Episode Details

Jon Herold comes in Tuesday on a chaotic summer schedule and immediately starts doing homework on a name nobody was floating. Trump just named Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as acting DNI, and Jon pulls his background live: no intelligence experience, but a track record of going after Leticia James, Eric Swalwell, and Adam Schiff, a role in the Fulton County files raid, and a management style so disruptive that Scott Bessent allegedly threatened to punch him at a dinner. Jon does not know if this is a great pick and says so out loud, which puts him in roughly the same honest position as everyone else. Trump also posted that Iran talks have been happening every single day this week regardless of what the media is reporting, Rubio told the Senate the war is over, and Jon notes this is approximately the seventeenth time someone has declared it over. Spencer Pratt's LA mayoral primary is happening today and Jon does not expect him to win, but is watching closely to see whether a stolen race finally gets mainstream people in California asking the question the rest of the country has been asking for years. The Trump-Netanyahu story from Axios is almost certainly planted narrative warfare and Jon explains why.