means immersion in an elite culture of failure,
(17:37):
a mindset that sees complexity as being virtuous and risk
and risk taking. Well, that's when you do action, when
you when you do things, when you take action, that's
risk taking and I can tell you from personal experience
that bureaucrats are absolutely risk averse. They don't want to
(17:57):
do anything that might cause blowback. These guys went in
knowing that what they do could calls blowback, but they
were going to use their word, their deal making, to say,
you got to trust this on this. This is what
the president wants, this is what we're gonna do. Presidential
promises and punishment things not very diplomatic to me, that's
(18:23):
how you get a deal done.
Speaker 8 (18:25):
Hey, Mike found it kind of ironic that London has
fallen about killing a president and then Olympus or sorry
Olympus has fallen about the White House getting invaded and
(18:46):
torn up and I never got to see the end.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Did the President die in? That was all at the
time of the note Olympus. Is he referring it to
a movie.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
I'm not exactly sure where he was going with all
of the but yes, there are several movies out there
that Olympus is falling and London is falling. It's the
whole movie series about, yeah, somebody kidnapping the President.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
I just can't place Olympus for some reason, I can't
place that one. Do you want to talk about the talkbacks.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
For a second.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Yeah, I'm not able to access the talkback screen anymore.
It just says, you know, the spinning wheel of death.
And so I'm assuming if you're trying to leave a
talkback it might not be working because I can't access
the other end too. So I'm playing what I have,
and that's what I have. So enjoy that that talk
(19:40):
back there.
Speaker 4 (19:41):
Well, I'm only laughing because as I look, I'm not
obviously I'm notshing. I'm not wishing ill will on the company.
But for all of the lectures we get about doing
everything to make certain that we don't ever click on
the link, or we don't answer a f fishing email
or anything else. There's the story about Overnight.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Is it still up on drugs?
Speaker 4 (20:06):
Let's see, Yeah, Internet metdown, Amazon and cloud A hits, airlines,
major sites hits iHeart.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Oh no, I didn't say that.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Now, I see it may not have hit us, and
maybe somebody's just rebooting it, or it hit us now
or something. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
I just didn't.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
I don't have access to any new talkbacks, So if
you seem to be frustrated and can't leave one, that
might be why, and.
Speaker 4 (20:31):
Dragon's frustrated because he's just getting the spinning wheel of death.
Site cannot be access site cannot be reached, and neither
can the support team. So there, I think we have
been hacked back to sixty minutes.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Now.
Speaker 4 (20:50):
Stall asks, I think a very legitimate question about wait
a minute, during all of this time period, while you know,
they they had seventy two hours to get the bodies back,
and then we still have to establish a you know,
an administrative governing body. All of this is going on.
HAMAS is rearming.
Speaker 6 (21:11):
Issues that were kicked down the road, left unresolved, like
the extent of Israeli true withdrawal, the need to establish
an international peacekeeping mechanism, a functional government in Gaza, and
most urgently, when and how HAMAS will disarm.
Speaker 4 (21:30):
Those are good questions, and those are legitimately good questions
about the curren cease fire.
Speaker 6 (21:38):
US now is using weapons to execute people that they
perceive as their enemies in Gaza, and they're also using
their weapons to re establish themselves as the entity that
is governing Gaza. They're moving into the vacuum.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
I'm as, right now, how.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
Would you answer that question? Because I didn't have an
answer to that question. When I heard it last night,
I thought, that's pretty tough. What is the answer selves?
Speaker 6 (22:09):
As the entity that is governing Gaza, they're moving into
the vacuum.
Speaker 5 (22:15):
Hamas right now is doing exactly what you would expect
a terrorist organization to do, which is to try to
reconstitute and take back their positions. Right the success or
failure of this will be if Israel and this international
mechanism is able to create a viable alternative. If they
are successful, Hamas will fail and Gaza will not be
a threat to Israel in the future.
Speaker 6 (22:36):
The eventual rebuilding of Gaza will be.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
Now, that's actually a pretty good answer. We have to
give those gosins a viable alternative, and that's the next step.
