Trump and Kamala's Frivolous Celebrity Interviews and Bipartisan Consensus; Former Trump Administration Official Fred Fleitz on Venezuela and Ukraine; PLUS: Aaron Maté on "America First"
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Softball Celebrity Interviews (1:58)
Interview with Aaron Maté (34:22)
Interview with Fred Fleitz (58:52)
Outro (1:39:04)
- - -
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET.
Become part of our Locals community
- - -
Follow Glenn:
Twitter
Instagram
Follow System Update:
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook
LinkedIn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It's Monday, July 29th, and welcome to another brand spanking new episode of System Update, our live daily show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Glenn is still away, mysteriously, so here I am.
I'm Michael Tracy, and I'll be filling in once more.
The 2024 presidential campaign has been remarkably short on virtually any serious questioning of the two main candidates.
In light of the election yesterday in Venezuela, I thought we'd explore where those two main candidates, Mamala and Trump, might find some unexpected agreement.
Then Fred Fleitz, a former Trump administration official and a vice chair of the America First Policy Institute, will join us to discuss Trump's foreign policy record on Venezuela, Ukraine, and other areas, and what he anticipates for a second Trump term.
Then finally, we will get reaction to it all from somebody you know and love, that is journalist Aaron Maté.
Before that, a few programming notes.
System Update is available in podcast form on Spotify and every other podcast platform.
If you would like to support System Update, you can sign up to Glenn Greenwald's Locals Community at greenwald.locals.com.
Tonight I'll be hosting a special after show on Locals, so tune in for that and bring all your most pressing questions and even some of your rudest questions, because I'll enjoy that.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting now.
So we're fairly deep into the 2024 presidential campaign at this point.
Although we did just have a switcheroo that was foisted upon us, whereby as we went over last week, Joe Biden was adamantly insistent that under no circumstances would he ever leave the race.
Then he leaves the race.
Kamala Harris is elevated into this new juggernaut.
And we're all just supposed to accept this like it's a wonderful thing.
And it's totally unremarkable that the Democratic Party decided to negate the results of its entire 2024 primary process and just lunge ahead into this brave new world.
One thing that I've been chronicling throughout the campaign, though, is that both Donald J. Trump, you may have heard of him, and now Kamala Harris, but also previously Joe Biden, have been subjected to a remarkable paucity or dearth or lack of serious questioning from media outlets to which they appear to grace their presence.
This is really a disservice to the general public because whether you're supporting Trump or Kamala or a third party or not voting at all, you would think it would be a marker of a healthy democracy, right?
We're all supposed to be proudly beaming about how sacrosanct our beloved democracy is.
But you would think that just the average voter, or people in the media, or people who have any kind of stake at all, whether even internationally, would want to put serious policy-oriented questions to the leading candidates.
But that just really hasn't happened, and I think part of that is due to the increasingly siloed nature of the media, where both Trump and Harris really have no Or at least they might not perceive a need to even make the effort of appearing on non-friendly media, or even not even unfriendly media, but any media that would seriously ask them probing and substantive questions.
Because why not just circumvent that entire process?
You don't need to really subject yourself to it, particularly in Kamala's case.
Because she was vaulted to the nomination without having to acquire a single voter delegate or sit for a single substantive interview.
So why not just continue on forward with that?
But I took the liberty of assembling a rather amusing montage of some notable examples of recent questions that have been posed to both Trump and Harris.
So we'll run some of those now for your viewing pleasure.
What's your relationship with God like and how do you pray?
That's Sharon from Alabama.
Okay, so I think it's good.
I do very well with the evangelicals.
I love the evangelicals.
There you have it.
Dr. Phil is next.
Trump also did a very aggressive interview, very daunting interview with Dr. Phil on the new Dr. Phil primetime program.
Dr. Phil went to Israel to interview Netanyahu, and then a week or so later, he gets a big bombshell interview with Donald Trump, and you know that the questions are going to be really difficult for Trump.
So let's get an example of one of them.
You know, we all have a personal truth.
You know, is that what we believe about ourselves when we don't?
have our mask on.
I put on a nice suit.
I'm going to see the president here.
I want to be credible.
Looks good.
And we put our best foot forward when we step out into the world.
But we do have a personal truth that what we believe about ourselves that are most vulnerable when nobody's looking, nobody's listening, Maybe it's three o'clock in the morning, we wake up looking at the ceiling thinking, what the hell am I doing?
What do you say to yourselves when the crowds aren't cheering?
When you're home alone, you're driving, you know, you're riding in the car, you're by yourself.
What is the hardest, darkest moment that you can think of in this journey you've been on in the last several years?
It's sort of funny because I've watched your show a lot over the years.
Okay, so another challenging question for Donald Trump from Phil McGraw.
Asking him a psychological profile, I guess, series of questions akin to what Dr. Phil would ask some teenager from a broken home or what have you on the daytime syndicated Dr. Phil Show series.
But now Dr. Phil broke out into current affairs and has his major, I guess, nightly news show and Donald Trump Gave him the honor of appearing on that.
And we have one more from Trump that really sums it up.
But my question is, for other young people in this country who are looking to get ahead, because for a lot of them, times are tough right now.
It's very tough.
What would you say to them?
Kids who want to pursue their own version of the American dream and try to achieve their wildest dreams and make it all come true.
I would say very simply, honestly, vote for Trump.
Okay, so that's amusing.
Trump is a phenomenal entertainer.
I will freely acknowledge that.
That has fueled Trump's ascendance as a political figure from the outset, from the moment he came down the escalator, maybe even before.
Because Trump, you know, he was professionally connected to NBCUniversal for many years.
He had one of the top-rated Reality TV shows and beauty pageants, Casino Magnet, etc.
So Trump is very good at that, but I guess I'm a stickler for major presidential candidates, major party nominees, at least occasionally getting asked a challenging question about their policy plans or their record, alternatively, or something that would actually shed light on how they would wield power if they won the election that they're seeking.
But that's been difficult to come by.
And then for Kamala, she's skated it even more frictionlessly than Trump, you could argue, because she's been kind of sequestered in her own little vice presidential silo for all this time, you know, waiting in the wings for Joe to step aside.
And so here's an example of the really tough questioning that Kamala has subjected herself to as of late.
Hey Kamala, what are we going to say to Donald Trump in November?
Bye bye bye!
Okay, so there you have it.
That's basically the caliber of media questioning that the public has been granted in relation to the two major party candidates.
And I have doubts as to whether that state of affairs will improve because If you notice, one of the things that we're all supposed to memory hole is that cute TikTok video that Kamala Harris appeared in and then posted to her newly created account with Lance Bass from NSYNC.
You would think that a competent media would at least be vaguely aware that only a couple of months ago, Joe Biden signed legislation to ban TikTok.
On the grounds that TikTok was a tool of Chinese espionage, and this was a largely Republican-initiated bill in the House of Representatives, Speaker Johnson employed all kinds of accelerated parliamentary maneuvers to expedite the passage of a TikTok ban that then eventually got folded into the mammoth $100 billion
Supplemental war funding bill that included the Ukraine, Israel and then Taiwan provisions, but that bill also included a ban of TikTok!
We were told that TikTok was corrupting our youth by making all the kiddos gender fluid.
And by watching lots of dance videos, they were all going to instantly become trans.
And by becoming trans, they were going to make themselves lackeys of the Chinese Communist Party.
And there were lots of doc connecting exercises to make that grievance about TikTok Makes sense.
I was never particularly convinced myself, but you would think that Kamala would at least have to answer for the fact that she has now created a political campaigning account, an electioneering account, on the very platform that the principal and the administration to which she belongs, Joe Biden, he signed a bill that banned TikTok on national security grounds, and here she is.
Cavorting with Lance Bass of NSYNC on TikTok.
And it's not just Kamala.
Let's go to Donald Trump, a curious posting from him on Truth Social.
I think it's called a truth.
So this is not a post, it's a truth.
Because if you want to circulate the truth as you might a tweet, you actually have to retruth the truth.
So whenever you want to retruth the truth, log on to Truth Social.
And you can do that.
And we'll all be the better for it because we will all be bestowed with this glorious truth from on high.
But here's what Trump said.
All caps, naturally.
For all of those that want to save TikTok in America, vote Trump.
Now you'll also recall, or maybe you wouldn't because maybe this has also been memory hold, That in 2020, Trump tried to issue an executive order to ban TikTok.
Again, on the grounds that it was a national security threat, that it was controlled by the Communist Party of China, and that, you know, in order to protect our vulnerable youth from the intrusions of communist ideology, TikTok had to be banned by executive dictate.
But that apparently has gone by the wayside.
Trump also himself Uh, started up his own TikTok account with the beautiful American flag logo of his face.
And, uh, here he is with all his postings on TikTok.
