Live from the Trump/Harris Presidential Debate; The Absurdity of Kamala's New 'Issues' Page; Fred Fleitz on America First
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Pre-Debate Review (6:05)
Michael Tracey Live From Presidential Debate in Philly (16:56)
Interview with Fred Fleitz (29:54)
Kamala Finally Reveals “Issues” Page (1:04:26)
Outro (1:19:38)
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Good evening, it's Tuesday, September 10th, which makes
me realize that we're not only going to be entertained by the Harris-Trump presidential debate tonight, but also we have tomorrow to look forward to a whole series of very serious and important commemorations of 9-11.
But for tonight, 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.
As I mentioned, there will be the first and almost certainly the last presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris that will take place in Philadelphia at 9 o'clock p.m.
Eastern.
Like I presume is true of most of you, I am having great difficulty containing my excitement over what will undoubtedly be a series of deeply substantive and thought-provoking exchanges between the two candidates, but I'm a professional.
And we have a show to do so I'm doing everything possible to keep those emotions in check.
Hope that you can do the same.
We're going to talk a little bit about the upcoming debate while trying hard to avoid all those dreary media cliches that are used to, as they call it, set the scene for what is about to happen such as what must Kamala do to win and what must Trump avoid doing to harm himself and other fascinating predictive inquiries like those.
We do have on the ground in Philadelphia both the ruggedly independent journalist Michael Tracy As well as our producer Megan O'Rourke and we will hear from them about some of the insights they've already attained.
They have credentials to get into the media wing of the debate and so we're going to hear from them about some of what they are showing and there's also the great anticipation that the media has over what Entering, this is the big treat they get after the debate, to enter what is called, in a rare bit of political candor, the spin room.
Very bizarre to call it that because it actually describes what American politics is, and that's where the candidate surrogates go after the debate to explain why their candidate won.
We'll try to have some interviews from there before the show with some people, but it might be difficult, but certainly we'll definitely have interviews after and we'll post those on our Locals platform along with my reaction to the debate, which I will talk about in a minute.
Then, As we mentioned last night, but did not get to, Kamala Harris finally did something today, or yesterday, that she had thus far refused to do.
She posted a page on her campaign's website entitled Issues.
There was no issues page anywhere on her website.
It was just donate, support.
Biographies, nothing about the issues.
They finally posted that, and it purports to advise the country on what she believes and intends to do if she becomes president.
The problem is that the page does nothing of the kind.
It's incredibly cliched and vapid and evasive, as much as Kamala Harris's campaign has been thus far.
Thus, I think compounding her growing problem, and the one that she has to address most tonight, that Americans, for good and obvious reason, have no idea who she really is or what she actually stands for, because the real answer is she believes and stands for nothing.
And then finally, Fred Fites has been around foreign policy circles for a long, long time.
Back in the Bush-Cheney administration, he was known as a key ally and protege of John Bolton.
When we posted that word, protege of John Bolton, as a preview to our show, he objected.
So I want to make clear that he considers himself that previously, but no longer to be that.
But he did also work with John Bolton, for John Bolton, in the Trump White House.
He's an avid supporter of Israel.
believes that Islam and Muslims pose a threat to the West.
He is also now a scholar at a think tank that purports to define what America First is, particularly when it comes to foreign policy, which is his specialty.
And I want to speak with him tonight to try and explore some of what we believe are some of the internal tensions and even contradictions between the concept of Trump's America First worldview, as he defines it, and many of the foreign policy positions advocated by many of the people closest to him, including Mr. Flight.
So look forward to that conversation.
Before we get to all of that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
I found the last debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden to be one of the simultaneously most entertaining spectacles and one of the saddest spectacles I had ever seen, it was
It was really remarkable to watch the sitting President of the United States just demonstrate to the world with no protection, no escape, no anything, that cognitive decline is woefully insufficient to describe what was and has been happening to his brain.
We have a President of the United States Still, months later, that everyone knows is dysfunctional, that cannot perform the duties of anything, that can't comprehend complex information, can't make decisions, doesn't know where he is half the time.
We all watched that.
We witnessed it.
And yet it's actually quite bizarre that no one seems to mind.
No one seems to notice.
No one seems to care.
The government just goes on with no president.
The vice president obviously has no participation in any policymaking role because she's out on the campaign trail every single day trying to succeed him.
So the government, the U.S. government, just continues to move along, roll along as if nothing had changed.
And I think for all the talk about how nothing is more important than every presidential election, it kind of shows that in reality our government is run by this sort of permanent, invisible, unelected faction.
That's who makes all the decisions when we hear all these policies all the time.
We just heard a new one today that the U.S.
is considering allowing the use of long-range missiles by the Ukrainians inside Russia.
A very consequential decision.
Who made that decision?
Who made the decision to deploy all those military assets to the Middle East when there was a possible or anticipated escalation of conflict between Iran and Hezbollah on the one hand and Israel on the other?
Who makes these decisions?
It's obviously not Joe Biden for all the reasons we just said.
It's not Kamala Harris either.
And it's amazing.
Nobody seems to mind this.
Nobody notices.
Nobody cares.
And that's because, in reality, it doesn't really make that much of a difference if you have a completely incapacitated president.
There are some things, though, and I think it's impossible to attain the same entertainment level without Joe Biden.
It's just not going to be the same without him at this debate.
But there are some things that I think are worth noting about this debate, and I want to begin with this breaking story that CNN reported just a couple of hours ago about how Kamala Harris is preparing for the debate.
Here is part of what CNN said.
Tonight, CNN learning that Kamala Harris has sought advice from Hillary Clinton, who sparted a debate with Trump back in 2016.
So, Imagine being Kamala Harris, preparing for a debate with Donald Trump, and then calling Hillary Clinton for advice on how to debate Donald Trump.
It'd be like, if you were about to fly and land a complex airplane, you called the pilot of the Hindenburg and were like, hey, can you give me advice on how to safely land an aircraft?
Like, why would you call Harry Clinton?
