All in With Chris Hayes 5/17/26 | 🅼🆂🅽🅱️🅲 Breaking News Today May 17, 2026

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]They should wave the white the flag, the white flag of surrender.

[00:00:05]The president asks Iran for surrender and keeps his eye on the ballroom.

[00:00:11]This is a uh a view of the columns.

[00:00:17]Tonight, the midterm elections that will test Trump's dwindling power as his war council calls for escalation with Iran.

[00:00:25]I would load the Iranian people up with weapons uh so they could go to the streets armed and turn [music] the tide of battle inside Iran.

[00:00:33]Lawmaker Cory Booker on the new plan for taxpayers to fund Trump's precious.

[00:00:40]It's about $300 million. No charge to the taxpayer.

[00:00:44]>> No taxpayer putting up 10 cents.

[00:00:46]>> Not one penny is being used from the federal government.

[00:00:50]And why is the Trump administration now reversing course on regulation after letting AI run wild?

[00:00:57]AI seems to be very hot.

[00:00:59]It seems to be the thing that uh a lot of smart people are looking at very strongly.

[00:01:04]But All In starts right now.

[00:01:11]Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. It is election night in America once again with some very interesting races unfolding in Indiana and Ohio tonight. Polls have now closed in both states. Results are pouring in. In Ohio, Trump's former deputy ICE director, a 29-year-old named Madison Sheen, is running in a very crowded Republican primary to try and flip the state's ninth district. Her campaign is centered around her role in Trump's mass deportation in what could prove to be an interesting litmus test of the public's appetite, even Republican primary voters' appetite, for ICE after the occupation Minneapolis and the killings of Renee Good and Alex Preddy.

[00:01:49]Meanwhile, in Indiana, Donald Trump is seeking vengeance against more than half dozen state senators who who his efforts to redraw their state congressional maps last year to get rid of the last remaining Democrats. At the time, the legislators pushed back against the very aggressive, near constant in-person bullying campaign from the White House.

[00:02:09]Now, not surprisingly, Trump-aligned groups are pouring a ton of cash into those races, at least $9 million, which we're talking about state legislative races in Indiana.

[00:02:23]A massive amount of money for a very, very local race. According to the AP, one of the Trump-backed candidates has won so far, while another has lost.

[00:02:30]We're going to follow that throughout the night. Now, there is, of course, a reason that Donald Trump and his allies are trying to make those state senators an example.

[00:02:37]Because when they stood up to Trump, when they said, "Look, we we don't do mid-decade redistricting. We're not going to do this just because you tell us to."

[00:02:46]They stood in the way of of of Donald Trump's only theory of how to hold on to power, which is, at this point, 100% of what they're doing.

[00:02:54]Rigging the maps. I mean, the Trump administration is staring down a country that is turning decisively against it politically.

[00:03:02]Trump, personally, I don't know if you've noticed this recently, can't seem to marshal much interest in turning things around. I mean, seriously, it's clearer and clearer by the day that there's one thing he cares about, it's the only thing he cares about, and it's building his ballroom.

[00:03:19]We've done tents for years. Tents don't work, and when it rains, you know, it's very wet land here. It's sort of marshland, so when it rains, it's brutal. It's you know, you have a thing and the the water literally goes over their shoes.

[00:03:31]Uh I would do it. I mean, more importantly, for the future, we're building a room, you know, it's ahead of ahead of schedule, on budget, ahead of schedule. It'll be one of the most beautiful and one of the safest ballrooms anywhere in the world, but it'll be one of the most beautiful ballrooms. It's been needed for 150 years, and I approve of the ballroom.

[00:03:51]You can see, he wants to move him on to maybe other things to talk about, although he does concede he approves the ballroom, which comforting to all the Americans struggling to buy groceries.

[00:04:00]By the way, even as a polling shows Americans are against the ballroom two to one, this is a new development.

[00:04:07]I can't even believe well, I can believe we're here, but but but this is where we are.

[00:04:11]Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress now want to spend 1 billion of your tax dollars with a B on building it.

[00:04:20]Meanwhile, not that anyone administration seems to care much one way or the other, we are once again on the brink of active war with Iran.

[00:04:28]So far Trump's main response has been to riff about it to a bunch of kids.

[00:04:36]We can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon.

[00:04:38]You might be too young for this. I don't know. I won't they probably know and they they probably know better than most people, but you can't let a bunch of lunatics have a nuclear weapon. They would have had a nuclear weapon in within 2 weeks. Remember we sent that beautiful B-2 bomber in and we we blew up their nuclear potential. It was obliterated for those that are not aware.

