I Know Who Trump's Going to Fire Next: Wolff | Inside Trump's Head

The interesting thing is that he has spent more than a year, that there's been more than a year of stability.

Well, and I was going to ask you, Susie Wiles is supposed to be one of the people that has ensured that.

Yeah, no, I think that that's a fair understanding. And I know that one of the things that when she came in, and she told Trump that among her priorities here is to run a stable White House. I think it's just a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction. Who can I blame?

I don't think it really relates to any one issue. I think it relates to things are bad. Somebody needs to be blamed other than me, me, Donald Trump. So I'm going to fire

somebody.

Michael. Joanna.

Oh, big news, big news, big news. Well, what you've been predicting last week, I think, Pam Bondi has been fired. Another one down. So go on, another one down.

What do you mean?

Many to go.

Many to go.

So I mean, I've been here before. This is Trump's go-to move when he feels things are out of control. He fires somebody. Now the interesting – so the interesting thing is not that he is firing someone and last week fired Kristi Noem. Now he's firing Pam Bondi, others to come.

The interesting thing is that he has spent more than a – that there's been more than a year of stability.

Well, and I was going to ask you, Susie Wiles is supposed to be one of the people that has ensured that.

Yeah, no, I think that that's a fair understanding. And I know that one of the things that when she came in and she said, told Trump that among her priorities here is to run a stable White House, which is to say that revolving door of the first administration looked bad, had a bad effect. That was the chaos that Trump won became known for. So she said, and she got a relative commitment to the extent that you can get any commitment from Donald Trump, that she would be able to keep the staff in place and keep cabinet

officers in place too. So the executive branch would be her department to effectively manage.

So Susie Wiles as we know last month announced that or the president announced on her behalf that she had breast cancer. She's being treated for breast cancer. We don't quite know what stage it's at. Do we think that she is

less involved than she was? I'm hearing that she's somewhat less present, yes.

So is he firing people while she's out of the office? Is that what's going on here?

I would say yes. I mean, I wouldn't set it up that she runs out to get whatever treatment she's getting and then he fires somebody. But that sense of her always being there, of him having to somewhat look to her for, you know, I'm going to do this, and then she's not there. So I just think that has created part of a new environment along with the fact, and I

think this is the bigger headline, I think the arc of history is beginning to bend to the downfall of Donald Trump. The inflection point has happened. Nothing is going right for him. Everything is going wrong for him. This is, I don't think, and probably the war represents the inflection point, I don't think

he can recover here. Also he is going in very shortly into his formal lame duck period. Plus we are approaching the midterms, which are going to be a catastrophe. He can't, you know, all of these efforts, the voting, the this, that, you know, to try to, you know, the initiative in the various states to reapportion the electorate, all of that is not going well. He's going to lose. It is finally, I mean, at this point, and I've been watching, doing this for more than ten years now, it is going south.

So in his go-to move in that case is starting to fire people, which is going to increase the chaos, which is going to increase the how deeply south this is going. Okay, so why Pam Bondi now? Was it

because the two of them walked out yesterday together from the Supreme

Court? I don't think that that has anything to do with, I mean she would have had relatively little to do with this. This was a case that the administration had decided to bring. He obviously wanted to bring this case. I mean, he, I'm sure, I'm sure was told that he would lose this case. I mean, it is possible, of course, that Pam Bondi said, we're going to win this case. And then, but I doubt that she did that.

We're going to talk about birthright citizenship and the whole case and him storming out in a minute.

So is it really the Epstein files, her mishandling of the Epstein files? No, I don't think, I think it's just a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction. Who can I blame? I don't think it really relates to any one issue. I think it relates to things are bad, somebody needs to be blamed other than me, me, Donald Trump, so I'm going to fire somebody.

And I don't think. I mean, Kristi Noem last week, Pam Bondi this week, Tulsi Gabbard next week, RFK Jr. the week after, Howard Lutnick inevitably coming up.

I'd forgotten about Howard Lutnick.

This is just a set of, now a set of dominoes. So he goes to, this is a go-to move and he was held in check from that move for the first year plus for, I think, a lot of reasons, including Suzy Wiles. But now we're back in the – he's back in the – he's back in the –

He's back in the sort of control seat. And what does Pam Bondi do at this point? She can't have been – this can't have been wholly unexpected because certainly you've been predicting it. A lot of people have been saying at some point she's vulnerable. What does she do?

Does she go into private practice?

I mean it's what everybody who leaves government, there usually is a whole wealth of money making opportunities, boring jobs, jobs that you don't want, but you do them because you make money. Now in the first Trump administration, people left the administration and no one wanted to hire them. You were kind of tainted by Donald Trump.