She's going to be like, oh, one really good thing to do is just to, like, skulk around the stage and let Trump, like, skulk around behind you and accuse him of all sorts of things and say that you're going to go to prison.
Like, why would you possibly call Harry Clinton and want that energy and that mindset anywhere near you?
That's one of the worst political candidates in modern political history.
And the debates she did were a disaster.
I think she got crushed in that election despite every conceivable systemic advantage.
But apparently that's one of the ways Kamala Harris is preparing.
I don't know, that reeks of kind of desperation to me.
I think one of the things that was interesting about that last debate was how Trump saw Joe Biden next to him, obviously.
Demented and disoriented and unaware of where he was.
And for the most part, Trump really restrained himself.
I think there might have been some actual empathy, especially if you're getting up there in age like Donald Trump is.
You're in your late 70s, headed to your 80s.
Seeing someone a couple years older than you, Going through this sort of dementia is something that probably scares you, or at least provokes a degree of empathy.
I think it does in most people, and he was constrained.
The only time that Donald Trump got genuinely angry with Joe Biden, where you could really see that he was upset with Joe Biden, was in this exchange that I thought was so notable.
You can see he is 6'5 and only 235 lbs.
Just take a look at what he says he is and take a look at what he is.
Look, I'd be happy to have a driving contest with him.
- Four, 200. - I never saw that.
- Well, anyway, that's what you're, anyway.
Just take a look at what he says he is and take a look at what he is.
Look, I'd be happy to have a driving contest with him.
The reason I got my handicap was when I was vice president down to a six. - Look at that, look at that reaction.
He really, to hear Joe Biden falsely claim that he had a six handicap is something that Trump just cannot, it's just as hard as he's trying, it's just the thing that he cannot stand, he cannot believe that he's hearing from Joe Biden.
And then they go on to bicker about their respective golf abilities.
I told you before I'm happy to play golf if you carry your own bag.
Think you can do it?
That's the biggest lie that he's a six handicap of all.
I was an eight handicap.
Yeah.
Eight?
I've seen you swing.
I know you swing.
Let's not act like children.
I've seen you swing, I know you swing.
Let's not act like children.
President Trump, we're going to turn around.
Let's not act like children.
I still think I cannot get through that without laughing.
Primarily because it deeply offended Trump.
He wasn't pretending.
There was no theater there.
Hearing Joe Biden claim that he had a six handicap, a handicap, when as Trump said, I've seen your swing, was the thing that really upset Trump more than anything.
In fact, he called it, he said, that's the biggest lie.
Of all, and as it turns out, I've seen people who hate Trump, golf experts, say that although he has a very unconventional swing, he apparently is quite a good golfer, like the kind who can actually win tournaments at clubs.
I think for anyone who cares, I think that he does have a sort of talent in that.
He doesn't seem very athletic in any other way, so he obviously takes a lot of pride in that, and that was the one moment that was just so...watching two old rich men trying to be president argue about who has the better golf swing, and they're Better Handicap is just such a moment of visible and visceral illustration of our politics, but the way Trump was so personally and deeply offended, genuinely so, was one of the highlights of the evening for me.
Now, there were a lot of other highlights.
You might recall that right after the debate, after everybody saw the full extent of Joe Biden's disability, And Americans were saying for a year and a half or two years that they believed Joe Biden was way too old to carry out the duties of the presidency, let alone to seek another four years.
This is something everyone in the United States knew, except the media.
They pretended they didn't know.
And then when Biden stood there so vulnerable, so exposed that not even the media could deny it, they all had to pretend they had no other choice.
They acted as though they were shocked to see that Joe Biden is in that form of mental incapacity.
This is like the first time they ever noticed.
They had never known before.
That was the reason why they were mocking those who said it.
Remember, they had spent the three weeks prior When Joe Biden was having multiple episodes of disorientation when he was in Europe, when he was on the stage with Barack Obama.
Where George Clooney ended up saying he wasn't the same Joe Biden, they were attacking as misinformation spreaders, anyone who pointed out that Biden really seemed to have been degenerating.
And so the media had to come out, and CNN, MSNBC, all of them, ABC, they were like, oh my god, I've never seen Joe Biden like this.
This is really a crisis.
Whereas, of course, everybody knew that he had been like that for quite some time, but it just never was as visible as the debate.
One of the other funny things that happened that night was 30 minutes into the debate, once it became clear that this was a debacle and a disaster and humiliation, on an unprecedented scale, media outlets started sending around tweets that read, breaking news exclusively, here's Axios, they even used a red siren.
That's like the sign for like breaking news, big, big news breaking.
Biden has a cold.
A person close to the president has confirmed to Axios his voice was raspy as the debate started, but as strengthened as... So, think about that.
They waited 30 minutes into the debate.
No one said anything about a cold before that.
30 minutes the first 30 minutes were some of the most humiliating moments I've ever seen a person have to publicly endure and then these media outlets were willing when the Biden campaign told them to circulate it just go on Twitter and other social media outlets to say breaking Biden has a cold that's why he he's performing as badly as he has.
Now one of the things that Donald Trump has been mocking Kamala Harris for is her height.
Donald Trump is quite tall.
He's six foot four.
Kamala Harris is, I don't know what the average height is for a woman.
I don't think she's well below average, but she's five foot four.
I think that's short on the short side.
I personally don't think it matters, but in terms of like presidential stature and other things, it has typically mattered before.
You may recall that Ron DeSantis is quite short for a man.
He used to walk around with platform shoes to appear less short or taller.
And the New York Times noted that Trump had been mocking Kamala Harris's height and they wanted to defend Kamala Harris because it's the New York Times and here's how they chose to do it.
Quote, Trump mocked Kamala Harris's height.
But her fans see a certain stature.
So here we have part of the attempt to defend her that even though her height is quite short, she has a kind of stature.
But then it went on and it said this, quote, Kamala Harris is modest in stature, but she's considered by some to have tall energy.
So She may be a short person, but she identifies as, and a lot of people identify her as being a tall person.
She has tall energy.
That's what Kamala Harris has.
So she's short, but she has tall energy.