Now, why did I bring up the montage of kind of frivolous questions that both Candidates had been asked or like frivolous media encounters that both candidates have had recently because you would think at some point over the course of a protracted campaign like somebody who's in the media or media adjacent would have the presence of mind or would have the kind of just minimal political
Adroitness to ask one of the two candidates, or ideally both, how they reconcile their earlier attempts to proscribe a massive social media platform, TikTok.
On the grounds that it constituted this dire national security threat and that allowing it to continue operating in the United States is going to empower our major nemesis, China.
How they square that with themselves using TikTok, right?
I mean, it's just very should be a pretty obvious question.
But because in the current landscape, both candidates can kind of just go on friendly territory, do ass-kissing interviews, and with the proliferation of podcasts, they could just pick and choose who they want to engage with, and there would be no expectation that they're going to ask even a mildly challenging question.
I'm not saying that both candidates need to necessarily have somebody berate them, and with Trump in particular, It is true that the media over the years of Trump's rise in American politics has just had their brains melted by him at various times and then would just try to go after him for the most superficial possible foibles that they could identify and really couldn't be relied upon to ask him
Many legitimate questions and there are a lot of legitimate questions to pose to Trump about his record, about his personnel, about his ideology such as it exists, about what he would plan to do in his second term.
Lots of that is ripe for questioning, but it is probably true that the media would just Want to start, you know, flipping out about him being a fascist or whatever else.
You know, it is sort of interesting that, especially in the wake of the attempted assassination of Trump, which wasn't that long ago, but seems like quite a while ago now, you did see maybe the media's attitude toward Trump begin to soften somewhat.
And I would argue that even a little bit before that, The attitude toward Trump in mainstream media precincts had softened somewhat.
I kind of traced that to April when Trump actually played a critical role in ensuring the passage of that $100 billion National Security Supplemental Bill, which included the largest ever disbursement of monies to Ukraine.
Imagine if Trump had tanked that bill, which he probably could have done given his outsized influence on especially the House Republican Caucus.
But, you know, Trump would have been screeched as having been this tool or puppet of Putin, which is just a continuation of a long-standing theme.
But instead, he kind of gave his sign-off on the passage of that bill, and he gave political breathing room to lots of Republicans, and Speaker Johnson in particular, Speaker Mike Johnson, who Trump refers to as MAGA Mike Johnson lovingly, to see to it that that bill would come to passage.
So, you know, both Kamala and Trump, they can just stay in their own little friendly media zones and there's really not even an expectation anymore that they would have to subject themselves to even, again, mild scrutiny.
I'm not even saying get, you know, Let yourself be just flamboyantly berated.
Maybe there are some right or left-wing media who would try to do that with Trump or Kamala.
I'm just saying that I want substantive, policy-oriented questions posed to the candidates rather than just letting them do their cute little TikToks or with Trump telling a Fox News podcast woman how he prays, explaining, which I have no doubt is extremely sincere piety.
Or, you know, what advice would he give to young people who want to make it in America via Logan Paul's podcast?
I mean, this stuff gives us no real insight into how these people would actually govern the most powerful state and national security apparatus and foreign policy infrastructure in world history.
So, you know, my humble suggestion is There should be at least a greater kind of social or cultural expectation that they sit and subject themselves to this kind of questioning.
And this does happen elsewhere in the world.
So now I want to play a clip from Sky News.
This was a couple of weeks ago.
This was before the UK election.
That was on the 4th of July this year.
And it's almost shocking how much more aggressively adversarial The conventional media is toward both major party candidates in the UK.
I mean, we're not talking about a country that is that dramatically different culturally or politically than the US.
Yes, there are some differences, obviously, between the UK and the US, but there's something peculiar about the media culture where, despite the very real flaws of UK media culture, there is a greater expectation that the major party candidates will be hectored pretty rudely.
by the standard media outlets to which they would subject themselves to questioning.
So here is Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak ahead of the UK election earlier this month.
David Cameron, 2010, tens of thousands reduced net migration.
May 2017, Theresa May, reduced net migration to tens of thousands.
Boris Johnson, 2019, committed to making sure overall numbers come down below the then net migration figure of just over a quarter of a million people.
Why should anyone believe anything that you say on immigration?
Wow.
And I can completely understand people's cynicism about this.
You told the country Jeremy Corbyn would make a great Prime Minister.
You then expelled him from Labour.
You campaigned for a second EU referendum.
Now you don't talk about the EU.
And you dumped all the left-wing policies, pretty much, you once loved.
Your short political career is a catalogue, actually, of broken promises and changed positions.
So how can the people in this room trust anything you say?
...mainstream news anchor, Beth Rigby of Sky News, brutally, almost mocking the two major candidates in that race.
The sitting Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, who went on to win the election when Labour got a majority.
But she's just viciously upbraiding them as liars and you can't trust a word that they say.
Now could you imagine an equivalent of that anywhere in the United States for Trump and Harris?
Could you imagine any equivalent journalist having an opportunity to question either Trump or Kamala in such unflattering terms?
I struggle to imagine how that could even be possible and I think that's Something to be regretted if you want our political class to not be exalted as these untouchables who us ordinary citizens must venerate or we must look up to them as these Oracles of Wisdom or whatever.
If you want to bring them down to our level, you have to kind of occasionally subject themselves to even fairly scathing criticism and questioning so that they don't occupy this kind of elevated stature.
And they can be seriously questioned because they're, at least in theory, there to, there to serve the public, right?
So, what's an area where if Trump and Kamala were actually being seriously questioned by the media, what's an area that they might be asked about?
Well, yesterday was the election in Venezuela where Nicolás Maduro, the incumbent, he has been declared victor by the Central Election Council and that's now being disputed by the opposition on the grounds of alleged election fraud.
And so we don't know maybe a full resolution of what the election will be, but Maduro has declared victory.
And one thing that I would love, like if I had Kamala and Trump on the show today, first of all, I would say, Kamala, I love your memes.
They're phenomenal.
They're fantastic.
And if Trump were there, I would say, Donald, you're the greatest.
I've read the art of the deal, which I actually have read, and it really helped me in my business acumen.
You're the best.
So that's how I would begin by buttering them up, but then I would transition seamlessly to Venezuela policy.
And I would begin by playing this clip of Trump.
This is Trump in Miami giving a speech about Venezuela in February of 2019.
We seek a peaceful transition of power, but all options are open.
We want to restore Venezuelan democracy, and we believe that the Venezuelan military and its leadership have a vital role to play in this process. and we believe that the Venezuelan military and its leadership If you choose this path, you have the opportunity to help forge a safe and prosperous future for all of the people of Venezuela.
or you can choose the second path, continuing to support Maduro.
If you choose this path, you will find no safe harbor, no easy exit, and no way out.
You will lose everything. - Okay, so there's Trump delivering a public message to the Venezuelan military, exhorting them to defect from Maduro, otherwise they're exhorting them to defect from Maduro, otherwise they're gonna face consequences that are gonna be imposed by the US.
in furtherance of effectuating regime change in Venezuela.
There was an initiative in early 2019 by Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Marco Rubio from outside the administration, John Bolton from within, to bring about the circumstances whereby Maduro would be ousted from power.
So that would be an interesting thing to ask Trump about, right?
Because I think just objectively speaking, the US policy that he That Biden has largely continued, meaning slapping Venezuela with massive sanctions on its gold sector, on the oil sector, has crushed the Venezuelan economy.
It's created a massive outflow of migration from Venezuela to the north and lots of those Venezuelan migrants end up trekking to the U.S.
Maduro is now apparently declaring himself to have won another six-year term in power.
So that would call into question the soundness or the wisdom of this policy that Trump was so vocally proclaiming back in 2019.
Around this time, it was the very early stages of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries where Kamala Harris was supposedly one of the big frontrunners.
Remember Nate Silver?
DataWiz had declared that Kamala Harris was the big frontrunner and he was so impressed by her history-making qualities as a woman and a half Asian or whatever from Berkeley, California.
But Kamala Harris for weeks said nothing, I vividly recall this, in January and February of 2019 about this escalating initiative on the part of the U.S.
government to Bring about regime change in Venezuela.
She was studiously detached from the issue and then only once, I guess, forced to, by circumstance, did she say anything.
Here's what she said.
What's happening in Venezuela is a crisis.
Basically, she said a bunch of words without saying anything in particular or of particular importance.
What's happening in Venezuela is a crisis.
The people who have fled Maduro's dictatorial regime deserve safety and protection.
As president, I would immediately extend TPS status to Venezuelans.
By the way, Trump later did that just before leaving office in 2021, so more bipartisan conversions that both Trump and Kamala could conceivably be questioned about if they were ever subjecting themselves to legitimate questioning.
And she says the U.S.
must show moral leadership in the hemisphere.
And then she had another tweet that perfectly echoed Trump in his address.
Here's the second tweet.
Trump used that exact phrasing virtually verbatim in the Miami speech, right, where they're demanding a transition of power in Venezuela.
So whenever you think of the Maduro regime, if you even have an opinion of it, To begin with, or the Maduro government, because people who use the term regime always use it for governments that they find to be unfriendly.