[00:05:03]And to a point where they it would take them weeks to dig down and we don't wouldn't let them dig down. We have our eyes on it all the time.

[00:05:10]But it's to us a very important thing. So, we would have had a an Iran with a nuclear weapon and maybe we wouldn't all be here right now.

[00:05:22]That is all nonsense, of course. Iran was not 2 weeks away from a nuclear weapon. I mean, remember it was the Trump administration who said they had obliterated the nuclear program. What is not nonsense are the costs of this misadventure. Gas prices are, as you well know, spiking. Diesel is going up, too. It's even higher than gas prices.

[00:05:41]We're starting now to see the second order effects of that diesel price spike on your grocery bill because everything is trucked around in diesel trucks.

[00:05:50]And Trump says, and I got to believe him here, it's hard to know what to credit, but this one I believe him on, he's in no rush to do anything about it.

[00:05:58]Voters, on the other hand, are very clearly getting fed up with the cost of living, which again, was the signature campaign issue for this president.

[00:06:07]I voted for Trump, too. I'm not saying I disagree with him, but I think he's getting a little bit carried away.

[00:06:15]He's more concerned about the war over there and killing everybody over here with everything increased prices, and he just doesn't seem to care.

[00:06:24]And his big beautiful building helped me.

[00:06:28]It didn't help me in the least. If anything, it's one of the reasons I'm having to go back to work.

[00:06:35]The prices keep just keep going up.

[00:06:39]When you see the polling that shows approval ratings of 38, 39, 36%, that that's the guy you should think of, right?

[00:06:46]And in the face of all that, there is seemingly no desire at all for a course correction. I mean, really, none. I mean, Trump's chief of staff can barely rouse him to do the occasional event where at least they bill it as him touting an actual legislative accomplishment, like a thing you do with governing power, with real policy. His no tax on social security plan, although that is predictably a deceptive description of the actual benefits, which are more constrained than no taxes on social security.

[00:07:14]But again, that's like a one-off. Maybe once a week you can get him to do that.

[00:07:17]Apart from that, you're not seeing a guy who seems particularly concerned with what we might call like small d democratic engagement, right? There's a populist, he's got the bully pulpit, like here's a thing we're trying to do to make your life better.

[00:07:31]No.

[00:07:33]Instead, this administration, and again, Republicans at large, all throughout the country, in both houses, are going all in on a strategy of rigging the system and combining it with dirty tricks.

[00:07:44]It's what they tried to do in Indiana and why those state senators are facing primaries tonight. It's what they did do in Texas and now in Florida, where the legislature effectively unilaterally rewrote their congressional maps to benefit Republicans in just one day, in violation of a clear stipulation in the Florida state constitution that says that's not permitted.

[00:08:03]Ron DeSantis signing it yesterday.

[00:08:06]And now, thanks to the Trump majority on the Supreme Court and Trump's hand-picked justices on that court along with the other reactionary sitting there, they're gutting the Voting Rights Act and they're basically giving a green light to a bunch of Republican states across the South to just carte blanche fully eliminate Democratic-held seats in most cases all but one held by black representatives.

[00:08:29]Just get rid of all your Democratic black congressmen members from all of the states that used to comprise the Confederacy.

[00:08:37]That's the plan.

[00:08:39]To be very clear, that is the plan to retain power. To purge all black Democrats currently in the South so that they're they don't exist anymore.

[00:08:50]It is a abhorrent race to the bottom.

[00:08:54]Trump is using every lever he can to essentially preserve his power against what sure seems like could be the will of a majority of the voters.

[00:09:03]Mark Leibovich, staff writer at The Atlantic, where he warns today, quote, "Democrats could use a cold shower before the midterms." Who couldn't? Tara Setmayer is a former Republican spokesperson on Capitol Hill, now CEO co-founder of the Seneca Project. They join me now. Tara, I want to start with you with what's coming out of Indiana.

[00:09:18]So, we've got I think there's six or seven of these races. And again, this really was one of those moments. It was a little similar, I think, what's on Arizona with Rusty Bowers after after 2020, where it really did seem to me like these were people whose politics I don't share at all, who are who are not like they're not squishes and they're not like never Trump, you know, Republican. They are dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republicans who are like, "It is wrong to do this. It's just wrong. We're not going to do it." They're now being primary. One and one so far. Well, how important do you think these kinds of showdowns are in terms of Trump's ability to continue to project power against his own party to stop them from breaking away?