Donald Trump has insisted she shouldn't be allowed to use, quote, boxes or artificial lifts.
During the debate.
All right, as I said, that's something to look for tonight as well.
Now, as I said, we have the regularly intrepid and independent journalist, Michael Tracy, along with Megan O'Rourke from our staff, who's the producer and social media manager for our show.
Very talented.
journalist in her own right, and they've gone to the RNC together, the DNC together to cover that live, and now they're credentialed to be in the media part of the debate, and we asked them to prepare sort of five or six minute report that they recorded just a few minutes ago about what and we asked them to prepare sort of five or six minute report that they recorded just a few minutes ago about what exactly it is that they're seeing, some insights from behind the scenes that you probably wouldn't know if you
I'll try to avoid getting two in Immersed in the media pack mentality.
One funny thing about these debates is that there's tons of foreign media.
Conventions, too.
And they really have no clue what they're doing.
No offense to them, nor should they.
I mean, if I went to Australia, there's an Australian lady doing some kind of social media video right near us right now.
Get her.
Get a good look at her.
She seems fine.
She might be from New Zealand.
I don't know.
Sounds Australian to me.
But like, I mean, if I were covering Australian politics, unless I did a really deep research dive, I'd be kind of out of my element as well.
And yet here they are.
And so we just bore witness to a giant mob of journalists that surrounded Anthony Scaramucci, who was press secretary for Trump for like, what was it, 12 days in 2017?
And he's the big Kamala Harris surrogate now.
And he was being swarmed by journalists as though he were the king of England, maybe even above the king of England.
Because he's a Republican who has denounced Trump.
And so there's not really a whole lot to do right now other than just kind of mosey around looking like we're doing something important, which we're not.
So I figured I would just do this little intro video because, you know, you might want to get a little bit of a behind-the-scenes peek.
At where the media have been relegated to.
And even identifying as media, I have some reservations about.
So here you see, like, I guess this is ABC with their setup and maybe CNN or all the people who can afford to spend, I don't know, like $10 million or something on having their dopey little remote studio set up.
And then if you want to pay just like, I don't know, $1 million or something, you can get one of these smaller Little setups.
We are not well endowed enough financially to afford one of these.
But then again, do we really want them?
I mean, I don't see the added journalistic benefit.
Oh, there's Scaramucci.
Looking very important.
Looks like he's a hot commodity.
We could probably interview him.
I mean, he's being ushered around like he's the star of the show.
It was embarrassing.
I mean, I felt like I would be disgracing myself and you, the viewer, if I joined that massive scrum of reporters that encircled him as though they were hanging on his every word.
Yeah, so most of what the journalists are doing here, I mean, we heard over one NPR reporter saying, excuse me, I have to do my, I'm going to be on air in a minute.
So we had to like move from her table.
And her report was like, we are here in Philadelphia, which as you might know, is the capital of Pennsylvania, a key swing state.
And that's the big NPR report.
And they just like recite the most banal conventional wisdom imaginable about expectations for the debate.
What does Kamala Harris have to do?
What does Donald Trump have to do?
We all are familiar with Donald Trump, but we're maybe not quite as familiar with Kamala Harris.
Therefore, what do they each respectively have to do?
So what do I have to do?
That's a better question, maybe.
I don't know.
I guess we'll hang around here for the next several hours, and we'll maybe do a little bit of trolling, have a little bit of fun, have some laughs, have some tears, and then once the surrogates are funneled into this spin room... So I guess you can demarcate the spin room versus the media filing center based on the color of the carpeting.
That's my understanding.
A lot of really intense logistics went into that.
They're c-spamming, they're the only ones who I don't resent.
I actually genuinely do appreciate c-spam, so.
I even got a c-spam t-shirt and sweatshirt recently.
Partly because I wanted the t-shirt and sweatshirt, but also because I wanted to just contribute to c-spam because I used tons of their content without compensating them.
So there's your little, I guess, civic responsibility note.
And yeah, we're overrun with journalists who are just staring at their computers doing God knows what.
They could be home, I guess.
Instead of here, but you have to be here because that makes you a serious journalist.
Or something, right?
I don't know.
You tell me.
So what does Kamala Harris have to do?
What are you expecting?
What does Donald Trump have to do?
What are you expecting for his performance?
Those are the utterly forgettable questions which will be repeated over and over again today and will have no lasting news value or informational value whatsoever.
So that's the fate that we've been beset with.
All for your edification.
And for my eternal dismay.
And yeah, ABC News.
These are the first debates.
I mean, this actually is somewhat notable.
These are the first debates, meaning tonight's debate hosted by ABC News, then the one in June hosted by CNN, which led to Biden being unceremoniously dumped from the nomination, that had been organized not by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which for decades had been the intermediary between the media organizations and the campaigns to host debates, but by the actual media company itself, in this case ABC News, and then the two respective campaigns. but by the actual media company itself, in this case
So I don't know.
I mean, people People talk about how corporate media is on the decline.
I don't really get the sense that that's true based on the dominance that corporate media has asserted over the debates this cycle.
So, yeah.
There you go.
Oh, and there's Byron Donalds.
Maybe we'll go chat with him.
Alright, that's it for now.
Sorry.
Goodbye.
All right, I'm very excited to be joined live from Philadelphia by the two people who produced that spectacular piece of journalism, Michael Tracy and Megan O'Rourke.
I think I can see you guys.
I know I can hear you.
There you are.
I mean, that was such a comprehensive piece of reporting, even meandering down the path of talking about the various sweatpants and sweatshirts that Michael had purchased from C-SPAN that I barely know what to ask.
I mean, it was just so informative and it's Complexity!
But what I would like to ask, just to start off with, because we have a guest coming on, so we only have a few minutes.
Michael, can you tell me again what the NPR person sounded like when she told you that you had to leave the table?
Hey Glenn, I just want to say, as always, it's such a pleasure to be with you.
Especially here in the city of Brotherly Love.
I've heard endless cliches related to Philadelphia, where people the NPR reporter to fill time as they give their totally banal updates to the editor or producer or whatever.
