Velshi 5/9/26 | 🅼🆂🅽🅱️🅲 Breaking News Today May 9, 2026

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[00:00:03]Hey, good morning. It is Saturday, May the 9th. I'm Ali Veli, and there's a story unfolding right now in the American South that might not be at the top of your newsfeed, but I happen to think it's the most urgent problem facing every one of us today, no matter where in the country we live. It's a story you might even think you know because it started like so many second-term Trump emergencies looking like a shameless power grab by a wannabe dictator facing the electoral consequences of his deeply unpopular regime. But two major developments in recent days have turned the cynical Trumpian scheme into a realtime deconstruction of our multi-racial democracy. What we're witnessing as a result is the dawn of a new Jim Crow era. one that uses the same pernitious strategy of leveraging bad faith pretense and dirty tricks to rob American citizens of their voting rights or of the weight and value of their vote. The first part, the laying of the groundwork, you probably remember Donald Trump was afraid of his party losing the midterms because his policies are so fantastically unpopular. So he set forth a plan quite openly of targeted gerrymandering to rig congressional district maps so that Republicans would pick up extra seats without picking up any extra votes. It began in Texas with a phone call from Donald Trump to Governor Abbott last August. Trump states his desires very plainly.

[00:01:29]We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats. We have a really good governor and we have good people in Texas. And I won Texas. I got the highest vote in the history of Texas as you probably know and uh we are entitled to five more seats.

[00:01:45]>> Entitled. It spread state-to-state anywhere with a Republican state house.

[00:01:50]One of the only GOP le states to buck the request from Trump was Indiana where a handful of state senators, Republican state senators, voted down the effort to change their state map. Trump was quick to target them for retribution. In fact, this past Tuesday in the Republican primaries in Indiana, six of eight Republican state senators who opposed Donald Trump's redistricting effort were voted out by the MAGA base. They were replaced by Trumpendors candidates. Now, across the country, some Democrats fought back. In California and Virginia, both states which believe that redistricting should be nonpartisan, Democrats organized referendums to allow voters, you know, the ones who actually matter, the choice to adopt new maps as a sort of a counterbalance. So, for a while it was a fight. But then two rulings from two different courts changed everything. First, the US Supreme Court effectively tore down the last real remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act last week, erasing protections that were designed to preserve the voting power of black communities. That cleared the way for southern states to redraw districts in ways that will unquestionably dilute black voting rights, eliminate black majority districts, and roll back black representation in Congress. And they rushed to do exactly that. Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina all began the process for implementing new maps. On Thursday, Tennessee's governor signed into law a congressional map. This is it's hard to see that these two maps look the same.

[00:03:24]Look at the one on the left. Look at the the bottom left corner, the little blue thing. And look at the one on the right.

[00:03:29]This new congressional map eliminates the only majority black district in the entire state, which is the Democratic held district surrounding Memphis. You can see how they did it on this map.

[00:03:40]They took the ninth congressional district, which included Memphis and its surrounding area, and split it into three different districts. In gerrymandering speak, that's what's known as cracking. You take a concentrated population of voters and you crack the block into separate districts, diluting the voting power of that group. Every eligible voter in Memphis will get to vote this November, but their vote will mean less by design.

[00:04:07]Yesterday, a legislative committee met in Louisiana to discuss a new map which would eliminate one of two majority black districts in that state. Louisiana is onethird black. And under the new map that erases a black majority district, the state will have 16th black majority congressional districts. Mind you, 40,000 people have already voted in the state's primary, which has now been suspended.

[00:04:31]Alabama Republicans are attempting to fasttrack a new map targeting two predominantly black congressional districts. Over a quarter of Alabama's population is black. They may not have a single representative in Congress after this. They'll still get to cast a ballot this November, but their votes will mean less by design. Mississippi Republicans will convene for a special session on May the 20th to discuss new state supreme court maps. It took Florida Republicans no time to pass a new map which targeted four Democratic seats.

