Transcript - America This Week, June 13, 2026: "Trumpship Troopers: New Riot Footage and the No Kings Protests."

Much like early June 2020, the population awaits nationwide protests after a local conflagration. What will result? Plus, the confession of Winston Smith

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, you look suspiciously northeastern at the moment.

Walter Kirn: Yes, I am suspiciously Maine-like. I’m here-

Matt Taibbi: Undisclosed location.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. I’m on a secret mission to Maine. I’ve returned from the undisclosed location to the airport city of Portland, Maine, where I have about 16 hours to eat as much lobster as I can. Being a Minnesotan lobster was held up, basically, there were two ambitions you had as a Minnesota kid sleep with a woman who looks like Raquel Welch and eat lobster. And so having done the first many times, I only have the lobster-

Matt Taibbi: Now you have to eat a lobster that looks like Raquel Welch.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. Yeah. And so they actually have bulk lobster meat being sold, and then you see it being trucked over to the restaurant where it’s much more expensive. And I’m thinking if I just go to the wholesaler where the giant tubs of bulk lobster are being sold, I could finally have my fill. Because Matt, have you ever had enough lobster at a meal? I’ve never had. I always fall short.

Matt Taibbi: Dude. I’ve worked on a lobster boat.

Walter Kirn: Oh, really?

Matt Taibbi: Not often. I did it kind of as a lark when I was living on an island in Massachusetts. But, look, there are places in the world where lobster is-

Walter Kirn: Crab.

Matt Taibbi: There’s too much of it. You get sick of it.

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: And Maine is certainly one of those places.

Walter Kirn: So not having ever gotten sick of lobster, I’m going to make sure that after this broadcast, because last night I had lobster stew and steamed lobster, today I’m going to have a double stuffed lobster roll, I guess they call them.

Matt Taibbi: Nice.

Walter Kirn: I’ll be satisfied finally.

Matt Taibbi: Well, all the lobster you can.

Walter Kirn: Does that sound like a guy who’s preparing for the end of the world, kind of? He’s going to eat all the lobster he can. It’s like that novel on the beach where they-

Matt Taibbi: Absolutely. Or Prince 2000, zero, zero, party over. We’re out of time. Right? You got to a party like it’s 1999 actually. So that’s a good segue. We’re going to talk about, this show is going to come out on a Friday, on Saturday there is what is likely to be a big event in this era of the Trump presidency. There is a massive protest planned all over the country.

Walter Kirn: A big pseudo event in some ways.

Matt Taibbi: A big pseudo event, and maybe even a big real event. There is absurdity and weirdness on both sides. We’re going to discuss all of that. But before we get to any of that, there’s a thing that kind of got lost in the weeds. Nobody is covering it in the mainstream press. It’s gotten a little play in kind of Fox world, but Tulsi Gabbard put out a video this week, which, and I’ve heard on fairly good authority that even anti-nuclear activists are kind of rolling their eyes about. Why I’m not sure. Well, let’s just hear what she has to say.

Tulsi Gabbard: Yet this one bomb that caused so much destruction on Hiroshima was tiny compared to today’s nuclear bombs. The bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of just 15 kilotons of TNT. Whereas today’s nuclear warheads range in size from 100 kilotons to over 1 megaton, a single nuclear weapon today could kill millions in just minutes. Just one of these nuclear bombs would vaporize everything at its core, people, buildings, life itself. The shockwave would crush structures miles away, killing and maiming countless people.

And then comes the fallout. Radioactive poison spreading through the air, water, and soil, condemning survivors to agonizing deaths or lifelong suffering. A nuclear winter could follow with smoke and ash completely blocking the sun, plunging the world into darkness and cold, killing crops and starving billions. Acid rain would scar the earth, wiping out entire ecosystems.

This isn’t some made-up science fiction story. This is the reality of what’s at stake, what we are facing now. Because as we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers. Perhaps it’s because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to.

Matt Taibbi: So my immediate reaction to that is, and I’ve already seen it, people sort of from the traditional center-left activist world saying, oh, this is a Trump official and we shouldn’t listen to this person. But to me, when any official from a nuclear power-

Walter Kirn: If a nuclear nuclear bomb drops, if hydrogen bomb drops to own Trump, it doesn’t hurt as badly, is that their idea? Or are they pretending that the likelihood of war is less than his being suggested?

