Transcript of Trump and the Art of the Surrender with Ben Rhodes New

All hell has broken loose as Donald Trump's top Republican allies in the United States and elsewhere are turning against him after his unequivocal, unconditional surrender to Iran. As one account notes, it takes truly keen political instincts to alienate your party's senatorial class just before selling out the US to Iran and needing them to run cover for you. Top-notch stuff. That was reposted by right-wing guy named Eric Erickson. Now we've heard from MAGA Republican senators like Roger Wicker after Donald Trump announced his surrender to Iran, after Trump promising that Iran would be the one that did an unconditional surrender. But Trump did an unconditional surrender and gave Iran everything they wanted, including $25 billion, control over the Strait of Hormuz, and that Trump has agreed he won't even talk about nuclear issues with Iran for another 30, 60 days. Here's what MAGA Republican Senator Roger Wicker says. The rumored 60-day ceasefire with the belief that Iran will ever engage in good faith would be a disaster. Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught. Let me just fact check him right there and fact check a lot of this. We should never have been in this unlawful and catastrophic war at all, period, full stop.

Donald Trump and Netanyahu are war criminals. They're genocidal maniacs. I'm just simply pointing out that Donald Trump promised a set of criteria that he said would show success, and he's failed in each and every one of them. Ben Rhodes, former President Obama's speechwriter and Deputy National Security Director, wrote the following: Nothing was accomplished by Operation Epic Fury except putting the IRGC in charge of Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. Then we heard from Lindsey Graham, warmonger, Lindsey Graham. He writes, if it is perceived in the region that a deal with Iran allows the regime to survive and become more powerful over time, we will have poured gasoline on the conflicts in Lebanon and Iraq. A deal that is perceived to allow Iran to survive and possess the ability to control the strait in the future will put Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Shia militias in Iraq on steroids. He then goes on to say, if a deal is struck to end the Iranian conflict, because it is believed the Strait of Hormuz cannot be protected from Iranian terrorism and Iran still possesses the capability to destroy major Gulf oil infrastructure, then Iran will be perceived as being a dominant force requiring a diplomatic solution.

This combination of Iran being perceived as having the ability to terrorize the Strait in perpetuity and the ability to inflict massive damage to Gulf infrastructure is a major shift of the balance of power in the region and over time will be a nightmare Israel. I guess Israel first for Lindsey Graham. Also, it makes one wonder why the war started to begin with. If these perceptions are accurate, I personally am a skeptic of the idea that Iran cannot be denied the ability to terrorize the Strait and the region cannot protect itself against Iranian military capability. It is important that we get this right. Then you had Ted Cruz, and Ted Cruz posted as well that he thought that this was catastrophic, that the outcomes be terrible. And he said that you couldn't have a worse solution, to which you then had Donald Trump's MAGA influencers and people in the White House like Alice Broussard said, cool, Ted, no one asked you, bro. Stop trying to undermine the president and his administration. Cruz wrote, I'm deeply concerned about what we are hearing about an Iran deal being pushed by some voices in the administration. And then in response to Trump official Alex Broussard, calling him out, Ted Cruz goes, hush child, the adults are talking.

I'm not your bro. And young political grifters pushing Iran appeasement are not remotely helping the president. One commentator noted, when you're having to tell Ted Cruz to shut up and be more obedient to Trump, probably not a great sign for normie voters. Then you had Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump's own former Secretary of State. He posted, the deal being floated with Iran seems straight out of the Wendy Sherman, Robert Malley, Ben Rhodes playbook. Pay the IRGC to build a WMD program and terrorize the world. Not remotely America first. It's straightforward. Open the damn strait, deny Iran access to money, take out enough Iranian capability so it cannot threaten our allies in the region. Overdue. Let's go. More and more warmongering. In other words, then you had Stephen Chung, Donald Trump's communication director, attack Mike Pompeo. And he said, Mike Pompeo has no idea what the fuck he's talking about. He should shut his stupid mouth. This is Donald Trump's head of communications in the White House. This guy's the top communications person in the White House. Leave the real work to the professionals. He's not read into anything that's happening. So how would he know? I think the only thing that people know is that Donald Trump said, here's what we're gonna do.