Is it different now? I think it probably has been somewhat different. But on the other hand, if the arc of history is bending in the direction that I think it is bending, then it could get dicey for all of these people.

So she could either go to, she could go and work for Paul Weiss. I mean, Paul Weiss that bent the knee, unfortunately, quickly.

She can't. I mean, she can't go to Paul Weiss. I mean, she can't go to a liberal law firm, which is already – I mean, Paul Weiss is already riven by all kinds of discontent. You know, I mean, if you're a big law firm, you know, the thing that you most probably have to do – most of all, it's not really even about keeping your partners happy.

It's keeping your associates happy because if they run, then there's no one to do the work because the partners don't do the work. So, that would – they can't – that's not going to happen. But I mean obviously there are law firms that she could go to. Is there other corporations that she could go to to represent, you know, tech companies? Yeah, possibly. But I just have the feeling that things that the climate is about ready to change.

So she goes to Dancing with the Stars like Sean Spicer did his first press spokesperson.

Bingo.

Right.

Yeah.

Pam Bondi, you better get your dancing shoes on and limber up. Just a reminder, if you are watching this episode and you're enjoying it, please share it with a friend. We're independent media. and limber up. there. But we are independent media. So we appreciate your support. Sometimes on these subscriber numbers, they unsubscribe and then you fall back below the

line.

That might happen to you, but it hasn't happened to us yet. And we've got our hundredth episode, two weeks today, and we can't decide how to celebrate it. Although, is that when you're in Venice?

No, I'll be here.

OK, good. So if you have any thoughts of how to celebrate it, we would be up for it. And when we embarked on this journey last August, we had no idea quite how bad things we're going to get, not on the podcast, but in the world.

No, and we had no idea that we would be able to do this over and over again together, actually, or at least I was a little leery of that. But here we are.

Great, thank you very much.

Well, here we are.

We've also got tons of stuff to talk about. That crazy speech that Trump gave last night. The strange timbre of the Attorney General's voice as he's presenting to SCOTUS and Trump walking out. What else have we got? The fact that the ballroom.

Mr. Gnome.

Oh, Mr. Gnome. Mr. Gnome. I mean, where to even begin to start with looning, but we will be talking obviously about looning. And they've closed the ballroom down, the ballroom construction.

Sorry, Shalom Baramas, not a good week. So it's been a tricky week for Trump.

For the moment, they've closed. We should start, it would be an interesting pool. I actually, I'm sure one of these betting pools, you can put money on.

Oh, Calixto or?

Will there be a ballroom before Trump leaves office?

Oh, that's a great, we should start that immediate, maybe that's how we should celebrate our 100th. We should open a kind of regular account at Cali, or what's the other one? That begins with a P.

I know nothing about this. I've never placed a bet in my life.

Anyway, did you see the speech last night when Trump addressed the nation?

Well, it was Passover last night, so I was at a Seder, but I did see it this morning. I woke up to it. Okay. That voice when you wake up to it, and it's kind of worse than an alarm, waking up to the alarm.

I thought his voice was subdued last night, actually.

Well, you know, I was thinking, I thought this was an unusual speech. I thought that he probably did not want to give it. I thought that he had been, you know, cajoled into doing it. And then I thought, I know his speech writer,

who gets very little attention, is a guy by the name of Ross Worthington. Perfectly,ly nice guy. I wouldn't say the top of the class, but a nice guy who has been doing this for a long time since the first administration. And I think about what that would be to have to be Donald Trump's speechwriter. A, because he deviates so it really doesn't matter what you say.

And then you have to supply the words that Donald Trump would say. So imagine that. I mean, this is, as I say, not the top of the class, but a reasonable, completely normal type person. And then he has to get into the head, as we do, of this utterly inarticulate, sub-verbal man.

Sub-verbal. He's not really in his head though, is he? Is he in his mouth? Because I feel like there's often stuff coming out of Trump's mouth that doesn't really connect with any part of a brain.

Well that's part of the struggle.

I mean, I should have counted and I meant to count, and then I realized I had more important things to do. But the number of times he said, never seen anything like it, never seen anything like it. And then there was a strange phrase of, he took over a dead and crippled country, made it the hottest country.

You can't, I'm banning you from doing Trump's.

You're not allowed to ban me. Lots of people wrote in and said, you're not allowed to ban me. I'm trying not to give him.

They like your Trump imitation?

Well, they appreciate that I'm not trying to give him the benefit of a British accent, a normal British accent. So I do it with an adenoidal British accent.

I mean, could you maybe give him a Cockney accent?

