Trump Wins New Hampshire & Utterly Shames the Establishment—Again, w/ Michael Tracey LIVE From NH. PLUS: Biden’s Bombing Campaign Spreads Across Middle East, w/ Expert Erik Sperling
Timestamps:
Intro (0:00)
Last Hope of the Establishment (8:29)
Interview with Michael Tracey Live From New Hampshire (31:27)
US Expands Middle East Bombing (1:02:37)
Interview with Erik Sperling (1:08:57)
Ending (1:33:50)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
First of all, thank you for your indulgence as we were off.
The last few days, as a result of my being under the weather, the real culprits here were my kids who passed to me some sort of bug or flu that their little 14-year-old body enabled them to get over in less than 24 hours.
While it lingered in me and I suffered for four straight days, time permitting, I will have a segment tonight vehemently denouncing them.
But either way, we're very happy to be back.
I'm feeling well enough to do the show and we're looking forward to it.
Also tonight, Donald Trump scores his second consecutive decisive victory on the road to determine who will be the 2024 presidential nominee for the Republican Party.
Trump defeated former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, his last remaining competitor, using a very generously broad definition of that term, by a margin of roughly 12 points.
The only reason it was even that close is because New Hampshire is an open primary, meaning that all voters, not just Republicans, have the right to vote in the Republican primary.
And so many left-leaning independents and even Democratic Party voters who said they prefer Joe Biden answered the call of Democratic Party leaders and Democratic Party pundits that they go and vote for Nikki Haley that it made the real gap seem less humiliating than it actually was.
According to exit polls, Trump won a three out of every four Republican voters, which means that had only Republicans been allowed to vote, as happens in many of the upcoming states, the margin of victory would have been 50 points, 75 to 25, not 12.
Trump's control of the Republican Party is historically massive and no longer in question.
Nikki Haley, clearly addicted to the lavish media praise she has been getting, as well as all the dreams she's harboring of how much she can monetize her candidacy, is so extreme that she's even willing to go next to South Carolina, her home state, where she's certain to lose to Trump by a wide margin, despite that being the state from which she hails.
In fact, the person she anointed to be a United States Senator, Tim Scott, Endorsed Donald Trump as soon as he dropped out of the race, as have many of the most prominent South Carolina officeholders.
It's very rare for someone to go and lose their own state, let alone lose it by the margin that she is likely to lose it by, and yet her humiliation is well worth the price she's willing to pay for more media attention and to monetize her future.
Now the fact that Trump's victories in these primaries has been predicted and expected Is, I think, causing the really extraordinary nature of his victories to be somewhat overlooked.
It is virtually impossible to overstate how much has been done by virtually every major center of power in the United States to sabotage Trump's candidacy, destroy his reputation, and all but force voters to choose someone else.
They have not only poured massive sums of money into that effort, and have not only had almost every major American media corporation devote seven years, non-stop, to depicting him as a literal Hitler figure, but they are trying to bar him from the ballot, and even making history by becoming the first party in power to use their control over the judiciary and the prosecutorial power to try and prosecute and imprison their leading political opponent.
And yet, in the face of all of that, Trump just keeps winning.
The collapse of establishment power and credibility as illustrated by Trump's resilience and all but inevitable victory in the GOP race continues, in our view, to be a story of historic significance, arguably the most important story in American politics since Trump's emergence in 2015.
And we will do everything possible to examine all facets of that tonight, including Even having on, yet again, the intrepid independent journalist Michael Tracy, who will join us from New Hampshire, where he has spent the last week or so doing reporting.
Then, I know it's not being reported this way, but the reality is that the Biden administration has now heavily involved the United States, not in two new major wars, but in three new major wars over the course of just three years, one every year.
The Biden administration has financed and armed the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, It is financing and arming Israel's now three-month-old war in Gaza, and it is absolutely involved in a new regional war that involves constant bombing of Syria, Iraq, and especially Yemen, a country that they have bombed at least six times in the last three weeks with vows from the White House to continue even more bombing.
As we have been reporting, none of this has been done without the slightest whip of congressional approval, let alone congressional debate.
And the warnings we issued after the first bombing attack on Yemen are now even more visible than ever, namely that when a president starts new wars without involving Congress, it is not just some technical violation of the Constitution, although it is.
It is dangerous in its own right, as it can easily lead to the type of endless war we are now at risk of seeing, with no strategic plans, no metrics for success, no exit plans, no weighing of benefits versus the risks of regional escalation and full-scale war.
We'll examine the latest in what can only be called this new Middle East war, and we'll speak with Eric Sperling, the executive director of the DCI, advocacy group Just Foreign Policy, one of the few D.C.
advocacy groups that really applies its principles and values rigorously without the slightest regard for which party it helps or hurts.
They have been leading the way in arguing why it is so vital that Biden, if he's going to continue to expand this Middle East war, at least seek the approval of Congress so that a public debate is had.
And then finally, time permitting, we report on some of the latest and most gruesome developments in Israel's ever-expanding war in Gaza, including one horrific video scene that appeared just today of the IDF shooting several men with their arms raised and waving a white flag just moments after one of them gave an interview to a British news outlet, only to then be shot dead seconds later after the interview concluded.
As well as the truly horrifying and almost certainly illegal abuse of detainees in Israeli custody.
As always, the key fact to remember is that it is the United States, you, financing and arming Israel's war.
And it is the Biden administration that has assumed the role of Israel's most stalwart and unflinching supporter.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Every night before this show begins, we announce the show and the various topics we intend to cover on our various social media platforms, both the program's social media platforms and my own.
And when I announced the topic of tonight's episode, namely that the establishment has suffered a grave and humiliating, I think, significant failure as a result of Donald Trump's Victory in New Hampshire, a place that Nikki Haley and her supporters really thought they had a chance, solely because they were allowed to encourage independent voters and even Democratic Party voters to go and vote for Nikki Haley, a state that in the last two elections has voted for the Democratic candidate.
There are a lot of Democrats and left-leaning independents in New Hampshire.
Only to find that Donald Trump won by double digits.
His victory was never really in doubt.
That this was a Another in a long line of defeats, of shameful humiliating defeats for the American establishment in the United States, by which I mean the financial centers of power, the largest media corporations, the people who run elections through big donors and lobbyists, all of the centers of power that have been uniting to sabotage the Trump presidency in every way they can.
And in response, I had a lot of comments of people saying, in what conceivable way is Donald Trump an enemy of the establishment?
If you don't understand that the central fact of American political life is that the establishment has one political priority right now, and only one, which is preventing Donald Trump's return to power, I say this not to be insulting, but simply to observe reality that it is impossible to have any understanding of what's happening in the United States politically.
It is such a basic, central, defining, driving fact of all of American political life that establishment forces are arrayed in every way imaginable against Donald Trump, that a failure to recognize that basically means that there's no way to understand anything meaningful about American politics.
That Nikki Haley was a person who was never taken seriously as a political candidate, as a potential opponent of Donald Trump.
At the beginning, the only person who was deemed to be a possibly formidable challenger to Trump was Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor.
And as a result, there were tens of millions of dollars, huge amounts of money, poured into the DeSantis campaign, only for the evidence to be pretty obvious early on that DeSantis was not really a good candidate, just not quite ready to exert the kind of retail just not quite ready to exert the kind of retail political skills that, for better or for worse, one needs to be competitive, especially if you don't have other advantages, in order to run for president.
He was awkward and uncomfortable.
He lacked charisma.
There was nothing really dynamic about him.
Even people who thought that he was a very good Florida governor simply weren't moved by him.
On top of that there was really no space for him to maneuver in a Republican Party that was still very enamored of Donald Trump.
If he criticized Trump too harshly, which he was afraid to do, it could ruin his political future.
And if he didn't criticize Trump, then the question of why he was running against Trump would be the unanswerable question.
He would just simply fade into the Republican primary as someone that Republican voters more or less liked, but had no real reason to opt for in order to reject Donald Trump.
And so that possibility was discarded pretty quickly.
There was a time when DeSantis was actually polling quite well.
And without much time passing, there was a precipitous drop in the support for Ron DeSantis and a significant rise in the support for Donald Trump.
Beyond the failure of DeSantis to demonstrate he had that kind of personal charisma, that Donald Trump absolutely excels at no matter what else you think of Trump, there's no denying that, what really helped Trump, what really made his victory in the Republican primary a virtual certainty is when the Democratic Party began doing something that has never been done before in the history of American politics.
