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Jane Coaston: It’s Wednesday, January 14th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that wishes every Republican were as forthright as North Dakota Senator Kevin Kramer. Here he is on Fox Business Tuesday. 

[clip of Senator Kevin Kramer] Maybe the point should be, if you’re the attorney for J. Powell and you wanna avoid an indictment, how about you go to Jeanine Pirro and say, I’ll make a deal. I’ll step down today if you’ll drop the investigation today. To me, that would be a win-win for everybody. 

Jane Coaston: Congratulations, Senator Kramer, for approving Jerome Powell’s point. [music break] On today’s show, net migration in the U.S. likely reaches levels of zero or even less than zero. So much for that shining city on a hill thing. And Elon Musk’s controversial AI bot, Grok, finds a new home inside the pentagon? But let’s start with Iran and Greenland, two places that under normal circumstances would literally never come up in the same sentence. But this is 2026, so sure. In Iran, weeks of protest against the ruling regime have resulted in the deaths of thousands of protesters at the hands of the government. The exact numbers are difficult to determine because of a near total blackout on internet access in the country. For example, the New York Times has estimated that nearly 3,000 people have been killed during the unrest, while a source told CBS News on Tuesday that at least 12,000 people have died. But as PBS NewsHour reports here, the protesters keep coming. 

[clip of unnamed PBS NewsHour reporter] In Iran, the street demands the end of the regime. [clip of people shouting] Spews contempt for their leaders. And declares this the final battle. [clip of people shouting]

Jane Coaston: In response, the Trump administration has voiced its full-throated support for the protesters because they aren’t protesting the Trump Administration. And during a visit to the Ford factory in Dearborn, Michigan on Tuesday, President Donald Trump did a standard this is a TV season finale, not a world event thing on the subject. 

[clip of unnamed news reporter] You said to Iran this morning that help is on the way for protesters. What did you mean by that? What kind of help? 

[clip of President Donald Trump] You’re gonna have to figure that one out, I’m sorry. 

Jane Coaston: Meanwhile, in Greenland, Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen joined Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in a joint news conference and said that, again, Greenland does not want to be part of the United States. 

[clip of interpreter for Jens-Frederik Nielsen] Greenland does not want to be owned by the USA. Greenland does not want to be governed by the USA. Greenland will not be part of the USA. We choose the Greenland we know today, which is part of the kingdom of Denmark. Now we are faced with a geopolitical crisis, and if we have to choose between the USA and Denmark, here and now, we choose Denmark. 

Jane Coaston: Seems pretty clear to me. But of course, Trump wants to annex Greenland anyway. Here he is on Tuesday speaking to reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, making weird, vague threats on the subject. 

[clip of unnamed news reporter 2] On Greenland sir, the premier of Greenland said today, we prefer to stay with Denmark. Do you see that as the final word? 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Who said that? 

[clip of unnamed news reporter 2] The premier of Greenland. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Well, that’s their problem. That’s their problems. I disagree with them. I don’t know who he is. Don’t know anything about him. But that’s going to be a big problem for him. 

Jane Coaston: So to talk more about President Trump’s continued desire to stick his nose in other countries’ business, I talked to Ben Rhodes. He’s the former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor under the Obama administration and the co-host of Crooked Media’s Pod Save the World. Ben, welcome back to What a Day. 

Ben Rhodes: Love being on What a Day. I really do.

Jane Coaston: Thank you. 

Ben Rhodes: I mean, it’s just, like, we get through a lot. 

Jane Coaston: We do. 

Ben Rhodes: In a short period of time. It’s impressive. 

Jane Coaston: A surprising amount. 

Ben Rhodes: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: Speaking of which, today, Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are meeting with officials from Greenland and Denmark at the White House to talk about everything going on there. Going into these talks, which I still can’t really believe are actually happening, where does each country stand? 

