Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson recently sat down with President Barack Obama’s former deputy national security advisor and New York Times bestselling author Ben Rhodes for a conversation covering some of the most consequential foreign policy and domestic political questions of the moment.
Rhodes broke down why Bill Pulte’s nomination as Director of National Intelligence represents a genuine threat to national security, explained why Democrats should use intelligence funding as leverage to stop his confirmation, walked through the origins and likely resolution of the Iran conflict, assessed the fragile state of the NATO alliance, weighed in on the political cost Democrats paid for backing Israel’s war in Gaza, and explained how the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan ended up as the cult Donald Trump.
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Bill Pulte as Director of National Intelligence: “This Is Police State Stuff”
Gibson opened by asking Rhodes about President Trump’s nomination of Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Bill Pulte to serve as Director of National Intelligence (DNI), following Tulsi Gabbard’s departure. Gibson noted that federal law — specifically 50 U.S. Code Section 3023 — requires that any DNI nominee have “extensive national security experience,” a qualification Pulte conspicuously lacks.
Rhodes didn’t hedge. “One hundred percent,” he said when asked whether Pulte’s appointment constitutes a threat to national security. Rhodes noted that his first job in Washington was working for Lee Hamilton, who was co-chair of the 9/11 Commission and one of the architects of the DNI legislation.
“Let’s just say Bill Pulte is not who he had in mind,” Rhodes said of Hamilton.
But Rhodes argued the danger goes beyond mere lack of qualification. He pointed to Pulte’s record at the FHFA, where Pulte used access to mortgage records to build allegations (which were later dismissed) against high-profile Trump critics including Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Rhodes said that pattern should terrify Americans when applied to the intelligence community’s far broader surveillance capabilities.
“Imagine with him having access to the National Security Agency — the signals intelligence people that intercept phone calls and email communications,” Rhodes said. “I’m not suggesting he’s even going to find crimes. I’m suggesting he’s invented them before with mortgage fraud. This guy going through everybody’s emails to try to find something he can use against Trump’s enemies should be a terrifying thought for every American. It’s police state stuff.”
Rhodes also raised the prospect of Pulte continuing work Gabbard had begun — using the intelligence apparatus to advance conspiracy theories about election fraud, potentially laying groundwork to contest future Democratic electoral victories.
“If they lose the midterm elections, and let’s say Trump wants to say that this was fraud and that some foreign government must have interfered to help Democrats,” Rhodes said, “that’s your nightmare scenario right there.”
Democrats’ Leverage to Stop Pulte’s Confirmation
Gibson noted that Democrats have threatened to withhold votes to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — the provision authorizing the intelligence community to collect and analyze foreign intelligence — as leverage against Pulte’s confirmation. He asked Rhodes whether he thought the threat was credible, or whether national security hawks in the Democratic caucus would ultimately fold. Rhodes was unequivocal about what Democrats should do.
“There’s no Democrat that should vote to reauthorize Section 702, full stop,” he said. “It would demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the nature of the emergency moment that we’re in.”
Rhodes pointed out that the entire rationale for reauthorizing surveillance authorities rests on the argument that the intelligence community needs these tools to keep Americans safe. According to Rhodes, Pulte makes that case impossible to make in good faith.
“Do you really think Bill Pulte is going to effectively carry out the functions of that job?” Rhodes said. “Do you think he’s going to be making sure we’re connecting dots to foil terrorist plots? No.”
The author and former Obama administration official acknowledged the real risk: a small number of Democratic senators who have historically been sympathetic to intelligence community funding requests. He noted that while some may normally break ranks to confirm a new DNI, Pulte is so extreme that it should be possible to hold the caucus together and perhaps even peel off enough Republicans to stop Pulte from being confirmed. He also suggested Democrats should think beyond Section 702.
“I’d be looking at holding up the funding for the intelligence community,” he said. “It’s time to play some hardball.”
For Americans whose senators include traditional hawks like Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) — the current ranking Democrat of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a figure Rhodes cited as particularly susceptible to deferring to the intelligence community — Rhodes offered a specific framing constituents can use when calling their offices.
“The argument I’d make is: this person, Bill Pulte, makes the American people less safe. If you’re trying to protect the intelligence community by voting for Section 702, you’re not protecting them, because you’re not using your leverage to make sure they have appropriate leadership,” he said.
To End the Iran War, Trump Has No Choice But to Eat Crow
Gibson turned to the ongoing U.S. military conflict with Iran, noting that Trump’s repeated promises of a swift resolution have gone unfulfilled, that negotiations have collapsed, and that Iran retains its most decisive leverage in control over the Strait of Hormuz. Gibson asked what a hypothetical new Democratic administration in 2029 should do to end the conflict if it’s still ongoing by then.
“You have to make a deal with the Iranians,” Rhodes said. “And you have to accept that that deal is not going to be everything you want.”