No. I don't think I could do that. That would be strange. But the overuse of no one's seen anything like it. I took over a crippled and dead country and made it the hottest country. The attack on Barack Hussein Obama for his deal

with Iran, it all felt desperate, Straits.

Yeah, no, it did. I felt, I mean, he's in this position. I mean, we've said, we said in the beginning of this, we said he was going to declare victory and get out. And that's what he tried to do last night to declare victory. What we didn't anticipate and what he didn't anticipate is that he couldn't get out.

So it's that kind of thing which we've discussed before, the split screen reality of how Trump operates and in which he usually, because he's an actor, because he can command attention, because he just loves the screen, he usually prevails in the split screen. So during the campaign, the split screen was, there were four criminal indictments against him, and which had never happened before in the history of almost any politician.

But then in the other screen, it was Donald Trump outside of the courtroom saying, the judges are scum and the prosecutors are scum.

And they're Democrats.

And everybody was scum and the prosecutors are scum. And the Democrats. And everybody was scum. And he actually somehow won in that split screen battle. That was who you paid attention to. That was, if not the argument, the narrative that was so unexpected, shocking, compelling. And the court grinded on like that.

And so they lost that. But in this split screen, which you have Trump saying, we've won, we've achieved all of our goals, they're all dead, whatever. And then that other split screen where you have the Iranians still firing missiles, closing the Strait of Hormuz, and so nobody has any oil. And even though they've all been killed, somehow the government is still functioning and not

only functioning, but able to repress any kind of uprising that Donald Trump had previously promised would certainly occur.

Right. He said last night that they'd shot 45,000 protesters, which was a higher number than we'd heard. They may well have done. We don't know, but I thought that was interesting.

Well, yeah, I mean, that would be. I hesitate to say it may be true because every number out of Donald Trump's mouth is always not true.

And always exaggerated, but in this case it might actually be true. Certainly people you talk to who have inside knowledge of Iran say it's much higher than the sort of 7 to 10,000 that was initially thought.

So, the question, what was his goal last night? I mean, again, this is kind of normalizing it to assume he had a goal other than a kind of irritation that the perception is that the war is not going well, that this is a forever war, that the MAGA people are annoyed, the Democrats are on him, other Republicans are beginning to complain, and the economy could go into the crapper because of this. That was channeling his – this is what I heard.

That was channeling his annoyance at everybody else's annoyance essentially. And always saying why don't you – I mean any objection to anything he does makes him cranky.

So do you think someone has said to him, look, you never sold this war to the American people at the beginning of it. They woke up on Saturday to hear that we were bombing Iran. You need to get on top of this and go out and talk to people and make it look like it's a proper thing.

No, no, nobody. I mean, anybody would have said that to any other president. No one would have said that to Donald Trump. So this would be, they would have said, you know, people want to hear you. You know, if you go out there and talk about things, that'll really, you know, people will really respond to that.

They respond to you. Right. They respond to that. They respond to you.

Right, they respond to you, they need to see their president.

So it's all about, you would have pitched this on the greatness of Donald Trump, not the failures of Donald Trump to get him out in front of the camera last night.

Oh, right, because it was short for Donald Trump. I mean, we saw him at the State of the Union and that was one hour, 47 minutes. And I sort of, you know, I was sort of sitting there last night bracing for impact of a long speech but it was pretty short, actually. It was whatever, 15 minutes.

I think it was 20 minutes, but it just is kind of shocking, actually. Yeah. I mean, to get Donald Trump off the stage in 20 minutes is a major accomplishment. I mean, it's almost a signal, I think, that something is going wrong.

Interesting. So, right, so it was a short speech. His voice seemed weak to me. There wasn't the usual range. He didn't look like he was enjoying himself. At the State of the Union, which is the last big speech, he looked like he was having a

great time and he did that thing where he turns his head to the crowd and you can hear him listening and judging what to say next and when to go off script. There was none of that last night.

I think that he must suspect that he doesn't know what's going to happen here.

Right. And so actually what we saw was a little bit of panic last night. Yeah, no. Masquerading as an address to the nation.

And I think even he must understand that as you sort of, all of the initial goals are now folding into so much less. It must, he must, I mean I'm always hesitant to say what he must understand about reality, but even he must understand that you've taken the essential nuclear material issues off the table, the central issue off the table, the central issue of regime change essentially off the table, the central issue now of the Strait of Hormuz

off the table. Is there anything left on the table?