[00:09:58]Well, it's incredibly important because it still gives him it breathes life into his influence over the party. Just when we think people are starting to the fever starting to break, then things like this happen. You know, we always question when are the people who are in power, who are Republicans, going to stand up to him and tell him no. When are they going to yell stop? Um and so but when they're but when their power is threatened, that's usually when they are the least courageous. There were only a handful of Republicans who elected Republicans who did this and they lost either lost their seats or retired. So, um good for the Indiana folks who did stand up and say no to the redistricting and said this is not what we want, but they may pay for it with their with their seats. But, you know what? Some things are bigger than your elected office. There's life after the elected office. And I think, you know, courage is contagious and if people are willing to say and willing to risk their careers to do the right thing, then maybe that will catch on to other people. But, that's a big if, you know, but power is very intoxicating in politics. But, in Trump's America, that's what this is about. In Trump's America, it's about ballrooms and and billionaires and bullying and this is what happens. And so, people need to decide is this really where they want to go? That guy that you showed in the beginning is is a microcosm of the Trump supporter who has been betrayed. Donald Trump has betrayed every level of his of his base from farmers to military to blue-collar workers to the small business owner.

[00:11:32]He's betrayed all of them because in Trump's America, he doesn't care about any of them. He just cares about enriching himself and enriching his billionaire power brokers. And it's playing out in the polls every single day. And he clearly doesn't have a real strategy of actually doing anything that that benefits the American people who he promised he would make life better for because this is not the posture of someone who actually gives a damn about the midterms and about improving people's lives.

[00:11:58]You know, Mark, you you wrote about sort of in some ways the all the tailwinds Democrats have and yet still the the enormous challenge before them of sort of converting that into a decisive victory in the midterms. And I was looking back historically, it's really interesting like Barack Obama's approval rating was much higher than in in 2010 than George W. Bush's was in 2006, but they got crushed in those midterms. It you know, way lost way more seats than uh than than the Republicans did in 2006. Trump, [snorts] you know, well, they lost 40 seats in the House in 2018, but they actually won Senate seats. It doesn't It's not like there's this like neat neat causal map or physics of low approval rating victory in the midterms at the scale the Democrats are hoping.

[00:12:43]That's true. I mean, I think definitely there's a correlation between low popularity rating in a president and the House race. I mean, the president's power tip the president's party typically loses a fair number of seats historically in in a midterm election.

[00:12:58]Senate tends to sort of follow its own rhythms here. But I mean, I think the point that I was trying to make today is that there's a weird epidemic of of what feels like overconfidence among Democrats. I mean, they're seeing these polls. I think the indicators are extremely good if you're a Democrat and you can feel very optimistic and many of them do about what November could bring.

[00:13:18]But I also think that there's this weird sort of giddiness sort of prematurely given the the massive hole that Democrats dug themselves into um two Novembers ago. And I do think that that there is a sort of a short memory over, you know, why Democrats are where they are to begin with. And I think that there's potentially sort of an obscuring of the problems that Democrats still have pretty foundationally in the party to sort of dig out from under the hole they're in.

[00:13:47]Yeah, I mean, the the place that you're going to see that, right?

[00:13:50]Let's talk about the Senate for a second, Tara. I mean, one of the big headlines tonight is that Sherrod Brown, I think is going to be on Lawrence O'Donnell's show later tonight, is going to run for for run in Ohio. Of course, he served three terms there. He's he's he's speaking right now.

[00:14:06]Very popular Democrat there. Lost two years ago to Bernie Moreno. He's going to run again. He's you know, that's an uphill battle in a in a place that he represented and was very popular. And if if Democrats are going to take the Senate, Tara, I mean, they got to they got to basically sweep North Carolina, Alaska, and Maine. And then they got to win one of three of Ohio, Texas, and Iowa. Those are I mean, those are tough wins. Like that's you you're really going to have to win over a bunch of folks that A, don't like the Democratic Party. B, probably voted for Donald Trump.

[00:14:38]Exactly. Especially Yeah, sorry. Go ahead.

[00:14:41]Oh, no, it's okay. It's not impossible, but the Democrats being Democrats seem to not learn from the mistakes of the past.

[00:14:50]And as a former Republican who now caucuses with the Democrats, I often try to explain the messaging and how you have to run these races. And you can't run them like you did in, you know, political environments of the past. Like places like Iowa and you know, my organization, the Seneca Project, we put out ads last year about Donald Trump betraying military and and small business owners. Like trying to lay that foundation because when people are hurting, they need to know who to blame.