Ben Rhodes: Well, uh the United States seems absolutely intent on taking Greenland. Um. I think we should believe Donald Trump. He’s come back to this again and again and again. He seems to have caught the conquest bug, which is never good for an autocratic leader. So seems like they want it um and it’s not gonna go away. Denmark absolutely does not want the United State to take Greenland, which has been kind of a colony of theirs that then morphed into this arrangement where they subsidized the country and kind of run their foreign defense policy. And the Greenlanders, they are ambivalent about their relationship with Denmark. I think there’s you know a bit of a colonial history that they don’t like, understandably. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Ben Rhodes: But they’ve made very clear that they don’t want to swap Denmark for the United States at all. Like, if you’re tired of being colonized, the answer to that is not to just invite the biggest empire in to colonize you. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Ben Rhodes: And they’re ambivalant about becoming independent right now, too, because they understandably probably feel like if they become an independent country of only, you know, 50,000 or so people, that they’re very vulnerable. So I would imagine that both Denmark and Greenland in their own way, for their own reasons are there to say no. And J.D. Vance is there to say we are not taking no for an answer. 

Jane Coaston: Right, which seems like an absurd position for the United States to take, especially given how little interest, not just people in Greenland or people in Denmark have in this, but in how little interest Americans have. 

Ben Rhodes: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: In taking Greenland. But like, what can we actually expect from these talks? Because it seems like America is going to say we want Greenland and Greenland and Denmark are going to no. 

Ben Rhodes: Yeah, I think what is potentially worrisome as a scenario, right, is that, I don’t know, maybe J.D. Vance is going to offer to buy Greenland because that’s the line that Marco Rubio was telling people on Capitol Hill that, oh, no, we don’t want to invade it. We just want to buy it. The problem is it’s not for sale, but it could be like going through these motions of, well, we tried to do it this way, but now that that’s failed and they won’t listen to reason, and as Donald Trump says, we need Greenland for our national security that that we have no choice but to occupy Greenland. You know so it could be that they’re kind of going through some motions here. Because otherwise I just don’t see how you reconcile these positions. 

Jane Coaston: No, and I mean, let’s set aside the fact that Congress is supposed to be involved here. 

Ben Rhodes: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: To handle any sort of territorial expansion. 

Ben Rhodes: Yes, yes.

Jane Coaston: Like why is he so obsessed with Greenland? 

Ben Rhodes: I believe that he just wants a legacy where he conquered a lot of territory. It’s as simple as that, right? Like that’s what happens like a Putin like, you know, the autocrats get older and they’re what’s my legacy gonna be? This is the biggest potentially available piece of land out there in the world. He believes that this whole hemisphere which includes Greenland is kind of his to run. He’s kind of the Emperor of the Western Hemisphere. You just depose the leader in Venezuela. And so I think first and foremost, he just wants a big chunk of territory. I think underneath that, there are a bunch of you know critical minerals and natural resources you could exploit in Greenland, and some of his buddies could make a lot of money off of that. He says he needs it for national security purposes because the Russians are up there, the Chinese are up there, they’re not in Greenland proper, but kind of in that region. 

Jane Coaston: In the Arctic, yeah. 

Ben Rhodes: In the arctic region. But that’s just not true because Denmark’s a NATO ally, so we have all the access to Greenland that we need. We have a military base there already. We could build ten more military. I’m sure that’s what the Danes are offering, I’m sure, is like, hey, like you can build another military base here. But that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying we need it. And so, ultimately, I don’t think it’s about defense in the same way that I don’t think Venezuela is about drugs. It’s about conquest. 

Jane Coaston: The president is also threatening to get involved in Iran, where sources in Iran say thousands of people have been killed over the past few weeks. On Tuesday, the president posted on Truth Social quote, “Iranian patriots keep protesting, take over your institutions, save the names of the killers and abusers, they will pay a big price.” First of all, I feel as if when presidents say that to people who are protesting autocratic regimes and don’t like follow up on that, we’ve seen that with John F. Kennedy in Cuba. And we’ve see this again in other historical instances. But–

Ben Rhodes: Yeah. George H.W. Bush in Iraq. And yeah.

Jane Coaston: Exactly, like the Kurds. 

Ben Rhodes: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: It doesn’t go great. 

Ben Rhodes: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: But like, let’s say Trump does get involved. What would US involvement in Iran actually look like? 