Well, I thought the way he talked about the Strait of Hormuz reminded me actually of how he talked about women. You can grab them by the pussy, just take the Strait of Hormuz, just take it, it'll open for you. And you're like, oh, that's how you had sex with people. And in this particular kind, he's like, oh, you take it, you take it, just take it, you know, as if as if there's no ownership of anything and he doesn't understand. Well, I mean, that was essentially his attitude about regime change here.

You can take it. It's your country. You can grab it. This is to the people of.

Right. The Iranian, the protesters.

Yes. Of the forty five thousand who have been killed. So, again, you again, in just from the inside Trump's head standpoint, it is waging war is a set of declarations. It is not a complex strategic problem to be solved. So and now he's frustrated that his set of declarations means are essentially meaningless. And his set of declarations have gotten him into a mess, which he doesn't know how to get out of.

And the thing I resent about him, as we now have, as he set up essentially a David and Goliath struggle with Iran, is that he makes me want to root against him with all this, which means that I'm essentially rooting against America, which I don't want to do. I mean, it's a complicated situation when a president like this goes into another country because you don't want to root for Iran. Nobody wants to root for Iran. It's a horrible regime, regardless of who's running it at the moment,

and nobody seems to know.

I mean, it's just, I mean, because you also don't want to want to root for incompetence, and you don't want to root for a bully, and you don't want to root for, I mean, all of these things in an asymmetric situation.

Yeah, and obvious, I mean, you could root for, I mean, high gas prices. I mean, his rationale last night was that this eliminating the Iranian leadership is worth the economic pain. And that actually may well be true. But to make the case for that, I mean, first you have to do it with a certain degree. I mean, that also has to represent plan and strategy and competence and a certain degree of faith

that this is all going to be achieved and that this is not all hit or miss and maybe, and nobody knows what they're talking about and another forever war. And, um.

Well, and our allies have ganged up against us. I mean, what he's managed to do is Canada, Europe, they're all sort of anti the US in this. They're not coming to the table to help. What, you know, he's saying, summon up some delayed courage and get in there, take the straight.

And essentially what he's ended up doing is put the Strait of Hormuz in play in a way that it wasn't before. So he's actually complicated the situation and done nothing for the US and used billions of dollars, which MAGA assumed was gonna be spent on America, you know, on the infrastructure, on schools, on healthcare, on all the things America needs.

You know, and the language too. I mean, he literally used the language about the Stone Age. So this was, we've talked about this before, that there was that moment in time, that post-war, post-World War II America, when we had a military capability

and a weapons capability, nuclear arms, that nobody else had. And the generals, and the generals at that moment in history were famous troglodytes. I mean, not very bright men who were not very educated, except just in their singular military focus.

And it was, and the generals and the right wing, where their language was bomb them back into the Stone Age. Always bomb them back into the Stone Age. And then what we found, and really from the Vietnam War on, was that it was that the bomb them back into the Stone Age did not achieve what that theoretically meant. It actually just created a greater and greater asymmetric

situation which redounded not to our benefit. And just a point on the language, the way he says the word dead, dead, he really enjoys it in the way that you hear a sort of five-year-old child when they're pretending to shoot their parent or pretending to shoot their friend, and they're like, bang, bang, you're dead.

There's a strangely unsophisticated sort of relish he seems to take in using the word relish and describing how we've killed the regime and then we've killed the people under the regime.

There's the insistence of the child, you're dead, you have to lie down.

Right, right.

You're dead. Yeah, anyway, it's extraordinary.

You're not playing fair. Lie down.

Anyway, he was not having a good day yesterday. Although, the more we go inside his head, the more I wonder if it doesn't really matter if it's a good day or a bad day as long as he gets attention. So yesterday he goes, the first time a sitting president has gone to sit to hear arguments at the Supreme Court. Obviously the argument yesterday was over birthright citizenship, the 14th amendment

whereby someone who is born here is entitled to American citizenship, which is one of his things that he thinks, you know, people are coming here for tourist citizenship.

And just let's clarify the context here. This has not been, I mean, first thing, it's crystal clear within the Constitution of the United States. So there's not a lot of dispute about this. I mean, the best you might argue is that there is some minor marginal nutcase right wing dispute about this.

From every other point of view, that's what it says. The Constitution says, were you born here? Okay, you're a citizen. So this is a dispute that he has created. And it's one of those disputes that he's created even though, A, he's wrong, and even though everyone else will agree that he's wrong.

So this is going to get him nowhere. So why did he do this? And I don't think you can reach any other conclusion but that it's performative. And that's the reason for showing up at the Supreme Court. All part of this performance. I have come to power, and this is how he came to power,

by taking this hardcore anti-immigration line. That's what I represent. There's nothing else really. I don't have any other ideas. This is the fundamental idea. So I just have to keep being out front of that.

