Up next in 10
Simon Marks joins Matt Frei for his weekly Washington round-up.
00:00 Scott Bessent admits that the Strait of Hormuz is never going to reopen.
04:42 Donald Trump turns on his old ally Jeanine Pirro after reflecting pool fiasco.
07:50 White House ballroom construction halted again by appeals court.
09:14 The Argentinian ranch where Silicon Valley's tech elite are planning to wait out the apocalypse.
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0:00
I think this is huge news that we all need urgently to be paying attention to
0:05
What is it? Because for weeks, and indeed for the past several days, Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary
0:11
kept predicting there was going to be an imminent deal to get the Strait of Hormuz reopened
0:16
And of course, we desperately need the Strait of Hormuz to be reopened
0:19
all of us, especially this country. Suddenly, last night, Scott Besant, giving a TV interview
0:26
was asked this question. Some who've speculated the strait will never go back to being the way it was before
0:31
What would you say? I would say I would take I think they're saying that in a doomsday sort of way
0:39
I would say it in another way. The strait is never going back to the way it was because the Iranians have used or tried to use it as a choke point
0:50
What we are going to see over the next two years, the strait is going to become irrelevant
0:54
It is going to become just another body of water. And I would say that more than 50 or 70 percent of the energy that moves through the strait now is going to go through underground pipelines
1:08
The strait is never going back to what it was. And we're going to have to wait another two years, at least
1:17
for the creation of a whole raft of underground pipelines so that we can find a way, basically, of getting the oil through a strategic waterway
1:26
that, if it is closed, the accounting giant EY, formerly Ernst & Young
1:31
said this week will lead to 6.4% inflation in the UK by the time everybody's going out and doing their Christmas shopping
1:41
And next year we'll see not economic growth, but economic shrinkage of 0.2%
1:49
If I were Andy Burnham or John Healy, you'd have your hair on fire over this
1:54
because that is the first top Trump official who's basically said it's never going back
2:00
It literally said it's never going back to what it was. And let's just remind the audience of the obvious
2:05
which is that America doesn't need the Strait of Hormuz because it gets its own oil and it has its own gas and it does its own stuff
2:11
And that American-owned oil companies are profiteering out of the fact that the closed Strait of Hormuz has sent the price of oil soaring
2:20
even though it has soared now to over a gallon on the national average I gather that in Washington D this week people were paying a gallon And that of course is politically unsustainable
2:33
for Republicans who in now three months' time will be facing their destiny at the hands of voters
2:40
So it definitely puts a pressure point on the Trump administration. But equally, you know, we saw July numbers
2:47
that showed that the economy lost 23,000 jobs in the United States
2:53
even as the corporate titans were recording record profits. So Trump's delivering for all his mates on Wall Street
2:59
while the working stiff is putting $4 a gallon gas into their cars at petrol stations all over the country
3:08
I wonder if in the laundry list of America's woeful wars of choice
3:13
you know, Iraq, which we participated in, vietnam whether this one this one will go down in history as the worst of the lot because it didn't
3:23
just they didn't just not do the things that they set out to do which is you know reduce i mean
3:28
fundamentally halt iran's nuclear and ballistic missile program get rid of the regime they didn't
3:35
do that they've also created a problem that wasn't there before and created a cancer on the trump
3:41
presidency, as Ed Luce described it this week in the Financial Times. I mean, there's no way
3:47
that privately they don't regret having begun this conflict, because it's turned into a steaming pile
3:53
of disaster for President Trump. He can find no way out of it. And the only way out that may one
4:00
day turn up is a situation that returns us to a worse status quo than existed before the war began
4:09
And that, as Scott Besant is saying there, is Iran continuing to use the Strait of Hormuz as a choke point, which, of course, it was not doing prior to the war
4:18
But the impact on our economy now is going to be such that, I don't know what John Healey obviously is going to announce in his October the 28th budget
4:25
but how would you even make those calculations if you were the Treasury now having to look at the possibility of no return to normalcy for another two years
4:35
And let's be honest, you're not going to build those underground pipelines in two years. There's no chance of that
4:39
Absolutely not. Okay, let's move to safer territory, which is the reflecting pond, and indeed, and the
4:45