She's like, can you please move in on the table?
I have to be on air.
And then we listened to her on air.
Yeah.
It was like-- OK, Michael.
I'm sorry.
Michael, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
Michael, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
We did have six minutes of highly, high-substance, high-level content from you.
Unfortunately, we're not hearing you well as you answer my question.
I'm very disappointed because I actually did really want to hear, re-hear how that NPR person sounded when ejecting you from their precious table.
But we will be hearing from Michael.
and Megan after the debate.
They're probably going to have lots of interviews from the spin room.
We're going to post those on locals for this evening and then probably post them gradually throughout the day tomorrow.
So we'll hear from both of them After the debate.
So that's my view on the debate.
I'm not going to tell you what to expect because I actually have no idea.
I think the format of the debate is kind of designed to make sure it's a pretty subdued debate, not a lot of back and forth and things.
But we'll see whether Kamala Harris has any of those moments where she cackles out her own jokes.
We'll see whether Trump has any moments where he goes off script from what he's intended to say.
And we'll come back with a 20, 30 minute or so reaction after the debate that we also post on Locals.
And as I said, there is a $10 discount that Locals is offering for anyone who joins this evening.
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Our guest this evening is Fred Fights.
He was previously the Deputy Assistant to President Donald Trump and the Chief of Staff to National Security Advisor John Bolton.
He also worked in the State Department under the Bush-Cheney administration, and he is now the Vice President of the America First Policy Institute, where he is an architect of and helps to define a lot of the America First policies, especially foreign policy, that Donald Trump, and if he wins his administration, intend to pursue.
Mr. Fleitz, thank you so much for coming on our show.
It's great to see you.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I wanted to just give you the opportunity.
I know when we promoted the show, we had, I think I referred to you as, or we referred to you as John Bolton's protege, and you objected to that.
You said you have a lot of differences with John Bolton.
So at your request, we changed that to make it clear that that was in the past.
So if you could, I actually had intended on asking you this anyway, because my perception of you had always been that you were kind of an ally Or a ideological fellow traveler of John Bolton's.
That's how I think you ended up in the Trump administration was when he became hired by Trump.
You became his chief of staff.
And there are obviously a lot of differences now between John Bolton and President Trump.
And my understanding is there's a lot of differences between John Bolton and yourself.
So can you talk about why it is that you think John Bolton has become such a harsh critic of Donald Trump and what differences you have with him that you didn't previously have with him in the past?
Well, it's a pleasure to be here.
I was in government for about 25 years.
Most of that time, I was in the intelligence community.
And when I worked for Bolton at State, I was detailed from the CIA to the State Department.
And I broke with John a long time ago over bombing Iran and bombing North Korea.
I was on a Tucker Carlton show in mid-2019, just when the U.S.
was about to bomb Iran.
And you may remember this because all of Trump's advisors wanted Trump to bomb Iran at the last minute.
I should say all of them, except for my colleague, General Keith Keller.
At the last minute, Trump said, I'm not going to do that because I'm going to kill 100, 200 Iranians for just shooting down an unmanned drone.
Well, Tucker had me on the show because he wanted to bash me, thinking, well, you work for Bolton, you must support starting these unnecessary wars and using military force without good reason.
But that is not the way I think.
And we had a great discussion, but I think Carlson was surprised And I also, I haven't talked to John since 2020 when I denounced his book, which betrayed his confidential discussions with President Trump and the Oval Office, which I think did a lot of damage to the Office of the Presidency, the Office of the National Security Advisor.
National Security Advisors have to Basically, maintain the trust of presidents and not betray information that they discuss with them confidentially.
I don't know why John Bolton went off the rails with President Trump, but I guess looking over it, I don't think he was ever suited to work in the Trump administration.
His approach of wanting to bomb Iran and bomb other countries to get things done was inconsistent with Trump's America First approach to national security.
He was out of unnecessary wars.
I think that's one of the things that a lot of people who found Trump's 2016 campaign messaging appealing, and not just his campaign messaging, but just off the cuff when he would speak and you kind of get a sense of his instincts on things like foreign policy.
One of the things that ended up being quite confusing is that he did end up appointing a lot of people Whose entire career was not just divergent from but quite antithetical to that kind of restraint, that kind of aversion to unnecessary wars, a kind of focus on domestic politics.
For me, Mike Pompeo is one example who ended up running the CIA and the State Department.
Nikki Haley, who became ambassador of the UN, as we saw in this campaign, is another who has a lot of sharp differences with Trump.
And there are many others as well.
I recently heard someone saying that, oh it was actually RFK, that he himself posed that question to Trump.
Why were there so many people in important positions in your administration who didn't share, obviously John Bolton another, who didn't share the foreign policy vision that you outlaid and he said that Trump told him, He didn't really know how to fight the permanent power faction in Washington.
He got to D.C., didn't know it well.
A lot of people were pressuring him, saying you have to hire these people, these people.
What is your explanation for why there ended up being so many people at such high levels of the Trump administration who clearly had never supported the foreign policy vision, the America First vision, as outlined, as defended by Trump in 2016?
What you said is exactly right, and I think Trump brought people in who were determined not to carry out his policies and to maybe carry out other policies without telling him or to talk him into other policies.
Look, Donald Trump was the ultimate outsider.
He had not worked in Washington.
I don't think he'd even lived in Washington before he won the election.
And when he came into the White House, there were a lot of people who seemed to have good intentions with great credentials, like Condoleezza Rice and Bob Gates, who referred people who looked good on paper.
But Trump didn't realize, didn't have the background, his team didn't realize that these folks were not in line with his beliefs.
And if you talk to Trump now, he'll tell you he made mistakes because he was the ultimate outsider.
He was adapting.
And also, I think Trump really underestimated the determination of the deep state to destroy him and to go after his policies.
Trump tried to fix this at the end of his administration, but it was too late.
But look, Glenn, I'm happy to say now Trump and his team learned from those mistakes.
And I know many good people who you would agree with who are lining up to work in national security positions.