They decided at exactly the moment that Trump was the leading presidential candidate, both in the Republican field as well as in the general election, at least very competitive with the incumbent president Joe Biden, to launch a campaign, a multi-pronged campaign, to try and imprison
Their leading political opponent, the kind of thing that we have for decades been told is the hallmark of authoritarianism and attacks on democracy in foreign countries.
In fact, in 2022, the Academy Award honored a film about the imprisonment of Vladimir Putin's primary most vocal political critic, Alexei Navalny, And this is something that we're constantly told is what happens in totalitarian countries, that the leading political opposition is barred legally by imprisoning the person who's a critic of the regime or trying to subvert the power of the regime.
And of course, in every one of these instances, there's always legal justification offered for imprisoning them.
There's a corruption case against Navalny.
In every single country where this happens, there's always an argument that the person is corrupt, that the person has violated the law.
There's never a time when the government comes out and says we're imprisoning our political opponents simply because we want to ensure there's no dissent.
There's always a pretext, a legal pretext.
And the very first prosecution that was brought by Trump against Trump was the worst conceivable case to do so.
It was brought in Manhattan, which everybody knows is the ground zero for American liberalism.
It was brought by an overtly left-wing prosecutor named Alvin Bragg.
There was a huge expenditure of money by George Soros, $500,000 to a PAC devoted to Alvin Bragg's election.
And the charges that were brought against Trump that were brought as felony charges were so trivial.
Essentially an allegation that he made payments to Stormy Daniels to prevent her from speaking about the affairs, she says, he had with her and mischaracterized it in internal Trump organization documents as something else.
Usually the kind of thing that would be a misdemeanor.
Alvin Bragg did everything possible to stretch it into a felony.
And right away the perception was that Democrats and liberals were going to abuse the power of law in order to try and stop Donald Trump.
And this was something that didn't just come out of the blue.
In 2016, the powers of the FBI and the CIA were weaponized both during the 2016 election and immediately after throughout the first two years of Trump's presidency to try and sully and sabotage Trump's campaign and then his presidency with what turned out to be an almost entirely fabricated scandal called Russiagate.
And everybody watched that come from the echelons and the bowels of the CIA and the FBI, interfering in American politics, leaking stories to the New York Times and the Washington Post on a virtually daily basis, including all kinds of deranged conspiracy theories that turned out to be untrue.
There were promises made of top-level Trump officials who were going to be arrested and frog-marched out of the White House for having conspired with the Kremlin to hack into the emails of the DNC and John Podesta only for Robert Mueller to be unleashed on the world with full subpoena power and supposedly the dream team of prosecutors only to close his investigation
In after 18 months and conclude that he could find no evidence to establish that conspiracy, not a single American, not a single one was charged with, let alone convicted of the core conspiracy that gave rise to the whole deranged scandal, which was the allegation that the Trump campaign had criminally conspired with the Russians to hack into those email servers.
2020 election happens, and here you have the same thing, the CIA, the FBI, manufactures a lie that the Biden story was a, the reporting on the Biden campaign was the byproduct of Russian disinformation.
That too got debunked.
So you have year after year after year of establishment centers of power Being abused while at the same time financial centers of power like Wall Street and Silicon Valley pouring enormous amounts of money, sometimes 9 to 1, 90% to 10% into the coffers of Joe Biden in order to defeat Donald Trump and before that Hillary Clinton to defeat Donald Trump.
And so the establishment has been doing everything it possibly can do To sabotage Trump, including lying and disseminating disinformation and conspiracy theories.
And they got to the point where they were so desperate that they're now even willing to try and strike Trump from the ballot to prevent people from voting for him and even trying to imprison him.
So this is the context to understand American politics.
That every major center of power is united in a desperate attempt to prevent Donald Trump from returning to power.
And despite that, despite how much money was poured into Nikki Haley, who became the alternative to Ron DeSantis...
Trump crushed them in Iowa and won Iowa with the biggest margin of victory in the history of a contested Republican primary.
And now they went to New Hampshire last night, the most possibly favorable ground for Nikki Haley, for the reason I said.
And here was the outcome.
Donald Trump wins New Hampshire by 11 to 12 points, 54 to 43.
by 11 to 12 points, 54 to 43.
And according to exit polling, Trump won Republican voters by 75 to 25, by 50 points.
And the next state, which is several weeks away in South Carolina, which is Nikki Haley's home state, shows that Trump has a massive lead in South Carolina as well.
So it doesn't matter what these people do.
It doesn't matter what they say.
It doesn't matter how much money they amass.
All of the weapons that they have been using to dominate American politics for decades no longer works.
And that is something that they have to grapple with and are confounded by.
And this is the major story of our politics in 2016, since 2016, which is the collapse of the legitimacy of American institutions of power to the point that not even indicting a presidential candidate four separate times on major felony charges can which is the collapse of the legitimacy of American institutions of power to the point that not even indicting a That is a historic development in the United States.
Now, Nikki Haley is actually one of the most preposterous people in American politics who has run for a long time.
And few things illustrated that more than what it is that she said when she spoke last night after getting crushed again. - Okay.
You would have thought based on her demeanor and the kind of energy of what her event was that she actually won.
She was doing that whole bit about how the establishment told us we couldn't possibly win and yet here we are, except she didn't win.
And the establishment didn't tell her she could win, they did everything possible to be on her side.
So, look, all politicians spin, they all manipulate facts for their own benefit, but Nikki Haley's lies last night were so flagrant.
But I just want to spend a couple of minutes on the two most glaring ones, not just because they show what a pathological and sociopathic liar Nikki Haley is, I think we've spent a lot of time on this show demonstrating that, but because the lies she told go right to the core of the key political narrative that I think is emerging in the United States in a way that is historic in nature.
So, first of all, here is the first fairy tale that she spun after losing New Hampshire.
And the question is, who's going to fix it?
With Donald Trump, Republicans have lost almost every competitive election.
We lost the Senate.
We lost the House.
We lost the White House.
We lost in 2018.
We lost in 2020.
And we lost in 2022.
The worst kept secret in politics is how badly the Democrats want to run against Donald Trump.
Okay, so according to Nikki Haley, the Democrats are doing everything possible to ensure that Donald Trump is the nominee because they know, according to her, that he's the only person they can beat.
The problem with that claim is twofold.
One is that polls show that Trump is actually the only Republican candidate running ahead of Joe Biden while Nikki Haley is running behind him.
But the much bigger problem is that Democrats are genuinely and earnestly doing everything to keep Nikki Haley's candidacy afloat, to try and make her win.
We've gone over this, that her money is coming from Democratic big donors and oligarchs That Democratic pundits on MSNBC and CNN are urging Democratic voters to vote for Nikki Haley by arguing not that she's the weakest candidate, but that she's the best candidate.
That if you had a Biden-Haley race, at least America would be back into the light and away from the darkness.
Democrats love Nikki Haley because she is the closest to them in their political ideology.
So to have a candidacy driven almost entirely by Democratic donors and Democratic operatives and Democratic pundits and Democratic money, and in last night's vote, Democratic votes, and then to get up on a stage and say the Democrats are doing everything in their power to ensure I'm not the nominee and Donald Trump is,
Is a lie so glaring and so obvious that it kind of stands on a category of its own, even considering that politicians typically manipulate and deceive.
Here's the rest of this.
He's a loser!
He's a loser!
They know Trump is the only Republican in the country who Joe Biden can defeat.
Alright, so everything about that is false as we just said.
Now, here's the other claim Nikki Haley tried to make.
She's trying to claim that she's the one standing up to the political establishment.
She's the anti-establishment candidate in the race.
The establishment is trying to push Nikki Haley out of the race, she says.
But the voters are saying no to the establishment.
He or she tweeted last night after the results came in, quote, I've got bad news for the political establishment.
I'm not going anywhere except to my sweet South Carolina.
We're not going to let them coronate Donald Trump when 48 states haven't voted.
The political establishment is behind Nikki Haley in a way that I've never seen them back a Republican politician in my life.
And it's not voters telling the political establishment, we're going to defy you by voting for Nikki Haley.
It's the voters telling the political establishment, we're going to defy you by voting for Donald Trump.