[00:05:03]South Carolina Republicans are trying to eliminate the state's lone Democratic seat held by Congressman Jim Clyurn. But the Republican state senate, their leader there isn't fully convinced just yet. But if they do push forward, they will have to delay their state's primary. And then yesterday, the other shoe dropped. The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the state's new map, the one that would have benefited Democrats, the one voted in by the citizens of Virginia a couple of weeks ago, is unconstitutional.

[00:05:33]The ruling was essentially procedural.

[00:05:35]The referendum to redistrict was a constitutional amendment, and Virginia has a strict process for enacting constitutional amendments. In a 4-3 split decision, judges found a flaw in how the referendum was brought to Virginia voters and they threw it out without regard for the fact that they voted. Virginia voters voted two weeks ago to approve the amendment. Which is to say that the straight Supreme Court in Virginia has invalidated 1.6 million votes. It's invalidated the clear preference for democratic governance in Virginia that Virginia voters have voted for loud and clear since last November.

[00:06:12]You may be wondering how in a functioning democracy we can land in such a place where Louisiana's governor can suspend an election to push through a new map. And in Tennessee, it takes four business days to disenfranchise a million black voters. Florida and Mississippi and Alabama pushing through new maps. But Virginia can hold a whole election to decide on a new map by popular vote and the will of the people gets tossed out by the courts. This is a flashing red warning light that we are slipping out of being a functional democracy. Right now in real time, a patchwork legal system for drawing congressional maps means some states like California have nonpartisan redistricting commissions. Virginia is also bipartisan and other states leave it up to their legislature. In Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Republicans hold veto proof majorities in the state legislature, which doesn't matter because the governor's a Republican anyway. They wouldn't veto it. But this means fewer legal hurdles to jump. In Florida's case, they just ignored their state constitution entirely. Back in 2010, Florida voters passed an anti-jerrymandering a amendment.

[00:07:16]Florida's new map is being challenged on that basis. But the Florida Supreme Court is packed with Ronda Santis allies. So again, it's not going to matter.

[00:07:25]Let's be clear, this system diminishes the power of everyone's vote. You may not live in Louisiana or Tennessee or Alabama or Mississippi, but if we are living in a system where everyone's vote doesn't carry the same weight, it means your vote is diluted, too. Doesn't matter how hard you vote Democrat in California or New York. If the system is rigged in half a dozen southern states, that is where democracy is defeated. In the abstractions, in the corrupting little power grabs and screams.

[00:07:57]Democracy is not defeated because somebody stands up and says democracy ends on Tuesday. It's defeated in the dozens or hundreds of smaller malevolent moves against it. And right now, this is the most important one. And look, Democrats were always the underdogs in this fight. Their approach to mid-deing was retaliatory. Democraticled redistricting has been framed as a necessary offset to Trump's push in Republicanled states. The disenfranchisement of black voters we're seeing now is the culmination of a larger political project to marginalize minorities. And it's going to take more than a few extra seats in California to fight it back. What this country needs to start thinking about is a new reconstruction, nonpartisan nationwide redist redistricting, campaign finance restrictions, easier elections, or at least elections that are easier to vote in, and a fair and just Supreme Court.

[00:08:52]The response to measured autocracy cannot be improvised. It cannot be improvised retaliation.

[00:08:59]Let me tell you about the states that have already enacted new maps and the party which stands to benefit from each.

[00:09:04]In Texas, Republicans could gain five seats. One seat in North Carolina, one or two in Ohio, three or four in Florida, one in Tennessee. Democrats, on the other hand, could gain five seats in California, one in Utah. Louisiana could add yet one more in the Republican column. But even these gains, I just want to be fair, are presumptive. Voters haven't voted yet. Nothing is certain.

[00:09:28]What's left of American democracy is in fact up to you, up to voters, defying the expectations of people who seek predetermined outcomes to elections, who seek to choose their voters rather than to let their voters choose them. Joining me now is Ellie Mustal, justice correspondent and columnist for The Nation. He's an Alfred Nobler fellow at the Type Media Center and author of multiple books, including Bad Law: 10 Popular Laws That Are Ruining America.