Matt Taibbi: I mean, it’s the latter, right? The party line right now with those who are saying that there is no nuclear risk in with the Russia-Ukraine thing is-

Walter Kirn: What about Iran?

Matt Taibbi: And Iran, the two. And Taiwan, right? We’re in this place where there are... I mean, Iran is farther off. I think it’s safe to say, but Taiwan and Ukraine are moments where it’s intense right now. And when any one of these nuclear powers, when any official in the security capacity comes out with a video saying, we’re closer to nuclear war than ever before, yeah, you can take it with a grain of salt, but it makes me nervous certainly.

Walter Kirn: What was Tulsi’s rationale behind putting that out? How did they frame that?

Matt Taibbi: So I don’t know. I reached out to her, I haven’t heard back, and it’s a little more difficult to get in touch with her these days, but there’s complete radio silence about it in regular media. I just thought it was noteworthy because sometimes people forget that in any government, not every official, when they speak publicly, is saying an officially approved or something that’s completely coordinated with the entire government. Sometimes they’re trying to subtly tell you one thing or another. I would worry about it. I think you have to start taking people seriously when both Russia and America now are talking about nuclear war like it’s not an incidental far off thing. Just thought it’s worth bringing up.

Walter Kirn: Well, I think it’s very much worth bringing up, and I want to talk about it a little more. She didn’t have a specific reason to post this. It went up on C that what happened? Where did it appear?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah.

Walter Kirn: Well, I’m going to counter any poo-pooing by saying we’ve crossed many barriers just in the last few months, we fired medium range missiles into Russian territory for the first time in history. We just had an attack on strategic bombers by Ukraine, by drones. I can’t think of a time when a superpower has had its strategic nuclear weapons force attacked by another, have you? Can you?

Matt Taibbi: I cannot. No. Not in our lifetime. No. I mean, Walter, when we were growing up, when a Soviet bear bomber flew off course in Greenland and had to be-

Walter Kirn: Exactly.

Matt Taibbi: And jets had to be scrambled to escort them out back over airspace, it was like an incident. The whole world was on its toes when something like that happened. The idea of strategic forces being bombed and there being video of these huge conflagrations, it would’ve been unthinkable in the ‘80s.

Walter Kirn: And not only were they bombed, they were bombed to great applause by our national security state. Here was Goliath being slain or at least harmed by little Zelensky David. It proved that we could reach deep into their most sensitive and powerful bases and wreak destruction. That’s another boundary that was caused recently. We still don’t know about the fullness of Putin’s response to that. Of course, even though Iran’s a smaller matter, we got news last night that American forces are being asked to leave, civilians at least, various bases in the Middle East, because it’s possible that Israel has decided to strike the nuclear program of Iran, whatever that means. I would imagine it means some really big bunker buster style bombs hitting mountainsides and all sorts of things.

So that she would put this out at this time does not seem to me worthy of derision or ridicule, especially because the generation that is young today still is almost absolutely illiterate about the realities of nuclear war. You and I had to watch movies like Threads and The Day After and so on.

Matt Taibbi: Fail Safe.

Walter Kirn: Fail Safe before that, we actually had to do drills in my generation.

Matt Taibbi: Even mine. Yep.

Walter Kirn: Hiroshima, the John Hersey novel was almost required reading for the interested young person who wanted to know what had happened in World War II.

Matt Taibbi: It was also considered must reading for young journalists too.

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: If you were studying a form for that kind of work.

Walter Kirn: Right. Right. So after many hours and hours of nuclear consciousness raising as a child that someone produced a three-minute video for social media at a time of such tension is, I think actually to their credit. As I say, I move among people who I speak to, not so I can write stories, but just so I can have it a real and informed awareness of where things are. And people are telling me, people I trust, people who know, the highest echelon officials in the United States, that there’s talk about maybe we’ll have to use tactical nuclear weapons in the streets of Taiwan should there be an invasion launched.