Here is an interview that Nikki Haley gave on Fox, where she again postured as the anti-establishment candidate.
Martha, I'm running to win this race.
And as much as everybody wants to talk about what I'm going to do, at some point y'all are going to realize that I won this race and you're going to have to accept when I say I told you so.
It is slow and nobody wins the race.
I've done this the entire time.
We're going to finish it.
I don't want anything else.
I don't want anything else.
I'm running to be president.
I'm not going to pull out because somebody wants to be coronated.
I'm not going to pull out because they think that I shouldn't be there.
The political class has never thought I should be here.
In South Carolina, in Congress, at the UN, no one has ever thought I should be here.
And that's exactly why I should be here.
Because I'm fighting for normal people.
And I'll always do that.
The political class has never won Nikki Haley in the race, she says.
How do you, even in the context of a campaign, get yourself to lie like that with a straight face?
Here's the Wall Street Journal, the voice of the establishment, the editorial board, on January 24th, yesterday, urging Nikki Haley to stay in the race.
Quote, Nikki Haley earns the chance to fight on after New Hampshire.
She closed strong in the primary and revealed Trump's November weakness.
If she can remain competitive, there's an argument from Ms.
Haley to stay in the race through the July convention, and that's a whole argument why Nikki Haley should Stay in this race.
Now, it is, I think, amazing and what's the important part here is not that Nikki Haley is lying.
The important part is that the establishment has really lost its ability to influence the American population any longer.
I watched a video last night.
Just through sheer schadenfreude, where Bill Kristol, who is Nikki Haley's most ardent supporter, was speaking to Tim Miller, a lifelong Republican operative who, in the wake of Trump, became a Democrat like Bill Kristol, and they were really hoping and believing Nikki Haley would win New Hampshire, and as the results came in and they realized she was going to lose by double digits, They just were so depressed.
It was one of those videos that started off hopeful and then ended up with them almost slitting their throats on video.
And one of the things they were basically saying was, I just don't understand how it can possibly be that after everything Donald Trump has done, after everything Donald Trump has said, after every law that Donald Trump has broken, It continues to win by such large margins.
And that is really true.
They cannot understand the world any longer.
They look at the world and it makes no sense to them.
Because all of these people are so detached from the people who they think they speak for or who they think they can analyze.
And it is finally, I think, sinking in that Their control is gone.
And that is why the only hope they continue to have is that they can imprison Donald Trump.
That really is the Democrats' only hope.
And both of them, Bill Kristol and Tim Miller, both said the one thing polls give hope is that if Donald Trump is convicted and if he spends time in prison, That's the one thing that can persuade some Republicans to abandon him.
him.
That really is their only strategy left for stopping Donald Trump, to imprison him at the same time they posture as the saviors of American democracy.
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We have been very excited to have Michael Tracy following the presidential campaign As you know, he was in Iowa's last week where we derived a huge amount of excitement and pleasure constantly hearing about the extreme suffering he was enduring because of the cold weather.
He also did a great job of reporting on what was going on there.
He was able to speak with a lot of voters to get a good sense of what was going on.
We had interviews live the night of the caucus and he has spent the last several days In New Hampshire, he unfortunately hasn't been able to be on the show because we've been off sick the last couple of days, but we are very excited to talk to him about what it is that he has seen and heard in New Hampshire and to make sense with him of the primary result that just happened.
Michael, it's good to see you look unfortunately kind of warm and comfortable, but it's nice to see you anyway.
Thanks for coming on.
As always, Glenn, I just wish you were here with me in beautiful Manchester, New Hampshire, in the middle of a two-part snowstorm that we're in, of course, at the moment.
I know.
I just wish it were colder for you.
But actually, I mean, New England is a great place.
Actually, I'm always jealous when people are there.
It is a beautiful part of the country.
So you have at least that.
All right.
I think it's my favorite regional accent.
When somebody has a really thick New England accent, it's the most pleasurable regional American accent to experience.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the Boston accent, never have been, it always kind of has been a little bit off-putting to me, but the generic New Hampshire accent, like Bernie Sanders for example, is really quite lovely.
Alright, let's get into the primary results.
Before we get into what you've been seeing and the kind of people with whom you've been speaking, first of all, just what do you make of the primary, how it kind of was conducted, and what the outcome was?
Yeah, so let's not get entirely derailed by this.
But of course, I had the profound honor of listening to your opening monologue.
And I'll just postulate a point.
And let's see if we can have some common ground on this.
The concept of establishment is extremely nebulous.
Establishments shift and morph over time.
And to say just flatly that Trump is 100% antithetical to whatever the current political establishment is, I don't think really holds much water.
Just look at who has endorsed Trump in this primary contest.
Kevin McCarthy did months ago.
Speaker Mike Johnson endorsed Trump.
Steve Scalise.
Elise Stefanik was one of Trump's first endorsers.
That's your top Republican leadership in the House, pretty much unanimously aligned behind Trump.
Okay.
Similar in the Senate.
Not Mitch McConnell, who has his own personal baggage with Trump, but you had Steve Daines, who's the head of the Senate Republican Campaign Committee in the Senate.
Rick Scott, Senator from Florida.
Marco Rubio just endorsed Trump on the eve of the Iowa caucus.
Ted Cruz has endorsed him.
The governor of South Carolina was an incredibly early endorser of Trump.
He has delegations of members of the political class following him around to every state endorsing him.
Trump brags about how unified his endorsers have been in terms of the Republican political class in the states that he's campaigning in, whereas Nikki Haley I think only has one endorsement.
of a sitting Republican member of Congress.
And Ron DeSantis only had a handful, including in his home state of Florida, where Trump was wiping him away in terms of endorsements.
We had Byron Donalds on the show last week on your show because I was at a caucus site with him.
He's a sitting member of Congress.
And he and almost all of his colleagues in the Republican delegation in Florida were endorsing Trump.
Now, in terms of donor factionalism and in terms of who they're supporting in the primaries, yeah, there are some big donors who tried to mount a push to come up with a Trump alternative, but it was kind of a tepid push necessarily Nikki Haley has gotten some support, including from some donors like Reid Hoffman and others who are more Democratic leaning, but it really hasn't been that robust of a disbursement of money to her, all things considered.
And let's not forget, Trump in 2020, his biggest donor, you must remember this Glenn, was who else, but Sheldon Adelson, who poured like $100 million into the Trump campaign apparatus.
And Miriam Adelson, his widow, is likely to do the same.
So I don't know, I just think there's a bit of, there's some qualifiers that can be added when you're talking about Trump versus the establishment.
Is it unprecedented that he's been indicted?
With 91 charters or whatever the number is?
Yes.
Are there factions of the establishment that are fervently obsessed with toppling him at any price?
Yes, but there's also elements of the establishment that he's been able to consolidate, given his prominence since 2016.
I mean, this isn't like the 2016 cycle when he genuinely was this interloper who almost everybody in the political establishment rejected.
Michael, you've had a lot of time to make your argument.
subsume elements of that establishment.
I mean, the head of the RNC effectively endorsed him last night in a contested primary.
Okay, Michael.
I think Michael, you've had a lot of time to make your argument.
I've been listening to the argument.
I think, look, there's everything you said is factually true.
I think the issue, though, is what is the establishment in the United States?
I think that's really the core of the difference we have.
When I talk of the establishment, I'm talking about where actual genuine power resides.
And I do not think that...
Office holders in the House and in the Senate are the real power in the United States.
I mean, it's the kind of thing that you learn is true from like a very basic civics class that you might take in like junior high or in high school.
Like, oh, the House and the Senate, those are the leading politicians.
What's obviously going on, and it's not a secret, is that a lot of Republican politicians hate Donald Trump.
They hate his policies, they hate his ideology, they hate him personally, but they, if one thing that good politicians can do is see the writing on the wall of what their voters and what the people in the party actually want.
And for months now, Trump's lead has been gigantic.
So if you're somebody who wants to have any future in the Republican Party as a viable candidate to be reelected, to seek higher office, to one day run for president, of course you can't be seen as opposing Donald Trump.
So of course all these people are falling into line, especially as Trump's support becomes more and more obvious and more and more undeniable.
You have a lot of these kind of latecomers who are getting behind Trump.
But when I'm talking about a Establishment Centers of Power, I mean things like Wall Street and Big Tech and the U.S.