Like, you never call a government that meant that you support or that you view in favorable terms to be a regime.
But Kamala and Trump were on the same page on that.
They were both calling for the supposed peaceful transition of power, which is a euphemism for a U.S.
coerced toppling of the government in Venezuela.
So I would love...
Maybe to get Trump and Kamala in the room, in the same room together, and they could explain how it is that they came to see, so eye-to-eye on Venezuela policy.
Wouldn't that be interesting?
And another thing is, so the Washington Post over the weekend, or a couple of days ago, had a very good series that they published on the dramatic rise in the use of sanctions as basically the default policy action that the U.S.
takes to address any international problem.
Something like a third of all countries in the world are subject to some form of U.S.
sanctions at this point, which is staggering.
And Venezuela is one of the chief examples.
So my point is that if you're one of these people who claims to be so very concerned about immigration to the U.S., illegal immigration or immigration that's uncontrolled, transiting up from South or Central America into the U.S., then one of the major culprits of the influx that has grown so massively into the U.S.
over the past several years is the U.S.
sanctions regimen Which I think even the most objective analyst of the Venezuelan economy would concede has been crippled at least in large part due to these ruthless impositions of U.S.
sanctions.
And so you see massive inflation in Venezuela and you see tons of the populace fleeing.
As one State Department official said to the Washington Post, this was a Trump-era State Department official, the sanctions clearly helped generate faster out-migration from Venezuela, that is.
And you knew it was only going to be a matter of time before those people decided to migrate north.
You know, to this bipartisan consensus on Ukraine, I misspoke, Venezuela policy, but also to some degree Ukraine policy as well, and we'll get to that with the next guest.
But on Venezuela policy, you know, there really is hardly any difference between the mainline Republican and Democratic view on Venezuela.
The results have been, to put it mildly or charitably, unsuccessful.
As evidenced by Maduro declaring victory, it's so it seems, in this next election and even by the regime changers own criteria, right?
They want to oust the government, they want to have More economic access to the natural reserves, or natural resources, of Venezuela.
And they want to facilitate some form of regime change there in order to achieve that goal.
Even by their own stated terms, it's been a failure, or so I think.
But now I do want to get to our first guest.
And before that, we're gonna do one of my very special ad reads.
When Glenn asked me to cover his very luxurious vacation at the studio here in Rio, I told him that my number one requirement was that there be plenty of coffee.
And he certainly kept his end of the bargain.
The studio here is loaded up with Rumble's very own 1775 coffee.
I guess it's 1775 rather than 1776 because there are some people at Rumble here who want to re-institute the monarchy, the British monarchy, and that would be, I guess, why you would go with 1775 rather than 1776.
Pre-revolutionary era coffee, which sounds great to me.
Not only is the coffee good, it supports Rumble's free speech mission.
1775 Coffee is ethically sourced from a family farm in the high altitude mountains of Bolivia.
There are several roasts to choose from.
I got to sample them all here.
I'm having the time of my life and have been drinking the light roast.
Go to 1775Coffee.com right now.
Don't wait.
Drop everything.
And pick up your first bag.
Use the code GLENN to save 10% off your first order.
You can know your hard-earned dollars are going towards supporting Rumble and its mission for free speech.
Wake up every day and first thing, you brew up a cup of Joe.
Not a Joe Biden, not an average Joe, not a morning Joe, but a cup of Joe.
And you order at 1775coffee.com slash Glenn.
Use code GLENN for 10% off your first order.
Okay, so I'm pleased to be joined by Fred Flights.
He was a Trump administration official and then he worked for the National Security Council in 2018.
He also worked for the State Department under George W. Bush.
And now he's a vice chair at the America First Policy Institute.
So we want to talk to him about various aspects of the first Trump administration's record and what that might foretell about a second Trump administration.
So, Fred Flights, thank you for joining us.
So, I wanted to go through the Trump administration's policy on Venezuela, if you don't mind, in light of the election yesterday.
The Trump administration, including, this was spearheaded by John Bolton, who you were the chief of staff to for some time.
Their idea was to inflict maximum economic pain on Venezuela with the idea that this would destabilize the government and empower the Venezuelan opposition and eventually you could have instituted in Venezuela a more America-friendly government and oust the socialists or the leftist rulers.
Under Maduro and Chavez, which had been in power for quite a while at that point in Venezuela.
But it seems to me, especially with Maduro yesterday having declared victory in the election, and we could call into doubt whether the results are legitimate.
I'm not there, you're not there, so I haven't been observing the polling stations to see whether everything is above board electorally in terms of vote administration in Venezuela.
But regardless, the central committee that runs election administration in Venezuela declared Maduro to be the winner.
And so now, at least if the current trajectory holds, he's going to be in power for another six or something years, at least.
And it would seem that this strategy on the part of the Trump administration To batter Venezuela with maximum sanctions and attempt to impose regime change, and much of these same policies were then replicated or continued by the Biden administration, which reimposed many of the Trump-era sanctions on Venezuela.
It seems like it's been a manifest failure to me, even by its own terms or by its own stated criteria for what the goal would be of the policy.
What am I missing?
Well, it's great to be here.
I just want to add that I spent most of my career with the CIA as an analyst, and I broke with John Bolton, resigned from his staff, and denounced him when he wrote his tell-all book against President Trump, just to set the record straight.
Look, we had this corrupt election in Venezuela.
We've been seeing this since 2000.
There's nothing wrong with the United States government trying to push Venezuela in the right direction.
But I think under an America First approach to U.S.
national security, we really have to think about what is really in our strategic interests.
And I think putting pressure on Venezuela to move in the right direction is fine.
But look, when Bolton was in office, he was implying to the Venezuelans, we might use military force against the country.
And I think there's something similar being thought of by the Democrats, that there should be some type of U.S.
intervention in the country.
I'm not for that.
Some pressure's fine.
But I also think we have to realize we're not the world's policemen.
We can't solve every problem.
And this one, frankly, I think, for the foreseeable future, is not something the U.S.
can solve.
I'm glad you gave that clarification of you breaking from Bolton when Bolton was authoring his book because, you know, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Trump DOJ attempt to block publication of that book on the grounds that Bolton was revealing unapproved, you know, classified information or sensitive information.
But just to clarify for my own knowledge, have you broken with Bolton on any substantive policy level or did you just object?
To him taking on an adversarial posture with respect to Trump after he left his post at the National Security, as National Security Advisor, because at that time you were Bolton's Chief of Staff, right?
So like in the years that have transpired since, have you discovered any policy differences with Bolton or was it just kind of more personal in relation to his stance toward Trump just as a persona?
Well, I'm glad you asked.
In mid-2019, I was on Tucker Carlton's show, good friend of Glenn Greenwald's, and I think Tucker had me on because the next day, in June of 2019, the U.S.
was scheduled to bomb Iran after it shot down a drone.
You may remember that almost all of Trump's national security staff, except for my colleague Keith Kellogg, thought this was a great idea.
But at the last minute, Trump said it would be disproportionate to kill a couple hundred Iranians Because they just shut down a drone.
Now Tucker had me on thinking he was going to beat me up because I had been Bolton's Chief of Staff and I probably supported bombing Iran.
I did not.
I thought that was disproportionate.
And I want to keep our country out of unnecessary wars.
I make that point in a new book that's been put out by the America First Policy Institute that I edited, An America First Approach to U.S.
National Security.
We need to have a strong military, a decisive president.
Use our military force decisively but prudently to keep ourselves out of unnecessary wars.
Look, John Bolton, I think he served his country well for most of his career, but he really does want to bomb Iran and that's something I've never agreed with him on.
Okay, I want to pull up this excerpt of an article that you wrote for Newsmax in 2019.
You bemoan, and this was when the Venezuela policy was ramping up, and the Trump administration tried to force some regime change, and you were lamenting that Venezuela could turn into a new Russian outpost in the Americas.
My question for you is, in light of this election and of Putin congratulating Maduro and pledging to foster even closer ties between Russia and Venezuela, do you view it as within the ambit of America first
To try to block any encroachment by Russia or China in the Western Hemisphere and basically reimpose some variation of the Monroe Doctrine, which is what was cited when the Trump administration was going forward with their attempt to impose regime change in Venezuela in 2019.
Is it America first in your mind to Try to have basically American hegemony in the entire western hemisphere, or does America First mean just worry about our own territory within our own borders, and if other countries in Central or South America want to develop ties with other powers, then that's their own prerogative.
I'm not an isolationist, neither is President Trump.
I am concerned at the relationship, the growing relationships that Venezuela has struck with Russia and China and Iran.
And I think the U.S.
has to use a variety of tools, short of military force, to stop that.
That's not in our interest.
We should be working with our allies to stop that.
We should make it clear to Venezuela that it is not in its interest to make these deals.
I think that is an America First position.
I don't think that we should be getting ourselves in more armed conflicts.
We shouldn't be sending our troops abroad, our Navy abroad, for interests that do not affect our strategic interests.