[00:15:19]Negative partisanship works. And in a place like Iowa who's gotten destroyed, their record number of farm bankruptcies, you know, the the fertilizer issue with the Strait of Hormuz and what's happening in Iran, the tariffs have killed our farmers, not just in in Iowa, but a lot of places, but using Iowa as an example, that's where you start to explain to people this Donald Trump has done this to you.

[00:15:39]His policies have done this to you. This is what we can do to help you improve your lives. So, if Democrats are able to be able to fight fire with fire with the truth on their side and show people what Donald Trump has done to them, then they have a shot. Cuz when you have numbers like Donald Trump has in the 30s like this, that's why the Senate is in play.

[00:15:58]So, it is an uphill battle, but they have a shot to do it.

[00:16:01]Mark, what were you going to say?

[00:16:03]No, I was just going to say Democrats' numbers are are almost as bad as Republicans. I mean, the reason Democrats have a shot here is because Donald Trump has handed it to them.

[00:16:12]Um I mean, I guess a sort of founda- the the sort of the the nuts and bolts of recruitment have been very successful for for namely Chuck Schumer in the Senate races. But Trump, I mean, you could not draw up a more counterproductive agenda than what Donald Trump's done the last few months.

[00:16:28]Um you know, starting with the tariffs and and obviously, you know, the war and the ballroom. I mean, just sort of go down the list. So, he seems to be mailing this in and Democrats obviously have a golden opportunity. The question is, will they fumble it cuz they've done this in the past?

[00:16:42]Yeah, and particularly, I mean, Mary Peltola, who I think is probably the the cream of the crop in terms of recruitment for Chuck Schumer this cycle, who's running in Alaska, who has won a statewide office there before, uh and who is also up in polling right now.

[00:16:54]I mean, of all the recruitments that and then of course Roy Cooper in North Carolina, his hand-picked recruit, Cheri Beasley, of course, just dropped out with Cal Cunningham, uh ran laps around her. Although, he's polling against Susan Collins, but again, um Sherrod Brown sort of officially uh tonight uh in that sort of that crew of people that are going to be the path to Democratic win the Senate if they can pull it off.

[00:17:15]Mark Leibovich, Tara Setmayer, thank you both.

[00:17:18]Coming up, the Republican plan to spend even more of your money on Trump's ballroom. I I can't believe they're going with it, but this is where we are.

[00:17:24]Senator Cory Booker joins me next.

[00:17:28]An unnecessary war in Iran, gas prices are at record highs, beef prices at record highs, Donald Trump remains laser-focused on building a fancy ballroom to host his fancy balls.

[00:17:39]And from the beginning, when he just bulldozed the historic East Wing of the White House, just without ever getting any permission from anyone to do such thing, Trump has assured everybody that like the border wall Mexico is going to pay for, this would cost exactly zero taxpayer dollars.

[00:17:58]You see that area? Yeah. That is going to be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world, and I'm paying for it. I'm paying for it. These are all uh private individuals that put up a lot of money to build the ballroom. Not one penny is being used from the federal government.

[00:18:13]Myself and donors are giving them, free of charge, for nothing. We're donating a building.

[00:18:20]Okay, so I'm paying for it, then donors are paying for it, free of charge, no money whatsoever. We're going to donate it.

[00:18:27]Well, prepare yourself, cuz you're not going to believe this, but that's all BS, and you are the donors.

[00:18:33]Republicans announced that they are proposing one billion dollars of taxpayer money for his ballroom. One of those earmarks tucked into a reconciliation bill that they're rushing through right now and can pass without any votes from Democrats.

[00:18:49]A billion dollars of public money for a ball one room no one wanted, that Trump did not campaign on, that no one even thought was necessary, that Trump said would cost 200 million dollars and zero public dollars, and is now one billion of your dollars. What a deal for the American people.

[00:19:07]Senator Cory Booker is a Democrat in New Jersey. He serves on the Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committee, and he joins me now.

[00:19:13]Well, I I saw the push alert today and I was like, "Wow, they're really going for it." Uh I'm I'm guessing you're probably a no on this. Um you know, Senator Chuck Grassley has been insistent that the bill does not fund ballroom construction. It provides funds for Secret Service. It's all about security. The whole day saying, "It's not about the ballroom." And then, of course, the White House immediately is like, "Hey, thanks for the ballroom money." Um we're very happy to have it. So, sounds like it is the ballroom, yes?