Everything that I do has to represent that. Not that I have to accomplish anything. Not that I have to build a wall, which I never built. Not that I have to accomplish anything. Not that I have to build a wall, which I never built. Not that I have to get rid of birthright citizenship, which I'm not going to be able to do. It's just a series of performative identification

with this issue.

Right, and for very specifically for his MAGA base, the story of immigrants coming here to have a child, then they can stay here. And he did it on he signed the executive order on his very first day. And then he becomes the first sitting president to turn up in the Supreme Court. And interestingly, three of his three justices he put, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh,

and Amy Comey Barrett, all take issue with his lawyer. And we have to have a moment on John Sauer.

Before we get to that, let me just – because I think that was during the campaign in which several issues directly related to Donald Trump came before the court. And some the court was favorable to him, on others the court was not favorable to him. But in several of those situations, he kept threatening to go and sit in the court. And he was always, all of the people around him were like, this is a bad idea.

I mean, there's no message that is going to be received by these justices except that he's there trying to intimidate them. This is not a good idea.

He wasn't president then, was he?

He wasn't – no, he wasn't the president, but he might well become the president and, you know, I mean, essentially to the same effect. Don't go there. That's the message. I mean, you know, this is a precarious, the Supreme Court justices are like any other justices, they are reading the room.

And that would be not a positive thing for them to read, that the president of the United States or someone who might well be the president of the United States was there in a face-off with them. So he went in yesterday, and again, I can only see that as this is not a smart thing for him to do if he was really serious about this, about wanting the court to rule in his favor. So he was just there. This is just again

performative. Well, and also perhaps I mean, he's a man that likes to pit everybody against each other, right? So he's trying to pit European countries against each other. He tries to pit J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio against each other. Anybody around him, he likes to try and pit against each other so that no one is united. What felt like what was going on yesterday was the nine justices felt united in this.

I mean, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it comes down and it's a unanimous decision. And he was there for 90 minutes, sort of sitting on the front row of the public gallery. He wasn't sitting with the friends of the lawyers or the friends of the justices.

And it felt like they must have, I mean, listening to it felt like they must have got some strength from being united in that they were not going to be intimidated. They must have had a conversation about it beforehand. And they certainly didn't sound intimidated.

Who did sound intimidated was John Sauer, the attorney general and his, or the solicitor general. He has a voice that is just like Robert Kennedy Jr.'s voice.

I'm going to defend Sauer here. Most lawyers are not lawyers as they would appear on television.

I mean, they're not Perry Mason.

Yes. Most lawyers are kind of stumble bums. I mean, they don't. This is a kind of a myth that lawyers go into court. It's a television myth. Lawyers go into court and they ah, and they um, and they can't get it

to thing. And it's, it's really kind of shocking. You know who goes in front of the Supreme Court and doesn't stumble bum around? Robbie Kaplan. And you know why? Because she practices. And that's why she's won as many cases as she has. Let's just play a clip, because I'm going to defend my position here. Let's play a clip of John Sauer at the Supreme Court yesterday.

Here's the fact about it that I think is striking. Media reported as early as 2015 that based on Chinese media reports, there are 500, 500 birth tourism companies in the People's Republic of China whose business is to bring people here to give birth and return to that nation.

Having said all that, you do agree that that has no impact on the legal analysis before

us?

I think it's, I quote what Justice Scalia said in his Hamdan dissent where they have, where like their interpretation has these implications that could not possibly have been approved by the 19th century framers of this amendment. I think that shows that they've made a mess, their interpretation has made a mess of the provision.

Well, it certainly wasn't a problem in the 19th century.

No, but of course, we're in a new world now, as Justice Alito pointed out, to where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who's a US citizen.

Well, it's a new world. It's the same constitution.

I mean...

That sort of sounds like your imitation of Donald Trump.

No, it doesn't. It sounds just like RFK Jr.

I disagree with that, but...

And I thought...

You don't think it sounds like RFK Jr. No, I think it's a sort of sympathetic voice. I was immediately, my heart was warming to this guy.

You are being sarcastic.

I'm not.

I think it's funny. Lawyers are, this is what they are before courts. They're not like Donald Trump wants them to be. I mean this is, but I remember during the campaign, Sauer, who was not the solicitor general, but he was the main appeals lawyer, so he was the guy arguing one of the guys who argued before the Supreme Court.

And the Trump staffers who were on hand, and Trump was not, but they were like, oh my God, it's really good that Trump was not here to see Sour because he was…

Because he was terrible. Terrible. I wonder, I mean, Trump stormed out yesterday. We actually had a reporter there and he stormed out. And actually there's a wonderful picture, which I think we might be able to show, by the courtroom artist of Trump leaving.