And this is something I think goes outside of that area, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use other tools of statecraft to discourage these relationships.
Okay, so now I want to go to your policy paper that you authored, as you mentioned before, with General Keith Kellogg in association with the America First Policy Institute, and it was reported a few weeks ago that you submitted this policy proposal to Trump.
This is for Ukraine and coming to some sort of settlement in the Ukraine war.
So just to clarify off the top, You did submit a version of this America First Policy Institute plan for Ukraine to Trump and he received that plan.
Can you just describe what that interaction was like and what you surmised from it in terms of whether Trump indicated receptiveness to the plan that you submitted to him for Ukraine?
Look, I don't work for President Trump or the campaign.
This is not a peace plan.
It's a research paper, and what it does, it talks about how Biden's policies encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine, Biden's policies made the war worse, and Biden hasn't been interested in discussing ways to end the war.
Now, we have some ideas on how to end the war, but we say towards the end of the paper that Trump has his own plan to end the war, and he hasn't said what it is.
Uh, like, like many experts, uh, we send our papers to, uh, to, to a variety of people, including to President Trump.
That's all I'm going to say about that.
But this is not a peace plan.
It is not a Trump document.
Uh, it, it, it is, I mean, beyond that, I don't know what to say.
I don't work for President Trump and this doesn't reflect his position or those of the campaign.
Oh no, I'm not suggesting that it reflects his position.
I just wanted to see if you would confirm that you submitted this plan to Trump.
It's a series of ideas.
It's not a peace plan.
We don't know what the ultimate policy approach that he takes is going to be.
It's a research paper.
It's a series of ideas.
It's not a peace plan.
Reuters erroneously called this a peace plan.
And if you look at it, it's mostly a discussion of this terrible conflict and how we got into it and how to keep our country out of similar conflicts.
And this happens when you have a weak American president.
Biden's weakness caused Putin to invade.
We go over that in great detail and one thing we try to say is beyond trying to solve this conflict, how do we stop future conflicts like this from starting that suck up tax dollars and our military weapons that we need elsewhere?
So among the prescriptions or among the criticisms in the plan or in the research proposal, which I read, is that you say that President Biden should have provided Ukraine with the weapons it needed to expel Russian forces early in the war, which leads me to conclude that the criticism of Biden is that he wasn't aggressive enough
In provisioning arms to Ukraine, at least early on, which is different from, I guess, what you would think of as a more conventional notion of an America First approach to Ukraine.
Obviously, America First is a very fluid concept.
It can have different meanings to different people, but sending more and more high-grade weaponry systems to Ukraine than the Biden administration had, that might strike some as a bit counterintuitive in terms of what America First is.
And then you also say that in terms of what the next administration ought to do, and again this is theoretical, I'm not saying that Trump endorsed any particular aspect of this, but you do say that the United States would continue to arm Ukraine.
You say that Ukraine would not be asked to relinquish the goal of regaining all of its territory, and that any negotiated end state should include provisions in which we establish a long-term security architecture for Ukraine's defense.
Now, When Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine, I obviously, I listened to his speech, I've read it several times, I've read many of his other remarks, and one of the core grievances that he has articulated is that the US and NATO have Basically establish their military architecture inside Ukraine to a degree that is intolerable for Russia.
It encroaches on their sovereignty.
That's the thrust of what Putin has said.
So if you're suggesting that a peace plan, I know you disputed the Reuters characterization that was a peace plan, but whatever kind of future prognosis this document constitutes for how US policy in Ukraine should be oriented, if it includes arming Ukraine, If it includes making no territorial concessions to Russia, at least in a permanent or semi-permanent way, and if it concludes shoring up or intensifying U.S.
and Ukraine bilateral military ties, how does any of that address any of the core grievances of Putin that he claims are what spurred him to launch the war in the first place?
I guess my question is, isn't this a recipe for just Perpetual war to be perpetuated, right?
I mean, none of the structural conditions that gave rise to the war seem like they would be addressed by this.
These are all good points.
I might add, we have a mess right now that was created by Joe Biden, and now we may have another president, Donald Trump, who has to solve this mess.
And let's be blunt, it may not be solvable, although I think Trump has a pretty good chance of solving it.
Now, you know in my paper, we discuss at length Putin's views about Ukraine, how he doesn't believe that Ukraine is a state, he doesn't believe in the nationality of the Ukrainian people.
He does talk about the threats he thinks that NATO membership, EU membership poses to Russia.
I don't agree with any of those things, but Biden knew that when he was dangling NATO membership in front of Zelensky.
And I think it created a situation coupled with Biden's weakness that really tempted Putin to stage this invasion.
But am I still on?
Yes.
OK, sorry, the picture was frozen.
But the question about what could have happened in 2022, once Russia invaded, Ukraine was doing pretty well pushing the Russians back, surprisingly well, because the Russian army was much more backward, much less, was not well equipped.
And there was a window there that if Ukraine had received the weapons that needed, let's say by the summer, early fall 2022, it may have substantially pushed Ukraine back.
Is this an ideal situation?
No.
But I'm just talking about the mess that Biden caused.
After the fall of 2022, Russia was well dug in.
And this arm Ukraine for as long as it takes approach simply made no sense.
And we're not supporting that.
I do think that we should take NATO membership off the table, which is in the chapter that you read, because I think that's too provocative to the Russians to start negotiations.
And I think that to get Ukraine to come to the table, we have to make sure.
make some kind of agreement to arm Ukraine to stop Russia from invading.
It's not a perfect situation, but I think this is the best way to stop this conflict.
I'm with Donald Trump.
We have to stop the killing and resolve this through negotiations.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but did not the Trump administration also have as a matter of policy a commitment to Ukraine that it would eventually join NATO?
I mean, Mike Pompeo went to Ukraine and reiterated as a matter of U.S.
policy that began in 2008 at the Bucharest summit, at the NATO summit under George W. Bush, that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually join NATO, and that was repeated as a matter of policy in the Trump administration, including by Pompeo
Verbally at many points when he was dealing with Zelensky or with other Ukraine officials, so If it was provocative for Biden, and I don't even necessarily disagree that it was provocative, but if it was provocative for Biden to be dangling NATO membership ahead of the Ukraine invasion to Ukraine Was it also not provocative for the Trump administration to be retaining that same policy?
Maybe less flamboyant in their expression of it, I suppose, but it was the same policy fundamentally, wasn't it?
No, it wasn't at all.
I think flamboyant is a good word to use here.
Trump believed in a working relationship with U.S.
adversaries and talking to them.
Biden hasn't talked to Putin since February 2022.
And my understanding is that it was not Trump's position to extend NATO membership to Ukraine, although I haven't asked him this.
But it's pretty clear the U.S.
wanted to find a way to get along with the Russians, to talk with them.
I was on the plane on Air Force One when we went to Helsinki for Trump's meeting with Putin.
I think there's going to be a big difference between the Biden administration and the Trump administration.
There's going to be tough policies towards our adversaries, but there's also going to be dialogue.
There's going to be an effort to work out our differences and lower tensions through negotiations.
We're not going to have an American president liking Putin to Hamas and calling him a war criminal.
And Trump has made it very clear, that's not productive.
It's not something a president of the United States should be doing.
Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth.
We have to find a way to be tough with Russia, but also to live with Russia.
I want to play you a clip.
This is Donald Trump in July of 2023 being interviewed by Maria Bartiromo and he gives his Prognosis for a future negotiation with Zelensky and Putin.
So let's hear that.
What I'm saying is that I know Zelensky very well and I know Putin very well, even better.
And I had a good relationship, very good, with both of them.
I would tell Zelensky, no more.
You gotta make a deal.
I would tell Putin, if you don't make a deal, we're gonna give them a lot.
We're gonna give them more than they ever got, if we have to.
Okay, so that sort of lines up with your critique of Biden in that you're saying that Biden and others have echoed this critique, that Biden did not expedite weapons to Ukraine quickly enough in the early phase of the war, and Trump is suggesting there that he might be even willing to escalate
In Ukraine, in order to force some sort of settlement, including by, you know, threatening Putin that he would send more weapons to Ukraine than ever before, right?
So, could you imagine that in service of achieving some kind of settlement to the war, Trump famously says he can solve the war in 24 hours, although he gives no details on that, but could a way that could be achieved, could that possibly be actually escalating the warfare in Ukraine?
And, you know, on removing some of the constraints that maybe Biden has imposed, whether it's striking targets inside Russia or certain longer-range missile systems being deployed to Ukraine, Trump suggests that that might be one of the tools in his arsenal To potentially put pressure on Putin, but that would be sort of ironic because, you know, if you look at the conventional media depiction of America First or MAGA Republicans, everybody kind of assumes that they're against Ukraine or whatever, right?
Which is silly, but...
It could be the case that Trump, if he were to get back into office, might well escalate in Ukraine, supposedly or potentially to achieve an expedited conclusion to the war, but still an escalation in Ukraine would be Very serious, and it could potentially spiral into any number of directions.
