In this episode we dig into Pete Hegseth’s Quantico speech about “fat generals” and what it says about culture wars inside the military, and then pivot to Trump floating the idea of using American cities as mock battlefields.

Trump storms into the UN, flexing like it’s his own private golf club. Sharaa sits down with Petraeus in a meeting that feels more like a spy novel than diplomacy. And Macron? Stuck in midtown gridlock, learning the hard way that in New York City, not even presidents get a pass.

This week we wade through the murk: the UAE’s quiet chips deal stitched together with real estate magnate Steve Witkoff’s crypto hustling, the velvet-draped rise of conservative social clubs in Washington DC where policy gets drunk at the bar, the strange gravitational pull of weird South Africans lurking in the administration, and the unlikely deployment of Infidel MC motorcycle gang members on the ground in Gaza.

In this episode of the Smoke and Hat Podcast, we dig into Israel’s strike on Qatar and the chaos it leaves in its wake, Trump’s move to drag the Department of Defense back under a blunt, old-world banner—the “Department of War”—and the quiet sabotage of America’s fight against disinformation, courtesy of Darren Beattie, the pro-Russia whisperer who helped kill off the GEC.

This week we break down a slide deck for the future of Gaza, which a hungover intern at BCG must not have fully proofread before they were replaced by AI. Then we check up on Modi, Putin and Xi in Shanghai. Are limos having a moment? Many people are asking. And finally we bid farewell to State Department spokesperson and human confused about calendars Tammy Bruce who heads to New York to assist what must surely be a vigorous American diplomatic presence at the United Nations.