Regime change. We're gonna get rid of all the nuclear material. We're gonna get rid of the conventional weapons that are a shield to the nuclear material, like the ballistic missiles and the Shahed drones, right? Trump said here, all regime change, all these things were gonna happen. And, and none of them happened. And Trump showed that America's security and Umbrella in the Middle East was a complete and utter failure. And now, you know, you have Donald Trump sycophants like MAGA Mike Johnson posting, President Trump is the only one who could have gotten Iran, the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism, to the negotiating table. We are, we are greatly encouraged to learn of a peace deal in Iran is underway and look forward to learning more about the specifics. Under Trump's leadership, our nation is stronger, more respected on the global stage, and safer than ever before. You know, to which Erik Erikson, very right-wing guy, says, Obama got Iran to the negotiating table. And boy, doesn't the JCPOA seem like a great deal? I always thought the JCPOA was a great deal. Iranian enrichment, taking the uranium down to what, under 4% enrichment? Weapons grades like 90% enrichment.

It had all these international mechanisms to ensure that Iran wouldn't get weapons grade, but could use for civilian purposes. There was the buy-in by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, and there was all of these mechanisms. Fort Doe was turned into a research center. That's what you had there. Here, Donald Trump's base, after all of this, after the war crimes, after Manab, after Lebanon, after all the horrors that were unleashed in the world. After all of this, after Donald Trump saying, here's what I'm gonna do, here's how we're gonna win. Donald Trump got a deal that was way worse, not even in the same league as Obama's. If the Obama deal was the major leagues, this Trump deal was the peewee leagues. That's who Trump always is though. You know who I wanna talk to about all of this? I wanna talk Talk to the person who you had Pompeo and Cruz are all attacking, someone who worked in the Obama administration, Ben Rhodes. As Ben Rhodes just wrote to Lindsey Graham also, this guy helps create a global catastrophe and then notices that his dumb policy has left Iran stronger. So of course what's needed is even more war right there.

Oh, and Ben Rhodes posted, DC's Iran hawks got two wars, nearly every conceivable sanction designation, a blockade. Threw a wrench in the global economy and will still claim that just a little more pressure, a little more war, a touch of more bombing will magically yield the concessions they still won't be satisfied with. So right before this deal by Donald Trump was announced, probably another market manipulation thing as well, uh, I spoke with Ben Rhodes and I had a great conversation with him about everything that's going on in the world, in the Middle East. This is an exclusive interview I'd done with Ben Rhodes. Let me bring in my interview with Ben Rhodes. You're gonna want to watch this. I mean, this was I thought a really powerful interview with Ben Rhodes.

Let's bring in Ben Rhodes, former President Obama's speechwriter, former Deputy National Security Advisor. Great to see you, Ben. You're out with the new book, All We Say: The Battle for American Identity, a history in 15 speeches. But I gotta ask you from the outset, with this geopolitical environment going on, you've been in the room with Vladimir Putin before. You've been in the most high-level meetings. With former President Obama. So we got to dig in there to start, but there's definitely a link with the book because projecting who we are as Americans is what pervades, uh, your book. So I'm trying to distill for our audience the kind of moment that we're in, which is filled with this kind of existential dread about domestic issues and foreign policy kind of being intertwined. And when you Think about foreign policy. It seems if there's any consistency, which there isn't, it is attack our allies, whether it's Canada, NATO, Denmark, Southeast Asia, Taiwan, whoever, just attack them and then heap praise on the authoritarians, the adversaries who are working very openly to undermine and destroy us. And aren't hiding that. And Trump brags about his meeting with Xi, which to me looked utterly pathetic.

