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Jane Coaston: It’s Monday, August 4th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that welcomes all of you to August, the bored month, where we all just do our best. Look, when an ad for jeans is allegedly causing controversy, you know we are in the bored month. Just hold out for September, guys. [music break] On today’s show, Trump fires the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he doesn’t like bad news. And Texas House Democrats are fleeing the state to block Republicans from redrawing the state’s congressional map. But let’s start by talking about Gaza. On Friday, U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, and Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, traveled to Gaza to tour an Israeli-backed aid site and report back to President Donald Trump on the conditions as Palestinians in Gaza continue to die from hunger and starvation. Their visit to Gaza comes at an inflection point for the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Barely a third of Americans support Israel’s actions in Gaza, a new low. Support for Israel’s action has even dropped among Republicans, and that unfavorable view extends to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which isn’t great for him, given that the United States is Israel’s largest and most powerful ally. The problems faced by Israel’s right-wing government are manyfold. Hamas has refused to disarm despite indications from Witkoff that it might. And Netanyahu has stuck firm to the idea that the people of Gaza are doing just fine, and that the real focus should be on freeing the remaining hostages by eliminating Hamas. Here he is in a social media video posted last week. 

[clip of Benjamin Netanyahu] There is no starvation in Gaza, no policy of starvation in Gaza. And I assure you that we have a commitment to achieve our war goals. We’ll continue to fight until we achieve the release of our hostages and the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities. They shall be there no more. 

Jane Coaston: And the Israeli public wants the hostages home, too. Especially the families of hostages like Evyatar David, who is being held by Hamas and who was featured in a video released by the terrorist organization last week, clearly suffering from starvation. But many Israelis, including the 60,000 who gathered in Tel Aviv on Saturday to protest David’s horrific condition, want a ceasefire deal that gets the hostages back and ends the violence in Gaza. But the government isn’t listening. Instead, Israeli officials are reportedly planning to expand the war. Netanyahu is focused on doing more military operations in Gaza, with the belief that only through completely eliminating Hamas can the hostages be freed. The families of the hostages don’t agree. In a statement, a group of families of hostages being held by Hamas said Sunday, quote, “The truth must be told. Expanding the war endangers the lives of the hostage who are at risk of imminent death. We saw the chilling images of the hostages in the tunnels. They won’t survive more long days of horror.” So how did we get here and what comes next? The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg suggested to understand Netanyahu’s thinking, we have to understand what went into the making of his government, what Rosenberg describes as a corrupt bargain. Yair, welcome to What a Day. 

Yair Rosenberg: Thanks for having me here. 

Jane Coaston: Just for some context to back up a little bit, can you take us back to 2022, well before October 7th? What was the political situation surrounding Netanyahu at the time he was running again for prime minister? 

Yair Rosenberg: Yeah, so Netanyahu had been ousted from power for the first time in a very, very long time. And had been out of office for an entire year, um where a sort of Rainbow Coalition of Israeli opposition parties, left, center, right, had come together for a year to prevent Netanyahu from getting back into power. Their government was very precarious and it fell apart. Netanyau finally gets back into office in 2022, but he does it in an extraordinarily precarious way. In order to get there, right, he actually only gets 48.4% of the vote in the election. In a sort of electoral college-like quirk, he still gets 64 out of 120 seats in the parliament. So he walks in with sort of less than half of popular support. And in order to create this 64-seat coalition out of one hundred and twenty, he gets 14 seats from, I would argue, the most extreme, most chauvinist racist parties in Israeli parliamentary history. Um. And they’re led by two men, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Perhaps your listeners know these names, perhaps they don’t. One of them was a disciple of Rabbi Meir Kahane, a rabbi from America originally who wanted to expel all of the Arabs from the land of Israel and Palestine. Um. And his party was banned from the Israeli parliament because it was fascist. But this is one of his disciples now leading a new party and it gets in. Um, and the other man, Bezalel Smotrich, was basically sort of a, uh more cerebral, big thinker, how could I get into power and sort of use the government to annex the West Bank, take over Gaza, and get rid of all the Palestinians slowly but surely? Um.  Netanyahu lets these people into government because they’re the only other way that he’s gonna get this office back. So these people can basically hold him over, you know, rake him over the coals. Anytime he does anything they don’t want him to do. 

Jane Coaston: So this is the corrupt bargain you write about. What’s an example of how this bargain has played out? Because I’m thinking that this kind of tells me how this war has gone. 