[00:09:56]Ellie, good morning to you. Thank you for being with us. I I'm I'm trying not to overstate this. I'm I'm trying not to have viewers look at me and say, "Dude, why is your hair on fire? This is this is crazy." It's really not. This is this is a pernitious acrosstheboard attack on democracy >> and an attack on black people specifically. Um, a lot of times when I've seen this story framed over the last few weeks, it has been framed as a Democrat versus Republican issue, as a battle for the soul of the House of Representatives. It is not. It is an attack by white people against the very concept of black representation. This is Jim Crow 2.0. Um, and I don't mean that in a kind of hyperbolic way. I mean that on a on a ground level, like what are they actually trying to do? So, let me interrupt you there cuz I think this is really important.

[00:10:47]Jim Crow was not one thing, >> right? Slavery was not one thing. It was it was a series. It was hundreds of little things that that curtailed people's freedoms. And that's what's happening. That from 1965 onwards, we've we've fixed a lot of little things and this administration's taking one thing down at a time.

[00:11:06]>> If you look if you lived in the Jim Crow South as a black person, you could vote as long as you could guess the number of jelly beans. you can vote as long as you can figure out what day, what time, if it like the the way that people are disenfranchised is not saying, "Darky, you can't vote here." It's all of these little procedural issues that frustrate and suppress the ability of black people to vote or the the ability of those votes to matter. And that's what the Supreme Court has approved. That's what the white supremacist decision in Louisiana versus Ka approved. this reconstruction of the Jim Crow South, right? And so when we talk about this issue, when we talk about what Americans what what Democrats need to do, it's not just what Democrats need to do, it's what Americans need to do, whether or not Americans want to live in this reconstituted apartheid state. And unfortunately, what I see is most Americans willing to go along with it.

[00:12:01]Um, when you look at how they are redistricting the maps in Louisiana or Tennessee, please note they are not messing with white Democratic enclaves in those states. There are white Democrats in Tennessee. There are white Democrats in Louisiana. Happen to be friends with one of them. Right. What they're and their and her neighborhood their neighborhoods. They're being left alone. The neighborhoods that are being taken away are the black neighborhoods, the ones in Memphis, like you saw like you showed in your your opening. It's the black neighborhoods that are being split up and cracked. And so what they're trying to do is eliminate the Congressional Black Caucus. The Congressional Black Caucus has 67 members. Most of them represent the South and those seats are the ones being targeted, being taken away. What do we do about it? I don't know, Ally. The last time we had a decision like this, the the most the historical precedent for Louisiana versus Cala in 2026 is PI v. Ferguson in 1896. That that that is the in terms of the racism that the Supreme Court has ushered in, that's your case, right? And when you look at PI v. Ferguson in in 1896, what what did it take to to overcome that? And it took an entire it took deca generations of black people lived and died under PI v.

[00:13:21]Ferguson before 1954 when it was overturnedish by Brown v. Board of Ed and 1964 and 1965 when it was overturned legislatively by the Civil Rights Act and the now defunct Voting Rights Act of 1955. So that's the timeline we're looking at when white people when white people get it in their head that they are allowed that they are to use Trump's words entitled to be this racist. That's the kind of generational long timeline we're we're talking about. And the way to overcome that is for establishment Democrats and the leaders of this country to take judicial reform seriously. That is the only way. What changed between 1896 and 1954? You had a different Supreme Court. And as long as you allow this conservative supermajority, this racist, this now provably racist conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, as long as you allow them to hold power, nothing happens. Nothing changes. This is what they want. This is what they have the power to do. And until you take judicial reform seriously at all levels, then you lose at all levels. Democrats, look what happened in Virginia, which you brought up, right? judicial reform at all levels. You had a a seven judge panel four to three overturning a voter referendum of the people in Virginia.

[00:14:47]That court needs to be reformed. And the way that Virginia picks its state supreme court is wacky. Um just to to be sure. So until Democrats can speak with one unified voice that we are going to reform this judicial system, Democrats will continue to lose at every level.

[00:15:05]the argument black people will continue to lose.

[00:15:08]>> I'm going to be talking to Kim Jeff in a minute and and and we can talk about what Congress needs to do, but what's the message to Americans who don't feel affected by this? I'm not in Tennessee.