Putin then shows up in China and then gets a hero's welcome where they announce a new multipolar world. You had Foreign Minister Aragchi showing up right before Donald Trump goes there in, uh, in, in Beijing. And so let's just talk macro, and then let's drill down a little bit, then let's get into the book. Macro, What, what, what are you seeing right now about what America is doing? To me, it's not projecting strength. It's projecting being like a predator and then attacking our allies and making us weaker.

Yeah, well, that's a good summary. I mean, I think one way to, you know, approach this is like Trump clearly feels most at home in the autocrat club. You know, the people that he wants to spend time with are not even, you know, Republican members of Congress. Certainly not ally leaders. It's Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin and, and Bibi Netanyahu and people like that. Um, but if you, if you pull the camera back, you know, Russia has wanted to destroy the U.S.-led international order for some time now under Putin. Xi Jinping in China would like to replace that order with something that is dominated by the Chinese. And Donald Trump is the most useful witting or unwitting partner in that project, because everything he is doing is accelerating the dismantling and unraveling of that international order. So, you know, essentially the international system doesn't function anymore. When you ever hear about the United Nations, uh, he's dismantling US allies. He clearly has no regard for NATO. Um, that's our comparative strength, by the way, to the Chinese and Russians. And it's no coincidence that at that precise time You have a massive war in Ukraine that shows no sign of ending despite Trump's promises to end it on day one.

You have this bizarre, uh, totally pointless and unnecessary and destructive war in Iran that is accelerating the loss of faith that people have in America around the world. And at the same time, and this is where it becomes kind of existential to people in this country, capitalism doesn't work, inequality is run amok. Uh, AI is coming online and creating all this uncertainty about the future. So there's a sense that, that everything is kind of unraveling, uh, and that the beneficiary of that, um, is basically going to be a combination of Xi Jinping and the Chinese alternative, and then the people that are kind of looting the system in this country, the tech oligarchs and, and Trump cronies. And it just— I just don't think it's a sustainable dynamic, it's going to require a pretty massive correction in the next couple of years.

Talk about the damage that you see arising out of this war that may not be so obvious. I think some of the obvious things, which I'm not downplaying, are the rise in gas prices, inflation increasing, the cost of the war in the hundreds of billions, the $1.5 trillion military budget because $1 trillion couldn't control the Strait of Hormuz, the loss of life most significantly. Of our brave men and women who were out there. There's that. And then there's the kind of American standing in the world though, that to me is not getting enough attention because that is, when you think about your administration with Obama handing off a stable, predictable, certain kind of world that Trump used to say, look how great I am for the first 2 or 3 years, and then try to blame the remainder on COVID. The point is you're a temporary occupant of the White House and you're supposed to pass on a worse, a better situation or a stable situation. And what I see, and you probably have a better perspective of this than just about anybody, the security umbrella America's standing both in terms of NATO in the Middle East and Southeast Asia is gone.

Having an American military base in your country is a liability and is not even a strength anymore. And it makes you subject to American extortion. And it makes you a target of other nations as well. And the offensive capabilities that America once projected were demonstrated, one, to be not reliable, but two, a defensive posture with all of these drones and the way modern warfare has taken place. I think we've been exposed there as well, that these billion-dollar, billion-dollar THAAD and Patriot systems are important, but it's also not reflective of the modern warfare that we've seen. you know, in play out in Ukraine and in Russia and now in Iran. So what do you see about the standing and a more, uh, significance in the kind of a global world order structuring?