Yair Rosenberg: Yeah, so when the war starts out, um Netanyahu has this very extreme government. Hamas invades Israel. This is one of the many um you know horrific aspects of what Hamas did. They were fully aware what kind of government was running Israel and what kind of response would likely be engendered. And they did this anyway, right? Without the consent of any of the people of Gaza and so on. And I want to explicitly spell out what the far right wanted from the start of this war, because I think that’s important. From basically the first days of the war, the far rights saw an opportunity to not only go back into Gaza and smash Hamas, but to go back into Gaza, and take over the land, to conquer the land and then to plant Jewish settlements in Gaza. Now, for those who are familiar, been around a little bit, they know that Israel used to have thousands of settlers in Gaza, and then in the early 2000s, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel pulled all of those people out forcibly, which is something the Israeli right has never forgiven. And they’ve always wanted to go back. And, they never had an opportunity until this moment. So they said, we’re going to take the land back. And in addition to taking the land back, we’re gonna have to move the Palestinians out of there. That entails ethnic cleansing in a whole little part of Gaza. And they also said we should probably just stop getting any humanitarian aid to Gaza, because A, well, it would just go to Hamas, but B, we want these people out, so why would we be helping them? Um. And so there’s this very coherent vision that the far right has. It’s held back by Yoav Galant, Netanyahu’s own defense minister, who was kind of a liaison with the Biden administration and wanted a very different version of the war. He wanted a war where you go and you smash Hamas. Then you strike a deal and you get the hostages out. And then you hand over Gaza to non-Hamas Palestinian administration with the help of the international community and various Arab states. That was Golant’s plan. He gives a public address in Israel. He goes on television and he says that Netanyahu is refusing to make the tough decisions for the future of Israel because he has personal political considerations, which is a shocking thing for the defense minister of a country to say. Um. Eventually, Netanyahu fires Gallant on the day that Harris loses to Trump in the United States when everyone is looking elsewhere. So that’s internal obstacle number two to the far right’s vision gone. And obviously, we just referenced there was one other major obstacle to the far-right’s vision, one other counter pressure on Netanyahu and that was the Biden administration. 

Jane Coaston: I think that what we see here, and you know and you’ve given a great explanation of how all of the guardrails against the right-wing Israeli government are gone, and it seems like this humanitarian crisis that’s now hitting Gaza, that is the result of no guardraills. Is that how you see it as well? 

Yair Rosenberg: Yeah, it’s the result of sort of a Netanyahu um being the figurehead for a government whose decisions are largely being made by the far-right ministers in it. Because again, Netanyahu is gone as soon as they say, we’re leaving your coalition. He doesn’t really have a majority anymore, not a functional governing majority. And if the far right parties say, well, you’re not doing what we want, we are going to vote to topple this government, Israel goes to elections and, spoiler alert, the polls have showed for years that Netanyahu would lose those elections universally before October 7th, and it hasn’t recovered. 

Jane Coaston: I think that that that actually leads to another question, which obviously we’ve seen tons of outcry about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, but something I’ve been really interested in is how Israelis are seeing what’s taking place in Gaza. We’ve seen protests over the last couple of years against what’s taken place, you know, I’ve seen protests in Tel Aviv, for example, but two Israeli human rights groups have recently broken a taboo in their own country and they’re accusing the government of committing genocide. How are the politics around this issue in Israel changing? Because you mentioned Netanyahu is not that popular, but also I’m guessing Hamas isn’t super popular either. How is this shifting? 

Yair Rosenberg: Yeah, so for some time you had all of these protests against the government and they were organized pretty much entirely around getting the hostages back. That began to change recently just as it has changed around the world as people began to see sort of the results of the you know humanitarian system, if you call it that, that was put in place by Netanyahu and the Trump administration, which is first they cut off all the aid, right? Then they set up this strange alternate humanitarian system called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Um, which wasn’t sufficient or adequate in any way to really serve the needs of the population. And predictably, what we are seeing now is the results. Um, and Israelis began to see this, it has began to penetrate Israeli media. It’s not just these particular human rights groups. It’s more that you’re also starting to see more protests in the streets. Uh, but I want to be careful to say that that’s not the majority sentiment, right? Most of the protests against Netanyahu are saying, we don’t want this war. We don’t wanna to keep fighting it. What is the point of it? Let’s get the hostages back because that’s what most Israelis wanted in the first place. But it’s not to say that they have tremendous sympathy for Gaza or for the Gazans. They see themselves as locked in a war with them. 

Jane Coaston: And the international situation is changing too. France, Britain, Canada, Germany have all signaled varying degrees of readiness to recognize a Palestinian state after horrific evidence of starvation. Now on the one hand, I was thinking this could change Netanyahu’s calculus, but on the other hand, if he doesn’t need France or Britain or Canada or Germany, he needs this Israeli right wing. So does this kind of lock him in more? 