He drew on historical precedent, noting that both the United States and the Soviet Union made significant concessions in Cold War agreements, despite then-President Ronald Reagan maligning the Soviets as an “evil empire.” Rhodes argued the same logic applies to Iran, and that the refusal to accept anything short of complete Iranian capitulation is pure fantasy.
“Arms control agreements are by definition agreements you enter into with your adversaries in which you don’t get everything you want,” he said.
Rhodes also pushed back on the premise that sanctions represent meaningful leverage, noting that they primarily hurt ordinary residents of countries like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, North Korea, while doing nothing to stop the regimes being sanctioned. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), he noted, has become expert at operating under sanctions and accessing illicit revenue streams, while ordinary Iranians bear the costs.
“Who’s getting hurt by these sanctions? The Iranian people,” Rhodes said. “It’s not changing their government. It’s actually entrenching the regime in power.”
Rhodes pointed out that during his time in the Obama White House, every national security war game scenario with Iran led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the strangling of the global economy.
“The IRGC is saying: if you won’t give us access to our money from sanctions relief, we’re going to start tolling this strait. We’re going to get revenue one way or another,” he said. “I would rather they get access to frozen revenue from transactions than that suddenly Iran is running 20 percent of the world’s energy as a toll road.”
Trump’s Eventual Deal with Iran May Mirror Obama’s 2015 Agreement
Gibson asked about a specific flashpoint in the Iran debate — the charge, frequently advanced on Fox News and by Trump himself, that the Obama administration “gave” Iran hundreds of billions of dollars in the 2015 nuclear agreement known as the JCPOA. Gibson noted his own understanding that the money in question already belonged to Iran.
Rhodes confirmed this and spelled out the mechanics. Iran sold oil and gas to other countries — India, China, and others — and the revenue owed to Iran in return had been frozen in international accounts by the United States. America was not party to those transactions. Releasing the funds meant giving Iran access to its own money, not writing a check from the U.S. Treasury. The actual figure Iran received access to was approximately $55 billion, not the $300 billion Trump has cited — a discrepancy Rhodes attributed to the compounding effect of years of additional frozen assets.
Rhodes further argued that the entire premise of the criticism misunderstands how sanctions are supposed to work.
“You don’t put sanctions on a country just to keep them there in perpetuity,” he said. “You put sanctions on Iran to restrict their nuclear program. So when they accept those restrictions, they get access to the revenue they’re frankly entitled to.”
Rhodes reminded viewers that Iran fully complied with the JCPOA, and that it was Trump himself who withdrew from the agreement in 2018, not Tehran. The bitter irony, Rhodes suggested, is that Trump now finds himself pursuing something that will inevitably resemble the deal he spent years denouncing.
“He just kind of can’t seem to bring himself to do it, because he knows it is going to resemble the Obama nuclear deal,” he said.
Did Biden’s Support of Netanyahu Cost Democrats the 2024 Election?
Gibson asked Rhodes to assess the political fallout of the Biden administration’s decision to continue unconditional military support for Israel despite its atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza, and whether it contributed to Kamala Harris’s defeat in 2024.
Rhodes argued the damage was real, but more layered than a simple question of where voters stood on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The deeper wound, he said, was the perception of Democratic inauthenticity. He observed that Democrats’ comments about being troubled by the murder of civilians Gaza were undercut by continuing to authorize billions in military aid to Israel.
“It’s kind of what people don’t like about politicians,” he said. “If you actually believe that you’re concerned about what’s happening, you do something about it.”
Rhodes recalled a maxim from Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign that has continued to stick with him over the years.
“Obama used to say ‘in order to win an election, you have to show people that there’s some things you’re willing to lose over,’” Rhodes said. “If you’re not willing every now and then to take an unpopular or controversial position, you’re the perfect foil for Trump — because what Trump says to people is all these politicians are full of it, they tell you one thing and do another.”
Rhodes was more sympathetic to Vice President Kamala Harris in her 2024 campaign than to the Biden administration, acknowledging the impossible position a vice president faces when she’s duty-bound to defend her president’s politically toxic foreign policy. But the author and former Obama speechwriter argued that the attempt to signal quiet disagreement with Netanyahu while publicly maintaining the status quo was the worst of both worlds.
“That stuff just doesn’t work with people,” he said. “Because it’s like: well, if you really disagree with the policy, why don’t you convince your boss not to do it?”
How Trump Is Pulling the U.S. Out of NATO Without Officially Withdrawing
Gibson raised the state of the NATO alliance, noting reports that some European members have begun developing contingency plans for a European security structure that could function without American participation. He also asking what a U.S. withdrawal would mean for European stability.
Rhodes pointed out that Trump likely lacks the legal authority to formally withdraw from NATO without congressional approval, but that a president determined to hollow out American commitments could achieve the same effect without a formal declaration. The more immediate risk, he said, would fall on the Baltic states like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which share historical and geographic vulnerability to Russian pressure.