Security State and large media corporations.
And there's just no denying that in 2016 and in 2020, and now again more so than ever in 2024, those institutions of power are united desperately in order to stop Donald Trump through all the means that I just went through.
So you're right, he now has a stranglehold on the Republican Party.
You have to be crazy to be a Republican politician and oppose Donald Trump.
Otherwise you end up as Liz Cheney, losing your seat by 36 points, or Adam Kinzinger who knows that you can't even run for reelection.
There's no opposing Trump and having a future on the Republican Party.
But when I say the establishment, I mean where real power resides.
Now, look, Trump was the American president for four years.
He has a very good chance to be president again.
And so you're right, people with real power are also going to kind of aggrandize him and try and gain favor with him because that can be beneficial as well.
So I'm not saying he's leading a revolution.
All I'm saying is that There is an unprecedented effort by some of the most influential centers of American power who are typically fine with whatever candidate wins, Republican or Democrat, because they end up serving the same power centers, who see Trump as such a kind of threat to the way of life in American political processes that they are engaged in unprecedented efforts to try and sabotage him.
I think, unless you want to say something about that, I think we, you know, kind of... Yeah, just very quickly.
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, just very quickly.
I mean, I grant that you're correct about that latter part that you just articulated, which is that there are these unprecedented moves to undermine Trump, and that's gone on since arguably 2015.
So, no argument there.
I just think that it's a little oversimplistic to say that the establishment writ large is united against him when that requires, excluding from your definition of the establishment, the entire Congress apparently, the leadership in both houses of Congress, some of the most powerful donors in the entire country like, yes, Sheldon Adelson, who's still going to have his wealth politically crucial in this coming election.
Um, Bertie Marcus, who is the founder of Home Depot, one of the most prolific Republican donors in the country for decades, endorsed Trump months ago.
Um, I mean, Lindsey Graham endorsed Trump this cycle before he even started running.
At least the phonic endorsed Trump the minute he declared his president, his candidacy.
I mean, even there, you know, like, so what, but whatever the reason, whatever the reason, I mean, even there, even there, the governors of the first two states, Ron DeSantis complained, Ron DeSantis complained that Fox News and the conservative media were Trump's Praetorian guard.
Right.
And Trump thinks Fox was behind DeSantis, at least from the beginning.
Are people who are devoted to kind of old school Republican politics, I think that's the main reason why Dr. Carlson is no longer a Fox host, and the two governors of the first two states that voted, first in Iowa with Kim Reynolds and now in New Hampshire with one of the Sununu's, Chris Sununu, both endorsed someone other than Donald Trump.
And Trump has Henry McMaster, the governor of South Carolina, and Joe Lombardo, the governor of Nevada.
Exactly.
Because, again, I don't consider real power to be elected leaders of Congress.
I think people get both of our points.
All right, let's move on to the on-the-ground reporting that we've done.
I think you made some fair points about the narrative of how it's important to think about what establishment power means in the United States.
Do you want to, before we get into a couple of the, I think, really interesting interviews that you were able to do with some Trump voters and Republican voters explaining why, what was your sense of the political dynamic on the ground?
Because you did have this interesting component where the governor of New Hampshire was, I mean, aggressively campaigning for Nikki Haley, vowing for a while that she was going to win the state, then kind of withdrawing it.
You had a campaign to encourage Democratic Party voters and left-leaning independents to show up and vote in the polls for Nikki Haley, which a lot of them did.
That was the only reason it was so close.
What did you make of the whole kind of vibe of how this election was playing out before the results were known?
Yeah, so on Saturday I went to one of the meet and greets that Nikki Haley did with Chris Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire, who, by the way, is a fairly popular governor, all things considered.
He's been re-elected several times.
He has to run every two years.
Vermont and New Hampshire are the only two states where the governor is re-elected, is elected in two-year terms.
So Sununu has been elected multiple times in New Hampshire as a Republican, in New England, which is a pretty significant accomplishment politically.
I mean, he's from a political dynasty, too.
Yeah, his father was the governor and his brother, I think it was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And those two also endorse Haley, not that it really means much, but yeah.
By the way, The Sununu family's home base is in Salem, New Hampshire, which is in the southeast corner of the state on the border of Massachusetts.
And that was one of the strongest Trump towns in the entire country.
So apparently their sway doesn't count for much in their own home base.
But I went to one of their meet and greets with Haley at a tavern in Nashua, New Hampshire, on Saturday.
And, you know, people are going...
It's interesting because I've been in New Hampshire for every primary cycle now dating back to 2008, and just kind of intangibly, in previous cycles there was more excitement, there was something different in the ether.
Than I really experienced this time.
I'm not sure I can really quantify that.
It's just an impression that one gets.
Because when I was in this tavern and Nikki Haley was doing her meet and greet, a lot of people in the tavern were not even really familiar with who she was.
And this was very late in the process.
It was like three days before the primary.
I even spoke to one girl that she took a photo with, like a selfie, and she only had the vaguest notion of who Nikki Haley was.
Didn't even know if she was going to vote.
and had only heard of Nikki Haley because she saw like a snippet of her on TikTok, believe it or not.
This is like a 19-year-old girl.
And I asked her if she was aware that Nikki Haley is actually in favor of banning TikTok, and she wasn't.
So I might have personally influenced that voter's potential choice.
So Nikki Haley only existed in New Hampshire as a function of her being used as a vessel to oppose Trump.
I mean, at the polling sites yesterday, I encountered people like a woman who is 67 years old.
Her name was Sue in Concord, New Hampshire.
She explicitly told me, look, I identify as left-wing.
She said I was a birdie girl, okay?
And she voted in the primary this year for the first time in her life, in 67 years, that she ever voted for a Republican for presidential office.
For Nikki Haley, not because she had any affinity with Nikki Haley whatsoever.
She would have voted for Biden against Nikki Haley if that were the general election matchup.
She just viewed it as a means by which she could undermine Trump.
And just one little minor factual correction, I mean there's some confusion on this.
Democrats technically cannot vote in the primary if they're registered As Democrats, if you're a registered Democrat in New Hampshire, you cannot vote in the Republican primary.
You would have had to have taken concerted action to change your registration to either Republican or undeclared, and the official state deadline for that was in October, and a few thousand Democrats apparently did make that switch, although I went around and talked to some local election officials, because there's a lot of local governance, actually, that's township-based in New Hampshire, and one of them in this place called Epsom, New Hampshire, last night told me,
As recently as last week, if you are a Democrat, you could change your registration and be eligible to vote in the Republican primary.
So I don't know.
There's a little bit of confusion around that.
But technically speaking, you cannot, as a registered Democrat, vote in the Republican primary.
The catch is lots of people who habitually vote Democratic and are even overtly left.
They're independent.
It's just like a quirk of New Hampshire.
So they can go to the primary.
Right, exactly.
All right, let's go back.
We have a little bit of time, because we have a guest who's an actual expert coming up.
But let me just, first of all, before I get to this first clip, I just want to say, because it was so funny, I was watching some video of Laura Loomer, the very vocal Trump supporter.
Doing one of her dramatic protests where she was banned from an event and you happened to be making a cameo appearance there where you were chatting with Laura Loomer in a way that I thought was so funny.
I encountered her twice.
I saw her just randomly by happenstance.
I saw her get thrown out twice of a Nikki Haley event and then out of a Dean Phillips event.
Poor Laura Loomer.
If you get thrown out of a Dean Phillips event then you're really paying a price.
I know, I know.
Poor Laura Loomer.
Here is an interview you conducted with, I believe this one is with a declared Trump voter.
I'm not sure what order we're in, but I think that's what this is.
Let's listen to it and then we'll see.
And you can explain it after.
And why would you not put your military on the border?
You put it on the border in Ukraine.
You put it on the border in Afghanistan.
Why would you not put your military on the border, especially after you pulled them out of Afghanistan?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Better there than in Yemen or someplace.
Well, better there than Yemen.
And it just is, like I said, it's gotten...
The government has gotten way, way too out of control.
They long ago lost sight of the fact they work for us.
So Michael, for a while now I've been interested in this idea that immigration, this idea, you know, he was being done to two arguments.
One is our border is insecure, but also we seem to care a lot about the borders of other countries, but not quite our own border.
I've never quite understood why states that don't really have a large immigrant population nonetheless seem to care quite a bit about the border.