And if we're able to successfully do that create a
viable governing authority absent sans Hamas, then HAMAS will fail,
(23:03):
not perfect, but absent the obliteration of Gaza, which pretty
much looks obliterated to me anyway, That probably is the
correct answer. Go back to Whitko for a moment. He
did an interview with Lex Friedman. Friedman and he offered
(23:27):
a window into his mindset. When he did so, he
described reading the Arab Peace Initiative just ten lines long,
full of a bunch of abstractions, but there was no
detail in it. He said, quote they liked that concept,
they meaning the Hamas, the Palsonian, the Pla, and of
(23:48):
course the State Department liked it. Why because quote they
liked that concept because it allowed them to reject everything.
The incentives were perverse. Mark moved a boss. The head
of the Palistini lived like royalty, flying in a sixty
million dollar private jet while governing a refugee population that
was receiving billions in global aid.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
And being siphoned often, I might add parenthetically.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
Meanwhile, Benjamin Nett and Yahoo, leading one of the world's
most dynamic economies, flew commercial. To Kushner, that contrast revealed everything.
The problem is not a lack of proposals. We've had
proposals since I was, you know, a kid. It was
a lack of incentives. Hamas and the Palsinian leadership they
(24:37):
had no reason to make peace because why because perpetual
conflict sustained their power and kept making them wealthier and
wealthy and wealthier. Kushner wit cough changed that, and they're
still in the process of changing that. So they did
that by reframing the deal not as some moral crusade,
(25:00):
but simply as a transaction. They approached it as a transaction.
Hamas's leaders were obviously not theologians. They were businessmen in camouflage.
They were businessmen. They were terrorists seeking to wipe out
another country, but at the same time, the leadership of
a mosque, they were just businessmen. They didn't care what
(25:20):
happened in Gaza. They didn't care what happened to the
people that were getting killed. They didn't care about any
of that. They were just trying to preserve their own status,
their own safety, their own luxury. Now, the diplomats would
never admit this, much less negotiating on that basis, but
Kushner and Whitcoff did. Trump understood that peace would only
(25:40):
come when the financial and the personal calculus shifted.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Now, both Kushner and Witkoff.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
Say that Hamas's leadership was assured that under the new
arrangement they could retain their personal security and lifestyle, but
it would be in a demilitarized Gaza, funded by the
Arab States, not through terror, and not through extortion, so
that for the first time those leaders of Hamas could
(26:16):
keep their palaces, but they couldn't keep the rockets. It
was pragmatic, transactional, and obviously going to be offensive to
moral purists, which is to say it probably is going
to work. That's the realism that defined a twenty point
peace plan that Trump had unveiled. Its first phase, now implemented, secures,
(26:39):
the ceasefire, the hostage exchange. Every living Israeli hostage has
been returned, roughly two thousand Palestinian detainees have been released.
Israeli troops had withdrawn to the pre agreed lines. The
next phase in visions Gaza governed by a technocratic Palasinian
committee under international oversight, Hamas disarmed, excluded from any governing
(27:06):
and the reconstruction funded by Arab investment.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Now think about that alone.
Speaker 4 (27:15):
If the Arabs are going to put their wealth into
the reconstruction of Gaza, do you think that they're going
to want Hamas to be militarized and be able to
do anything which would rightfully and legitimately cause Israel to say, seriously,
here come the bombs again.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
That's not gonna happen.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
I mean, could it happen, yes, But they've set up
a framework where it's unlikely to happen because the Arabs
don't want their investment destroyed, and Israel is still willing
and capable of destroying that investment. If Hamas is allowed
to reconstitute and rearm and re goovern, they've taken that away.