Well, first of all, there's some other unseen short-term costs, and then there are the longer-term costs that you're speaking to. I just say that we have also not been told the truth by the Pentagon and by the U.S. military, frankly, about the extent of the damage. I mean, I talked to people in the Middle East, the extent of the damage to US bases, facilities, embassies across the region. We just, we have no sense of the price tag, the amount of devastation, how long some of those facilities are going to be offline. And to your point, we've also spent down an extraordinary amount of US munitions that we brought from places like Asia, leaving South Korea more vulnerable, to try to defend, uh, uh, all these facilities and, and our allies. And what have we learned? To your point, Shahzad Iranian drones that you can make in your garage have hit our bases, have hit our Gulf Arab allies. An aircraft carrier cannot stop a speedboat from closing the Strait of Hormuz. And so it undermines the entire concept that America is a security guarantor, both in terms of our predictability and reliability and our you know, not doing something as stupid as launching a regime change war against Iran, but also just in terms of our capacity and our understanding of where war is moving, as you said, after Ukraine and Iran, then I think there are going to be massive geopolitical shifts here.

Um, first of all, the Iranian regime, because of the war and the assassination of, uh, Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, who, uh, you know, nobody is shedding a tear for, but it's actually more hardline now. Iran is now run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that has demonstrated that they can control the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world's fossil fuel energy flows. That is a huge deal, right? The Gulf Arab allies have played along with a concept in which we provide their security and they provide the energy, and that's kind of how the whole global economy works. Well, now their dependence on America has put them at risk. They were attacked because they are American allies and we could not defend them And that is going to lead them, I think, to start hedging against the United States and looking towards China. And then if you look around the world more broadly, to include our Asian allies and to include potentially even our European allies, who looks like a more stable and predictable actor right now? The Chinese Communist Party, that maybe you don't like the terms of the deal, maybe you think they're bullies, but the terms never change.

Or the United States, where you have a president who's been imposing tariffs, launching wars, shaking you down for essentially, you know, tribute payments like he's done to the Gulf. Um, America is not the stable bet. We are kind of the rogue nation in the world. And so I think what you're going to see in the long run, it puts at risk the dollar as the world's reserve currency. The dollar— I think most Americans don't realize what, what allows us to sustain our standards of living, which already feel like they're at risk because of rising prices, is the fact that we can take on so much debt because the whole world transacts through the dollar. Well, and that includes oil trades, importantly. You're already seeing some nations begin to move away from that. And if that is the case, then that is truly the end of not just kind of American hegemony, but America's capacity to sustain its fiscal situation. So there's a lot happening right now.

Yeah. And I want to—

I'm going to put a little pin in that because I want to talk about that, because what do we do when the next Democratic administration comes into power in D.C. and all of this, this, these issues then get blamed and the arsonists blame the firefighter for trying to put it out. And then you have a corporate news of trillions of dollars that just push, you know, the day-to-day game of— well, I won't put a pin in it. I'll jump in it now and then I'll get back to the next point. But, but, but then it gets back to the gamification of of, you know, oh, look, you know, all these problems are happening. But this is this mounting Ponzi scheme that we're seeing, you know, this, this shell game right now that we're seeing where things are bad right now, but in the future, 10, 20, 30, 50 years, they can get significantly worse. And Trump's handing the successor a pile of crap in the worst possible situation. And then that person gets blamed for it. And then all of these MAGA people who are going along with golden ballrooms and arches and $1.8 billion J6 settlements where Trump waives claims against himself for like audits and all these people then are like, we're so against this and how dare you, you know, Democratic president, yo, yo.

Then they become China hawks and Taiwan, the exact things they were. How do you see having the perspective of an Obama man? How do you combat when that happens so we don't get into this constant seesaw of the Democratic president gets blamed and a new Republican like Trump emerges, then a Democrat fixes it? Obama had to fix George W. Bush's mess. Took him a while but fixed it, handed it over. Trump created a mess. Biden started to fix it. It's the blame for those first 3 years. Things were going good. Trump Brexit. How do we get out of this cycle?