Now maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe there is more of an immigration issue in New Hampshire than I understand there to be.
But where, is that a common sentiment that you encountered in New Hampshire that the border was a very important issue?
Yeah, I think it's clearly, if not the top, one of the top two or three issues for Trump voters in particular.
And that was also true in Iowa.
But what was interesting with that gentleman who I spoke with, and I sent a photo along with the file that I gave one of your Colleagues, colleagues, colleagues.
Yeah, sorry.
Excuse me.
I take it back.
This guy's name is Tom.
He was 67, retired home builder, and he was bringing up, on his own accord, this was just somebody who happened to come out of a polling place in Concord, New Hampshire, where I was just serving a random sample of voters.
And he on his own volition said that he was making an argument not just about the border, but he was tying it, as you mentioned, to what he sees as the strangely excessive focus that the US government has on the problems of foreign countries like Ukraine and Israel.
In particular.
But I don't think that was what this guy said.
I think there was the one coming up with that.
No, this is the same guy.
This is just a different clip.
And yes, that's the same guy.
And he is one of the growing number of Republicans.
I mean, this is what I'm saying about like shifting political sentiments.
If you look at the polling, something like 30 to 40 percent of Republicans now oppose Sending money to Israel to wage this war.
Still a minority, but a growing percentage.
And still below the Democratic percentage, but you know, rising.
And this guy was one of them, and he was making that point specifically in relation to the lack of concern that he says the government pays to US problems that could better utilize those resources, including the border.
Yeah, I saw somebody today saying that at some point the America first ethos that Trump is increasingly spreading through the Republican Party will eventually have to make its way to the question of Israel and he was lamenting this kind of saying this is a reason why we should oppose Trump whereas I actually you know regard that as a positive the idea that why is it that so many people are willing to say the United States can't fund
The wars of other country, we're too much into debt.
We don't take care of our own citizens.
Why can we fund the war in Ukraine and all these other countries wars where it's not a 51st American state?
And yet suddenly at the same time the same people are supposed to say let's do everything and everything and we can to finance an arm and incur all the costs of war in Israel.
Like at some point that inconsistency is going to have to come to the fore the more this ethos spreads.
Let's listen to the second Let me just play this mic because we do have genuinely a minute of time today and I want to hear your reaction to the second part of this interview.
I employ a lot of veterans, a lot of military people, and it's really sad that I have to, you know, donate my stuff to wounded warriors and all that shit.
When I love doing it, you're gonna be wrong, but it's a sad day that we have to have these.
You should have to take care of that.
Yeah, right, that we should have to have this stuff with all my, and I pay, let me tell you, if everyone pays taxes, I pay ten times more taxes than you think you pay taxes.
Trust me, I pay every fucking tax under the sun.
Employee taxes, state taxes, Massachusetts taxes, doesn't matter what it is.
There's no income tax in New Hampshire, right?
Right.
But it doesn't matter.
I have my employee tax, and trust me, it's brutal.
It's like, on a 40-hour week, it's like $390 per employee.
So you have a construction company?
Yes.
So, is business good now?
Yeah, business is decent, but it's not because of what's been going on for the last three or four years.
These contracts have been out since, these are ones that came out when Trump was still in, in like 16, and then went into 20, and then when numbnuts got in.
I just have a hard time.
I have never been a Biden fan.
I never have been.
I just never have.
My in-laws are liberals, and it's fine.
It's fine, but women who are of age, over 45 or 50 years old, they fucking hate Trump.
But I always ask them.
They're the most radical anti-Trump.
And I go, why?
I go, I go, listen, I don't, I go, why?
Because he got, he got illegally taped on a bus grabbing, saying he's grabbing a friend.
I said, what male who's been with a woman since they're 15 years old doesn't grab him?
I said, I understand you don't want to hear the locker room talk.
I said, but, but I said to my mother-in-law, my, my wife and everybody else, I go, when you get together with the girls, you've been on to Foxwoods or you go to fucking Vegas, you know, five, you, you, animals are together.
I said, you women go, every single time, and you can ask a woman how bad you guys are, you're ten times worse than any guys get together.
Trust me.
It makes you just turn red.
Well, some of them don't like the changes to the abortion laws recently.
Listen, I always say, if Trump wants to really get it, and this is fine, get the nomination, but I think he should, since he's not a status quo politician, why doesn't he go against it?
I personally, I don't think a guy should even have a freaking choice.
I said, because let's face it, we have ten minutes of fun, and the only thing we've got to worry about is wiping our ass every day.
And they have nine months.
Of crap.
So I just look at it as, why do we, yes, you should have a say a little bit, but the majority of it would be the woman.
It should be pro-choice, period.
It should always be.
Hi, Michael.
You know, One of the reasons that's interesting to me is I think New Hampshire has always had this, like, much more libertarian strain in the Republican Party than most other Republican states.
You know, this kind of hands-off our lives, and it does translate into the culture war, even a lot of times to abortion.
I'm just wondering though, having now been to Iowa and then spending time in New Hampshire talking to Republican primary voters, how much does the culture war, I'm excluding things like immigration there, but like the kind of culture war fights, LGBT fights and trans issues and school curricula and abortion, how much of a place of prominence have those kinds of issues played in the concerns of these people that you're speaking to?
I've never heard anyone voluntarily bring up issues like school curricula or LGBT stuff as what's at the forefront of their voting calculus.
Now, people are concerned about those issues, but in terms of what they prioritize As like the guiding factor and how they make their voting decisions.
I've never had anybody volunteer that as something that's front of mind.
Um, but that guy in particular, who's actually a separate guy than the first one, you know, I sent your slaves the photos of them, but maybe my colleagues, Michael was a separate guy.
Sorry, the colleagues.
Um, they, I sent those guys, um, that that guy perfectly encapsulates the difference between like the median Trump voter in New Hampshire versus Iowa.
So that guy was effectively making a pro-choice argument saying that, you know, maybe he's not so into the religious stuff in terms of anti-abortion activism, and he actually thinks that Trump would be well-served to moderate his views on that, and therefore he would be able to sweep the general election.
That was the point that the guy was making.
But culture war, I haven't really heard emphasized all that much.
In fact, and this is something new, you don't typically hear this, especially from the supporters of the mainstream leading Republican candidate, there's been a lot more foreign policy talk than I expected in terms of what voters bring up.
I was in this place called Chichester, I think is how you pronounce it in New Hampshire, and I was talking to a 38-year-old guy who's a registered independent.
I mean, Trump complains about registered independence or undeclared voters being able to vote in the primary.
But that's how he won in 2016 in New Hampshire.
And a good share of them actually still voted for Trump this time around.
But this guy was telling me how he thinks that we're on course in the United States for some kind of global conflagration.
World War III, that's gonna bring back the draft, and he thought that Trump was gonna prevent that, and he said that Trump hasn't gotten the U.S.
into wars for, was first president not to get into the U.S.
into the new war for decades.
That's a line that gets repeated.
You've heard that many times, and you've made it yourself, made the point yourself.
And even Don Jr., I went to a surrogate event for Donald Trump Jr., and he spent a lot of his remarks talking about how Nikki Haley's in the pocket of what he called Big War, how she was on the board of Boeing.
And I had, you know, the first guy that we, whose clip you played, he was bringing up how he perceived this misallocation of resources to Ukraine and Israel as opposed to domestic needs.
And I heard several people bring up that point as one of the main reasons that they were supporting Trump.
And that's an issue, I don't have to tell you, Glenn, that has been completely ceded by Democrats to the Republicans.
For whatever faults there might be with Trump in terms of how Faithfully, he can actually follow through on that desire to properly allocate resources away from foreign conflicts, and I think there are some legitimate criticisms to raise on that point.
It's still a very salient political argument that's being made, and Trump is basically given fertile ground to almost completely monopolize that issue, because Biden has no interest in making the point, and neither do a majority of Democrats, who are still just as rock-solid on Ukraine, almost without, literally, exception, as they were almost two years ago now.
Absolutely.
That was a main observation that I made that you won't really hear mentioned much in the corporate media because they don't want to see Trump as being given credit as an avatar for people who have anti-interventionist views at all.
Exactly.
I mean, you know, along with what I began by talking about the establishment, this to me is also one of the most important changes in American politics is even though, you know, at the party leadership level, they're far from perfect or faithful when it comes to implementing policy.