“If you remove the United States from NATO, you just make it that much more likely that we’re back in the days of conquest, of war between great powers,” Rhodes said. “We set up NATO to prevent a world war. And I think if you remove the United States from NATO, you make it that much more likely that we get drawn into a major global conflagration with Russia and China, because we no longer have the very institutions we set up to prevent that from happening again.”
On the episode in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the withdrawal of thousands of troops from Poland only to have Trump reverse course, Rhodes speculated that the reversal likely reflected pressure from Poland’s allies in the Republican Senate caucus. He opined that some senators may have called the White House to flag that the move went too far.
“They don’t have any backbone, they don’t say anything publicly,” Rhodes said of those Republican senators, “but they might call over the White House and say, ‘Wait, you’re going too far on this one.’”
Trump Would Be Powerless to Stop China from Taking Taiwan
Gibson pressed Rhodes on the risk to Taiwan from China, given how broadly the Trump administration has extended American military commitments — simultaneously supporting Ukraine, backing Israel, pursuing regime change in Venezuela and Cuba, and now waging war in Iran.
Rhodes said he’s deeply worried about the convergence of conditions. Chinese President Xi Jinping, he argued, is almost certainly watching American overextension and diplomatic isolation and calculating whether this represents the optimal window for action on Taiwan.
“The maximum window is when the United States has no friends and allies around the world, when the American president doesn’t indicate any willingness to defend Taiwan, and when the world is already chaotic,” Rhodes said.
He pointed out that that the geographic fault lines in East Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe look uncomfortably like the map of World War Two. And for Americans inclined to dismiss Taiwan as a distant concern, Rhodes offered a more concrete argument: more than 90 percent of the world’s advanced semiconductors are manufactured there.
“If there’s a war in Taiwan, good luck having anything in this country work for a long time, like the computers in your car, like the way your refrigerator works,” Rhodes said.
How Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party Was Destined to Be Led By Donald Trump
In the interview’s final stretch, Gibson asked Rhodes about the historical argument in his new book, All We Say: The Battle for American Identity, a History in 15 Speeches — specifically in which Rhodes laid out how Donald Trump is the conclusion of events set in motion by Ronald Reagan. Gibson asked whether figures now positioned as anti-Trump conservatives — including Liz Cheney and others from the Bush era — bear some responsibility for creating the conditions that made Trump possible.
“Yes,” Rhodes said without hesitation.
He walked through how Reagan assembled a three-legged coalition of Christian evangelicals, national security hawks and small-government conservatives. The Cold War served as the glue holding those factions together. When the Soviet threat dissolved, the coalition’s internal contradictions came to the surface.
The enemy then shifted inward toward liberals and cultural change, while the economic policies those same Republicans championed hollowed out the industrial base and accelerated inequality. The hawks, meanwhile, steered the country into Iraq under George W. Bush, which Rhodes described as a direct precursor to Trump’s rise.
“With no war in Iraq, there’s no Donald Trump,” Rhodes argued.
Rhodes further observed that failed right-wing presidential candidate Pat Buchanan had already articulated the essential Trump message in 1992, which included a wall along the Southern border, punishing tariffs and an America First foreign policy. While Republicans were hesitant to embrace that platform in the early nineties, they were ripe to run on it by 2016.
“He was tapping into political forces that had been there all along,” Rhodes said of Trump, “and taking the wreckage of the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and weaponizing it against the rest of us.”
What Comes After Trump: A Return to Compromise, or the Brutal Wielding of Power?
Gibson closed by asking Rhodes one of the book’s core questions: given the arc from Benjamin Franklin’s argument for compromise at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, to Trump’s open contempt for constitutional constraints in 2025, is the era of compromise over? Should Democrats, if they return to power, govern with the same force Trump has, or attempt to restore norms?
Rhodes drew a careful distinction. The problem with Trump, he argued, is not that his policies are unpopular, but that he has abandoned the legal framework within which political competition is supposed to happen. He argued that gerrymandering and the influence of dark money are more insidious in that they rig the contest itself.
“What is radical about Trump is he’s not playing within the lines of the compromise,” Rhodes said.
Democrats, he argued, have abundant tools available to them that are entirely within constitutional bounds and have simply gone unused out of excessive caution. This includes antitrust enforcement against big tech companies, rooting out entrenched corruption in government and eliminating the Senate filibuster (which Rhodes pointed out is not in the Constitution) and pass legislation on a simple majority. He added that Democrats should pushing hard for getting money out of politics and ending partisan gerrymandering.
“I’d be moving with speed and force to essentially reverse Trumpism,” Rhodes said.
Rhodes concluded with one note of historical optimism. He pointed out that the Gilded Age of the late 19th century — which was marked by extreme inequality, government corruption and a captured political system — gave way to a progressive era. He noted that this era brought about antitrust law, child labor protections, the direct election of U.S. senators and women’s suffrage.
“I think we’re in a Gilded Age,” Rhodes said. “And I think the next phase is going to be a progressive age.”
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