Yair Rosenberg: Yeah, I don’t think it matters one way or the other so much to Netanyahu’s caucus precisely because he cares internally what keeps him in power. And it’s sort of inside, I want to be like, say this carefully, but I think Netanyahu in his head finds ways to reconcile the national interests with his personal political interests so that they’re always the same. Now, in practice, when leaders do that, that’s extremely dangerous for a country. Um. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Yair Rosenberg: But I think he believes that in his head right, that he is this singular figure who is basically the only thing between Israel and annihilation. And therefore, he’s justified in making all of these compromises and all of these deals with the devils that he’s done over the years, and not just this time, um in order to keep himself in the position of power for as long as possible. 

Jane Coaston: And I’m curious, though, if that includes President Donald Trump, who seems to sort of shift when faced with the overwhelming images of starvation inside Gaza and starving children in particular. Netanyahu recently said that there is no starvation in Gaza, but Trump disagreed. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] That’s real starvation stuff, I see it. And you can’t fake that. So we’re gonna be even more involved. 

Jane Coaston: How does Trump factor into Netanyahu’s political thinking and what he’ll do next? I mean, there’s a neighborhood in Israel named for Trump, but now Trump is saying that he’s going to, quote, “get people fed.” There has been obviously this past weekend, the visit from Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff and U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, the visit to Gaza. How is that factoring into Netanyahu’s thinking? 

Yair Rosenberg: So I’ll say two things. The first is that Trump is probably the only person internationally that Netanyahu actually needs to stay in power. And it’s not about, oh, because Trump could cut off weapons or this or that. Um. Israel could keep fighting in Gaza for quite a while without American weapons. It doesn’t take nearly as much as, say, fighting Iran or Hezbollah and such like that. The issue is is that, you know, Netanyahu has presented himself as this statesman of stature on the world stage who can manage the American relationship and can bring Trump into the Israeli corner. And that is a huge part of his electoral pitch to many Israelis who are otherwise skeptical of him. He’s saying, you can’t trust any of these other you know pretenders to the throne to actually manage this very mercurial American president. Now, it’s a very interesting argument. If Trump comes out and really were to make a point of saying Israel has to change course, that wouldn’t just be important for Palestinians, of course, right? And for the region, it would be important for Netanyahu’s political future. That being said, I would say the most consequential thing Trump has done in this conflict since coming into office has been to join the Israeli far right in putting more pressure on Netanyahu in the opposite direction towards ending the war. What do I mean by that? We all remember that when Netanyahu was visiting Trump for the first time after he got reelected, Trump says, we should clear out Gaza. We should relocate all the Gazan people and we should build some sort of Riviera in the Middle East. You know who heard that as a warrant for ethnic cleansing and everything they ever wanted? The Israeli far-right. And I think until Trump comes out and repudiates that plan and says, that’s not the end goal I seek, that’s not what I want, then you’re going to continue to see all of this energy going in the other direction towards what I think are extraordinarily dark and terrible scenarios. 

Jane Coaston: Yair, thank you so much for joining me. 

Yair Rosenberg: Thanks for having me, Jane. Next time, hopefully we’ll have better news. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Yair Rosenberg, staff writer for The Atlantic. We’ll link to his work on our show notes. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of unnamed Meet the Press interviewer] Bottom line, were the numbers wrong? Do you have any hard evidence that you can present to the American public that these numbers, these revisions that were reported, and there were plenty of revisions under former President Biden, including right before the election, do you have hard evidence that these number were wrong? 

[clip of Kevin Hassett] Yeah, there are is very hard evidence that we’re looking at the biggest revisions since 1968. 

[clip of unnamed Meet the Press interviewer] Are you going to present those? 

[clip of Kevin Hassett] No. 

[clip of unnamed Meet the Press interviewer] Are you going to present that evidene?

[clip of Kevin Hassett] If you look at the number itself, it is the evidence. 

[clip of unnamed Meet the Press interviewer] But just saying it’s an outlier is not evidence Mr. Hassett.

[clip of Kevin Hassett] It’s a historically important outlier. It’s something that’s unprecedented. So unprecedented–

[clip of unnamed Meet the Press interviewer] It still doesn’t. It’s still not evidence. 

[clip of Kevin Hassett] That I’ve been looking at it for 40 years and I’m like, it must be a typo. 

Jane Coaston: Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, defended President Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics during an interview on NBC Sunday. On Friday, Trump fired Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the most recent jobs report from her team of experienced economists made him look like he’s running the US economy like a man who’s bankrupted multiple casinos. Oh wait. The report showed the U.S. only added 73,000 jobs last month, way lower than expected. The BLS also revised down its job numbers for May and June by a whopping 258,000. It suggests the job market is, um, well, it’s not doing great right now. Trump accused McEntarfer of faking the data in the report for political purposes. Did he have any evidence? Nope. But clearly, there’s no way the president’s erratic tariff spree could have caused economic instability. It’s much more logical that yet another woman is lying, just to spite him. Here’s what the president said to reporters on Friday. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] We’re doing so well. I believe the numbers were phony, just like they were before the election. And there were other times. So you know what I did? I fired her. And you know, what? I did the right thing. 