So is that an accurate sort of assessment of what Trump potentially might be looking to do?
Again, this is all hypothetical, but what do you make of that?
Well, first of all, I would say the Biden administration sees the war against Russia for virtue signaling, basically to call out the Russians.
There's been no interest by Biden in ending the war.
And why would Zelensky want to end the war when the U.S.
doesn't want to end the war?
It's not a coincidence of four successive presidents Bush, Obama and Biden.
Russia invaded neighboring states, but not during Trump because of Trump's leadership and because he was a decisive president.
I think if Trump is elected, it's going to be a whole new ballgame.
I think Putin will deal with him.
I think Putin will respect Trump as president.
We'll see a president prepared to restore American deterrence and strength.
And it's going to be tough with Zelensky.
He's going to tell Zelensky, time is up.
We're not going to provide you weapons forever.
You must enter a peace negotiation.
I might add, I'm not speaking for President Trump.
I'm not part of the campaign.
But my prediction is this would be the approach.
I think it will be well received.
And I think Putin will be told that there will be consequences if he doesn't agree to negotiate.
But I think he will negotiate because Trump wants to improve relations with Russia.
Biden has no interest in doing that.
He wants to use Russia as a punching bag.
That has to end.
The more we do that, the more we push Russia towards China.
It's a really ridiculous position that's undermining global security.
I think Trump has it right in making a priority of ending this war as soon as possible.
So would that include rolling back the sanctions that have been put on Russia under the Biden administration?
In terms of integrating Russia back into the international system, You would probably have to eliminate some of these incredibly overbearing sanctions that have been imposed on Russia, right?
And it's unclear, like much with the Trump second term forecast, as to what his attitude would be with respect to sanctions.
You have people like Robert O'Brien, who is the National Security Advisor for a portion of the first Trump term.
Suggesting that a way for Trump, once he gets back into office, to force a settlement would be to actually accelerate or intensify U.S.
sanctions on Russia and go even further than the Biden administration has by, for example, sanctioning the Russian Central Bank and that sort of thing.
Trump could escalate arming Ukraine.
He could escalate the sanctions regimen that's been put on Russia.
This is quite a lot of escalation potentially.
Obviously, we can't say with certainty what he would do, right?
Because a lot of it is kept under wraps.
But do you see any potential where, you know, this approach Ends up seriously escalating the war and maybe doesn't produce the peace settlement or the ceasefire that some are claiming it will result in.
Otherwise, I'm asking you, what are the downside risks of this sort of approach?
Well I think Trump is a deal maker and you don't go into a deal not offering both parties something and I think in all likelihood that there would be some offer to lower some sanctions on Russia but what I argued with General Kellogg in our article is that Russia will not have a normal relationship With the rest of the world, the United States and Europe, until it strikes an agreement with Ukraine that's going to return all of its territory.
That may not happen until Putin leaves the scene.
But I think that there's a real possibility of ending this war, beginning negotiations.
I don't think Ukraine should give up its territorial claims to get back its territory.
But practically speaking, that can't be done right now.
Ukraine is not going to use force of arms to take back its territory.
It's going to lose a whole generation of young men fighting a hopeless war of attrition.
I think that's immoral.
And we have to find a different approach.
There's people on the right and left calling for that right now.
I think that's where Trump will be.
All right.
Well, Fred Flights, thank you for joining us.
And maybe we'll talk again sometime soon.
So, appreciate it.
Good to be here.
All right.
Our next guest is Aaron Latte, a...
A household name to many of you, I'm sure.
Definitely close to my heart.
And we're gonna get him to comment on his impressions of my Fred Flights interview, among other things.
So let's go to Aaron.
Aaron, how's it going?
Hey Michael, how you doing?
So, did you listen to that?
And if so, what do you make of it?
What are some of your impressions?
Well, first of all, like all your interviews, you did a great job.
And I just want to say on behalf of the System Update community, there's a contingent of us who are inspired by Kamala Harris, a new generation taking the reins, replacing the stale old generation.
And maybe it's time for regime change also at System Update.
I'm just saying.
Aaron, I've already sent a warning.
I've already formally warned Glenn.
That there's a growing clamor for me to oust him just as Kamala ousted Joe, so he better watch his back.
Yeah.
You never know what might happen.
I fully support you.
People are demanding for Glenn to pass the torch.
Yes, yes.
Well, I'll be marching with him.
My impressions of the interview, well, look, first on Venezuela, What I find just fundamentally wrong about all the discussions of Venezuela or any country targeted by U.S.
regime change is who elected Donald Trump or Joe Biden or Mike Pompeo or Fred Flights to make a decision on behalf of the Venezuelan people?
In this case, who should rule their government and specifically trying to change the government by destroying their economy?
I can't think of anything more autocratic.
The complaint about Venezuela is that Maduro is an autocrat.
First of all, it ignores that the U.S.
has been trying to overthrow Venezuela's government even before Maduro, going back more than two decades.
Who elected these people in Washington to decide who should rule over Venezuela?
If we cared about the Venezuelan people, we'd mind our own business, let them run their own country.
But as you talked about in that Washington Post article, The Trump administration knew that it was consciously destroying Venezuela's economy because it wanted people to flee, because it wanted to pressure the government to collapse.
John Bolton admits that to the Washington Post.
And then Trump goes and rails against undocumented immigrants while he's responsible for creating millions of them in Venezuela alone and everywhere else targeted by these sanctions.
Just the arrogance that we have the right to destroy other people's economies because their governments are disobedient, and because their governments have successfully resisted our regime change efforts going back many years.
To me, that has to be called out first.
And if we truly cared about America first, why not focus on our own country and stop trying to destroy other people?
It just never makes sense to me.
And then the other thing, Aaron, is that Using the regime changer's own logic, right?
They never achieve their desired outcome, or they very seldom do, right?
So even if you did want to oust Maduro, It seems pretty clear that the strategy of saddling Venezuela with these massive sanctions on the oil sector, the gold reserves, other elements of the economy, it's been a catastrophic failure in terms of actually ousting him, right?
So I'm not even saying that ousting him is something that ought to be pursued.
But if that is what you're pursuing, and over and over again this tactic of inflicting as You know, destabilizing and crippling sanctions as possible doesn't achieve the desired result.
You would think maybe you would re-examine it, but as the Washington Post series, which was actually very good, sort of an unusual thing or unexpected thing to appear in the Washington Post, but hey, I celebrate it.
This addiction to sanctions, and you've covered it with respect to Syria and other places, Seldom seems to provoke any fundamental re-evaluation of the efficacy or utility of that policy program.
So I couldn't get Fred Flights to even really acknowledge that the policy had been a failure when... How could you say it's not a failure even by your own terms if Maduro's still in power and is declaring he's gonna, you know, be there again for another six years at minimum?
So yeah, it's very difficult to get people who are invested in the kind of Mainline national security paradigm to admit that one of these main tools in their arsenal actually tends to produce far more failure than it does success, quote unquote.
Well, let me say, though, in defense of our neocon friends, I do think they still achieve at least some of their goals.
One of the goals is to teach a lesson that if your government is going to defy us, defy the so-called rules-based international order, then you're going to suffer.
And that has had success.
People have suffered in Cuba, in Syria, in Venezuela, in Iran.
In Nicaragua, after a decade-long dirty war in the 1980s, people did finally vote out the Sandinistas after they were basically told, if you vote for these people again, you're going to starve.
So, it did work there.
And also, in a new book by my colleague, Anya Parampil, called Corporate Coup, which is all about the regime change effort in Venezuela, she points out that there was a major success from the point of view of U.S.
coup plotters and the Trump administration and their Venezuelan allies, and that they got, basically, they expropriated the U.S.
assets of Venezuela's oil company, Sitco.
Which was basically stolen from Venezuela and transferred to Venezuelan allies of the U.S.
And the aim there was to basically weaken Venezuela's economy, weaken its power, and take away one of its most valuable assets.
And at least, you know, the U.S.
element of SITCO was seized, expropriated, in a very Cuban or Soviet-style action, I should say.
For all these people talking about how they love the free market, they love capitalism, they're the biggest interventionist in the market in the world.
I mean, that's what sanctions and asset seizures are.
It's a massive state intervention, which is an irony that doesn't get discussed here.
So they have achieved some of their aims.
If not outright regime change, at least they can impart the lesson.
If you defy us, as Venezuela has and many other disobedient governments, your people will suffer.
Yeah.
OK, so Aaron, I want to play you a clip.
I did many wonderful interviews, as you might have seen, at the Republican National Convention a week or so ago.
And I want to play for you a clip from one of them.
This is me interviewing Congressman Mike McCaul of Texas.
He's the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
So let's play that.
I think President Trump's the kind of guy, like, let them take the gloves off, give them everything they need to win.
Jake Sullivan has been restricting the Ukrainians.