[00:19:42]Uh it it is. That's what I'm being told.

[00:19:44]It may be security features in the the ballroom, but remember, we don't want this. America doesn't want this. This is a billion-dollar expense, uh and a really a fund that he created, a slush fund, for more of these big corporations to try to curry favor with the president and his other pet projects. So, I I will tell you right now, this is uh straight-on Marie Antoinette. That's probably what the M and the now stand for, MAGA. Uh people want childcare, they don't want chandeliers.

[00:20:14]Uh they want uh affordable drugs and healthcare, not more dance floors at the White House. And it's really an insult at a time that he's raising costs on Americans, uh taking away healthcare from Americans, taking away uh feeding programs from our schoolchildren. And now he's coming to Congress for a billion dollars for this awful ballroom, uh which frankly he built in a way that thwarted all kind of historical protections on the building that used to stand there.

[00:20:45]There has been a huge sea change in the terrain upon which these midterms are being fought uh over the last a few weeks.

[00:20:54]Pa- partly because of the president sort of kicking off this round of of partisan gerrymandering at his direction to kind of lock in a Republican advantage, and then the Supreme Court essentially voting gutting the Voting Rights Act.

[00:21:07]Louisiana, uh moving Tennessee, others to get rid of uh majority black districts in the South and get rid of black representatives in the South. What How How significant is this right now and and where do you diagnose we are as we as you watch one southern state after another announce their intention to essentially purge their states of their lone black and democratic representatives?

[00:21:33]Look, I'm I'm just back from Birmingham, Alabama where people uh paid for the rights that Americans enjoy right now in sweat, blood, and and even death. Uh the hurt and the anguish in that community was palpable, especially because its history in a convulsive way repeating itself. Remember, right after the Civil War, so much blood, so much struggling, they had fair elections, and they were the first wave of African-Americans that came to serve in Congress, from the first black senators to the first black house members, but by the 1870s we saw the powers that be able to rejigger their elections by violating people's voting rights, and suddenly there was no African-American representation. In fact, states from North Carolina to Alabama would not see from the late 1800s, it wasn't until the 1980s, 1990s until they got black representation again.

[00:22:26]And so here we are uh after all of that history, all of that struggle, all of that sacrifice, six people erase the work and the progress of millions of Americans who bound together and said, "We're going to create a free society with free voting." And so it is absurd in states where the black population is 10 as 20%, 25% that there should be no federal representation that reflects uh the multicultural democracy that we have. It is systematically allowing states to stop African-Americans from having just representation. This is not about right or left, it's right or wrong. And this is us revisiting dark chapters in our history that so eviscerated our ideals, our common shared principles of fairness in elections.

[00:23:16]Increasingly I hear from not just Democratic wonks or people in the legal world, but but but sort of average Democratic voters, primary voters, plugged-in people, but the kind of folks who are who are paying attention that something has to be done about the court. That it that that that that we've gone through other periods of time where the court was out of control. Go read the Lincoln-Douglas debates and and they're all about the court and and what the the court had done in Dred Scott.

[00:23:44]Is Do you feel that way? Is this a priority of Democrats who gain power that something must be done? Some change has to come to the way that this court currently function?

[00:23:53]Chris, we're we're pitching this and you said Democrats Again, these are issues that most Americans agree on. Most Americans are against partisan gerrymandering. Most Americans believe that we should have fair representation. The Supreme Court is another example of an area where most Americans agree. Most Americans agree that the highest court in the land should not have the lowest of ethics laws and that billionaires can routinely shower Supreme Court justices with gifts from mobile homes to fancy expensive vacations. We all know that's wrong.

[00:24:27]In addition, most Americans agree that Supreme Court justices shouldn't sit on those benches until they're so ailing just hoping they can hold on well past perhaps even uh senility until their president lines up with their their their jurisprudence uh philosophies and they can leave the bench. That's why term limits are a good thing as well. And so yes, we have to think hard about how we're going to reform the court and bring it back into alignment especially because they're continuing to do things like we saw last week eviscerate years and years and years of progress and throw us back to those dark years where so many people were successfully suppressing the votes of minority groups throughout the South.

[00:25:12]Senator Cory Booker just back from Birmingham which is a great town with a really interesting mayor, really fascinating local political culture as well. Thanks a lot.

[00:25:20]>> Yes, great folks. Thank you.

[00:25:22]Still ahead.