Well, I think first of all, what we can do is we can kind of learn from the last two times, uh, cuz there are things that were done right, but there are also things that were done wrong. Um, if you look at Obama comes in and there's a global financial crisis, remember that one, as well as, uh, the catastrophic war in Iraq. Uh, and you know, while I think Obama did a lot of stuff right, there was also a sense that, hey, we're not gonna look back, we're not gonna kind of go after people. Um, we're here to look forward and to build new things and to try to work together with Republicans. And that obviously left Obama in a situation where there was both a sense there wasn't accountability for those failures, but there was also a sense that, well, he owned things now because he's saying, well, this is normal. I'm taking the handoff and doing what I'm doing. Biden very similarly came in with COVID and a lot of economic disruption, obviously a lot of, you know, diminished US standing in the world. And the idea was we were kind of returning to normal here.

We're getting like the adults back in charge. And, and the same thing, there wasn't kind of a relentless effort to kind of spotlight just how much things had gone wrong and who was to blame for that and hold them accountable. Look, I think that the next Democratic president is going to come in, things are going to get worse in the next couple of years. So first of all, I think it's going to be very apparent to Americans, um, just how deep of a hole we're in by the time of the next presidential election. I think you have to come in with speed. You're not coming to restore normalcy. You're coming in an emergency situation. I mean, I think the analogy would be, uh, and I just spent, you know, uh, 4 years in American history because of working on this book. The analogy would be FDR, who was one of the chapters in my book. But when he came in, it was not normal. We're, we're doing— we're moving fast, we're doing huge things. Um, and, and I think that we have to come in hold people accountable. We have to reveal all the corruption.

Uh, don't hesitate from looking back. I mean, I'll leave it to the justice system to deal with people who've committed crimes, but beyond that, I think there should be a relentless focus on spotlighting the grift and corruption and dismantling of the U.S. government that was done. There has to be a rapid effort to uproot anything that is entrenched in the U.S. government that is MAGA ideology or grift. There has to be a construction of how the US government works. There has to be an enormous reform agenda. And this is another thing I found in my book. After the Gilded Age is when you got the direct election of senators, you got women's suffrage, a similar level of ambition in just transforming how politics is financed, how, how politicians are held accountable in this country, how you can assure Americans that the government is actually going to work for them and not just a set of special interests. And then globally, I think a real effort to say this is over. You know, we're dismantling this forever war apparatus. We're not just drawing down some troops. We're taking the whole thing apart. We're an anti-war party now.

We're not going to do the dumb war thing anymore, and we're going to reengage the world as a country that wants to deal with issues that people care about, like how do you put guardrails about artificial intelligence? How do you deal with the threat of climate change? So I, I think all that adds up to the Democrats needing to not come in and try to make things feel normal, but to come in and act as FDR did with the sense that there is an emergency that is of a scale that everything is going to have to be different going forward.

I think about the State of the Union address that you put in January 6, 1941, FDR, when he says the nation which had looked inward was now committed to an all-inclusive national defense, to defending not just the Western Hemisphere but people who are resisting aggression and to rejecting any negotiated peace with dictators. These principles, as you write, would not shape not just America's approach to World War II, but its policies for 80 years, as you talk about the speech that he gave. And here we are now seeing a complete reversal of that, Donald Trump coddling with dictators. And as I go through your book, I mean, as you say, these words these speeches have a way of redefining, setting the direction and tone of American history and just how important words are. I mean, you as a speechwriter were very careful when you would be drafting these speeches. I can't even imagine the amount of work that went into the famous speech that you and Obama did in Cairo. I mean, these are— every word, comma had a meaning that was embedded. That was past looking, forward looking, present looking, that communicated messages to parties that, that understood it.

And in this particular moment right now, as you also pivot in the book to talk about Trump's assault on democracy, it's also an assault on, on words and language. And the meaning by when he does these speeches, if you even want to call them that, which is just verbal diarrhea and it's all over the place. It is kind of an affront to the idea of words matter, what America says matter. And in and of itself, the verbal diarrhea is a destructive exercise akin to siding with our enemies over our allies through the verbal diarrhea. That's, that's one of the things I took out of the book, even if that's not, that's not what you said it's about.