So, sorry, we're talking about Ukraine.
When McCaul is saying, let them take the gloves off, we're referring to Ukraine.
I should have specified that.
Go ahead.
You know, Jake Sullivan has been restricting Ukrainians from day one with weapon systems.
I had to write in attack him in the supplemental and even now he's restricting their use across border where all the bases are where these glide bombs or bombers are coming across.
He saw the one that killed the children at the hospital.
That's no way to manage a war.
And that's one reason the American people are not supportive if they see it mismanaged like that.
My view has always been, like General Jack Keane's, is like, either get in to win, all in to win, or get the hell out of there.
And Jake Sullivan has completely... National Security Advisor if viewers aren't aware.
Correct.
I think he's hurting the Ukrainians.
I've met with Zelensky and his team, and they tell us these restrictions are not allowing us to... I think the goal here is to push the Russians out as far as they can, have a ceasefire, and a negotiated settlement.
My hope is that President Trump will allow that to happen, and then call for a ceasefire, and he's the master of the deal.
Okay, so Aaron, it seems like the emerging consensus among self-described America-first Republicans is that Trump's going to take the gloves off with respect to Ukraine.
That's how he's going to force Putin to accept some kind of settlement.
Fred Flights, who we just interviewed, produced this policy paper that was submitted to Trump that, among other things, says the U.S.
should continue arming Ukraine.
It should further entrench a bilateral U.S.-Ukrainian military architecture as a bulwark against Russia.
And it should basically continue bringing Ukraine into the, maybe not NATO full membership, but some international security architecture.
And there's McCaul saying, look, America First Republicans view Trump as wanting to remove the constraints from Ukraine so that the war could come to an end, I guess, by escalating in order to de-escalate.
You know, there's something called deterrence theory in nuclear doctrine called escalate to de-escalate, where the idea is if you take the gloves off, not necessarily even in the realm of nuclear policy, but in any kind of, you know, high-stakes warfare, you take the gloves off and that kind of batters Your nemesis into submission.
And with Trump never saying with any specificity what he would actually do to solve the war in 24 hours, and you have people around him in his orbit, under the banner of America First, suggesting drastic escalation, I don't know, I find it a bit ominous.
What about you?
I find it very ominous, too.
One of the biggest cons that I think has ever been waged on the U.S.
public is this idea that Trump and Biden have radically divergent policies when it comes to Ukraine.
It serves both of them.
Biden can then frame any opposition to his Ukraine proxy war policy as being Trumpian And by association because of Russiagate, people associate that with appeasement to Russia.
And Trump, meanwhile, can continue to claim he's a foe of the deep state.
He's against intervention, which was a message that helped them win in 2016.
The problem is it's a complete con.
Trump's policies helped fuel Russia's invasion.
Trump likes to claim that Biden's weakness fueled Russia's invasion.
In fact, Trump's bellicosity towards Russia helped fuel the invasion.
Trump pulled out of the INF Treaty, which was a landmark Cold War treaty that had eliminated an entire class of really dangerous weapons pointed at each other between the U.S. and Russia, to...
Trump removed that treaty, and that's one of the issues that Russia tried to address before it invaded Ukraine, because Ukraine was being integrated into the NATO military infrastructure, and a major new component of that that fueled the danger was that there were no longer restrictions on these really dangerous missiles.
So Trump tried to, so Putin tried to address that, I'm sorry, before invading, which the Biden administration refused to engage with, therefore continuing the Trump policy.
Trump also did nothing to advance the Minsk Accords, which was the peace deal brokered back in 2015 to end the war in the Donbass, which began after a coup backed by the Biden administration.
Let me stop there.
Let me stop there, because one of the one of the talking points and Fred Flights repeated this, that you hear from Trump supporters, is that Russia was too scared to invade Ukraine under Trump.
But they did.
But Russia did take aggressive action under Bush and then Obama and then Biden.
So they're trying to distinguish Trump as this exemplar of striking fear into the heart of Russia and preventing them from taking any adventurous military action.
And they neglect that Trump and Ukraine maintained essentially the policy status quo that became untenable, at least in the eyes of Putin eventually, and then precipitated the invasion.
But what do you make of that talking point?
Putin was frozen into compliance under Trump, unlike he had been under Bush and then Obama and then Biden.
The one thing you could argue is that Biden certainly became more bellicose after taking office.
Biden encouraged Zelensky to crack down on the opposition in Ukraine that was actually second in the polls.
The second highest polling party was very close to Russia.
And Zelensky, you know, basically arrested their leader and took their opposition TV channels off the air.
And Biden, the so-called huge defender of democracy, cheered that move and encouraged it.
And then also, I think, encouraged Zelensky to keep attacking the Donbas rather than do what I was saying before, which is implement the Minsk Accords, which is the peace deal reached in 2015 to end the war in the Donbas that began after the coup backed by the Obama-Biden administration back in 2014, which Trump did nothing to advance.
Now, the one thing I'll say in defense of Trump is that To the extent Trump had any sincere desire to end the conflict in Ukraine, he was handcuffed by Russiagate, where he was framed as a Russian agent.
And by calling him an agent of Putin, Democrats basically used that to coerce Trump or incentivize him to be more bellicose toward Russia, maybe more than Trump wanted to be.
Because Trump in 2016 did talk about how he wanted to cooperate with Russia and how he didn't want to fight a World War III over Ukraine.
So Russiagate was used.
To basically constrain whatever diplomatic inclinations Trump may have had.
I'm not saying he actually had them, but to the extent he had them, Russiagate certainly undermined that.
And then Trump also had a neocon cabinet, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, who all encouraged him to increase militarism inside Ukraine.
And so there was nothing done to advance the Minsk Accords.
And therefore, when Biden took office, he basically sees that.
And by the way, the one time Trump did something concrete, he paused the weapons to Ukraine.
He was impeached.
And that solidified a consensus that we should be using Ukraine.
But he never actually paused them.
He never actually.
I mean, one of the funnest facts of that whole first impeachment saga that I feel like I'm the only one who knows.
And maybe you know it as well, Aaron, because you're a little bit peculiar, just like me, is that there was never actually a weapons shipment that was unsent, right?
I mean, there was never a weapons shipment that was on schedule to be delivered to Ukraine that went unsent, right?
And yet Trump was impeached over this kind of inconsequential, superficial delay that actually didn't amount to anything, which that's a pretty good kind of Emblematic symbol of the superficiality with which Trump was attacked by Democrats.
Oh, impeach him for delaying but then eventually sending, within the prescribed period of time by statute, the weapons shipments to Ukraine.
But that gets all lost in the memory hole now, so maybe I'm dwelling on ancient history, but I don't know, it's still crazy to me.
Well, it is.
And imagine if there had been that much effort into promoting the Minsk Accords, which was the peace deal reached to end that war.
Instead, there was a bipartisan consensus, illustrated by Adam Schiff getting up on the Senate floor during Trump's impeachment trial and saying that the United States aid Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there.
We don't have to fight Russia here.
So that was Adam Schiff declaring the bipartisan policy that we want to use Ukraine to fight Russia over there.
And two years later, you know, we got our result.
Russia invaded Ukraine to end the fight.
Now, Fred Feitz's paper, I scanned it as he was speaking because I wanted to see, does he mention the Minsk Accords?
The pact that could have resolved all this?
No, he doesn't in that article.
He also doesn't mention that in Istanbul in the spring of 2022, after Russia invaded, there were really serious talks between Ukraine and Russia.
And they came very close to reaching a deal.
But we now we know from multiple sources that Boris Johnson came over and told Zelensky that we're not going to back you up if you make a peace deal with Russia.
And Ukraine needed Western backing because it wanted security guarantees to underpin any peace with Russia.
And Boris Johnson basically gave the marching orders that sorry, we're not going to give you that.
And you should keep fighting Putin.
And now here we are more than two years later, hundreds of thousands of people dead, and neither political party is willing to go back and stand up for the fundamental So I'm glad you brought up Boris Johnson, Aaron, because I want to show on screen Boris Johnson and Donald Trump reuniting at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee.
Ukraine instead for a proxy war.
And they advance this by pretending as if they have radically divergent policies when they're totally in concert with the other.
So I'm glad you brought up Boris Johnson, Aaron, because I want to show on screen Boris Johnson and Donald Trump reuniting at the Republican convention in Milwaukee.
There they are giving a beautiful thumbs up in good spirits.
And I would love to have been a fly on the wall for that meeting.
That's Boris Johnson trekking to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which I hear is where he spends his summer vacations ordinarily, so he would just happen to be in the area.
It was funny because there was like this oddball crew of random UK politicians who were at the Republican convention.
I spotted Liz Truss, who was the Prime Minister for about a month and a half, Nigel Farage, and we were told that Boris Johnson was also gallivanting around.
I didn't see Boris Johnson myself, but I wish I had because I would have just been basking in his glow.
So, I want to bring you up a column that Boris Johnson wrote in the Daily Mail after having met Trump in Milwaukee.