[00:15:16]I'm not in Mississippi. I'm not in Alabama. I'm not in Louisiana. What what's what's the way you motivate people to say this is actually your democracy coming apart? This is not it.

[00:15:25]It's targeting black people, but it's it's once again once you put one of us in chains, we're all in chains, >> right? I mean, look, you can go to white South Africans who were living in Cape Town in, you know, 1975 and they be like, I'm not on Robin Island. What does this HAVE TO DO WITH ME, >> RIGHT? Like that that's that's your mentality there. If you are okay living in an aparttheid country, then it doesn't have anything to do with you. I happen to believe that when one when one of us isn't free, all of us aren't free.

[00:15:54]And I happen to believe that the way that you stop Republican racism, the way that you stop this white supremacist, these white supremacist decisions, is to reject them, is to put party, to put country over party, to put morality over party, and to reject the Republican agenda. But we see time and time and time and again, white Americans won't do that. Um, the Democratic candidate for president has not carried the white vote since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That's not a phase. White people aren't going through a phase right now. They have decided since 1964 that the promise of a multithnic, multi-racial democracy based on fairness and justice is not a project they want to be in. And so the only way that we've had progress is by a a coalition of black people, Latino people, Asian people, and the few whites of good conscience that they are to to build a rising majority. That's the only way it's happened. And as we're seeing now with these new rules, unless white people get over themselves, unless they reverse themselves and their ancestors and their voting habits since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they will get exactly the racist country that they have long desired. So at some level, it's not even Chris Rock has a great joke, right? Like racism isn't a black problem, it's a white person's problem, right? like y'all are the ones with the sickness, not me. Like until white people heal thyself, >> this is going to continue happening again.

[00:17:42]>> Uh I I encourage people to read your writings this week. You were talking about how you have to tell your kids that they're going to have uh less in terms of democratic privilege than than you do, which is saying something.

[00:17:52]Ellie, thanks a million for being here.

[00:17:53]Ellie Mustell is a justice correspondent for the col and columnist for the nation. He's the author of multiple important books, including Bad Law. All right, up next, I'll continue this conversation with House Minority Leader Hakeim Jeff, who says the Democrats fight on this is just beginning. More Veli after the break.

[00:18:15]In a statement reacting to the Virginia Supreme Court's decision to block the state's newly drawn and voterapproved congressional map, the Democratic House leader, House Minority Leader, Hakeim Jeff says, quote, "Over 3 million Virginia citizens cast their votes in a free and fair election. Yet, the state supreme court has chosen to invalidate their voice, disenfranchise them, and violate their due process rights. The decision to overturn an entire election is an unprecedented and undemocratic action that cannot stand. MAGA Republicans have adopted voter suppression as a strategy, as also evidenced by far-right extremists on the Supreme Court, gutting the Voting Rights Act to open the door to a Jim Crowike attack on black representation across the American South. We are exploring all options to overturn this shocking decision. No matter what it takes, House Democrats will win in November so we can help rescue this nation from the extremism being unleashed by Donald Trump and Republicans. Our fight is not over. We are just getting started." End quote. The Democratic House Minority Leader, Hakeim Jeff of New York joins me now. Uh, Congressman, thank you for being with us. Let me ask you this. At some point, the polling indicates the likelihood that Democrats will will take the House in uh in November. History in you suggests the likelihood that that'll happen. Are you a little worried that this this nutty outofcontrol gerrymandering actually compromises that possibility?

[00:19:43]>> No, we're going to win back the House of Representatives in November. We are only three seats short. We historically overperformed in November and that's one of the reasons why Republicans are in panic mode. Remember Ally, when we took the House back in 2018, we were 24 seats short. We crossed over that hurdle. And in fact, in 2018, we flipped a total of 40 seats. So, we're going to take back control of the House of Representatives.

[00:20:09]We're going to continue to make clear to the American people that we will lower their high cost of living, fix a broken health care system, and clean up the corruption that we're seeing in the country, in the Congress, certainly with the Supreme Court, and deal with the most corrupt administration in American history. Now, we're going to need nationwide judicial reform. We're going to need nationwide electoral reform.