Yeah, no, that's, that's exactly right. And look, to connect these conversations, because I think it's really important how you framed it. We— Trump has kind of dismantled the idea that we have a shared national identity or even a shared reality in this country. Now, underpinning that is a deeply reactionary story that has always been part of the American story, right? It's a kind of white Christian nationalism that rejects or subordinates other identities and basically says that there's a group of people in this country. And with Trump, it's a very small group group of people who are allowed to do whatever they want. Um, and, and then alternatively, there's a more progressive sense of national identity, a progressive story that I trace, you know, all the way back from the Constitution through the abolitionist movement and Lincoln and through FDR and Kennedy and King up through Obama, that says what America is about is a country that is founded on a creed, an idea that we pursue equality, um, and that we're extending that effort across the United States and around the world. And, and I think that this has been missing in this country and in how this country talks to the world right now.

There's a sense that people have everywhere that, that it's not working, that, that the American experiment is in some ways unraveling, that I don't think that, that, that life for my kids is going to be, uh, better than my life, that I don't know how the economy is going to function with AI. I don't know what we stand for in the world anymore. That's how people are feeling. That is much more existential than just, uh, even important things like, I want my ACA healthcare subsidies, or, you know, I want the government to, to build more housing. Those are important things. I think what's missing for Democrats is what is the story, you know? Uh, Obama launched in 2004 because he came along when Democrats were feeling on the back foot and he told a story about America and what American identity means that allowed him to become president of the United States. Like, that's how important speeches and words can be. And I think right now we need political leaders, uh, in the Democratic Party or even in movements who, who are engaging in this bigger question about what is American identity, what is it all about, and where are we going?

And by the way, when we have done that well in the past, that shapes what we mean and stand for in the world. you know, in that FDR speech, the Four Freedoms speech, he didn't just lay out the case against isolationism and for support for, uh, Britain against Nazi Germany. He said, this country stands for something. We stand for four freedoms in this world, right? Freedom to say what you want, freedom to believe what you want, freedom from fear of, of war, and, and freedom from want as well. And those four freedoms became the basis not just of what America stood for in opposition to fascism in the war, they literally became the basis for the entire post-World War II international order. They're really written into the United Nations Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, their words around civil rights, around the purpose of the United States, well, that gave us an advantage over the Soviet Union because people said, look, look at what people can do in a democracy. They can right wrongs, uh, they can stand for things, they can even deal with their own problems like systemic racism and segregation.

We are in a moment where we're gonna need similar storytelling about what is the purpose of the United States, but also about what is the next world order, because the whole house is being blown down right now. We're not renovating this country or the international order. We're gonna have to rebuild it on the other side of Trump. And that there has to be a story at the center of that. From which policy and relationships grow like branches.

You know, it's fascinating when I see Prime Minister Carney's speeches, very intentional, very Obama-like, frankly, almost like you've written some of those speeches in a way, but he probably has speechwriters like you. But it definitely sets out a vision of what Canada looks like in the future. Reliable, predictable, turning to Europe. This is a rupture. This isn't just a mere temporary— I mean, it's a very consistent message and it sets out what Canada is going strong. So I would be remiss if I didn't conclude this interview with you as we talk about your book, which everybody needs to get, by the way, All We Say: The Battle for American Identity, a History in 15 Speeches, to ask you, and I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I've got you, probably one of the most, if not the most preeminent speechwriter of our time right here who wrote these Obama speeches that changed the world for good. What would you tell someone who's running for office in 2028 right now? Obviously, I'm not going to ask you to sculpt the full speech, but what do you think that looks like for them? And I'll tell you what I observe.