[00:25:25]The operation Epic Fury is concluded. We achieved the objectives of that operation.

[00:25:30]Oh, okay. Well, then if you want to know just what an intractable mess Donald Trump's war in Iran has become nine weeks on amid a US blockade of Iran's own blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced today a new plan.

[00:25:48]As a direct gift from the United States to the world, we have established a powerful red, white, and blue dome over the strait.

[00:25:56]Project Freedom is defensive in nature, focused in scope, and temporary in duration with one mission, protecting innocent commercial shipping from Iranian aggression. Iran is the clear aggressor.

[00:26:11]Okay, that was as our dateline. That was today. It was this morning and it was a big announcement and you know, from the lectern Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense rolling out this new thing called Project Freedom this morning. A [snorts] glorious red, white, and blue dome.

[00:26:25]And as part of that plan to escort tanker ships through the strait, the US military said it had destroyed six Iranian small boats as well as cruise missiles and drones launched by Iran.

[00:26:33]Now, Iranian authorities said the US killed several civilian boaters in those attacks.

[00:26:38]Now, that comes a day after Iran fired more missiles at US ships and attacked the UAE. Of course, one might think that that means the so-called ceasefire which has been operative for a number of weeks is over. But no, Secretary Hegseth has that's not the case because this this new operation is part of something different.

[00:26:58]Iran fired at us, we fired at Iran. I'm just going to ask you more directly, is the ceasefire over?

[00:27:04]No, the ceasefire is not over.

[00:27:07]Ultimately, this is a separate and distinct project. The president's going to make a decision whether anything were to escalate into a violation of a ceasefire, but certainly we would urge Iran to be prudent in the actions that they take to keep that underneath this threshold.

[00:27:21]Okay, again, just if you're tracking this, they're firing at ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which of course is their main leverage point, but that is not a violation of the ceasefire.

[00:27:29]Ceasefire holds. We're just announcing a new Project Freedom that will let ships pass through the strait.

[00:27:35]And then this afternoon, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which yeah, where has he been really on all this?

[00:27:40]Finally went out to explain why they have this big new Project Freedom thing.

[00:27:47]The operation Epic Fury is concluded. We achieved the objectives of that operation. The United States has to do something about the fact that we're the only nation on Earth that can do anything to open up a lane within the Straits of Hormuz to get product and to rescue these people that are trapped in there.

[00:28:02]Okay.

[00:28:04]This is a new thing. This is not Operation Enduring Freedom. This is a new thing. Okay, Epic Freedom. So, then this evening, after all this, Donald Trump just pulled the rug out from his own strategy posting quote, "We have mutually agreed that while the blockade will remain in full force and effect, Project Freedom, the movement of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, will be paused for a short period of time to see whether or not an agreement can be finalized and signed."

[00:28:31]So, RIP Project Freedom. You you barely made it a day.

[00:28:36]Now we sit and we wait.

[00:28:38]What's going on?

[00:28:40]Meanwhile, more financial analysts are predicting that if the war persists and if the the strait remains blocked, right? Reserve gas supplies will be exhausted. Prices will rise further.

[00:28:50]People will drive less. Airlines will take it on the chin, and a global recession could set in by the fall.

[00:28:56]Robert Pape is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago who has studied air power, regime change, and war strategy for decades. He's the author of the escalation trap blog as well as a forthcoming book, Our Own Worst Enemies: America in the Age of Violent Populism, and he joins me on.

[00:29:10]And Professor, I want to have you on because we've been checking in with you throughout this. Your you know, your body of economic work and your prediction of the at the jump was air power will not produce the strategic outcomes you desire.

[00:29:24]Here we are now 2 months later after watching the coming and going of this newly announced project today, what do you think?

[00:29:32]Uh what I think is that Trump is bouncing from extreme to extreme in a clear doom spiral of failure. This is what it looks like, Chris, to be stuck in an escalation trap. Uh for months now, he has been searching for a use of military force that will allow him to declare a strategic victory. And at every turn, whether it's bombing to change the regime, whether it's an extended air campaign, whether it's the naval blockade, whether it's then Project Freedom, whether it if every single step, what you are seeing is strategic failure, and his choices are then to pull back in layer after layer of humiliation. And that's what's driving this forward because the more he fails, the more he's humiliated, the more he's searching for that next step.

[00:30:28]And I have to tell you, this is a quite a dangerous time, Chris, because he's bouncing from extreme to extreme.