So I want to probe on that and perhaps a little bit on that because for me it's such an important point because part of what I found appealing about Donald Trump's 2016 campaign was this very radical deviation from what had been I think long-standing bipartisan consensus on foreign policy and maybe in the past people might have thought it was right and now it's not but whatever that was a radical break and it ended up Not often being reflected in administration policy, and I think in part because of that.
But in addition to what you said, which I totally believe that Trump got there and was kind of in the dark about, you know, you have a bunch of positions you have to appoint, you rely on people who are not in accordance with your ideology, and you end up appointing a lot of people who are more sabotaging or undermining what you say you want to do and what you want to do than not.
There is this other aspect to it, which I think even the most ardent Trump supporters will agree is a problem, which is that Trump has this personality flaw that if you flatter him, if he preys on him, he's somebody who will trust and like you and even appoint you to certain positions.
And I just heard Trump, you know, I think it was when he was talking to Elon Musk, maybe in a campaign rally, saying, look, I'm somebody who's very simple.
If you say good things about me, I will like you.
Do you agree that part of the reason why Trump was able to be kind of maneuvered around so easily wasn't just because of his lack of familiarity with everybody in Washington and how it worked, but also this personality trait that he has?
And what gives you confidence that he won't fall prey to that again?
My experience is he really was taken off guard by people like H.R.
McMaster and Rex Tillerson and John Bolton and General Mattis who just weren't carrying out his policies.
He ordered something to be done and they decided to do something else and they all ended up being let go.
I just think he assumed that since he was the president, people carry out his policies.
And let me add something that's related to what you're saying.
Remember when Trump decided to talk to Kim Jong-un.
The establishment hated this idea.
John Bolton hated this idea because it's not the way you're supposed to do things.
Presidents can't meet with bloodthirsty dictators like that.
It's the wrong thing to do.
But it was the right thing to do.
It was certainly a lot better than bombing North Korea, and it significantly lowered tensions.
It was unconventional.
And in the end, when it did lower tensions, when it got North Korea to stop testing missiles, even some of the president's liberal critics agreed that this is better than what we've tried before and we should do more of this.
Yeah, you might remember in the 2008 presidential primary, this protracted war between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that culminated in Obama's success.
One of their first big differences in the debate was Obama was asked, there's a series of five or six dictators, I think Assad, at the time Chavez, maybe Kim Jong-un, who his father at the time was running North Korea, and they asked him, would you agree to meet with these leaders without conditions?
And Obama said, Yes, of course.
I think it's crucial that we have open dialogue.
That's the way we prevent war, misperception, miscommunication.
And Hillary Clinton said, that's incredibly naive.
Of course you don't meet with these bad leaders.
And so I remember very well that when Obama said it, it was something that gained a lot of applause from on the left.
And then when Trump started doing it, there tended to be a little bit of a different reaction.
Let me ask you about this.
The issue you referred to about the deep state opposing Trump, being so dedicated to his sabotage.
You know, I remember very well, I still think it's one of the most important things that has happened publicly in our politics, was in between Trump's election in 2016 and his inauguration on January 20th in 2017, there was this kind of back and forth between Trump and the CIA where he was kind of mocking them over getting Iraq wrong and the intelligence wrong.
And I think the reason was because the CIA was hyping this Russiagate narrative that Trump believed was designed to undermine the legitimacy of his election.
And Chuck Schumer went on Rachel Maddow and she asked him about that.
And Chuck Schumer said, look, you know, even just from the perspective of being a hard-nosed businessman, which Trump is, it's incredibly stupid to confront and bash the CIA because everyone in Washington knows you don't do that because they have six different ways from Sunday to get back at you.
And for me, that was just an extra...I mean, of course, everyone knows that, but that was an extraordinary thing to admit that a president, the elected president, cannot confront the intelligence community because they will destroy him in one way or the other.
Now, it is surprising for me to hear that from you given that you spend a lot of time as an analyst with the CIA.
Although, I know there are people inside the intelligence community who know even better than most people what its function is, what its flaws are, but why do you think that This permanent U.S.
security state was so devoted to sabotaging Trump, either in the campaign or the administration.
And what kind of tools do you think they used to do that?
Well, first of all, they're part of what I call the foreign policy establishment.
And in the government, they're promoting a liberal international approach to government.
And when I worked at the State Department, Cariris used to say that, you know, we are basically We're safeguarding the organization for the future.
We have to outlast these people.
But in the CIA and other intelligence agencies, they've forgotten that their only mission is to provide intelligence support to the president.
They're not supposed to be second-guessing the president.
They're not supposed to be giving speeches, questioning presidential policy.
They're not supposed to be attending open congressional hearings where they say presidential policy are going to fail.
They've forgotten their mission.
They think they're in charge.
Do they have that power?
I realize you think they shouldn't, but are they really in charge?
Do they have that power to sort of override even what an elected president might want to do?
Well, they've certainly had some success in undermining presidents.
And the challenge for a new Trump administration, if he wins, I think he's going to win, is not just to put a very good head of CIA and DNI and other agencies, but there has to be reform of these agencies.
There has to be people brought in from the outside to basically assume positions throughout these bureaucracies, not to politicize them.
But to make sure the careers understand that they have to keep politics out of their work and they work for the White House.
They don't work for themselves.
They don't work for the New York Times or the foreign policy establishment.
Now, you used the phrase America First several times.
Obviously, that's an important phrase for the Trump movement, for Trump's worldview.
It definitely, I know for sure, means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
I've interviewed plenty of people who say they are supporters of the America First worldview and yet have very different views on a whole variety of things.
With respect to your area that you've worked on most, which is national security and foreign policy, and as somebody who now works at a think tank with that phrase in its title, What, in your view, when it comes to let's say specifically the issue of involving United States military, United States Treasury in foreign wars, what does the America First vision orient or direct someone to do with regard to that question?
First of all, you'll forgive me if I plug my book, An America First Approach to U.S.
National Security, that has contributions by Morgan Ortagus and General Keith Kellogg and Chad Wolf and many other national security experts.