I'm saying, who's filling up stadiums right now in the Democratic Party on off years and what message is resonating? I'm listening very carefully to those Bernie rallies and the fight the oligarchy tour that draw 20,000, 30,000 people in Utah, you know, and in West Virginia. And I'm listening to what those people are saying when AOC's out there speaking in front of huge crowds. I'm listening to what those people are saying, and they're drawing crowds who are Democrats, Republicans, MAGAs, independents, people who don't like politics. And I'm listening carefully to those speeches, and I'm saying, I see how that's resonating with those people. But what's your, what's your view to you know, looking forward, what does it look like, do you think?

I, you know, I love the question. And actually, I will point to a few Democrats and who are doing something interesting in the way they speak, because I think we can draw from, from them some of the answers to your question. If you look at a Jon Ossoff, for instance, when he speaks about corruption, broken. He connects it to why things are so broken and how things could get better. In the Democratic Party, there's also often been like, we're either talking about democracy and corruption, kind of process issues, or we're talking about, you know, healthcare and policy issues. And what Ossoff is saying is he's telling a story about how this whole system has become corrupted. And not just Trump, the entire political system has become corrupted. That's why you, the voter, are getting bad outcomes. That's why the prices are too high. That's why you can't afford healthcare. That's why AI is coming for your jobs. It's a coherent and complete story that connects the need to fundamentally reform our democracy to the outcomes that people care about in their lives, their jobs, their healthcare, their prices, so that it's not just a kind of pointy head, you know, uh, op-ed page.

Democracy argument. It's an argument about how to make government work. If you look at James Talarico in Texas, he's talking about, you know, and I found this in going back and looking at what makes these speeches consequential and connect, it's when they're also truly authentic, when you're the only person on earth who could be delivering this message. And then I think that's something everybody who runs for president needs to keep in mind, not just what's my 5-point plan, why, why are you running? Why? Why you? And when Tallarico talks about why he's running for Senate, he talks about his faith and how his faith compels him to want to care for his neighbor and to want to have a different kind of conversation in this country. I think people are ready for that kind of message, a more kind of not just policy. Again, like, who are we as Americans? How do we connect with one another? What motivates the people that go into public life? And then to your point about the rallies, I think AOC, what she does that is so important is she's fearless and joyful in how she refuses to be intimidated by all these forces that are arrayed against her.

Joy is really important. I was on the 2008 Obama campaign. That was the most joyful exercise I've been a part of. People wanted to be a part of it. And I think in the Trump era, we've fallen into a trap the last 3 presidential campaigns where we're so angry and we're kind of— we should be, by the way. But, but you need to kind of have— what AOC is angry about the same things we are, right? She's angry about the oligarchy. She's angry about inequality. She's angry about racism, discrimination. But there's a kind of joy to her politics. And so I think if you take those three examples, the kind of coherence of an Asaf, the kind of core values proposition of Vitalik Buterin, and then that kind of joyful fearlessness of an AOC, You have the ingredients of what we need. Again, the common thread, and I saw this like through all the speeches that I found to be the most impactful in my book, is they're not just policy proposals. You know, they're about something bigger than that. They're telling a story about what has happened in this country, why it's happened, why I, the speaker, uniquely care about it and am motivated to do something about it.

And then laying out a vision that other people can be a part of. And I think we're beginning to see, and notably Ossoff, AOC, Tallarico, they're younger. I also think there's a generational change. People are ready to hear someone come along who's my age or younger and say, let's just turn the page on all of this, which can also often be the most powerful message in the world, one of generational change.

Everybody, if this interview didn't convince you to get the book, I frankly don't know what else will. But we had 7 million subscribers, so y'all need to get this book, All We Say: The Battle for American Identity, a history in 15 speeches. It's great to see the man behind the book, Ben Rhodes. Thanks for all you do. And of course, we'll be checking in on all of the Midas Mighties book reading experience. I know they'll enjoy it the way I did. And then also, I'm looking forward to seeing what you're up to next.

Thank you so much, and I love what you guys are doing. It's really inspiring to watch. So thanks.

Thank you, everybody. Hit subscribe and let's get to that 7 million subscriber mark.

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