[00:30:38]Yes, and I I I share that all I will say I I you know, again, personally to editorialize for a moment, I think humiliation is preferable to escalation.

[00:30:45]So so I think that's that's the better of the two outcomes, but I want to play you something that you know, one of the closest foreign policy advisor to the president, Senator Lindsey Graham. We know that he has been at the forefront of the effort to start this war. He was shuttling back and forth between Israel and the US and has been in contact with a lot of people in the region pushing for this war. So this is his plan.

[00:31:06]Which is to just pump Iran full of weapons.

[00:31:09]And let them sort of go to town shooting each other. And and that's the solution.

[00:31:14]I want you to listen to his idea for for how to kind of get out of this. Take a listen.

[00:31:20]I love the idea of a second amendment solution for the Iranian people. So if I were President Trump and I were Israel, I would load the Iranian people up with weapons so they could go to the streets armed and turn the tide of battle inside Iran. We don't need American boots on the ground. We've got millions of boots on the ground in Iran. They just don't have any weapons.

[00:31:44]What what do you think of that idea?

[00:31:46]This is just another delusional strategy. Recall when you had me on back in what two months ago, it was the Kurds. We're going to arm the Kurds. We What you're seeing here, Chris, is these are not strategists. These are people looking for a quick PR or a quick idea that can kind of hold the tide for an hour or two, but this is not really going to work. And after Donald Trump has threatened to end the civilization Iran to kill 92 million Iranians, we're now going to arm them with the idea they're going to fight for us. They may they may fight, but I think we're way down on the totem pole of who they think they're going to listen to.

[00:32:27]This week there's a lot of kind of geo-strategic alliances and conversations being had, right? I mean, we've got reporting about how Russia has provided Iran with intelligence, the Chinese have come to aid Iran ways. Obviously, those countries have bilateral relationships and interests that are distinct from the US, often adversarial to it.

[00:32:48]The Iranian Foreign Minister is heading to China for the first time since the war. Now, this is in advance of what is a very big planned summit between Trump and Xi I think in just about 2 weeks.

[00:33:00]How significant do you think that that relationship between China and Iran is at this moment since so much of that oil flowing east out of Hormuz is headed for China.

[00:33:11]Uh it's incredibly significant and it's the mirror image as President Trump Trump's authority is declining in Europe with merits in the Gulf with the say the UAE who we just got here who we just helped get hammered. And now the Foreign Minister of Iran's going to China after he's been to Pakistan and Russia. What's happening is Iran's great power is growing. It's growing as the fourth center of world power. Now, it's not quite there yet, but what you see is it's engaging in diplomacy with other major powers and notice America's not in the room. They're not consulting America. They're working against America and this is not a good sign. Those folks do not have America's best interests at heart and they're more and more talking among themselves. I don't think they're talking among themselves, how can we help Donald Trump and bail him out? I think if anything, it's going to go the other way.

[00:34:12]All right, Robert Pape, thanks for lending us your expertise tonight. I appreciate it.

[00:34:16]Thank you.

[00:34:17]Still to come, the big backlash to Donald The artificial intelligence industry infamously cozied up to Donald Trump when he returned to the White House last year. Remember they attended his inauguration ready to keep lining his coffers and in return the White House basically approached Big Tech with a laissez-faire attitude. Zero regulation, zero oversight. I just launched a special series on the Why Is This Happening? podcast called the AI Endgame, where I learned a lot about the potential impacts of this technology, about the political economy of it.

[00:34:48]And now, as the risks of this explosive unregulated technology have led to rare bipartisan noises in Congress, these models have become exponentially more powerful, Trump has, within the last few days, apparently finally decided that maybe there should be some kind of oversight after all.

[00:35:07]His reversal on this comes as the billionaire venture capitalist David Sacks, the White House AI czar, who wrote an executive order banning states from regulating AI, announced that he's on his way out and stepping down.

[00:35:19]George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, author of that profile titled The Venture Capital Populist, and he joins me now. It's great to have you here. Good to be here.

[00:35:26]>> Learned a lot from the piece. I mean, Thank you. So, talk me through Sacks. I mean, there are sort of sort of overlapping interests here, right?

[00:35:32]There's like all this huge tech money and billionaires who see like trillion-dollar markets in their eyes of AI. And then there's Donald Trump.