This means a competent president, a decisive president with a strong and modernized military Who uses our military when he has to, but prudently, to keep our country out of unnecessary wars.
This is not an isolationist approach, but it is an approach that demands that our allies carry their weight in defending their regions.
It also means we have to defend supply chains, and we have to modernize our military to make sure it operates.
We have to have an intelligence community that answers to the president.
And I guess, frankly Glenda, I think we should talk about Ukraine on this because I think we have a great chapter on Ukraine and I talk about how America first deals with the Ukraine war because this war has to end.
I wanted to ask you to define it and then I was going to ask you to apply it to a couple of wars.
The war in Ukraine is not the only war the United States is financing, but let's start with the war in Ukraine.
So the policy of the Biden-Harris administration has been, and according to Kamala Harris it will continue to be if she wins, and they have a lot of Republican support for this, that we should, together with NATO, finance and continue to finance the war in Ukraine until the very end, which is defined as expelling all Russian troops from every inch of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea.
Which the Russians regard as an existential threat and would absolutely use, I believe, nuclear weapons before they allow that to happen.
And not only are we not close to that goal, we're moving further and further away from it.
The Ukrainian front lines are crumbling.
The Russians are controlling more and more Ukrainian territory.
Is there any way to reconcile Paying for funding and sending huge amounts of arms to the point we deplete our own stockpiles to Ukraine in this regional war with an America First vision of foreign policy?
Of course not.
Our policy right now is to throw weapons at Ukraine forever, thinking somehow Ukraine's going to take back all this territory.
It isn't going to take back this territory.
It is going to lose this long-term war of attrition.
And as this war expands, you may know this week Ukraine attacked the suburbs of Moscow.
The chances of a nuclear war are getting much higher.
The only moral and practical solution to this war is to force both parties to the negotiating table And to end it.
It's immoral to continue this.
And what's the strategy that the Biden administration and their Democratic and Republican supporters have for pouring all this military aid on Ukraine?
Basically, it's virtue signaling.
Putin is evil, so we have to give weapons to Ukraine.
But what is this accomplishing?
It's accomplishing nothing other than it's running down our arms stockpile.
It's making the situation with many nations much more dangerous and is driving Russia into the arms of China.
And I think that's the biggest flaw, the biggest danger of this policy.
Which the US managed not to do throughout the entire Cold War.
That was one of the principal objectives, was to keep the Soviet Union and China apart.
But on Ukraine, Looking at things very pragmatically, given all the lives Russia has lost, all the expenditures that they've had to make, the sacrifices for this war that they've endured, to me, there's no question that in a peace negotiation, Russia will never give up Crimea, as we just discussed.
Never, ever.
They will not, I doubt, even consider that.
And my belief is that they will insist, at the very least, on some sort of buffer where eastern Ukraine and those provinces are semi-autonomous or have some neutrality, force neutrality.
Do you agree that part of any Possible peace deal that President Trump could engineer at some point would have to be ceding some parts of what two years ago had been Ukrainian territory to Russian control.
What I've called for in this book in a chapter I wrote with General Kellogg, it's not a peace plan, but it's ideas of bringing about a ceasefire, is that the war stops along the current battle lines.
Negotiations begin on a final settlement.
Ukraine, for now, does not cede any territory.
That will be resolved in negotiations.
The negotiations will take many years, and probably there will not be a final settlement until Putin leaves the political scene.
The priority right now, as Trump has said, is to stop the killing and let's use negotiations to find a peaceful solution.
What would you be prepared to offer Putin to say, let's freeze the conflict in a ceasefire, given what he perceives as the success of the Russian military in expanding further westward into Ukraine and taking over more territory?
Wouldn't you have to make some very meaningful concession to him for him to say, OK, I'm going to agree to a ceasefire and we'll put the terms of the peace deal years down the line?
Why would he do that?
These could be offered is to take NATO membership off the table, maybe for 10 to 25 years, maybe some offer to to to loosen some sanctions on Russia.
But I think also Russia should be paying for reconstruction of Ukraine.
So that would have to be negotiated also.
But I think if we're looking at what's our policy going to be with Russia down the road, Ultimately, we have to bring Russia back into Europe as a European state.
Russia's not an Asian state, and this alliance with Russia and China has very dangerous implications down the road, and I think that should be communicated to Russia.
That is the ultimate end state of this process, and I think it would be in Russia's interests.
Perceiving a little bit incorrectly what the Russians are prepared to do without a lot more concessions than the ones you suggest you're willing to make.
Would, in other words, that you can't foster a ceasefire deal from because the Russians won't accept it under those terms that the West and the United States are prepared to offer.
Would, in your view, President Trump be willing in that event to continue to provide the financing and arms that Ukraine needs to continue to wage the war against Russia?
I have to say that everything I'm saying now, I'm not speaking on behalf of President Trump.
He speaks for himself, so I have to be careful because he's worked on this very, very carefully.
I think that maybe, that would probably be part of the equation, that we'll continue to arm Ukraine and make sure that they are secure against this Russian offensive unless it ends.
But I think if you look back, the chapter we wrote on the Ukraine conflict in our book, Doesn't look at how to end the war.
It looks at how incompetent diplomacy and failing to recognize Putin's red lines led him to invade.
I don't agree with Putin's twisted sense of history with the Russian, the Ukrainian people, but he believes these things.
And the Biden administration simply ignored that.
They ignored him when he said that NATO membership was a red line.
And frankly, if we had a halfway competent president instead of Biden, Putin wouldn't have invaded.
Yeah, it was so ironic that Trump for four years was called a Russian agent, and yet Russia didn't take any Ukrainian land under Trump, yet seized Crimea under Obama, and then seized another 20% of the country under... I'd rather seize Crimea under Obama, and then seize another 20% of the country under Biden.
Just on the final question on Ukraine, though.
invaded neighboring countries during three of the last four presidents, when Bush was weak, when Obama was weak, when Biden is weak.
Oh, yeah.
But this is my question, though, that how is it possible to characterize Biden and the Democrats as being weak when increasingly, you know, we've crossed every line that we said we wouldn't cross?