Jane Coaston: Oh okay. But William Beach, the guy who led the bureau during Trump’s first term, defended McEntarfer on Friday. He said there’s no way the commissioner could interfere in the revision process, which is conducted by a team of career employees. When asked if Trump is prepared to fire anyone who reports data he disagrees with, Hassett said, quote, “Absolutely not. The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they are more transparent and more reliable.” Cool. That’s totally not suspicious. 

[clip of Representative Chris Turner] We’re here on a summer Saturday morning in a meeting announced just before midnight last night, less than 10 hours ago, to ram through a discriminatory and racially motivated congressional map to the full House of Representatives. 

Jane Coaston: That’s Texas Democratic State Representative Chris Turner speaking Saturday at a meeting of the state’s House Redistricting Committee. On Sunday, a group of Democratic Texas lawmakers left the state in order to stop Republicans from passing their highly suspicious redistricting plan, in case you weren’t listening to What a Day last week, which is mortifying for you. At the behest of President Trump, Texas Republicans recently proposed a plan to redraw the state’s congressional map, way outside of the normal schedule. It’s a nakedly partisan attempt by Republicans to maintain their majority in the U.S. House after next year’s midterm elections. We’ll link to the episode in our show notes. Roughly 30 Texas Democrats headed to Chicago as part of a plan hatched with Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. Others headed to New York to see Governor Kathy Hochul. For now, the Democrats’ plan is simple. If they don’t show up to work, Texas Republicans can’t meet the required quorum to pass a new map. So if the Democrats peace out, that’s curtains on the legislature’s ongoing special session. However ditching work could come at the cost of a $500-a-day fine per missing lawmaker. And the plan doesn’t come with any guarantees. While the tactic could delay Texas Republicans for a matter of weeks, similar attempts to stop Republican legislation in Texas have failed in the past. Meanwhile, the Texas House is scheduled to reconvene at 3 p.m. Central Time today. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel is launching an investigation into former special counsel Jack Smith. He oversaw two federal criminal cases against President Trump, over his handling of classified documents after he left office, and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The Watchdog agency confirmed reports Saturday. Days earlier, Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton asked the OSC to investigate Smith. In a series of posts to Twitter, Cotton insinuated that Smith’s activities were a violation of the Hatch Act. The law limits federal employees from certain political activities. Its goal is to remove partisan influence over how the government functions. On Twitter, Cotton accused Smith of quote, “unprecedented interference in the 2024 presidential election” and said the investigations were quote, “nothing more than a tool for the Biden and Harris campaigns,” i.e. the campaigns that did not win the 2024 election. It’s not totally clear what the end goal here is though. The Hatch Act mainly applies to current federal workers, and Smith left the government after winding down the two Trump cases. 

[clip of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 

Jane Coaston: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, whose name you’ve heard a million times at the end of a million episodes of Sesame Street and Arthur, announced Friday it’s shutting down. Through Congress, the CPB helped provide funding for NPR, PBS, and more than a thousand local radio stations and newsrooms. But last month, Republicans in Congress clawed back the more than $1 billion in federal funding CPB was supposed to get for the next two years. It was part of a big rescissions package pushed by President Trump that also included huge cuts to foreign aid. And just last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee doubled down on those cuts when it excluded CPB funding in a bigger 2026 spending bill. Washington Democratic Senator Patty Murray commented on what happens next. 

[clip of Senator Patty Murray] It is a shameful reality, and now communities across the country will suffer the consequences as over 1,500 stations lose critical funding. I really hope that Republicans will join us to restore this funding down the line, and I want you to know I’m going to keep pushing to do that. 

Jane Coaston: In a statement, the CPB said most roles there would conclude by the end of September. The CPB was created almost 60 years ago following the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Since then, it’s supported local journalism, educational programming, emergency communications, and more throughout the United States. And that’s the news. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, enjoy the intestinal fortitude of Elon Musk, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how Elon Musk accused Donald Trump of being in the Epstein files and promised to primary Republicans who voted for Trump’s spending law and then donated $5 million to Trump’s super PAC and to Republican leadership funds three weeks later, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston. And if you can’t lean on Elon Musk, who really can you trust? [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Emily Fohr. Our producer is Michell Eloy. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Gina Pollock, and Laura Newcomb. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. We had help with the headlines from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]

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