Transcript- America This Week, Dec 5, 2025: "Murder, War, or What? The Venezuela Conundrum"

Is the Trump Pentagon more of the same, or a major deviation? Plus, a brief intro to "Train Dreams"

Illustrated by Daniel Medina

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Who still is sick, but he’s Lou Gehrig-ing it.

Walter Kirn: I decided to Lou Gehrig it for my own ego because my dad raised me on the pride of the Yankees. He knew I wasn’t very good at sports, but he could at least inculcate stubbornness in me and make sure that I showed up for every game. And so now, even though I’m as really ill as I’ve been I think in 20 years, both my wife and I have not been up off the ground really for four days now, fevers that won’t go away, body aches that make your clothes feel like they’re hurting you, every place where your skin touches, even soft cloth just drives you nuts, and I made the perverse decision last night that I’m going to do a show in that condition and everyone’s going to see what it’s like. They’re going to see me at my worst, and maybe one little kid out there, one little kid way out at the edge of the field is going to say, “Yeah, but that guy never quits.”

Matt Taibbi: That’s right.

Walter Kirn: And that’s what I want to be, I want to be the guy who never quits.

Matt Taibbi: Goddammit, that’s right.

Walter Kirn: Dammit, dammit. And then maybe, let’s hope this doesn’t happen, but at some future America This Week show years from now, I can come out on the field and give a big speech-

Matt Taibbi: That’s right.

Walter Kirn: ... having never missed a show. But the thing about, Matt, is you are like my father, a catcher in baseball and a center in football. Was that true?

Matt Taibbi: No, no, no, I never played football.

Walter Kirn: You never played football. My dad-

Matt Taibbi: Well, I mean... Mm-hmm.

Walter Kirn: My dad was a center in football which is like a catcher in baseball. You’re in on every play offensively. They’re both positions which are supposed to be secretly running everybody else. From their hard-knock brutality and just getting in there, they’re also thinking up and generaling the whole thing, right?

Matt Taibbi: Mm-hmm.

Walter Kirn: So let’s say that to the catcher.

Matt Taibbi: 53’s the Mike, yeah, although you get a lot of that quarterbacks doing that now.

Walter Kirn: Right, right, right, right.

Matt Taibbi: But used to be the center’s job. Mm-hmm.

Walter Kirn: And I idolized my dad, at least as far as sports went. And so he’s up there now, and when I woke up, he said, “Go on the fucking show. Can you sit up?” “Yeah.” “Can you open your eyes?” “Yeah.” “Does your mouth work?” “Yeah.” “Then what are you talking about? Get on the show.”

Matt Taibbi: Awesome. I wonder how many of our listeners don’t know who Lou Gehrig is. Probably a few, yeah.

Walter Kirn: They probably don’t. He was played by Gary Cooper, our most attractive, raw-boned American everyman next to Jimmy Stewart, I suppose, from the golden age probably.

Matt Taibbi: He was more muscular than... yeah.

Walter Kirn: He was more muscular. Gary Cooper himself was a Montana cowboy before he became an actor. Gary Cooper was the guy in High Noon who held off the entire crew of bad guys while the rest of the village went and cowered in the candy shop, and his figure alone with his six guns on the street of whatever the street of that town was, was in Poland when I was in Poland just years after Poland had freed itself from the Soviet Union, the iconic picture that represented solidarity, but also defiance and freedom for the new Polish nation, and it was absolutely sincere. There were buttons everywhere and cups everywhere, and we’d really made a difference with that. I mean, even I was moved. I thought, “Wow, American popular culture, when it’s really done right can move the world.”

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. It also presented an image of men who didn’t talk that much, and here we are podcasters, stomping that out on the ground as it were. But anyway, we go on. Thanks, Walter, and for doing your very Lou Gehrig-ian effort, not a Ripken-esque effort, but specifically Gehrig-ian.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, Gehrig-ian.

Matt Taibbi: And look, unfortunately there’s a lot to get to because...

Walter Kirn: Let’s do it.

Matt Taibbi: So we talked on Monday, this whole... I think we’re of the same mind about the don’t give up the ship gambit by Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly and a bunch of other acolytes of the CIA and John Brennan, and the timing of it is strange and it’s destabilizing and we’ve already had disruptions and violence. So I think we feel the same way about that. The underlying question of you can refuse illegal orders went into hyperdrive last Friday when the Washington Post published a still disputed story, well, still partially disputed, about the idea that there were survivors on a drug boat, on the first drug boat that was blown up in these Venezuelan operations that the Trump administration’s been doing, and the idea was that the commander, Frank Mitchell Bradley, a.k.a. Mitch Bradley, apparently, fired a second shot to blow away the boat, to finish off the boat, and ostensibly the people in it.

Now this became the example of the illegal order because firing upon the shipwreck is literally the paradigmatic example of a war crime. There’s not much you can’t do in war. In the United States Pentagon manual, The Law Of Armed Conflict, there’s only a few things that are utterly prohibited, including-

Walter Kirn: Can you shoot twice at a crashing plane?

Matt Taibbi: I don’t know about that, but you can’t shoot at somebody parachuting out of a plane, a crashed plane.

Walter Kirn: Okay.

Matt Taibbi: You can’t shoot on the wounded, you can’t shoot on the sick, shoot at the sick, which is interesting, and we’ll get to that because we had a policy of doing exactly that for years, and we even interviewed people who investigated that this week. But this whole idea of the Pentagon firing on survivors became the driving issue because now everybody could point to an order that everybody agreed was illegal, like every legal expert, right?

Walter Kirn: Mm-hmm.

Matt Taibbi: Once that happened, before the Washington Post story came out, Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, and Donald Trump could not have been more outspoken on the subject of all of this was entirely appropriate and they were fully within their rights to do it, blah, blah, blah.

Walter Kirn: And they were referring to this specific case or...

Matt Taibbi: Actually, yes, but yes. So we had Karoline Leavitt saying he was fully within his authority to do that, the admiral, then there were a series of statements. Hegseth’s original tweet in response talked about how these strikes are designed to be lethal, the Biden administration was coddling these terrorists, we kill them. And then there were... Let’s look at an example. Here’s Trump and Hegseth sitting together and they’re sharing sort of a joke about how there aren’t many boats left to attack because they’ve done such a good job of wiping everybody out.

Video: ... said, “No, we’re taking the gloves off. We’re taking the fight to these designated terror organizations,” and it’s exactly what we’re doing. So we’re stopping the drugs, we’re striking the boats, we’re defeating narco terrorists, and we’re standing-

And you may say one thing that drugs coming in through the sea, by sea, are down 91%, and I don’t know who the 9% is.

I’m not sure either, sir, because-

But down 91% by sea.

We’ve had a bit of a pause because it’s hard to find boats to strike right now, which is the entire point, right? Deterrence has to matter, not arrest and hand over and then do it again, the rinse and repeat approach of previous administrations. This is meant to get after that approach. And I will just end by saying, as President Trump always has our back, we always have the back of our commanders who are making decisions in difficult situations...