And Boris Johnson says he is more convinced than ever that Trump has the strength and bravery to save Ukraine and end this appalling war.
He says having talked to Trump this week, he's more convinced than ever that Trump has the strength and bravery to fix it and to save Ukraine.
He says, whatever some other Republicans may have said about Ukraine in the past, I believe that Trump understands the reality that a defeat for Ukraine would be a massive defeat for America.
It is not just about the extinction of freedom and democracy, those cardinal American values and the enslavement of the Ukrainian people, though that result would be grim in itself.
Trump could simply do what's natural to him.
End the bureaucratic dither and delay, and give the Ukrainians the permissions that they need, and then once Putin has once again pushed back, he could offer the deal.
So, that's Johnson basically echoing what a lot of these other people in the America First orbit seem to be suggesting that Trump would undertake to do when he's back in power, which is Take the gloves off, at least for a period of time, in order to give Ukraine the most ideal negotiating position.
Which, by the way, is functionally what the Biden administration has always at least claimed that their policy was.
Like Blinken and Sullivan and people, they're not.
Opposed on principle to there being a negotiated settlement, right?
They're just saying we need to give the Ukrainians the maximum leverage as they enter any forthcoming or future negotiated settlement and that requires having Ukraine be given the ability to beat back Russia in much of the territory that Russia has seized.
But that's Boris Johnson, who has now entered into the folklore as the person who went to Kiev in, it was April of 2022, right?
And then delivered what was perceived to be a message on behalf of also the Biden administration for Ukraine to keep fighting.
They're gonna get all the supplies they need.
They're gonna have the full-throated support of the US and the UK and EU to wage the war in perpetuity and don't agree to any concessions.
Now, maybe Ukraine was radicalized Enough at that point that it would have been almost politically untenable for them to accept a deal.
It's hard to say.
We only for the first time fairly recently got like the draft documents out of that Istanbul accord.
And I think there were portions of it where like Russia may have actually have inserted some maximalist demands that could have also contributed to the undermining of those negotiations.
But it was a confluence of factors.
Boris Johnson was there, delivered the message, and now he's meeting, you know, gleefully again with Trump.
They're giving the thumbs up together.
And I also want to now play you, this is Boris Johnson in May on CNN, so he's on American TV, telling of Trump's role in the passage of that national security supplemental bill that included the $61 billion for Ukraine.
So let's play that.
Who was the guy who actually gave the Ukrainians the javelin anti-tank weapons, which were so vital in that initial defense of Kiev, when Putin thought that his tanks were going to roll in within a matter of days and take the Ukrainian capital?
It was Donald Trump who gave the Ukrainians those weapons.
And you remember, in 2014, the Obama White House actually didn't really do very much to support Ukraine.
So, actually, The paradox is that I think Donald Trump has a good record on Ukraine.
And when it came to the $61 billion, to the supplemental, and, you know, again, I pay tribute to the United States of America, my understanding of what happened is that President Trump played a very important role in reassuring my understanding of what happened is that President Trump played a very important role in reassuring congressional figures that this was a sensible thing to do, because it was structured, as you know, as a loan, like the Lend-Lease because it
And my understanding, and you're correct, I've, of course, been talking to politicians across the United States about this issue, and I wouldn't want to go into the details of it, but my understanding is that the president was very important in that respect. but my understanding is that the president was very important So, Aaron, that's Boris Johnson saying that Trump is totally aligned with his, Boris's, preferred policy prospectus on Ukraine.
in.
Boris Johnson is probably one of the most messianic interventionists when it comes to Ukraine.
He is celebrating, heralding Trump for having armed Ukraine initially in 2017-2018, which is true.
Trump did that.
And now he's meeting with Trump.
You know, with all smiles at the Republican convention and proclaiming that Trump is basically, once again, totally aligned with Boris Johnson on what the ideal policy approach is for Ukraine.
And yet you have like America First Republicans on the internet and also screeching MSNBC liberals who like can't Wrap their heads around this, right?
And that's why the narrative gets so buried, like the more reality-based narrative around Trump is just chronically buried because it doesn't serve anybody's like short-term political interests, so it just gets ignored and it falls to heroes like me and you to shed light on it.
So yeah, what do you make of the Trump and Boris relationship there?
Well, I mean, as you documented, Trump was instrumental to the passage of that extra $60 billion for Ukraine proxy we're funding.
Mike Johnson came down to Mar-a-Lago.
Trump gave him his blessing.
And Biden didn't give him credit, but Mitch McConnell did.
And there you have Boris Johnson doing it as well.
And in terms of the efficacy of this strategy, look, this has been the policy.
Recall a year ago was the summer of Ukraine's so-called counteroffensive, which was the product of months and months and months of heavy training, planning.
The US and Britain, their top military leaders, heavily involved in planning Ukraine's military offensive.
This was going to be the big game changer.
Ukraine was going to take back all this territory.
What happened?
It was a massive failure.
Actually, Ukraine ended up losing a net loss in territory for the year.
So this idea that somehow a new injection of weaponry and taking the gloves off is going to yield Ukrainian success, it's a complete fantasy.
That has been the strategy, and it has seen Russia take about 20 percent of Ukraine, and right now it's taking even more.
And the reason why is not hard.
Russia is such a bigger country, and they have such a more advanced military industrial complex than actually either Ukraine or the U.S.
does, because it's heavily state-integrated.
The best counter-argument to this was made back in March 2015.
And also, Aaron, Russia has converted into a war economy, essentially.
A huge percentage of their GDP is now devoted to defense.
It's in part why the Russian economy has actually performed much better than people might have thought due to the imposition of the sanctions, because You're having this like World War II style infusion of state expenditures into the military industrial sector, which provides a kind of stimulus.
And then that filters into other elements of the economy.
Yes, another result of the genius Biden strategy, where Biden was bragging that the ruble was going to be reduced to rubble.
And now you have Russia's economy growing more than many European states.
But as I was saying, back in 2015, somebody made a very good counter argument to this claim that arming Ukraine could, you know, put it in a better position to to take back its territory.
This is a quote.
If you're playing on the military train in Ukraine, you're playing to Russia's strength because Russia is right next door.
It has a huge amount of military equipment and military force right on the border.
Anything we did as countries in terms of military support to Ukraine is likely to be matched and then doubled and tripled and quadrupled by Russia.
Who said that?
Antony Blinken.
Back then he was working for Barack Obama.
And Obama, after backing the coup in 2014, which started all this, he got cold feet because he realized he was fueling a really dangerous proxy war.
And also he was worried about some of the weapons going to the neo-Nazi militias that are incorporated into Ukraine's military.
So Blinken was making a very, I think, convincing argument that putting aside the morality here, whether it's wise to have a proxy war with Russia and Ukraine, whether we want to do that, just in terms of strategically, it's a fool's errand because Russia is just so much bigger and can, as Blinken it's a fool's errand because Russia is just so much bigger and can, as Blinken said, double and And that's why there's always been the option of diplomacy.
There's been, there was the Minsk Accords, which were undermined before Russia invaded and To Johnson's claim that, you know, Trump's javelin stopped Russia from taking Kiev, if you look at the size of Russia's force that entered Ukraine, I don't think it was enough to take Kiev.
I don't think Russia ever seriously tried to take Kiev.
I think the point of Russia's invasion was to compel the diplomacy that Ukraine was refusing to engage in by refusing to implement the Minsk Accords.
And that's why within days of Russia invading, Ukraine and Russia immediately sat down on Like three or four days later, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators already met in Belarus.
This escalated into the peace talks in Istanbul.
And look, you don't have to take my word for it.
A top Ukrainian negotiator said that they reached a real compromise.
He said that Putin did everything possible to make peace.
Another Ukrainian negotiator said that Russia's central demand was simply that Ukraine accept neutrality, that it not join NATO, which again was not a radical demand.
Right now in the U.S.
that's treated as an act of appeasement.
Neutrality is enshrined in Ukraine's Declaration of State Sovereignty back in 1990.
So Russia asking for this was not some radical Kremlin demand.
It was actually enshrined in Ukraine's foundational documents.
The people who were opposed to that were neocons in Washington from both parties who saw an opportunity to use Ukraine to bleed Russia.
and a very small but powerful minority in Ukraine, the alternationalists like the Azov Battalion, who don't want to accept the rights of people in Ukraine who identify with Russia, who want to speak Russian, who want to engage in Russian culture, who are concentrated primarily in the Donbass, who felt disenfranchised by a coup in 2014 who are concentrated primarily in the Donbass, who felt disenfranchised by a coup in 2014 backed by the U.S., which overthrew the president that they voted for, Yanukovych, who had
And funnily enough, Boris Johnson, in that article that you cited in the Daily Mail, he says that under any new peace deal, there should be some sort of accommodation to protect the rights of Russian speakers inside of Ukraine.
So therefore, he's tacitly admitting that actually the rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine were being infringed upon if he's now saying that they should be protected, which was another major reason for this conflict to begin with.
