Harry Litman & Ed Zitron

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And a PRRI poll says Americans who say they are proud or very proud of being an American has dropped 31% over the last decade. Hmm, I wonder who's been president. We have such a great show for you today, Talking Feds' own Harry Litman stops by to talk about Trump's latest illegal behavior. Then we'll talk to Better Offline's Ed Zitron about the latest AI news, but first the news.

**Harry Litman** (0:38)
So Molly, we have some election news. Trump got all his picks that he was excited about in a couple states, showing that he's strong in the party. But on the left, we have the opposite response where in DC, the socialist that he is threatening won or is going to win.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:56)
Yeah, DC is like an 80% Democratic.
Is it 80? 88%?

**Harry Litman** (1:04)
80 is being generous, I think.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (1:06)
Yeah.
We got a Los Angeles situation here, where Spencer Pratt looking for the votes. Of course, a Democratic socialist is going to win. She has a lead. She is a member of the city council. Look, we have a Democratic socialist in New York, and he has been pretty great. People are really happy with him. He's done a lot of cool stuff. So maybe DC will get some of that. Yeah.

**Harry Litman** (1:38)
I mean, what do you think, though? It really feels like Trump is having a great season of electing very beatable candidates. Am I right?

**Molly Jong-Fast** (1:45)
Yeah. I mean, this has always been the problem with Trump, is that he doesn't really care. There's been the problem for Republicans. It's a good thing for the rest of us. He doesn't really care about any one selection but his own.
So he has supported people that are just the Roy Moore types. So we saw that in Georgia, the Georgia Senate primary that Trump came in at the 11th hour and endorsed a guy called Mike Collins, who is very mega and very nutty and makes Ossoff's campaign for re-election a little easier.

**Harry Litman** (2:24)
Yeah. So we're seeing the Senate delay Jay Clayton's nomination for Intel Director.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (2:30)
So it's not entirely clear what's happening here, whether Trump is trying to get. Trump had a sort of laundry list of things he wanted with the Jay Clayton stuff. So basically Bill Pulte is going to be the acting DNI until Jay Clayton is confirmed, both Democrats and Republicans decided to jump on the Jay Clayton confirmation hearings as quickly as possible because they hoped that this would end up creating a scenario where Pulte didn't get the job at all. But Trump, in his infinite whatever weirdness, decided that he just wanted to tie a bunch of stuff to it, including FISA and SAVE Act, which, by the way, I am convinced that the reason why Trump is so obsessed with the SAVE Act is because he just knows that he can't win any other way. By the way, there's no world in which the SAVE Act gets passed, right? Because they'd have to kill the filibuster in order to do that. And everyone has said they have no... The Republicans have said there is no appetite to kill the filibuster. So I don't know exactly what Trump is thinking here. I mean, I think he thinks that if he gets Bill Pulte in there, it's good for him. I still am not convinced, but we'll definitely see more of this. You know, this is this continual thing where, you know, Trump has put everybody in a terrible position, as always.

**Harry Litman** (4:00)
So you know what I really hope is planning our wars for us? A racist chatbot designed by Elon Musk. But unfortunately, that is actually the case that the Pentagon used that to target Iran.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (4:13)
There are a few people who have gotten more from this government than Elon Musk. I mean, maybe the Trump boy is, but that's it. So top defense officials say data centers powering trillionaires' chatbots are critical to national security, and they used Grok AI to fire 2,000 missiles at Iranians.
What we're going to see here, so this is from this lawsuit about Elon's data centers illegally polluting black communities. This is like so on the nose, Trump's DOJ defends Musk's colossus data centers despite the fact that it threatens black communities. Elon Musk, the guy who is anti-antiracism and feels the real victims of racism are white people, that guy is illegally polluting black communities. Who could have seen this coming? Everyone? Everyone could have seen this coming? Again, what's interesting about this is that nobody knows who, I mean, certainly some people know, but none of us sort of casual observers to the Defense Department know what was used to fire more than 2,000 munitions at 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours. We do know that we did hit a girl school, and US military investigators believe American forces were likely responsible for the strike on an Iranian girl school that killed at least 175 people, mostly children, mostly girls, Iranian girls. And you'll remember that when Trump was asked about it, he said it wasn't him, it wasn't us, it was definitely us. And so there is this weird scenario where these guys are actually admitting that GroK-powered AI took out a girl school. I'm sure that's not what's happening though.