(27:58):
So the plan in essence, replaces ideology with incentives, economic zones, aid, transparency,
the promise of prosperity. Think about just that, the promise
of prosperity in place of perpetual, ongoing, infinite resistance. So
where the diplomats typical foggy bottom sees endless cycles, Trump
(28:23):
saw an equation, how do I solve the equation? He
saw a transaction? How do I do the transaction? When
people say that you know now, I think in personal relationships,
being transaction, being transactional is pretty awful. But in terms
of diplomacy, in terms of trying to solve an interminable conflict,
(28:47):
being transactional seems to be quite workable. Think about how
in his first four years Trump one point zero Trump
rebalanced the region by confronting Iran, not appeasing the Iranians,
by recognizing Jerusalem, Israel's capital, cutting off the cash that
(29:08):
fueled terror.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
He proved.
Speaker 4 (29:11):
Trump proved that stability flows from strength, terror flows from appeasement.
The Abraham Accords, which were obviously dismissed by the Democrats,
dismissed by liberals and seemed impossible, actually normalized Israel's relations
with multiple Arab states. And I think, like I think,
(29:33):
the Saudis will eventually sign on to it. Now that
success created the economic and the diplomatic architecture that now
underpins this Godsen deal. Trump, Kushner, and Wittkoff.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
What they do.
Speaker 4 (29:48):
They simply applied the same principles to the hardest case,
the Washington establishment. They won't learn this lesson at all,
and they they will. And and it is Look, this
piece is temporary. This depends upon the transaction actually being completed.
But the incentives are in place. Israel they can bomb
(30:13):
if Ams rearms, and if the technocrats and Tony Blair
aren't able to put together a governing organization, yeah, it
won't work, but it's the principles and the steps necessary,
the transactions necessary to make it work have been put
in place.
Speaker 9 (30:34):
Michael, I guess you were watching the same table channels
I was. I was assured that there were millions of
people on the street and there was no kind of
violence or vandalism. There were a couple peripheral arrest made,
but it wasn't from the no King rally.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Interesting, maybe they've learned their lesson.
Speaker 4 (31:01):
Isn't it interesting that members of the State Department have
conflicts of interests because they have wives they're involved wives
or spouses, husbands they're involved in in g os. We
have US senators whose husbands or wives are you know,
in a c suite or executive director or whatever of
an NGO, and they get paid millions of dollars. So
(31:25):
of course Leslie Stall has to ask, wait a minute,
you have business interests in the Middle East? Isn't that
a conflict?
Speaker 6 (31:31):
I mean, some blurring of a line between you know,
what you're doing in terms of foreign policy and benefiting
financially from what's going on.
Speaker 5 (31:42):
So, first of all, Leslie, nobody's pointed out any instances
where Steve or I have pursued any policies or done
anything that have not been in the interests of America.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Number Two perception.
Speaker 5 (31:54):
But we can't spend our time focused on perception as
much as we have to focus on the facts.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
We're here to do good.
Speaker 5 (31:59):
These are impossible tasks, and because this is important, I've
volunteered my time to help the President and Steve try
to make progress. But Steve nor I will be involved
in awarding contracts or figuring out who does business, you know,
in Gaza.
Speaker 4 (32:14):
After I think it's an incredibly important point to make. Now,
we're just here to get this deal done. We're not
going to We're not going to do any contracts. We're
not involved in that. We're not going to oversee it
or anything else. Woodkoff makes an astonishing admission from.
Speaker 7 (32:29):
My standpoint, Leslie, I'm not in business anymore what your
family is. But I've divested like Jared, I receive no
salary and I pay all my own expenses.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
I didn't know that he's flying around the country on
his own doing this. Wow, there are uh good for him?
Speaker 4 (32:53):
Good for him? I'm done that he's wealthy enough to
afford to do it, and he's serving us. So this
whole thing about a conflict of interest another attempt at
a gotcha that I think utterly fails. And the proof
will be if this piece deal holds and they really
(33:15):
do start rebuilding Gaza. I don't expect to see Jared
Kushner or Steve Whitcoff, or their families for that matter,
anywhere near that. Trump can talk about a new riviera
on the Mediterranean all he wants to, but they won't
have anything to do with that, and nor should they.
Nor should they. Leslie Stall proves herself once again just
(33:39):
to be another member of the cabal. But if they
conducted the diplomacy the way they conducted the interview, they
have at least a fifty to fifty chances succeeding, which
I wish them well.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
I hope it does
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