And so I remember you saying, as you were following the court cases and going to court before Trump had become president again for the second time, how he would ream his lawyers out. And I could only imagine how he either called or yelled at John Salley yesterday.

Oh, terrible. It would be – I mean, yeah, have pity on the guy. But the storming out too is also performative. Of course. And they have – they – during the various trials during the campaign or the various courtroom appearances, that would

always be a set piece. When am I going to go out? How am I going to go out? How am I going to look? Who should talk to me when I go out?

Well, it's perfectly reality television. I mean, actually, it made me wish that the Supreme Court was televised. I don't understand why it's not televised at this point. We should have transparency into it. And so listening to it is, and also it's hard to tell.

I'm grateful it's not televised.

Well, I think it should be televised.

The less things that are televised, the better to me.

Why?

I think it just distorts everything. It's, I don't think anything has ever benefited

by being televised? Well, it's true that American business hasn't benefited from The Apprentice being televised. But it was pretty, the whole thing was pretty interesting. And then of course, well, I have a gift for you. I have a gift for you for our next subject matter, which is just going to require me bending down and picking up the gift. I think this will give you a clue.

I'm just going to leave them here as to what we're going to talk about next because we need some merriment and distraction and hilarity in our understanding of looning. Did you know what looning was?

No, and I'm still not sure, but I really feel sorry for this guy, but tell me your understanding what looning was? No, and I'm still not sure, but I really feel sorry for this guy, but tell me your understanding of looning. I want to hear it in detail.

I was the editor of Cosmopolitan and I hadn't come across looning, but looning is where you take a balloon, a man takes a balloon, of course, it's a man, sticks it up his sweater, pretends it's a breast, and fiddles with these things and pretends they're nipples. Which according to an interview that we had today

with one of the OnlyFans girls that Brian Nome did this with it's a sort of submissive action. And Brian Nome was looking to be submissive with these women. And I can't help wondering if it's a reaction to the overdone Barbie figures of the MAGA crowd.

I'm still not exactly seeing this.

Well, did you not see the pictures of them?

Yeah, no, no, I did, I did. But I'm not seeing the whole interactions here of you do.

The interactions, I think you should try this. It's like how does anybody get this in your sweatshirt?

Well that's what I'm thinking. It seems, it's no, yeah.

I mean who, I mean I wrote about this for Substack at my last night.

I mean also these are very large. I mean are there smaller, what?

Well, the only fans cam girl. For those of you who don't know what on earth we're talking about, Christine Noem.

I don't know what on earth we're talking about.

Okay, well, Christine Noem's husband, Christine Noem, you'll remember, is the recently fired head of Homeland Security. And why was she fired? Because she'd spent quarter of a billion dollars on an ad campaign featuring who?

Herself, in front of the backdrop of granite cheekbones, which is Mount Rushmore.

And many other reasons that she was fired. Well, hello, ICE. Minneapolis, ICE, you know, her complete incompetence, her open affair with her aide.

Which they both denied. Corey Lewandowski. I don't know what came first, Corey Lewandowski or the looning. But her husband was revealed to have spent at least $25,000 with OnlyFans where he was inserting balloons up his T-shirt and wearing very tight pants and then having a conversation

about- t-shirt and wearing very tight pants and then having a conversation about… He's an insurance salesman in… somewhere in North Dakota.

South Dakota, actually, which is where she was governor. South Dakota. And, yeah, he's an insurance guy. And Sean McCreish for the New York Times did a piece where he went out to talk to local people who didn't believe it and said they'd grown up with him, he was a local boy, this must be AI. It doesn't seem like it was AI.

Yeah, apparently many, many people are using OnlyFans and we just haven't known.

Well, lots of people are using OnlyFans.

I think it's a subculture of OnlyFans. But the thing I found really odd is that according to the interview we have with, I think she was called Linda Love. That he was twiddling the ties as if they were nipples and as if he was getting feeling from them.

Anyway, who knew? Who knew? But it sheds a different light on our Department of Homeland Security. And the truth is none of this would matter. You do what you want to do. You do you in your private life except that it opens her to blackmail. And she was the head of Homeland

Security whose job is to be responsible for every single American safety.

That seems completely ridiculous to me.

I don't think it's ridiculous.

You can't blackmail a narcissist.

It's impossible.

So if the only fans-

She doesn't care. I mean, she's, look at if, this is the least of her problems. You know, a husband with balloons. I mean, she's got Corey Lewandowski. I mean, she's having this for a long time.