[00:20:31]We're going to need nationwide campaign finance reform, which is why we have to take the House back, take the Senate back, keep pressing forward, and then in 2028, take the presidency back as well.

[00:20:43]>> So, I'm going to talk to you about those three areas of reform that you suggest.

[00:20:45]You heard Ellie Mustal saying he puts judicial reform at the top of that. But I want to talk about something else of those things. You say you're going to talk to people and win their votes over based on their cost of living and their health care. that message is being very clearly put forward by an increasing number of progressive candidates who are winning uh primaries that sometimes feels out of sync with both the Democratic party and who House leadership wants to run in in primary elections and you face some criticism for this. Where are you on this? Because the people winning elections right now tend to be putting that message forward very clearly.

[00:21:25]Well, since January of 2025, in my first remarks to the new Congress, we made clear that we're going to center uh lowering the high cost of living.

[00:21:34]America is far too expensive right now.

[00:21:36]People are working hard. They're playing by the rules and they can't thrive. They can barely survive. That's a universally held belief amongst Democrats in the House across the ideological spectrum from progressive to new Dems to blue dogs and all points in between. And what we've seen across the country, we've now won elections for 16 consecutive months, including in places like New Jersey where Governor Mikey Cheryl ran on affordability. The New York City election, Zoran Mandami ran on affordability. In Virginia, Abigail Spamberger ran and won on affordability.

[00:22:14]This is a universally held belief. I don't get involved in open seat Democratic primaries. We'll see who emerges, but the focus has got to be on winning in November, and that's what we intend to do.

[00:22:28]>> What about non-open seat primaries?

[00:22:29]Challenges from from progressives who say that establishment Democratic leadership has not moved fast enough and hard enough.

[00:22:39]>> Well, we're going to continue uh to defend every single House incumbent.

[00:22:45]Ultimately, however, it's going to be up to the people. And that's the reality of serving in the House of Representatives, the institution, the framers designed to be the closest to the American people.

[00:22:54]We have only two-year employment contracts. We've got to go back to the people every other year, and everyone is going to have to make their case to the individuals that they're privileged to represent. And that's what, you know, they'll continue to do. And I've indicated whether it's a progressive incumbent, whether it's a blue dog, whether it's a new them, I'm going to support members of the House Democratic Caucus. And then we all have to come together to actually push back against this unprecedented attack on our democracy, unprecedented attack on free and fair elections, an unprecedented attack on black representation in the American South and all across the country, which is what the Supreme Court's decision in Calala has unleashed. Let's talk about that for a second because if you you and I from New York, we we don't live there's not a daily lived experience of reconstruction and the end of it and and Jim Crow laws in the south. There still is like people have either in recent memory or or or they still experience things like that.

[00:23:52]This is being described as u like the end of reconstruction. It's that serious. It took decades, seven decades to get out of that mess and get back to to 1965. How do you get people in New York and California and Minneapolis and places like that to think about the fact that this is everybody's fight right now? This isn't just black people's fight.

[00:24:14]It's certainly everybody's fight.

[00:24:15]Listen, Dr. King once eloquently made the observation that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And that's the reality of what we confront right now. So, it is everybody's fight to show up and stand up and speak up.

[00:24:28]Now, the American journey has always been characterized by moments of progress followed by moments of backlash and then a new generation of Americans have to show up, stand up, speak up, fight, get into good trouble to usher in an era of progress. We went from the progress of emancipation to the backlash of Jim Crow. the progress of the civil rights movement to the backlash of mass incarceration, the progress of electing Barack Obama to the backlash that has resulted in the elevation of Donald Trump, mega extremism, and this behavior that we're seeing coming out of the Supreme Court of the United States to throw the American South back into the Jim Crow era. So, it's going to take an all hands-on deck effort and everybody has a stake in preserving a multi-racial democracy as part of the effort to preserve American exceptionalism as we move forward into our next 250 years.

[00:25:25]>> There's nothing that Republicans are doing now that's anything of a surprise because they wrote it all down in a two a 922page book that that Donald Trump denied having anything to do with and then they're implementing all of it.