We started just funding it.
Then we started to provide weapon systems.
We said we wouldn't provide tanks, aircraft carriers.
We're now talking about lifting all the remaining restrictions on the use of American weapons by Ukraine inside Russian territory.
Hasn't the strategy of the Biden-Harris administration with regard to Ukraine and Russia been one of aggression, not weakness?
It's been a record of weakness, of incompetence.
All the weapons that the Ukrainians needed that could have possibly moved the Russians back arrived too late or had strings attached.
The Russians are dug in right now.
There's no amount of weapons we're going to provide.
The Ukrainians are going to push Russia out of Ukraine.
There is a way to get Russia out of Ukraine.
We can send in American troops.
I don't want to do that.
The Biden administration doesn't want to do that.
That's why I'm saying this isn't a real policy, it's virtue signaling.
Biden wants to make a boogeyman out of Putin, say he's like Hamas, he's a war criminal, so I'm going to throw weapons over there, even though the weapons are making no difference.
So I want to be respectful of your time and there's a couple other areas I absolutely want to get to with you.
I enjoyed talking to you about this.
So let me just make this the last question on Ukraine.
This is what I guess has created some confusion is on some level, your critique of the Biden administration is that their weakness was that they didn't provide more sophisticated weaponry, or they imposed too many limits on Ukraine.
At the start of the war, we should have been funding Ukraine even more, arming them even more to fight the Russians even more effectively.
And I still hear you saying that although you believe a peace or ceasefire deal can be facilitated, that in the event that it can't be, you think President Trump should or at least would or at least should, in your view, continue to arm and fund Ukraine.
In what conceivable way is arming and funding Ukraine Over a regional border dispute or a territorial dispute between these two countries consistent with an America First view that says we ought to be spending our resources not to help foreign countries but to help our own country, to secure our own country, to improve the lives of our own citizens.
Well, let's start with why I think that the Biden administration should have sent more weapons at the beginning of the war.
I didn't support sending a lot of weapons to Ukraine for the war, but once the war began, there was a short period of time when the Ukrainians had a tremendous advantage and could have pushed the Russians out or back substantially.
But the Biden administration didn't do that.
It gave them the minimum amount of weapons with strings attached, which allowed the Russians to recover and to dig in, and now they're not going anywhere.
I don't want to reward Russian aggression.
I don't want Russia to take over Ukraine.
At the same time, I don't want us to be depleting our arms stockpiles and funding an endless war.
So you're right.
It is a bit of a contradiction.
We have to find a way to strike the right balance between not hurting our country and our ability to defend ourselves and our allies and basically rewarding Russian aggression to Ukraine.
Whenever I've had members of Congress on who identify as America First or Trump surrogates or spokespeople, one of the main ways that they justify their opposition to the funding of the war in Ukraine on America First grounds is they say, Look, our cities are falling apart.
Our populations are, you know, deprived of all sorts of basic services.
Marjorie Taylor Greene gave a speech that was actually very true about how mothers in the United States, American citizens, couldn't get baby formula and were sending hundreds of billions of dollars over to Ukraine to fund their war.
And she was saying, why is our priority?
You know, and you hear Tucker Carlson saying that, that's kind of the America First worldview that a lot of its adherents have.
That we should only help other countries once we've taken care of our own infrastructure, our own citizenry, secured our own border, etc.
That's been the critique of Ukraine and funding the war in Ukraine.
The other war, though, that we're funding is the Israeli war in Gaza.
We're not only funding it, but we give them $4 billion every year.
We send them more when they start wars or when they're involved in wars.
We arm them.
If an American worker were to come up to you and say, look, you tell me that you believe in an America first agenda.
Where you prioritize my interests as an American citizen over the interests of other countries.
How is it that you can justify then making me work and pay taxes to the U.S.
government that the U.S.
government uses to send over to Israel when millions of Israeli citizens have better social programs and more opportunities economically than tens of millions of Americans have?
How can you square that with an America First ideology?
I think we're fairly close with Ukraine.
We may have some differences, and I don't like the fact that our cities are crumbling in this crime in this country, and we're sending so many weapons to Ukraine.
That's why I want to end the war.
But I think America First is standing solidly behind the State of Israel, standing against terrorism, standing with Israel after the horrendous October 7, 2023 terrorist attack.
I sort of agree on Ukraine, but I don't think we're going to agree on Israel.
I know we're not, but what I'm trying to get you to do is not even speaking to me.
As I said, you know, Trump said in his inauguration and throughout the campaign, I'm the representative of the forgotten man, the person in the middle of the country whose towns have been de-industrialized in the name of free trade and all sorts of deals with China and other countries that have been detrimental.
prioritizing of the interests of corporations and the military industrial complex over the average citizen.
And Trump said, "I'm here to change the priority where you become the priority." So imagine one of those members of the working class, white working class, multiracial working class, whatever, who comes to you and says, "In my community, the streets are falling apart.
There's no public transportation.
Crime is rampant.
People are dying of fentanyl.
The borders aren't closed.
The fentanyl is flying freely.
How can you justify making me finance Israel's military and pay for their wars that they have frequently with their neighbors when I think that money should be used instead to improve the lives of Americans, not of Israelis?
How would you justify that to them on an America First basis?
First of all, you know this theory of scarcity, that there's not enough resources to go around, and that's why maybe we want to husband our resources and maybe just focus on the threat from China.
I don't agree with that concept, but I don't think we have time to get into it right now.
I think that one of the most important aspects of America First foreign policy is standing solidly with the State of Israel and the Jewish people, opposing anti-Zionism, opposing anti-Semitism.
I think it is a principal position.
I think it is in America's security interest, and I think it is a moral cause that our nation has to endorse.
I endorse this without reservations, and I don't think we're going to agree on this one.
Do you think it's equally a moral cause for America to stand in opposition to anti-black racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, or is there something special and enlightened and kind of elevated about the cause of opposing anti-Semitism that ought to make it a higher priority than those other ones that I just described?
I guess I'm just appalled that there's so much press attention for all the things that you just mentioned.