There is clearly a change in the Republican voting base and the Democratic voting base in different directions when it comes to questions of militarism, the U.S.
security states, civil liberties and the like, that is so easily demonstrated and also yet important.
And just to note, we did show the pictures of the two people you interviewed while you were speaking there, so I know the viewers were happy for That relief from your image.
Michael, you did a great job, both in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Depending on what the weather reports are in South Carolina, if it's really bad, we're definitely going to ask you to go there and cover that next race for us as well.
And we really appreciate you taking the time to come on and talk to us tonight.
Thanks for the great work you've been doing.
All right.
Thanks, Glenn.
Bye, Michael.
Have a nice evening.
I'll send you a postcard for my next destination.
Absolutely.
We're looking forward to it.
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We began talking a lot about presidential powers and war powers a couple of weeks ago when the United States decided, with no debate, no debate in Congress, let alone a vote in Congress, to just start bombing Yemen as though the president could just wake up one day and decide, "Hey, I think we should go bomb this country."
And what we urged people in our audience to think about, even if you believe That what the Houthis are doing in attacking commercial shipping of the Red Sea in retaliation for the countries that they believe are responsible for the destruction of Yemen.
Even if you believe that that bombing is justified to think about the reasons why it's so important still for Joe Biden not to be able to start new wars or bomb new countries absent emergencies that are not applicable here without first going to Congress.
And one of the things we warned is that this is very likely to start escalating, and that is exactly what happened.
There is not just escalation when it comes to bombing Yemen, but in the last month Joe Biden has also bombed Syria and bombed Iraq.
A constant tit-for-tat that is rising in seriousness with various militias affiliated with Iran.
One of the things we had agreed on as a nation, and polls showed this, was we were tired of Middle East wars.
And yet it seems as though the things that are certain in life are not just death and taxes, but also that the United States ends up bombing multiple countries in the Middle East at once.
Here's the New York Times warning of the dangers.
As US and militias engage, White House worries about a tipping point.
Quote, the number of attacks on American troops in the Middle East increases the risk of death, a red line that could lead to a wider war.
Now remember, all of this is happening Because of the decision of the United States to fund and support Israel.
This is yet another cost of our decision to tie ourselves at the hip to Israel.
That is what all of this is about.
The Yemenis were not attacking ships in the Red Sea until the Israelis were destroying Gaza.
There was most of these conflicts fully under control.
And they only started escalating as a result of anger and unrest in the region toward Israel that then spills over to the United States because of the vital role we're playing in enabling that war.
The New York Times goes on, quote, the assault on American troops based at al-Assad air base in western Iraq.
Why do we still have military bases in Iraq and Syria?
On Saturday night was by one measure the most successful belief to carry it out by a militia sponsored by Iran since the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7.
Two out of an estimated 17 rockets and short-range ballistic missile fired at the base made it through air defense systems.
An unspecified number of American military personnel were reported injured but none were said to have been killed.
But it was just the latest in a regular string of relatively low-level assaults that have become a way of life in the Middle East for US forces since the Hamas attack.
As of Thursday, Iranian-backed militias have carried out 140 attacks on American troops in Iraq and Syria.
Again, why are there American troops in Iraq and Syria?
With nearly 70 U.S.
personnel wounded, some of them suffering traumatic brain injuries.
All but a few have been able to return to duty in short order, according to the Pentagon.
Here's from NPR, January 22nd, the U.S.
and U.K.
bombed more Houthi sites in Yemen.
Quote, the U.S.
and British militaries bombed multiple targets in eight locations used by the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen on Monday night, the second time the two allies have conducted coordinated retaliatory strikes on an array of the rebels' missile-launching capabilities.
Before we get to our guest, who I am very excited to talk to because he is the head of one of the most important foreign policy activist groups in D.C.
I just want to quickly show you, as the setup for the interview, the exchange that happened with the Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder.
At the Pentagon on January 23rd, where he was essentially asked, we're bombing all these countries, it's escalating, aren't we in a new war in the Middle East?
And listen to what he said.
The UN Secretary General just now is talking about the conflict in the Middle East.
He's mentioning the Houthis.
He's mentioning the U.S. and the U.K. strikes.
He's mentioning what's going on with striking in Iraq, both Israelis and the United States.
And he's urging all parties to step back from the brink and to consider the horrendous human cost of a regional conflict.
What's the Pentagon's response to that?
Well, Carla, we've been working for a very long time on regional security and stability, not only in the Middle East, but around the world.
And so we'll continue to work very closely with allies and partners globally to address tensions in the Middle East.
You know, since Hamas's attack against Israel, of course, we've been very focused on deterrence and on preventing a wider regional conflict, and we'll stay focused on that.
What about his words, on the brink?
Is the U.S.
on the brink of war right now in the Middle East?
We are not at war in the Middle East.
Clearly, there are significant tensions in the Middle East, and again, we're working closely with allies and partners to de-escalate and reduce those tensions where we can, recognizing the fact that, you know, others have a vote as well.
You know, this is one of the things I've tried to explain before that when you live outside the United States, you realize how ridiculous it is to have a government that is regularly bombing multiple countries and at the same time standing up and saying, no, we're not at war.
I mean, bombing countries is the definitive act of war along with invading the countries with troops.
And yet the United States is so constantly bombing other countries in a way that no other country gets close to.
That we've had to raise the bar of what a war is so that we can constantly deny we're at war, even though for 95% of the countries on the Earth, if you started bombing other countries, it would be not only an extraordinary event, but obviously it would be preposterous to stand up and say, hey, we want you to know we're bombing this other country, but we're not at war with them.
It's basically a self-negating concept.
I talk about all of this.
We are very excited to have Eric Sperling, who is the Executive Director of the D.C.-based advocacy group Just Foreign Policy.
He has a J.D.
from Georgetown University Law Center and a Bachelor's from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
He has been a Policy Advisor in Counsel for both Democratic Congressmen Ro Khanna and John Conyers, and like I said, It is an organization that I consider one of the very few in Washington that is genuinely and fully committed to its values in a very nonpartisan way.
So we are very happy to have Eric with us tonight.
Good evening.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
It's great to see you.
Hey, great to be with you.
Thanks for having me.
Sure, so let me begin just by asking about Just Foreign Policy for people who might not be familiar with it.
It's an organization that I have been following for a long time that helps me a lot understand a lot of the issues involving the intersection of war and militarism with legal issues and our Constitution and Congress's role.
So just talk a little bit about what Just Foreign Policy is, what its structure is, and what its mission is.
Yeah, well, Just Foreign Policy was founded back, you know, it seems like ages ago when the U.S.
had just finished the Iraq War and was preparing to, there was a lot of talk of moving on to Iran.
And that's kind of the context.
Thankfully, we were able to defeat that war, at least, you know, the full-on invasion.
But what we did see from then on was sort of a progression in how the U.S.
conducts war.
You know, the American people basically rejected the idea of losing thousands of soldiers.
Of course, we've lost tens of thousands more to PTSD-related suicides since then.
So kind of the war machine has sort of evolved.
You know, I think you've followed much of this, you know, throughout your career, you know, where you saw, you know, bombing in Libya, but then supporting rebels on the ground.
And then they sought to do a new version of that in Syria.
And then in Yemen, they did a new progression of that as well.
And so, you know, we're sort of tracking that way, that kind of way that the U.S.
is distancing itself from the war-making while achieving the same or even more horrific outcomes in many cases.
And looking how, you know, see how we can harness, you know, all that anti-war sentiment that we know exists on the left and on the right among the general public.
And actually bring that to bear in a city like Washington, where it is really difficult to navigate that city if you don't have a lobby firm, you know, working for you.
So, you know, I think our role is, you know, we're very much an advocacy group, but we seek to kind of understand to the extent possible this crazy town and try to channel that energy that, of course, you know, is proven right time and time again among the base.
It is this fascinating phenomenon, I think, and I've been seeing it for a long time and thinking about it for a long time, that if you look at polling data about issues relating to war, what almost always happens is that at the start of the war, they're able to generate enough support to be able to
that plausibly engage in the war, to get enough public opinion on their side to support the war using a combination of emotional appeal and propaganda.
And yet you look at the history of American wars going from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya to Syria.
