For once, the President’s rhetoric did the fact-checking for us.
Donald Trump threatened to bomb Iranian bridges and power plants, one for one, every time Iran fires on a ship in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran promised to return the favor against American infrastructure. And when Marco Rubio was asked point-blank whether targeting Iranian civilians would be a war crime, he had every chance to say no. He didn’t.
Former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Sue Gordon joins us to make sense of a foreign policy being improvised on Truth Social, with actual lives on the line, alongside new reporting on U.S. troop deaths shifting from the front lines to base defense and Trump quietly tacking a new condition onto an already-signed Saudi nuclear deal.
Back home, the DOJ tried something bold and thought better of it, dropping subpoenas for New York Times reporters’ phone records after a federal judge made clear he wasn’t having it. Small win for the First Amendment.
Then there’s Taylor Farms, the company behind a cyclospora outbreak in over 30 states, whose executives met with the White House days before an FDA “positive” test result mysteriously became a “false positive” nobody can explain. Turns out $3.6 million in donations to conservative groups, including MAGA Inc., buys a lot of goodwill. So we talked to the people trying to do something about it:
Sean McBrearty and Christy McGillivray of Michiganders for Money Out of Politics, whose ballot measure to bar utilities and government contractors from buying influence just cleared 368,000 valid signatures.
And because every episode needs a bright spot, we’re welcoming Tecate to the Defiance for an ad campaign that does more for deported workers than anything coming out of this administration.
