Marcus and Madeline get into the news — and the news is a lot.
They open on Trump's unilateral ban of CNN, Politico, and MSNBC from White House coverage, which by Monday had produced a lawsuit, by Tuesday had the Justice Department in court arguing that press access is a privilege and not a right, and by midweek had produced a clip of Trump telling Kaitlan Collins at the UN General Assembly that she shouldn't be there covering him. Madeline notes that the administration invented something called "post-deprivation due process" to justify acting first and providing process later — a legal theory she has never heard of in her life and describes as made-up BS. The judge assigned to the case is Trump-appointed Judge Timothy Kelly, the same judge who presided over the Jim Acosta access case in 2018. Marcus thinks this gets laughed out of court. The more important point: the press ban and the Iran war are not separate stories.
Then the UN General Assembly speech — Trump threatening to either rebuild Iran into one of the greatest countries in the Middle East or "drive them into hell with no chance of survival." Marcus, who spent a decade serving in that region, says Iran doesn't believe him and has the upper hand in this war. Madeline traces the Board of Peace grift through Trump's own words at the UN: Morocco, Bahrain, Kazakhstan — countries whose names he can't pronounce, all lined up for the rebuild. It always comes back to the money.
The final stretch is about AI — and it goes deeper than the usual conversation. Trump has hundreds of millions invested in AI companies and is not motivated to regulate them. The Chevron deference ruling gutted the ability of subject matter experts to enforce meaningful regulations, which is exactly the point. Madeline draws a sharp distinction between Anthropic — the good guys, who refused Pentagon contracts without human oversight guarantees — and OpenAI's Sam Altman, who stepped in when Anthropic walked away. Pope Leo's alliance with Anthropic against the Peter Thiel/Marc Andreessen war profiteer tech bloc is not an accident. These are people who understand what's at stake if this technology ends up in the wrong hands without guardrails, and they're saying so out loud.
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