Rick Wilson & Michelle Lujan Grisham

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Molly JongFast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And an NBC News poll says Democrats have a five-point advantage to take back Congress. We have such a great show for you today.
The Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson joins us to discuss the White House melting down over leaked tapes of their readings on the Epstein files. Then we'll talk to New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham about universal childcare and how her state is delivering it. But first, the news.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:39)
Smiley, Trump is apparently after 40 tries going to actually end this war in Iran, which is good because we're running out of oil. That seems pretty bad, huh?

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:49)
I mean, again, will he end the war in Iran? Israel is bombing the suburbs of Lebanon. So Donald Trump is not going to be able to get this war over until Israel stops bombing Lebanon. And Donald Trump does not seem to have any control over Netanyahu. So until that happens, I think that Donald Trump is going to talk a lot of smack. But whether or not he actually does it, I think is a real question. And that's where we are at this moment. Now, the problem is there are these cliffs for oil refineries. There's a certain amount of oil that are sort of stockpiled in different places. And we never filled up our oil stockpiles to begin with. A normal government making normal plans, even Republicans, even a Bush government, a normal government would have said, well, we're going to bomb the Iranians. Not a great idea, but we're going to fill up our oil reserves so that we have it. But they never did that. And so fast forward, we are on day 105 of this very short war, which is not a war where the straits are open, but also closed. And now, according to the US Energy Information Administration, which still seems to give out legit information in our otherwise 1984-ish world, there's little more than half of the 40 million barrels they usually store. The tanks are effectively empty with only unusable sludge remaining. That's right, baby, unusable sludge. Is that going to be my new nickname, unusable sludge remaining? That's how my voice feels right now.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:35)
Yes, yes. You know, you remind me of two things that Trump would be bitching about Biden with the oil reserves when gas prices would go up. Hmm. It's always funny how there's always a tweet.
Secondly, when you were talking about Netanyahu, there's this great reporting that Trump said to Axios that Netanyahu has, quote unquote, no fucking judgment.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (2:55)
When he's right, he's right, and he seems to be right about that. Look, Netanyahu, this is the problem with a foreign country, whether it be a big country or a small country, a country that some of us who are Jewish feel some emotional connection to. Other countries have other goals, and they're not the same goals as our goals. Now, Netanyahu's goal happens to be to stay in office, so he doesn't go to jail, which happens to also be Trump's goal.
But they need to leave Lebanon alone, and that's the only way we're getting this peace deal going, and that's the only way that oil prices will go down. Though, Donald Trump, I think, is about to find out that it is much easier to make prices go up than make them go down.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:42)
Yeah. So, more interesting reporting that we have is CNN is reporting that Trump literally, like, we were hours from having boots on the ground in Iran.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (3:53)
I mean, all of us saw that and could tell, and basically, they wanted to seize the enriched uranium, which, by the way, would have been a fucking... I mean, you don't have to be a military expert to know that sending American men and women into Iran to go underground to seize uranium dust and then take it with them would have been a fucking disaster. I mean, there is no world where this would have ended in anything but tears. So we're very lucky that this didn't happen. It would have been insanely difficult. An anonymous source told CNN, I mean, it would have been a huge, huge effort with a lot, a lot of troops. And also, by the way, again, like this is poor planning on the part of the Trump administration, which, you know, you don't even need to say it. It's an oxymoron. But we don't have any allies going into this thing except the Israelis. So going into it alone, huge amount of ground troops in there to get something that supposedly I was told was destroyed or is hidden underground, it would have been a fucking disaster. And we're really lucky that whoever convinced Trump not to do it was able to.