So the point is there are opportunities for diplomacy.
They've been there before.
Whether Russia will engage in anything now, I don't know.
The opportunity might be lost.
But certainly, it's a complete fantasy to believe that doubling down on more of the same, which is using Ukraine to bleed Russia, using its people as cannon fodder, will lead to anything positive, especially for the people of Ukraine.
Yeah, so finally, Aaron, I know that you identify as a strong America First Republican, so I just want to get you to explain what you think of this current bizarre dynamic where everybody in the Republican Party nowadays has to at least nominally identify with this concept or slogan of America First, right?
Because everybody has to associate with the Trump branding, and that's part of the Trump branding.
At the Republican convention last week, you know, I just whenever I would interview a Republican like member of Congress There was just an unstated assumption that they would have to be defending America first or explaining the value of that term Because obviously they're supporting the Republican nominee I mean Trump's like the big kingpin of the Republican Party undisputed at this point so you can't really deviate from his preferred terminology, but
Really, what seems clear is that America First, it's incredibly fluid, there's no real boundaries for what that even means, you can just appropriate whatever you want under the America First umbrella, and nobody can really challenge you because, like, what, who determines what America First is?
Nobody.
It's just, like, something that you can project.
Because, like, who wants, like, what, you want to say America second?
No, everybody likes the idea of America being first, even if it means, like, you know, militarily and economically imposing your will by force all around the world.
That could be America first, theoretically.
And so like everybody who I would talk to at the Republican Convention, or even with Fred Flight tonight, they would all have this idea of America First, but just, you know, seamlessly incorporates their preferred military adventurism, their punitive sanctions policies.
Name your aggressive American policy measure, that's all under the rubric of America First, potentially.
So I'm just, Just wondering what you make of that dynamic at this point.
Well, your interviews from the RNC were fascinating because, you know, first of all, the theme throughout them, especially when you talk about Israel, is the religious component where all these people really believe there's some sort of divine need that basically God has demanded that we provide Israel with unfettered military support and that there's something Like, divinely mandated by that.
So the religious extremism of these so-called America Firsters, as illustrated by your interviews with them, is just off the charts.
It was stunning to hear it in interview after interview.
And that's why, presumably, they're giving Netanyahu dozens of standing ovations.
I mean, they're worshiping this foreign country while calling themselves America Firsters.
And also they're talking about Upholding Christian values by arming a state that's committing mass murder and, you know, doing all these things I don't think Jesus would approve of.
The thing is, Aaron, though, I think how they would describe it is or how they would explain their rationale is they don't even view Israel as a foreign country so much as an extension of the United States with which it has this joint divine mandate.
I'm not even exaggerating.
This is what they believe.
Yeah.
Because the United States and Israel are both founded on the same Judeo-Christian values, and they're both the bulwarks against these encroachments of, you know, Islamism throughout the world, and they're defending, you know, shared values, and that they have a joint destiny.
Because, I mean, a lot of these people very plainly believe that in order for there to be a second coming of Christ, the United States has to defend Israel, because Jerusalem is where Christ will return to to rule over Earth.
So it's a sprawling, theocratic vision that I don't feel like gets enough attention in the mainstream media.
And all you have to do is ask them about it.
They're happy to talk, as you saw from my interviews, right?
Yes, they were.
And it's a pretty obvious and palpable driver of their worldview on this stuff.
I mean, the one thing I think they have right is that if they're banking on Israel to, you know, hasten the apocalypse or Armageddon or the rapture, I mean, I do think, I can see why, because Israel is such a, to me, is such a crazy state, committing mass murder, armed to teeth with nuclear weapons, constantly threatening and attacking its neighbors.
Today in Israel, there are riots of people who are trying to defend the right of Israeli soldiers to rape.
And sexually assault Palestinian prisoners.
It's off the charts in its extremism.
So from the point of view of someone who wants to bring in Armageddon, I can see why you have your ships on Israel, because it is kind of an Armageddon state.
But, you know, in terms of how it benefits ordinary Americans to be funding all this, I mean, I'd love to see someone make that argument.
Again, they have to turn to the biblical prophecies that they believe in.
And it's just shocking to hear.
And I really thank you for the interviews you did, because it really Brought that out.
And I want to say, too, about Ukraine.
Think of, you know, for Republicans from a partisan angle, Ukrainian officials interfered in the 2016 election to undermine Trump because they were worried that Trump was going to make a deal with Russia and end the war on the Donbas and, you know, let Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine, you know, speak Russian and have some autonomy, which is what the Minsk Accords called for.
So Ukrainian officials actually interfered in the election.
They leaked I think fake claims about Paul Manafort to get him fired, which was successful.
And then recently we learned from the New York Times in that long article about all these CIA bases that have been built up in Ukraine since 2014.
We learned that Ukrainian intelligence played a pivotal role in generating the Russian hacking claims that were at the heart of Russiagate.
So from a partisan point of view, and then of course you have Trump's first impeachment, which was about Ukraine.
So from a partisan point of view, Ukraine's being used to actually undermine Trump and constrain his presidency, but yet Trump and his allies are all lining up under the name of America First to fuel the proxy war in Ukraine and pursue very similar policies to the Democrats.
Preserving and expanding American primacy is paramount to the America First crowd, right?
That's the prevailing ideology of both parties, and they have rhetorical or other kinds of image-related differences in terms of how they present it.
But does Trump strike you as somebody who wants to relinquish American power, right?
I mean, and with Ukraine functioning as a source of American power in Eastern Europe to project against Russia or wherever else, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find Trump being willing to voluntarily accede that.
Which is always why I found the liberal hysterical critique of Trump to be so batty, like he's gonna destroy the liberal international order or the rules-based international order is going to crumble under Trump.
Like this is like the David Frum think tank critique.
He's going to sabotage NATO.
Like why would Trump sabotage NATO?
So he has vastly diminished power economically and militarily on the international stage to promote American primacies.
Does that like strike you as something that's intuitively pleasing to Trump to like have less power?
It never made any sense!
There's nothing in Trump's record to suggest he would undermine U.S.
hegemony.
He advanced it through, as we talked about, pulling out of arms control treaties with Russia, sending weapons to Ukraine that Obama would not send.
And just to keep him in line, just to make sure, they framed him as a Russian agent.
And that's why we had Russiagate or a major function of Russiagate was to constrain whatever possible sort of diplomatic inclinations Trump may have had toward Russia.
Because sometimes he had to talk about cooperating with Russia.
And I think just the fact that Trump said it out loud, that that is what set off so many national security state officials who just couldn't tolerate a president possibly talking about, you know, cooperation with Russia and making peace with Russia.
So just to make sure they participated in this, you know, multi-year campaign to frame him as a Russian agent, which did successfully keep him in line.
I don't know what's in his head.
Sometimes he does blurt out the truth.
He does talk about how, you know, we kill people too, which really offended liberals like David Frum when Trump dared to say that we were somehow – that Putin was not alone in killing people that were killers as well.
So they don't like Trump not because I think of his policy differences, but sometimes he blurts out the truth and he's hard to keep in line.
And they don't see him as a suitable steward of the U.S. war machine.
And so that's why we had scams like Russiagate, just to make sure that he stayed in line.
And I think it succeeded to a T.
OK, Aaron, anything you'd like to promote other than your gorgeous face as we wrap up here?
I'm sorry.
I'd like to promote the coup effort underway at System Update to install Michael Tracy as the permanent host.
And also my podcast Useful Idiots with Katie Halper and TheGreyZone.com where I do regular streams with Max Blumenthal.
Aaron, my only conundrum at this point is to identify who would be the Nancy Pelosi in this ouster scenario.
So she was the person working behind the scenes to force Joe out.
Yes.
And I can't figure out who would be Nancy Pelosi.
Maybe you, maybe Lee Fang, maybe like Donald Trump Jr.
or something.
If we can enlist Tucker Carlson.
He's pretty influential, supposedly.
That's a plausible one.
I'll fire off some texts and try to figure out who could be the craven political conniver to get me installed into power over Clint.
We'll even maybe cancel his passport or something and prevent him from returning to Brazil.
Well, there's a precedent for that, you know, with the Snowden case.
I was just going to say, yeah.
Give him a taste of his own medicine.
Exactly, yes, yes.
All right, Aaron Maté, thank you very much for joining as always, and we'll talk soon.
Thanks, Michael.
Okay, thank you for watching another episode of System Update.
Hope you enjoyed staring at my face for, I don't know how long it was, 90 minutes, 100 minutes.
And if you're pining for the return of Glenn, too bad, because it's not happening quite yet.
But you can stay tuned for that.
I'm sure it'll happen eventually.
At least if I don't stage the coup that I'm being increasingly encouraged to stage.
I'm going to be hosting a special after show on Locals shortly after tonight's broadcast.
So check that out if you want even more of me.
And I'm also going to be having a special guest who will provide you additional details about how great I am.
