In this episode: Trump vs. the pope, the Iran war blockades, and the weird little politics of the DoorDash grandma. We get into a week where religion, war, propaganda, and spectacle all collide, from Trump’s feud with the Vatican, to rising pressure in the Gulf, to one bizarre media moment that says more than it should about the country we are living in. War abroad, theater at home, same fevered age.

In this first Rendezvous Interview, we sit down with Amjad Tadros to talk about his new book The Fixer and the career that shaped it. For years, Tadros worked behind the scenes as a Middle East producer for CBS News and 60 Minutes, navigating war zones, fragile governments, and the quiet, dangerous work of getting the story told.

The first weeks of the Iran war have been loud, chaotic, and strangely unclear. Missiles fly, drones swarm, oil markets panic, and the official explanations shift by the day. In this episode we pick through the smoke. The economics of shooting down cheap drones, confused messaging from leaders, the silence left behind by destroyed newsrooms, and the uncomfortable reality that modern wars are often fought in a fog of bad information.

Trump turns Greenland into a pressure point and starts jawing at Denmark like it’s a shakedown, Macron shows up in sunglasses like diplomacy is a red carpet, and Mark Carney finally snaps at Trump before cutting a deal with China that changes the temperature in the room.

In this episode of Smoke and Hat, we track three signals of a political moment getting reckless in public. We start with Maduro and the Venezuela story, then cut to Stephen Miller’s strange interview energy, and end with Katie Miller and the Greenland war talk, where online bravado starts looking like policy by dare.

This week on Smoke and Hat, we dig into the latest National Security Strategy release and separate the headline gloss from what it actually signals. Big language, big promises, and the usual gap between strategy on paper and consequences in the real world.

Smoke and Hat breaks down the World Cup draw circus, Trump’s pardon of a convicted Latin American drug kingpin, and the Caribbean boat strikes, with sharp, skeptical analysis of power, optics, and consequences.

This episode of Smoke and Hat digs into the week where MBS strutted through the White House, Trump pitched a shaky Gaza plan at the UN, and the Olivia Nuzzi scandal cracked open the press room. It is politics at three in the morning when the lights buzz, the coffee burns, and everyone pretends they are not in over their head.

This week we look at three stories shaping the political conversation. Trump turns a Washington Commanders game into a spectacle. Tom Barrack praises benevolent monarchs after years of business ties with them. And Palantir CEO Alex Karp claims Democrats are not masculine enough. A sharp, funny, and thoughtful breakdown of politics, influence, and ego in America right now.

Trump rages over a Canadian ad, the Caribbean’s tangled political history resurfaces, and Karine Jean-Pierre faces Isaac Chotiner’s brutal questions.

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.