Ben Rhodes: I mean, first of all, like he’s been saying this for days. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Ben Rhodes: And they’ve been protesting and they’ve been getting slaughtered for days, and the estimates range from 2,000 up to 20,000. Um. Look, I think what we know is that Trump is the kind of guy that likes to you know bomb countries and he bombed a lot of them, but not get you know really involved with like ground troops, right? And so I think what he might try to do is decapitate the regime. You know, to take out, maybe to kill the supreme leader of Iran if they can get his whereabouts, maybe take out other senior leaders of the Iranian regime, maybe take out like military targets and and think that if you just bomb this regime for a day or two, um it’ll just collapse and the protesters will storm the government buildings and that’s the end of the Iranian regime. That’s possible, I suppose, but it leaves a gaping question as to what comes next inside of Iran because it will be a chaotic and violent place if that happens. It already is. It’d be more so if that happens. And the people with the most weapons tend to emerge from that scenario and the people with the most weapons are the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, which is kind of the elite military force of the regime. And so it doesn’t necessarily make things better. If he–

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Ben Rhodes: –just bombs this country because there’s a protest movement. 

Jane Coaston: If the regime fell, who would potentially rise to power to replace it? You mentioned the IRGC, but I think in the United States, you have Reza Pahlavi, who is the son of the former Shah of Iran. He’s been living in exile since 1979 in the United States. There are kind of a lot of different factions all battling, and they’re doing a lot of battling on the internet over this. But in brass tax terms, who do you think would be most likely to fill in that power vacuum besides the IRGC?

Ben Rhodes: Yeah, I mean, first of all, if I think the IRGC is most likely because they’re the most kind of armed, um then I think there’s an alternative scenario where essentially maybe the top of the regime, like Khamenei, the supreme leader flees the country or something, or he’s ousted, and you have kind of the more moderate remnants of the regime. There’s some people there that, you know, like the former president Rouhani or the Larijani family that that that might try to emerge as kind of brokers to negotiate some transition away from the regime to something different that’s not, you know, pulling the entire regime up root and branch, but is kind of trying to become more democratic and responsive to people. We’ll see if that actually happens. Then there’s a kind of collapse in which nobody fills the vacuum. Essentially there are factions fighting out. There’s a period of instability, kind of a failed state type of scenario. The Pahlavi, I just don’t, I don’t buy it. My experience, which includes mistakes, like when we were in the Obama administration and Muammar Gaddafi was ousted in Libya, we had a very good collection of exiles who were smart and technocratic, and some of them were well connected, but they didn’t know what was going on on the ground. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Ben Rhodes: And they showed up there to run the country and they ran nothing. Because–

Jane Coaston: Right and Pahlavi has not been there. 

Ben Rhodes: Yes. 

Jane Coaston: In nearly 50 years. 

Ben Rhodes: If you arrive in a shit show like that, and there are people there with militias, they’re not going to listen to you. You know why why would the IRGC listen to Pahlavi? So I don’t think it works. Um. Never mind the optic of reinstalling the Shah regime. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Ben Rhodes: You know which was loathed at the time. I mean I, I don’t think they want the United States to kind of like de facto run Iran via like the Shah. You know?

Jane Coaston: Something I’ve been interested in is how it seems as if Iran is very isolated right now. Like, yes, they have like a long standing relationship with Russia. 

Ben Rhodes: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: But it doesn’t feel like, it does not feel like Putin would be like, I’ll help. Like what, how would Iran’s allies react to American involvement? 

Ben Rhodes: Look, you’re right. I’ve been struck by the fact that Iran did come to Russia’s aid in Ukraine. They supplied a lot of drones and weapons for the Russians. The Russians haven’t exactly. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Ben Rhodes: They’re not a very reliable friend. Let’s just put it that way. That said, the Chinese buy somewhere like 90% of Iran’s oil. Like, China and Russia do have significant interests inside of Iran. And, you know, China would, I think, wanna make sure they can keep getting Iranian oil. And they’d be really nervous if it looked like the US was trying to like install some regime. When these places become you know kind of violent, quasi-failed states, they become often proxy wars. And I could see a China or Russia backing the IRGC, you know and their interests there are just making sure the United States has not become the dominant player in Iran as well as in the Gulf Arab countries. And so, even though they’re not showing their hand now, This is a country of 90 million people with huge oil reserves and a very sophisticated population, um a pretty capable military. This is not like a hollowed out Venezuela where you like pick off Maduro in a special operation. Like this is a different stakes, you know that we’d be messing around with. And I just think our capacity to control events inside of Iran is gonna be quite limited. 

Jane Coaston: Ben, as always, thank you so much for joining me. 

Ben Rhodes: Thanks. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Ben Rhodes, former Deputy National Security Advisor and co-host of Crooked Media’s Pod Save the World. 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, watch us on YouTube, 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 Senator Bernie Sanders] If this vote succeeds, over 20 million Americans are going to see at least a doubling in their premiums in the Affordable Care Act. 