I mean, this has been going on for years now, openly, without regard. She's having an affair with her aid. And he's not only an aid, he's someone who has a very close relationship with the administration, a very close relationship with Donald Trump, is hated by other people in the administration. I mean, how could she, anyone with a scintilla of political regard would realize this is going to end in tears.

Right, right. So the idea that she would be worried that anyone could blackmail her, blackmail her, the woman is out there living a, I don't even have the language for the preposterousness of Christy Noem.

So that she would worry about someone discovering some indiscretion around her. Everything is an indiscretion.

Well, I was, I mean, did she, I mean, I wonder if she knew. She said, and the family said, or they issued a statement saying that they were completely distressed. They had no idea. And I was like, did you notice some, you know, did you not want to say to Brian, the insurance salesman, there seems to be a lot of helium and there's quite a lot of party supplies in the garage.

Are we entertaining again this weekend?

First thing, what does he think about Corey Lewandowski? Then Corey Lewandowski, what does Corey, I'm sure Corey Lewandowski knew about this. Anyway, it's, but again, even the idea of blackmail sets this up in some kind of traditional political reality. Forget about it. These people are so, they don't care.

They don't care. So do you think the FBI knew about it? Because surely they're supposed to do background checks on everything and.

Yeah, well, the FBI, when we get to the FBI, where everybody's been fired, Kash Patel.

Kash Patel's own Gmail was hacked by the Iranians. Right. So again, it's awful because it makes you want to root against the foolishness of America and we never want to root against America. But this is, it's just been a really astonishing week. You think you can't get any worse and it does.

But it is actually this, and the more telling thing is not the balloons, but the more telling thing is Corey Lewandowski, who is now being investigated.

Right.

And what's he being investigated for? You know, I mean, he's essentially being investigated for how he used the Department of Homeland Security to further his interest. So I mean there is another thing and it's a kind of, I mean it's a theme that I don't think has been addressed in a systematic way, although we see aspects of it all of the time, beginning of course with Elon Musk in the administration. And it is all of these tech guys.

I mean, the entire tech industry has seen the Trump White House as an invitation. I mean, let's in-

An invitation for grift.

An invitation to how can we get our products adopted by the federal government. And let's go, this is significant. The federal government, the United States government is now the biggest buyer of information technologies. I mean, by factors, I don't know, 100,

I mean, overwhelmingly. So it actually is, if you have a tech company, you're supplying information technology, and if the federal government is not your client, you probably won't make it. So the entire technology industry is now the entire – the point of it is how do you get

the federal government to adopt your products? And if you don't, you're screwed. If you do, you're fathomlessly rich. So you've suddenly created a situation of enormous grift. I mean, that's your focus. And with the Trump administration, which is open for business, you know that everybody

is in there. Everybody, everybody in the tech industry has their person inside the Trump orbit essentially hawking their products.

So that's why they were all standing in his inauguration, you know, there to pay homage to Donald Trump. There are definitely all sorts of administrative and bureaucratic hoops you have to jump through to get your products into the government system.

Almost in many instances almost insurmountable hoops unless someone navigates you around

them.

Right.

So that presumably was also why there was such a big deal around the Anthropic issues a couple of weeks ago when Pete Hegseth said, well, we're not going to use Anthropic anymore. Anthropic, well, you can't have us for limitless use. We are going to tell you what you can and can't use our product for. And then OpenAI stepped in and Sam Altman, the founder, said, well, you can use us to

do whatever you want.

But understand how important this is. And I mean, that's the key things. This is existential. I mean, you are in business if the federal government is your client. If you were a supplier to the federal government,

you are out of business if you can't accomplish that. So all of these companies, you're raising $500 million in venture capital. That is against one outcome. You're going to be able to get a deal with the federal government. If you don't get that deal, that $500 million, there's a good likelihood that goes down the drain.

Well, and there's a whole group of people who get introducing fees and get commissions for these contracts getting put into place.

Of course. I mean, that is a monstrous ecosystem because there is so much money at stake here. I mean, and it kind of goes in even a bigger way. The entire, the economy, the United States economy is dependent on the tech industry. The tech industry is dependent on the federal government.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think I told you- So we have a kind of a pyramid scheme here that is really probably quite dangerous.

Yeah. And I think I told you I was speaking to a founder, a big software founder in the Valley a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking about the war, and he said, nobody's paying any attention to the war. Everything's on fire.

We're all inventing the future. It's all about AI. This is a fantastic time for us. It was just a complete disconnect from what felt like what's going on everywhere else.

Yeah, and there's a disconnect in all of this discussion about the invention of AI, because on one hand, that's just a technological marvel. On the other hand, that technological marvel, or who gets to profit off that technological marvel, is all dependent on who manages to sell it to the federal government.

