DSR Weekly Wrap-up: Trump Admin Scrambles to Contain Iran Fallout

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1:02Thank you and enjoy the show. Hello and welcome to the DSR Daily. I'm David Rothkoff. I am joined by Riley Festler. We're here to talk about the news, past, present, and future, because it's a Friday, which seems like an accomplishment each and every week here. How are you doing today, Riley? Oh, all right. The weather has stabilized at least today, I guess. Yeah, and sort of the crap zone. It's not nice like it was a couple days ago. It's not ridiculously horrible. Yesterday in Washington, DC, ladies and gentlemen, Mark Day 55 degree shift from the prior day, which is the biggest shift between two days ever in history. And yet here we are. Healthy and rare and ago. So why don't you kick us off with

2:09whatever he knows you're going to kick us off with here, Riley? In an effort to stabilize global energy prices spiked by the American Israeli conflict with Iran, the United States is issued a temporary short-term lift on sanctions for Russian oil currently at sea. Treasury Secretary Scott Besson characterized the move as a strategic step to promote market stability despite acknowledging it could inadvertently provide a financial boost to the Kremlin's war chest. While Russian officials have welcomed the decision as an inevitable recognition of their role in the global market, European leaders expressed deep concern that easing pressure on Moscow undermined security on the ongoing defense of Ukraine. Despite these measures and a historic release of oil reserves by the IEA, Brett Kruid prices have remained above $100 a barrel as Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz continues to disrupt the global supplies. I mean, this is really worthy of comment. I know you're sitting there, you're doing whatever you're doing, you're at work, you're in the car, you're doing something and you're thinking,

3:10okay, what is this is trivial? Just stop for a second and think. The United States is choosing to direct much-needed revenue to the Russian economy at a moment where the Russians are alive with the country we're engaged in a war with and are actually likely providing them with intelligence details as to how to kill Americans. At the same time, by doing this, we help Russia in its illegal war against Ukraine. This would be unfathomable if not for two things. One, everything that we do with regard to this war is incoherent. And two, everything that Donald Trump has done since taking office benefits Russia at the expense of the United States. This man is

4:16committed to helping our enemies, helping himself, helping his friends, helping his friends, and doing so without the slightest concern for what it means for the lives of average Americans, for what it means for American troops, for what it means for America's national interests. It's appalling and it's completely consistent with everything that Donald Trump has done since he arrived in office. Indeed, it's consistent with the way that he ran his first presidential campaign, working in, help your seated, collusion with the Russians. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly criticized CNN today in dismissing reports that the Trump administration underestimated the impact of the Iran War on the Strait of Hormuz as fake news. Hegseth suggested that the network's coverage would improve once David Ellison,

5:19whose company recently acquired a Warner Bros. discovery for $11 billion, takes full control of the outlet. While Hegseth accused the media of intentionally using sensationalist headlines to make the US military look bad, Ellison has previously pledged that CNN's editorial independence will be strictly maintained under his leadership. The Secretary concluded his remarks by arguing that headlines should focus on Iran's desperation rather than the intensification of the conflict. Yeah, it's pathetic. You know, it's pathetic coming from a guy who once described himself as a journalist, although I don't think anybody else would describe him that way. It's pathetic coming from a guy whose one of his first acts as Secretary of Defense was to kick all the real journalist out of the building. It's pathetic coming in the wake of just the day or two ago. Hegseth kicking out a couple photographers who took pictures of him that he thought were not flattering enough because the job of journalists is, of course, to make administration officials look better.

6:26And in this particular case, it's especially pathetic because what Hegseth was saying was that CNN was wrong when it said that the administration had not planned properly for the event. And moments after he did that, he then said that they had not anticipated the shutdown in the state of Hormuz, which if you were running a war game involving first-year international relations student at East, whenever state college, they would have said the first thing you would have to anticipate is Iran using its strategic advantage and shutting down the state of Hormuz. So essentially, he said, A, don't cover us this way, B, the coverage was correct. Of course, you won't see much good coverage of the press conference that he did because he only

7:30took questions from lap dog media organizations like OAN and other organizations that just simply write what the administration wants them to write. One final point on this, say you're the Ellison family and you are buying this asset. You have just been announced on television to be a lap dog. Now we knew they were lap dogs of the administration. We knew David Ellison went to the state of the union as the guest of administration spokesmodel Lindsey Graham. But essentially, here is an administration for which the clock is ticking. Time is running out, whose power will fall dramatically in the course of the next couple of years. And here is Peter says saying, this is essentially a part of the administration. Can't be good for asset values. Really can't be good

8:39for the companies that have just been bought. And I would have to say, the shareholders of those companies would have grounds to suggest that if this new regime takes over there and is undermining the journalistic standards of a place like CNN that they're undermining the asset value that they have a fiduciary responsibility to uphold. Anyway, Hagsetto's pathetic and he demonstrates that every time he opens his mouth. A U.S. Air Force KC-135 refueling tanker crashed in western Iraq following an unspecified incident with another aircraft in friendly airspace, resulting in the deaths of four of the six crew members on board. The aging strato tanker is a

9:39critical asset for mid-air refueling and medical evacuations but has faced increasing reliability concerns. U.S. Central Command has ruled out hostile fire as the cause, noting that the second aircraft involved landed safely in Israel. This fatal event marks the fourth publicly acknowledged U.S. aircraft loss during the ongoing conflict with Iran and falls a string of recent aviation accidents in the region. Yeah, Hagsetto said during the same press conference war is hell and this is an example of war being hell. But at the same time, he also revealed how the administration is handling its responsibilities to tell the American people what's going on and why it's going on. And of course, by how it's handling it, I mean badly. He didn't explain why this took place. He didn't even, in terms of broader issues, address the number of American victims of this war

