The Pope, Pulp Fiction & Wild Presidential Claims
The Trawl
Jemma Forte & Marina Purkiss
4.7 • 867 Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2026
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this Trawl, we're heading Stateside because, frankly, you can’t look away.
From Pentagon prayer sessions to a defence secretary apparently quoting Pulp Fiction as scripture, Marina Purkiss and Jemma Forte try (and fail) to make sense of the latest chaos unfolding in US politics. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is back making sweeping claims about Iran, the Pope, and global diplomacy many of which don’t quite stand up to scrutiny.
As tensions escalate around the Strait of Hormuz, questions swirl about what’s really going on behind the scenes and who, if anyone, is actually in control.
Plus: MAGA vs the Pope, market-moving statements, political hypocrisy, and one truly unhinged news cycle.
Confused? So are we. Let’s trawl through it together.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Here we go, trawlers. Off to the States. I know. We've got to do it. |
| 0:04.3 | I'm not fighting with him. The Pope made a statement. He says Iran can have a nuclear weapon. |
| 0:09.5 | I say Iran can not have a nuclear weapon. |
| 0:28.3 | Hello and welcome to The Trawl where we come together for our once, twice, sometimes thrice, weekly group therapy session to cope with the binfire of domestic and geopolitical news. |
| 0:34.5 | I'm Gem Forte. |
| 0:35.6 | And I'm Marina Perkins, and yeah, that is it. Mara 333 wrote, |
| 0:40.2 | To be honest, I still haven't moved on from a whole civilization will die tonight. That happened. |
| 0:46.8 | That did happen. That happened. That was scary. |
| 0:49.6 | It may well have done, by the way, and we'll get to it because there is a story that was |
| 0:53.6 | such little coverage about the fact that Trump wanted to press the nuclear button. |
| 0:59.2 | But we're momentarily moving away from that for this episode trawlers, and we're going to |
| 1:02.9 | dive straight into other things, because, well, they've taken a turn for the crazier. |
| 1:09.4 | So it was already bloody weird that braggardotious secretary |
| 1:13.6 | of war Pete Hegsafe, former Fox News weekend warrior, self-described Christian nationalist, was holding |
| 1:22.0 | one of his now regular Pentagon prayer sessions, right? This is what he's doing in the Pentagon. This is not a |
| 1:29.6 | normal thing. This is not something that happened prior to Pete. And he does these like prayer sessions |
| 1:34.0 | to bless the Iran war, you know, very normal stuff, the Department of War. I know. I mean, |
| 1:39.4 | it is absolutely batshit and you see these poor military people sitting there just sort of |
| 1:44.9 | looking genuinely a little bit baffled and I guess the irony that thick peat won't realize is that |
| 1:50.9 | this makes the US look like the kind of theocracy that they're fighting in Iran and have such |
| 1:56.6 | a bloody problem with. Yeah, but then it gets worse than just the prayer sessions being held. |
| 2:03.7 | Because last week, Pete stepped up to the podium. |
... |
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