Right. Okay, well we should talk more about this because it's a really sort of fascinating and under-explored subject, I think. Also, another setback for Trump, not only did he have to address the nation about a war he didn't want, not only did he storm out of the Supreme Court, possibly performatively, but what else happened to him this week?

What got stopped this week? Passion project of yours, you love this subject. The East Room, the East Wing got stopped.

You know, I totally, again, in the Trump world, all of this stuff, you forget about this.

Right. Yeah, no, in the Trump world, all of this stuff, you forget about this. Right.

Yeah, no. So the ballroom has been momentarily kiboshed. Momentarily.

Right, Shalom Barhamas. You know, if you want to write to him to give him your commiserations. Shalom, shalom. Shalom, shalom. It's info at S Barhamas, B-A-R-A-M-E-S.com. If you want to say sorry,

that your project's been halted for now.

So we are going to do this. We're setting up a betting pool on whether or not there's a ballroom before Trump exits office. Or maybe he'll stay in office and figure out how to stay in office just to get the ballroom built.

I mean, I think we should not underestimate how important this ballroom becomes to Donald Trump. This is Donald Trump. This is his legacy. You know, other presidents think in terms of legacy, a historical legacy, what have I accomplished, what have I, how have I changed the political structure

of the country, how have I changed the zeitgeist. I don't think that's true for Donald Trump. For him, the legacy is the ballroom.

It's the ballroom. And I can't help having a sense of Schadenfreude that he's now literally living in a demolition site. I mean, it is such a mess because as we know, he tore it down basically overnight under the cover of darkness, which is what you've said. He always did. He did that with a building on on Fifth Avenue.

That's what he does. He moves at night. He's a man of the night. And now the project's been stopped.

And there's another aspect of this, and we should come back to this. What Donald Trump can't accept, cannot, temperamentally, physically, is no. He can't. And it goes further than that. Anybody who does accept no is a Trump. That is the Donald Trump theory of the game.

So what the judge said in this case was that they're stopping the project because it's not allowed to go ahead without congressional approval. Donald Trump then said there's never been congressional approval for anything to do with the White House before, which is complete nonsense. It's completely standard to have congressional approval. I think he thought he was going to skirt around it by not having public funds used because

as we know he's raised the $400 million that he says it's going to take from American companies. But this is actually very interesting because it now appears that Congress doesn't want to help him on this. Well what will happen

on this, he will appeal this decision so it is not unlikely at all that he will get to Trump judges who will give him the authorization to go forward with this. And then that decision then will be appealed. So this is a typical Trump situation of who can outlast someone else and who can outmaneuver

somebody else within the courtroom and within the structure of judges who are essentially on his payroll.

I'm not sure there are many judges who want to give the go ahead for this because I think there is a fairly united sense that this is a preposterous addition to the White House.

Well, I think, I mean, I like your optimism here. But I'm not sure that I would count on it. Now, there is, however, I would say that the thing that is somewhat in the favor of all right thinking people is that as the end of the, as he becomes more of a lame duck, then I think people don't have to bend the knee so much, judges don't have to bend the knee so much,

and then also just the time frame to build this is going to be limited. And I do think nobody wants to stick the next guy with this project.

Well and do you remember he made Shalom Baramas, I think he had to give some sort of public statement recently because they were terrified he would be the second architect to walk away from this project, which has now swelled to 90,000 feet.

A New York Times interview and they pushed the administration, really pushed him out there to do this because of fears that he was not committed.

Right, so his career might well get sunk by it, might be farewell Shalomba, Omez, Inc. because let's just remind people it's 90,000 square feet which will be almost three times the size of the existing White House. So we might reach a point where Donald Trump leaves office and there is still just a pile of rubble there.

You know, my wife has been after me to take the kids to Washington to see Washington before it is remade in Donald Trump's image.

Yeah, it's a very good idea. You should do that. But it's possible it doesn't get remade in his image. And it's always been a metaphor for him, right? He tears down the East Wing under the cover of darkness. He's going to build this, you know, very glitzy ballroom. But an even better metaphor is he leaves the White House and there is no East Wing, that he's ripped it down and been unable to build his ballroom.

Well, we're setting that up, that bet.

Okay, we're setting the bet up. So, well, who knows what will have happened by Saturday when we're back. I mean, many, many things. I mean, I'd quite like to know a little bit more about looning. Apparently it's where people get excited by rubbing balloons or popping balloons. Okay, rubbing balloons or popping balloons. Okay, rubbing balloons or popping balloons. I hadn't heard it before.

Okay.

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