And you ask people afterward, was this a war worth fighting or do you regret that the United States did it?
And in every war, you have to almost go back to Korea where this isn't true or maybe the first Gulf War, people will say, no, it was a mistake for the United States to do that.
At the same time, you have polling data showing...
That Americans think we fight way too many wars, that we need to get away from wars in the Middle East, that we shouldn't be the world's policemen, and yet again, every time there's a new war to present to the public, oh look, this time we're going to go and fight for democracy in Ukraine, or this time we're going to go help Libyans free themselves of Muammar Gaddafi, or whatever it is, obviously the war in Israel now, even the Middle East wars, There's kind of a success that Washington has in getting just enough Americans to get on board with that new specific war.
What explains to you, as somebody who kind of works against that, this discrepancy?
Well, I think some of it would, we'd have to look at the polling on the particular war.
You know, I think there's two different kind of categories, like some of the major investments, like we saw with Ukraine, where they really needed that buy-in from the American people to be able to justify it.
And you have other wars, like the Saudi-backed, the US-backed Saudi war in Yemen, which was basically for the last nine years.
And for the first three, two, three, four years of that, American people didn't even know about it.
They cast it as a Saudi war, you know, that, well, we're assisting.
But as you go, you know, and we've worked through that process of trying to end this war, you realize, well, actually, the U.S.
was doing a lot more than assisting.
It was actually running the war largely, but using Saudi pilots to pull the trigger of all U.S.
weapons and acting on U.S.
intelligence with U.S.
strategy, essentially.
And so, you know, but I do think if you looked at these polling questions and you, you know, if we had more polling money, say on our side, I think you could frame the questions in a way that that would get a different result.
But generally speaking, you know, I think the pollsters are there's more funding for polls that are that are going to be kind of simplistic.
And I think most Americans say, you know, they take that question to be, you know, do you want to help these people?
And I think a lot of American people say, yeah, if we can help those people, I'd like to help them.
But it's never framed.
You know, if there's a 50% chance that you harm those people and a 50% chance that you help them, then, you know, do you have a different opinion?
That's never a question they ask in these early war polls.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
So much of this is done by exploiting what I think are the kind of generous and positive sentiments of Americans.
It's not bloodthirsty.
It's framed as, oh, do you want to help, as you said, Ukrainians while you have all this propaganda about how they're suffering?
And rarely do you have the actual questions of the policy, such as, are you prepared to finance and pay for Ukraine's war, even if it means spending hundreds of billions of dollars for the next several years, which probably would produce a much different Answer then, should the United States support Ukraine, which sounds like a benevolent thing to do?
Let me ask you about what it was that I was just talking about in the lead up to our conversation, which is the events in the Middle East over the last month, where you have Joe Biden, beyond financing and arming Israel's war in Gaza, just in the last month alone, he has bombed three separate How do you characterize what the United States is doing in Yemen?
He's also bombed Somalia in a different region.
But we just showed you that clip at the Pentagon where a reporter was saying to the spokesman, are we on the brink of war?
Not even are we at war, just are we on the brink of war?
And the general said, you know, no, we're not on the brink of war.
We're trying to avoid that, actually.
How do you characterize what the United States is doing in Yemen?
Is that a new war?
Well, in one sense, it's a new war because for the previous nine years, the U.S.
was, like I said, just backing the Saudi-led coalition, which we supply with all the arms.
Actually, unfortunately, Hillary Clinton was at the State Department when she presided over the biggest arms sale in the history of the world to Saudi Arabia.
And that was the previous war.
The Saudis, after about seven to eight years of that, decided we're actually gonna take a new approach.
Some may have seen there was a China broker deal and the Saudi Arabia decided we're gonna get out of this war, we're gonna use our money, invest in the region, and actually generate more goodwill that way because we're not able to defeat this Houthi group in a way that is gonna protect our transition to a kind of a more developed country.
And so now the U.S.
doesn't have that Saudi partner to be able to go ahead and do the bombings and kind of give U.S.
that plausible deniability.
So we're seeing, you know, that they have had to step in and kind of launch this new phase, which is a direct U.S.
targeting of Houthi facilities and So, in that sense, it could be a continuation.
We're kind of waiting to see how it develops.
But there are definitely people within the White House that would like to see the U.S.
essentially continue that previous war and move towards regime-changing the Houthis.
And there are others who probably feel that that would be so hypocritical and so obvious for Biden to do it after he made ending the Yemen war such a high priority in his campaign and in his early days in office.
Yeah, and of course you have statements from Joe Biden, Kamala Harris in 2020, when there were issues about whether Donald Trump was going to strike Iran or whether or not he was going to strike assets inside of Iran, saying things like, under no circumstances does Trump have the power to start a new war without Congress, and now you have them in the Oval Office, with seemingly a much different Attitude.
So let me ask you that.
You have, on the one hand, the Constitution that says only Congress has the power to declare wars, and it makes the president the commander-in-chief, meaning when there's a war begun by Congress, the president's sort of the top general.
And then you, on top of the Constitution, have the War Powers Resolution, which was, we went through the history of this last week, which was the reaction on the part of a Republican Member of Congress from a moderate district of Illinois, Paul Finley, who was one of the earliest opponents of the war in Vietnam that kind of happened without congressional approval before the Gulf of Tonkin incident where there were already a lot of military advisors.
So when you look at the framework of both the Constitution and Article I and Article II, but then the War Powers Resolution on top of it, As a very basic matter, and I know it's hard because there's some complexities, but how do you see the legal framework when it comes to the question of what right the president has unilaterally to use military force in a country where there's no declaration of war?
Well, the complexity actually comes from the way that the executive branch has tried essentially since, I mean, over many decades now, but to get around the very obvious intent of the founders of our nation.
And, you know, they had a very basic idea, which was that The executive branch is the branch that's most prone to war.
And so they specifically placed that power in the legislature.
And there was even discussion of requiring members of Congress to go and consult with constituents before you could launch a war.
There was discussion of two-thirds majority needed for a war.
So they were very obsessed with this idea.
And I think it's really proven correct that, with some exceptions after 9-11, by and large, You know, when the White House feels that it has to get an authorization or when it's pressure to get an authorization, they have struggled to get that authorization.
And so, you know, I would say their argument is, you know, you often hear, you know, well, we can do limited strikes or this is a self-defense strike.
And they're basically stretching the understanding of self-defense over time more and more.
Obviously, you know, everyone understands if there's a sudden attack, On U.S.
troops.
You don't have to go convene Congress, you know, get all these, you know, members with all their personal issues and families and, you know, get them to come to D.C.
and say, we got to strike back.
You know, you're allowed to respond in the moment.
But so they are now extending that and essentially defining all of this activity of preemptive striking.
All of that is self-defense.
And, you know, if all of that is self-defense, well, basically every war could be called defense.
And that's why they call it the Defense Department.
So, you know, that's the challenge is kind of, and we do have a great group of, you know, that is kind of coming out of that tradition of people that, you know, you've highlighted such as, you know, Ron Paul, you know, my former boss, John Conyers, you know, Dennis Kucinich, those were the previous kind of people leading this left-right movement to reclaim the original understanding of war powers.
And that we still see a good amount of that today with members both from Freedom Caucus, you see folks who are diehard Trump, MAGA folks who are really committed to this, and you see the squad who are very committed to this, and a number of people in between.
And so, yeah, hopefully that's helpful. - Let me ask you about why it matters.
Let's assume that everything you just said about the legal framework is correct.
I think one of the things people have forgotten, because it's now a while ago, or maybe people didn't live through it and don't even know about it, is that the position of the Bush-Cheney administration when they wanted to invade Iraq was that they actually had the power to go and invade Iraq without having congressional authorization, without having a congressional vote, because is that the position of the Bush-Cheney administration when they wanted to invade Iraq was that they actually had the power to go and invade Iraq without having congressional authorization, without having a congressional vote, because they had
And I remember people in Congress, Democrats particularly, all but begging the Bush administration to say, please let us vote.
Please come to us and let us vote.
Basically promising, you're going to win, just let us vote.
And this seems a little bit to me similar to what's happening now, where you do have some members of Congress Both Republicans and Democrats, left and right, as you said, standing up and objecting to the process, saying, we think that Biden should have come to the Congress and still should come to the Congress when it comes to the question of whether we should be attacking the Houthis.