[00:35:41]And Donald Trump is coming to office just as they want to make these trillions of dollars, and Sacks is the kind of nexus between these two interests. He's Silicon Valley's man in Washington, which is interesting because Silicon Valley for decades wanted nothing to do with Washington. It had kind of a contempt for bureaucrats, for the freaky workings of representative government. Let us do our magic, keep your hands off it, you don't understand it. We might contribute money every now and then, but we'll go our separate ways, and it'll be good for everyone, and it will change the world. But in the last decade, I think Silicon Valley realized it could not afford to keep its distance from Washington. It became a lot of public skepticism about social media, >> Yes. about monopoly power, about invasions of privacy, and now about AI and its effect on children, on workers, and on humanity.

[00:36:34]There was a a shift in the valley it during the Biden years toward Trump, and it was >> [clears throat] >> Peter Thiel was sort of the er tech right figure going back to 2016.

[00:36:46]David Sacks is an old friend and associate of Thiel's. These are conservatives, so it's not a big surprise that they're for Trump.

[00:36:53]>> let me be clear here. Like there's a lot of sort of rewriting of this. I mean Marc Andreessen, who's another one of these conservatives, he was having a fundraiser for Mitt Romney in 2012. You know, there's a little bit of this like oh, they all turned around. It's like a lot of these guys were just conservatives. And a lot of them didn't really have strong politics at all. It was just let me run my company.

[00:37:12]Trump seemed like a figure who would let them run their company in a way that maybe Biden would create a few problems with antitrust action, with regulation, with SEC enforcement of the crypto industry. So, Sacks became the nexus between MAGA and Silicon Valley, and to reward him for a big fundraiser he held at his San Francisco mansion in the summer of 2024, Trump, I think with Andreessen kind of as the escort, turn made Sacks his AI advisor. And what Sacks's policy amounted to was essentially get the federal government out of this.

[00:37:50]Hadn't really been in it all that much.

[00:37:52]By the Biden administration had an AI Safety Institute. It had a policy where AI companies would share the results of safety tests with the federal government, but basically there's it's still an unregulated industry. It is all private sector, which is shocking given how much the federal government has had to do with tech ever since World War II.

[00:38:11]And and we should note that I mean, it's not entirely get out of it because one of the big things they did do was sign this executive order which says that states can't regulate.

[00:38:21]>> Right.

[00:38:21]>> [laughter] >> We don't want a patchwork quilt of all 50 different >> Right. regulations. We need one federal regulation. Where is it?

[00:38:28]>> It doesn't exist. Because we don't want it. The other thing Sachs did was kind of ran interference for Nvidia, which is the richest company in the world, the AI chip maker, by using his uh influence on Trump to get Trump to get rid of export controls on selling advanced AI chips to China. At the same time our whole policy is we're in a race with China to win AI dominance, and we must win it for the sake of civilization. So, there's a lot of contradictions.

[00:38:59]Basically, if you want to understand it, just think what is the interest of the biggest companies. What is the interest of the industry? That's where Sachs is going to land, and that's where Trump's policy has been for for an entire year.

[00:39:12]>> Except, you know, the point you made. I mean, the the the the line I kept hearing in a lot of these interviews was, "Imagine the nuclear arms race.

[00:39:20]It's Los Alamos, but it was a bunch of private firms just trying to build the bomb." Exactly. But What would that look like? How can that be? What we hear from tech leaders is this is dangerous, it could wipe out half of white-collar jobs in the next few years, and we must do it as quickly as possible. So, this is strange dissonance about the danger of it and the need to do it really quickly. And so, the public is rightly confused, frightened, skeptical, I think.

[00:39:49]Skeptical. Americans are actually more skeptical of AI than people in any other country in the world. Here we are the leaders in AI, and we also are the most worried about AI. And that's where Sachs, I think, has pushed Trump into a politically perilous position. Because he has got Trump and MAGA and the the White House on the wrong side of the public on this crucial issue, which several people told me will be the most important issue in the 2028 presidential election.

[00:40:17]>> really >> interesting point and I think I think there's a good chance that that is the case that they're now talking about maybe they're going to vet models before they come out, which again under more enlightened leadership, I would say, well, yeah, there's certain logic to that, but I think this is this is a typical sort of Trump kingly thing of like I'm going to do it. What you really need is some framework that's much more comprehensive.

[00:40:39]>> exactly. And it's insane that this technology that we're being told will be on the level of the industrial revolution, if not a greater transformation, has absolutely no collective control over it. George Packer, great piece on The Atlantic.

[00:40:53]Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

[00:40:55]Stay tuned. In just a few minutes, Jen Psaki will be speaking with former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

[00:41:00]We'll be right back.