10:43so far. Their position is a bunch of people have been hurt. He said during the press conference, well, 90% of the injuries have been minor. Well, that means 10% of the injuries have been major, by the way. And that suggests, you know, real suffering on the part of individuals in the military and their families that is being minimized by this administration that is trying to make everything look good and trying to minimize the loss of life or the expense of this war. Because they view it all as a kind of a political exercise and not as real events having real impacts with thousands of people dead and many thousands more injured and huge global economic impacts, perhaps the worst energy disruption in the history of global energy disruptions.

11:46So it's a it's a grim on every front and the administration is just making it worse. The US Senate passed a bipartisan bill with an 89 to 10 vote aimed at increasing affordable housing construction and narrowing a nationwide of four million home shortfall. The legislation includes government incentives faster environmental reviews and controversial caps on institutional investors ability to purchase single-family homes to help individual buyers. While the bill represents a rare moment of cooperation between leaders like Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, its path through the House remains uncertain due to industry opposition. Furthermore, President Trump has threatened to withhold his signature until unrelated voting restrictions are passed, adding a significant political hurdle to the measures enactment.

13:03That they have far right members of the Senate and far left members of the Senate voting together to put them through. I don't know, it seems to me that political common sense and survival instincts suggest that this thing deserves to pass and in any other time would be likely to pass. But of course we have an adult 79-year-old president who is irrational almost all the time and we have a bunch of folks in the House of Representatives who will do whatever he says whenever he says it no matter how damaging it may be to the country or to them. When are they going to wake up to that? They have hitched their wagon to a falling star that is declining rapidly and could lead to a GOP MAGA mass extinction event that all of us will likely cheer.

14:12Well wrapping up with kind of a combination of a few stories. Yesterday, a former ISIS sympathizer opened fire in an ROTC classroom at Ultimate University, killing an instructor and wounding two others before being neutralized by students in what the FBI is investigating as a terrorist attack. Simultaneously, a man died after ramming his vehicle into a Michigan synagogue and sparking a massive fire. An incident authorities are treating as a target act of violence against the Jewish community. Amidst these events, New York City at Mayer, Zoran Mamdani condemned Senator Tommy Tuberville for bigoted social media posts that used 9-11 imagery to target the mayor's Muslim faith. Together, these incidents highlight a volatile period of religiously-targeted violence and inflammatory political rhetoric currently being addressed by federal investigators and community leaders across the country. Yeah, but how are they being addressed? You've got more than one Republican member of Congress

15:14going on the record attacking Muslims saying that they don't belong in the United States. It's disgusting, reprehensible, should be the kind of thing that leads to people being expelled from the United States Congress. You've got the administration kicking the hornet's nest in Iran with the world's largest state sponsor of terror, likely to create a much more volatile atmosphere. And of course, you've got the administration. It'll prepare to deal with this from top to bottom at the top of people like Cash Patel saying, hey, why don't we go to the Olympics and spend a lot of money or why don't we retrain FBI agents for by bringing in WWE wrestlers to teach them how to fight? You know, I mean, ludicrous as that is, it's not as ludicrous as the fact that the agencies in the United States government that were assigned the responsibility

16:18of fighting terrorism have been gutted. Their key people have been fired. One of the key positions in a DHS agency that's responsible for this has gone to a 22-year-old just out of college with no experience doing counterterrorism of any sort. This is the part of the program where we look forward, I am telling you, there are going to be terror attacks, they're going to trigger racism on the right, but they're going to also reveal the incredibly dangerous, irresponsible combination of bad policies atop this administration, the kind that we see in so many other areas from the economy where we're just finding out that the weak economic performance we saw at the end of last year was actually much weaker than that. The prices continue to rise and that all of

17:20that was happening, as all of that was happening, we entered into a war that's likely to create deep global economic shocks. We see it in healthcare, the, you know, record number of cases of measles and other things as vaccine use falls. We see it in administration policies towards energy and dependency on fossil fuels, precisely the moment where dependency on alternative energy would work. And by the way, I should add the administration pushing the US car industry away from clean forms of propulsion is playing directly into the hands of the Chinese car industry, which is going to leave them in the dust. We see it in the environment, we see it in trade policy, of course, we see it in tax policy, we see it across the board, incompetence, incoherence, venality, criminal behavior, and that's what we report on here every week at the DSR Network.

18:23That's what we'll report on next week. A little later today, you'll get a new episode of Words Matter, one of your most popular shows here at the DSR Network. We've got New Siliconsciousness, we've got New Deep State Radio. If you haven't listened to them yet, go and listen to them. They're extremely on the news and fascinating. And of course, daily show from TNR as well. So we're going to keep it coming. We hope you have a good weekend. Maybe I'll have an Oscar party. You'll watch, don't know why you'll watch, every year with the Oscars, and I love film. I just start out five minutes in. I'm like, wait a minute. Didn't I say last year I wasn't going to watch this again? And we'll probably then change the channel. Whatever makes you happy, find enjoyment where you can enjoy it. Riley, find enjoyment where you can enjoy it. And we'll all be back with you on Monday. Until then, thanks folks. Bye-bye.