Jane Coaston: Last November, Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders warned that letting the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced subsidies expire would send premiums soaring. Well, he was right. The expiration of the enhanced subsidies has led to higher prices in the ACA marketplace. The Congressional Budget Office predicts the subsidy expiration could leave two million more Americans uninsured this year. Federal data released Monday shows roughly 800,000 fewer people have signed up for ACA individual health plans compared to this time last year. But people are still signing up. About 2.8 million people signed up for the first time this year. Returning enrollment fell by about half a million people. Health policy experts warn enrollment numbers could fall further as people who were automatically re-enrolled see their first bills and decide the higher costs aren’t worth it. A bipartisan Senate group working on a deal to revive the lapsed ACA subsidies says it won’t have legislative tax ready until late January. The Pentagon launched a controversial attack in September on a suspected drug trafficking boat in the Caribbean, killing 11 people. The Trump administration was accused of potential war crimes after it came to light that survivors clinging to the boat were killed in a second strike. Now the New York Times reports that the US aircraft used in that airstrike was painted and configured to resemble a civilian plane, with its missiles concealed inside the body of the plane, rather than mounted under its wings. International law isn’t cool with combatants disguising themselves as civilians to launch attacks. That practice is known as perfidy, and it’s considered a war crime. According to legal experts, the disguise component is key, because the administration argues the killings were acts of war. Trump asserts that the U.S. is in an armed conflict with drug cartels, a claim many international legal experts dispute. But that’s why this new alleged perfidy development matters so much. Because even if you buy the pentagon’s justification for the killings, disguising a military aircraft as civilian would still violate the laws of war. I mean, the U.S. military’s own commander’s handbook makes it very clear, quote, “honor prohibits perfidy.” But on second thought, I guess that explains why this administration didn’t see a problem with it. 

[clip of Pete Hegseth] Very soon, we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department. Long overdue. 

Jane Coaston: Secretary of War/little boy Pete Hegseth said Monday that Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, will be integrated into the Pentagon’s network alongside Google’s AI tools. That’s right, the nation’s most closely guarded secrets will be processed by Grok which sounds less like a cutting edge AI and more like what a caveman says right before pointing at a rock. This comes just days after Grok which is built into Twitter caused international backlash for letting users digitally undress women without their consent. And reportedly even creates child sexual abuse material, a feature other AI chatbots prohibit. In a world first, Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked the chatbot. The UK threatened to ban Twitter, drawing sharp rebuke from the Trump administration. Grok has since restricted image generation and editing to paid users, because nothing stands between perverts and pedophiles and their images like $8 a month. Hegseth said that Grok will go live inside the Defense Department later this month. The Pentagon plans to make, quote, “all appropriate data from military IT systems, including intelligence databases available for AI use.” Has not one person seen Terminator 2 Judgment Day? No? For the first time in at least half a century, net migration in the U.S. was likely close to zero or negative in 2025, according to estimates published by the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan policy think tank. The Trump administration’s xenophobic and nationalist agenda is hard at work. And though ICE arrests and deportations are making headlines, the study highlights a slowdown in people coming to the U S. New restrictions on humanitarian parole, and refugee programs contributed to the lower migration numbers. The report’s authors said they expect the administration’s, quote, “pattern of restrictive policy and increased enforcement to continue or intensify.” They predict net migration numbers will likely stay in the negative in 2026. Of course, that comes with a caveat. Recent reductions in data transparency are making estimates more uncertain. So what does the slowdown in migration mean for the country as a whole? The economists write that it implies weaker employment and consumer spending growth. And this is where we tell you that the Brookings Institution estimates are vastly different from those released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office last week. In its own estimate, the government suggests net migration was positive in 2025. 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. Remember that a lot of the allegedly pro-immigration and customs enforcement influencers you might see online are being paid by the government and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how back in December, The Washington Post reported that ICE is spending $100 million on recruitment this year, including $8 million on deals with online influencers to encourage support for ICE, featuring peer-to-peer messaging to quote, “normalize and humanize careers at ICE through storytelling and lived experiences.” Like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com /subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and I don’t think we should normalize careers at ICE. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Emily Fohr and Chris Allport. Our producer is Caitlin Plummer. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Ethan Oberman, Greg Walters, and Matt Berg. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. 

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