[00:25:35]Should there be a a Democratic equivalent of of that? Should there be a this is actually how we're going to fix all of these problems. Judicial reform, electoral reform, nonpartisan redistricting, uh campaign finance, and everything else.

[00:25:49]>> Yeah. Yeah. Well, certainly I think a lot of that has been laid out by House Democrats and we will continue to lay out what we think needs to be done in order one to solve the problems that the American people want us to address in terms of an affordable life, a comfortable life, giving them the ability to live a middle class life or beyond, live the good life. At the same period of time, we do have these structural problems that need to be addressed. We've got to, for instance, make sure we pass the John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act so we can end the era of voter suppression in the United States of America once and for all. We have to end Citizens United, dramatically reform our campaign finance laws to stop the ability of these deep pocketed special interests to intervene.

[00:26:33]And we are going to have to explore massive judicial reform state by state and at the federal level. and everything should be on the table as far as I'm concerned.

[00:26:45]>> Congressman, good to see you. Thanks for being on the show this morning. We appreciate it. Congressman Hakeim Jeff of New York is the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives. All right, coming up, President Trump says the ceasefire with Iran is holding. Never mind the back and forth attacks over the last 48 hours. Coming up next, where Trump's peace offer stands with Iran and how closely it resembles the Obama era deal that he tore up in his first presidency.

[00:27:12]President Trump is insisting that the ceasefire between the United States and Iran is still in effect despite the fact that both sides have attacked each other multiple times over the past 48 hours, which wouldn't really be a ceasefire.

[00:27:23]Yesterday, the US military said it disabled two Iranian flagged tankers that violated the blockade in the Gulf of Oman. Just a day earlier, Iran launched attacks on three American warships that were transiting the Straight of Hormuz, and the US said it struck Iranian targets in response. Both sides are blaming the other for violating the ceasefire. On the other hand, Trump sort of shrugged it off. He referred to Thursday's attacks as both quote a trifle and a love tap. And lately, he's dismissed the entire conflict with Iran as a quote mini war.

[00:27:52]The resumption of attacks occurred at a particularly sensitive time. Over the past week, it seemed like some measure of progress was being made on the diplomatic front. On Tuesday, Trump abruptly paused the operation that he called Project Freedom, which was a plan to reopen the Straight of Hormuz. But Project Freedom was short-lived, and like many Trumpy things, it had only begun the day before. The plan reportedly got backlash from Saudi Arabia, which of course is a critical US regional ally, which then suspended the US's military use of its bases and airspace for the operation. That's according to NBC News. But President Trump put a different spin on it. The reason he gave for the operation sudden pause was quote, "Great progress has been made toward a complete and final agreement with representatives of Iran."

[00:28:39]End quote. That sounds good. The so-called agreement that he mentioned refers to a onepage 14-point memorandum of understanding. It's a work in progress, an outline to advance talks to end the conflict. If agreed to, both sides would enter into a 30-day period of negotiations. During that time, both Iran and the US would lift restrictions on shipping through the straight of Hormuz. As we all now know, 1/5if of the world's oil flows through that uh choke point. The US also wants to impose a moratorium on Iran's controversial nuclear program, especially its enrichment of uranium. Iran would have to give up its current stockpile of highlyenriched uranium and agree to snap inspections of its nuclear facilities by international inspectors. In exchange, the US would lift economic sanctions and release billions of dollars in frozen Iranian funds. Yesterday, President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said they expected a response from Iran about its current proposal by the end of the day, and there's no indication yet that the US has received that response.

[00:29:42]Now, if everything I just said sounds familiar, in fact, if it sounds like maybe I I said this more than 10 years ago, it's because it contains pretty much the same terms that Iran agreed to back in 2015.

[00:29:55]That agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA, was a landmark deal. It's called the Iran Nuclear Deal, but the reason it has a big name like that is because it was a lot more. The Obama administration led those talks with four other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, China, France, Britain, and Russia, plus Germany, and the European Union joining in. All the parties involved were holding up their end of the bargain in the first three years of that agreement. But then Donald Trump was elected to his first term in office.