But it doesn't seem like there's much opposition to the bombing of Yemen or the Houthis itself.
You don't really have a lot of people objecting on the merits.
So when you have what seems like bipartisan agreement, Or a generalized kind of sense that, yeah, this is something we should be doing.
Why should people really care if this process is adhered to?
Yeah, so that this is the key question and groups on the left and right who are principled, you know, this is a question everyone's grappling with in these recent weeks.
And there's a number of reasons why.
I mean, first and foremost, it is true that, you know, when you go to Congress, you know, the sense of the founders and in our recent experience, There's a number of reasons for that.
able to basically get authorization or do an expansive war than if they go it alone without that scrutiny.
And there's a number of reasons for that.
First is that once it goes to Congress, all of finally, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, all those, they might have an article here or there, but it'll be a headline story, this authorization for war.
And so there'll be a lot of scrutiny.
And, you know, I could say I was actually a congressional, I was an intern at the time when this Obama came to Congress.
He said, I'm going to strike Syria, but I'm going to come to Congress because I want Congress to be behind this.
And it was shocking, the outpouring of opposition that was happening, you know, on the phones.
Constituents calling in.
You know, just like you said, I figured while the war, you know, kind of the drums of war were in the media, it was very much a sense of, you know, we have to do something to protect Syrians.
But there was a huge number of Americans who still remember this idea of authorizing war as being something that once you authorize it, you're likely going to regret it.
And so I say that's one part of it, but I think there's also an accountability benefit as well.
You might remember, you know, we look at all these senators and House members who voted for the Iraq War, and we actually know that, you know, Hillary Clinton was one of those people, and Barack Obama was opposed to it, and that's what allowed him to defeat her, and so there can be an accountability function.
Even Donald Trump sort of ran against Hillary's Iraq vote, and so You know, I think what you do see is, this is one of the reasons why when you go to Congress, it can be really beneficial.
A lot of members do not want that vote on their record, because if that war goes disastrously, they know that it could be something that they're held accountable for.
Whereas right now, a lot of these members are supporting it, but they're not, they don't have to go on the record.
They don't have to, they're supporting the administration, but there's really no way to hold them accountable And that's good both politically for accountability, but it's also the bare minimum that you should do when you send your troops in to risk their lives and risk injury or death.
The very least Congress should do is say, this matters enough that I'm going to put my name behind it and stand behind it.
And so then I would say finally, yeah, I think we just generally want to strengthen this tradition and reclaim war powers, because even if in this particular case there might be a way to pass it, by and large the administration, they totally believe that if they had to vote on every military action they wanted to do, they know that they would be completely constrained.
And so there are those cases You know, potentially, where it'd be they have a chance of passing an authorization, but the vast majority of things that they do, look at me, look how many bombings there were just this week.
If they had to authorize all of those, they know they would be constrained.
And that's why they never, they haven't passed an AUMF in over 20 years, because it's exceedingly hard to do.
And so I think that's, yeah, so I think from our side to the executive branch, everyone agrees that if they had to come to Congress for every conflict, the amount of war they would be committing and the amount of spending they would be doing on that war would be dramatically decreased.
Yeah, the American people would actually realize how many actual wars we fight at once because there'd be all these different instances where the Biden administration is coming and saying, hey, we have another war we need you to approve.
You know, one of the things that's so frustrating about the refusal of Congress to kind of get more involved is that if you go and read The Federalist Papers and the Founders, the whole idea of checks and balances was that each branch was going to fight for their power because human beings want to exercise authority and power, especially politicians.
This is the assumption.
The courts will fight for their right to be able to do what they're supposed to do.
The executive branch will.
The Congress will.
And that was the phrase used was that they will jealously safeguard their prerogatives.
That's the way that checks and balances work.
So if you have one branch that is overstepping its power, as the presidency and the executive branch has been doing for many years by going to words with no authorization, The only other branch that really is able to put a stop to that and to say, look, you can't do this, is the Congress.
The Congress has ways to do that.
They can, for example, cut off funds and say, OK, we didn't authorize this war.
You know, and I remember, this is another thing that I think people have forgotten, is when President Obama, reluctantly, but he was persuaded, took the country to war in Libya with France and Great Britain as part of this NATO effort against Libya, They didn't go to Congress and ask for approval and at the time the Republicans controlled the House and then once the war began the Republicans brought it for the House and the authorization failed.
More people voted against authorizing a military force in Libya than voted for it.
Obama ignored it.
And continued the war anyway, but of course the Republicans never followed through by cutting off funding because I think there is a sense that what's really going on here is that while it is true that the presidents are starting wars without Congress, Congress is kind of happy about that because they don't really want the responsibility of having to go on record and vote one way or the other and so they're kind of happy to let the president take the blame for all of these wars.
Is that something that you think is a failure on the part of Congress and how can that incentive scheme be changed?
Yeah, well, that's absolutely part of it because, like I said, the administration doesn't want to go to Congress because they'll get way fewer authorizations than they currently are doing without authorization.
And Congress also, in many cases, doesn't want to take that vote because they're afraid that they will either, if you don't vote for the war, I mean, we know going back to the Iraq War, you know, well, you were a Saddam supporter or something like that, you know, and they've used that, they use that over and over.
So people are afraid to vote against the authorization.
But they don't want to vote for the authorization either, in case the war goes horribly, and then they can be primaried.
Or they will be used if they try to run for Senate or run for higher office than in the Congress.
It can be used against them.
So that's absolutely correct.
I will say, there are different wings, of course, in Congress.
We have the two-party system, but there really are, on some issues, more divisions.
And like I said, You know, there is that group of, you know, for lack of a better term, you know, what kind of the MAGA or kind of the squad, you know, those folks have been very clear that, you know, they're happy to vote.
And they've also, we also have progressive members and conservative members on different issues who have led efforts to cut funding.
But as you know, you know, in Washington, The bulk of the influence through the think tanks, you know, and through the lobbying is going to be the defense industry and also the careers kind of that are in that NATSEC realm broadly, whether it's intelligence or whether it's, you know, kind of those general.
So there is a general sense in Washington, kind of the center, you know, in Washington is definitely far from that, but there is that group and In terms of changing the incentives, I think, you know, the upside, one of the great things about the War Powers Resolution is it does allow any member of Congress to force a vote.
And so we saw this year Rand Paul and other members as well, but forced votes on a number of issues.
And even though they weren't successful, it did force all the number of, we had votes on Niger and on Syria and on at least those two, and I'm forgetting one more.
You know, and it forced all these members to get on the record.
So, you know, that's the upside of the War Powers Resolution.
And I think, you know, we're definitely a supporter of, you know, letting the members of senators take a vote.
Let's see who wants to leave our troops there and who doesn't.
And, you know, the Biden administration said this week that they're just waiting to hear a call that there were significant casualties in any of these strikes in Iraq and Syria, for example.
And when that happens, you know, these members that said, no, let's leave our troops in Syria, you know, will that will be something that we'll say, well, your decision to vote against that war powers resolution and leave the troops there was partly responsible for that.
And so I think there's, you know, that's one mechanism that we definitely support is, is even when they're not successful, forcing those votes, getting members on the record.
So there can be some accountability later.
Absolutely.
Well, like I said at the start, and I've said this other times, for me the only determinant of the value of an activist group at this point is whether a group is searching for ways to put together coalitions without regard to whether they are on the left or the right, or the Democrats or Republicans.
That is a true test of authenticity for whether a group is a disguised group pretending to believe in values but is really a partisan arm, or whether the group really believes in the values they claim to believe in.
And I think your group is one of the sterling examples that really pursues your values without regard to the question of partisan politics.
And I have learned a lot from following all of you guys.
I really hope people will follow Just Foreign Policy on Twitter and various other social media platforms and also the website.
Follow Eric as well.
We will put the links in the notes of the show so that people can do that.
Absolutely, Eric.
learn a lot.
You're going to get perspectives that you don't otherwise hear.
I hope you keep up the great work in trying to enforce the Constitution and push back against some of the success of militarism.
I think you're making slow progress, but definitely progress, and that's how progress is made.
So keep up the great work, and thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us tonight.
We really appreciate it.
No, and thanks for all your attention on these issues, and thanks for having me.
Absolutely, Eric.
Have a good evening.
All right, so that concludes our our show for this evening.
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