ballroom that was cancelled. So which one do you want to tackle first? Well let just start with the reflecting pool right Because these things are linked You got a war on Iran you can find your way out of And instead of spending all of his time last week focused on that the President of the United States
5:02
appeared to spend vast amounts of time talking about the Reflecting Pool, fuming at Janine Pirro
5:08
We should just remind people what it is. Beautiful landmark in the middle of Washington DC, right at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial
5:13
this massive reflecting pool that is always a feature of any televised event that's taking place in Washington
5:20
and a huge tourist mecca for visitors. And, of course, Donald Trump became obsessive about wanting to refurbish the reflecting pool
5:29
and putting in an American flag blue floor. So he brought his pool guy in
5:36
I mean, literally, his pool guy in. But it looks like an extra from The Sopranos
5:40
A man who he now denies knowing, of course, to the surprise of nobody
5:44
So what happened was the renovation was done, and as you know, it was botched
5:50
and the flooring, the new flooring, started breaking apart and floating to the surface
5:55
at which point a three-time Olympian canoeist by the name of David Hearn, like many tourists
6:01
thought, I'll go and have a look at the reflecting pool and see what this was all about, saw a bit of the floor floating to the surface
6:07
grabbed in to look at it with his hand and was promptly pounced upon by the National Guard
6:14
and the US Secret Service and accused at President Trump's behest of vandalism
6:20
because Trump can't accept his pool guy mucked this up. It's all vandals
6:26
So Janine Pirro, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, two weeks ago has to go into a court and says
6:33
I'm very sorry, we've got to drop the charges because there's no evidence to support that he engaged in any act of vandalism whatsoever
6:39
there is unfortunately evidence to show that this was a botched renovation job
6:43
Trump has gone bananas over this. And to the point where her job is now hanging in the balance
6:51
And this is a woman who, as you know, Matt, has been his loyalist supporter
6:55
long before he was even running for the presidency and a rottweiler on his behalf on Fox News
7:01
including, of course, backing the completely false narrative that the president continues to spread
7:08
about the 2020 election having been rigged. So all of this focus on the reflecting pool
7:15
now they looking at I think million of expenditure The expenditure on this thing is ballooning to try and repair it after his pool guy botched it And he just cannot accept the reality that this was a botched renovation This was not
7:30
done to the reflecting pool maliciously by radical left communist vandals. Now, Trump understands
7:37
images. That's been one of his secret sources of political success. And the image of that botched
7:43
pooled together with the image of the East Wing of the White House being munched away
7:48
by bulldozers and now being rebuilt as that beautiful big ballroom. These are the things that I predict will come to haunt him in the future
7:56
So tell us about the ballroom. So there is a real question now about the ballroom because a Federal Court of Appeals
8:01
yesterday said that Trump did not have the power to tear down the East Wing of the White
8:06
House and build, and it's not really a ballroom, it's a six-storey deep security bunker that
8:13
they're building at the White House that happens to have a ballroom on top of it. He himself has
8:17
conceded that. It's more of an airport hangar. He didn't have the authority to do it. He had to do it
8:21
by getting congressional approval for it. So now it goes to the Supreme Court. There is a real
8:27
possibility here that either the Supreme Court agrees with the Federal Appeals Court and says
8:31
no, you didn't have the authority to do it, in which case everything comes to a complete standstill
8:36
Or the Supreme Court gives him the go-ahead to keep working on it. I mean, it could take a while
8:41
for the Supreme Court to hear this case. There is a possibility that by the time we get to 2029
8:46
and a new president presumably comes to power, that president is going to have to decide
8:53
what to do with this building site about which Congress knows nothing
8:58
They don't even know what he's planning to put down there. Amazing. It's staggering
9:02
It's amazing. And by the way, Maggie Haberman in her excellent book
9:06
that she co-wrote with a colleague, Regime Change, says that he spends about 70%... 70%
9:11
70% of the time on buildings. Good to him. Finally, and very briefly, I'm afraid
9:15
the Argentine ranch where tech CEOs plan to ride out the apocalypse
9:19
Absolutely amazing. Big story about this in the Financial Times today. Tech CEOs literally building a post-apocalyptic colony for themselves
9:27
and not thinking about this in terms of the long haul, in terms of when they might have to go and sit there and retreat to it
9:37
even suggesting that if China invades Taiwan and the Russians invade one of the Baltic states
9:45
one of these tech guys, billionaires, says, I've told the family, we're immediately moving there
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