[00:30:28]In 2018, he formally pulled the United States out of that agreement. He called the JCPOA quote one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into quote what he would give to have the GC JCPOA back right now. So, while this agreement may result in a break or even an end to this current war with Iran, in reality, it could just be taking us back to square one. For more on this, I'm joined by somebody who was involved in that deal.

[00:30:58]Ben Rhodess, a former deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama. He's now an MS now political and national security analyst and the co-host of Pod Save the World. He's the author of the book After the Fall, the rise of authoritarianism in the world we've made. Uh, Ben, I mean, one can't joke about a war, but this is it's ridiculous. This is literally ridiculous. There's no chance of him getting as close to that deal as you guys had in 2015.

[00:31:24]I think he'd be happy if the Straight of Hormuz were to open at this point, which wasn't closed before. This is a I can't believe we're having a stupid conversation.

[00:31:32]>> No, it's quite astonishing. I mean, if you remember what he said on the day that the war was launched, he clearly thought that the Iranian regime was going to fall, right? He clearly had been convinced of that by BB Netanyahu.

[00:31:45]He said the Iranian people are going to rise up. You know, we're basically going to have, you know, democracy in Iran.

[00:31:51]The nuclear program is going to be completely eliminated. And now here we are, Ally, he's so desperate to get out of this war. That has made everything worse. I mean, the fact that what we're really focused on is opening a body of water that was open before the war tells you everything about the futility of this. He would be lucky to get anything approximating the JCPOA. And then think about just think about the insanity of that that essentially pulls out of a deal that's working. We have like nearly a decade of sanctions and confrontation and proxy wars with Iran. We launch a war that's going to cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars.

[00:32:29]killed thousands of people including school girls and US service members. Uh you know drove up the affordability crisis in this country cause shortages around the world could bring about a global economic recession just to get back to the deal that Trump pulled out of. I mean if there's not some sense of accountability for that in American foreign policy and in the Congress where a lot of people enabled this hawkish nonsense that led to this then we've learned nothing. So remind me, I I've forgotten the details of this, but the the the thing that led to the the Iran nuclear deal was actually many years in the making. The US got involved sort of toward the latter part of it and and imposed remarkable power through sanctions and uh banking limitations on Iran, which really brought them to the table and caused them to make a deal.

[00:33:16]But it was super complicated. It was super complicated on the nuclear side.

[00:33:19]It was super complicated on the military side, on the economic side, on the sanctions side. This is you can't really wing this. And a one-page 14-point memorandum does not a Iran nuclear deal make.

[00:33:30]>> That's right. I mean, just the quick version, right, is you have the United States, Britain, France, Germany, the European Union, Russia, China, all at the negotiating table. You have the International Atomic Energy Agency doing the inspections. You have sanctions relief in return for all these nuclear restrictions. They had to destroy their plutonium reactor. They had to put centrifuges into monitored storage. We had inspections at the uranium mines and mills to make sure that they weren't diverting materials for a covert nuclear program. They had to ship their stockpile where it could be diluted. All of these different elements were in place in the Iran nuclear deal with with a literally a commission to monitor implementation of the deal. What do we have now, Ally?

[00:34:15]We've got Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, two grifting real estate developer, friends of the presidents who know absolutely nothing about nuclear policy. I mean, Ernie Monise was a nuclear physicist who negotiated this for the Obama administration. We've got two real estate developers in Pakistan, uh, which, you know, has no experience, you know, mediating these kinds of talks. No participation from the any international body that I can see. Uh, I mean, this is beyond amateur hour. It's it's it's almost an absurdity. And when you think about the differentiation between how serious it was taken not just by us but by all these other countries and institutions uh and and the idea that every now and then we put Jared on a plane to Pakistan to to negotiate a one-page document, not get headway, then leak it to some uh reporter so that it seems like some people can make a lot of money on insider trading and Trump can kind of lie to the markets that the war is over.

[00:35:10]I mean that like there there's we we cannot tolerate this degree of amateurism if we if and when we get through this >> and the lying about the war and whether it's a war and whether it's over is is another topic. Let's let's actually take a quick break and continue on the other side. Ben Rhodess is going to stay with me. You're watching Veli on MS Now.