And my Jewish friends in New York who wear Jewish garb or look Jewish, they can't walk the streets of Manhattan because they'll be beaten to a pulp.
I think there is a difference.
I think... Your Jewish friends in Manhattan cannot walk the streets without being beaten to a pulp?
Yes, there's certain areas of New York where they can't do that.
And have you seen the synagogues in New York City?
They're like fortresses.
This isn't right, and I'm not embarrassed to stand with the Jewish people and speak out against this.
I speak out.
I'm with you.
I don't like those other things you mentioned, but it really bothers me that this is a form of discrimination, a form of hatred, that our society and the American media doesn't seem concerned about.
I've never believed that there was an under-representation of concern over anti-Semitism and the well-being of Jews in the American media, but I guess that's something we're going to have a hard time reconciling, as you said.
Let me ask you this last question.
I actually have a lot more, but I've taken up a lot of your time, which I really appreciate.
Over the weekend, Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney both endorsed Kamala Harris.
They didn't just repudiate support for Donald Trump.
They affirmatively said, go out and vote for Kamala Harris.
And for a long time, when people like that, Bill Kristol and all the neocons from back in the day, from the Bush administration, Nicole Wallace, that whole crew, were opposing Trump, they were saying, we hate the Democratic Party.
We're as opposed to the Democratic Party ideologically as ever before.
We're just doing this because we think Trump is a unique threat to the republic.
And I never believed that.
I always thought that they saw the Democrats As becoming the better vehicle for their expansive militaristic ideology.
And Liz Cheney went on ABC this morning, or over the weekend, and she was asked exactly that.
Like, why are you affirmatively and your dad affirmatively supporting Kamala?
Is it just because of your animosity toward Trump or your fear of what Trump will do to democracy?
And she said, no.
Here's what she said.
I just want to play this for you.
We've been talking about economic policy.
You know, you look at national security policy.
And again, there are certainly areas where I disagree with Biden administration, national security policy, where I've disagreed with Vice President Harris's position on issues.
But when it comes to fundamental alliances, when it comes to the importance of NATO, for example, and how important it is for the United States to lead in the world, we've seen a sea change.
We now have a Republican Party that is embracing isolationism, that is embracing Putin, that, you know, we've seen just in the last week, the Republican vice presidential nominee willing to appear, willing to be interviewed by Tucker Carlson, who is platforming pro-Nazis, is himself willing to be interviewed by Tucker Carlson, who is platforming pro-Nazis, is himself That is not the party of Ronald Reagan.
And I believe strongly that if you're talking about a national security set of issues and you care about No, let's leave all this stuff out about Tucker Carlson platforming a Nazi or whatever.
It's a totally separate, trivial issue that I think merits no attention.
On the point she's making, though, which is like, look, if you have the foreign policy ideology that my father has and that I have, the reality is that the Democratic Party is a lot closer to my foreign policy views than a Trump-led Republican Party.
I feel like if I were Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney and believed what they believed, I would also probably support Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party.
Do you understand or maybe even agree with her view that it makes rational sense for people who believe what the Cheneys believe about foreign policy to see the Democratic Party as a closer ally than a Trump-led Republican Party?
I think you're right there.
And look, obviously Trump wasn't an isolationist, and the left is angry that Trump's Russia policies were more successful than Biden's.
As you said, Putin invaded Ukraine under Biden's administration, not under Trump's.
But look, the Chinese are establishment neocons.
They're George Bush Country Club Republicans.
They're more comfortable with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama than they are with President Trump.
I think that's a fact.
And I think they dislike Trump because they don't like his mannerisms.
They don't like the fact that he's unconventional.
They don't like the fact that he doesn't do what the establishment tells him to do.
And she's not going to admit that.
But that's why I think you're exactly right.
She's much more comfortable hanging out with Democrats.
All right.
Well, I hope your optimism about Trump having learned the lessons of those past and his determination to prevent them from occurring in the future turns out to be prescient in the event that he wins.
Obviously, we have some differences, but I always appreciate people coming on and being willing to discuss them in a civil and constructive way.
I really appreciate your time.
I'd love to have you on again.
And thanks for coming on tonight.
This is great.
Thank you.
All right.
Have a good evening.
All right, as we discussed last night, although we didn't get to it, Kamala Harris has finally appended to her website a page where she purports to set forth her views on what she calls the issues.
The fact that it happened two months before an election, especially for a candidate who has gone through none of the rituals and Forced interviews and debates that every candidate goes through to become the presidential nominee in modern American politics makes it even more striking, obviously, that she has adopted a campaign of essentially just being a blank slate.
My guess is we're going to see a lot more of that tonight.
She's going to try and sound specific and concrete, but she doesn't want to commit to any actual policies.
So let us take a look at First of all, what Democrats had been telling Kamala Harris and had been saying about her strategy of avoiding interviews, of answering questions, for a long time when she seemed to be doing well in the polls with that strategy.
Here from the New Republic on September 4th, here's the headline, Kamala Harris doesn't need policy to win.
In fact, a detailed platform will hurt her campaign more than it will help.
I just want you to contemplate what is necessary for someone to go into what they consider journalism, to call themselves a journalist, to think they're doing the work of a journalist, and to encourage a presidential candidate to continue to avoid telling the public anything about what they believe.
That it's better for her to just refuse to commit to anything.
And that the media shouldn't pressure on it, and even if they do, Kamala Harris should ignore the media.
Imagine what a partisan hack you have to be to call yourself a German journalist and simultaneously do that.
Now, it did, I think, work for a little while.
The primary reason was, if you look at polling over the last two years, the one message over and over that you saw is that Americans were unhappy with the choice of Trump or Biden.
I think it's because they're both Old.
If Trump wins, he will be the oldest president ever to be inaugurated, as Biden was.
They know both of them.
They've each been president for four years.
They were looking for anything that just felt fresh and new.
And then from the mountaintop descended this person who, not a young woman, but she's not old either.
She's 60, but she takes good care of herself.
She's very vibrant, energetic.
She was just a different energy that people were craving.
And I think that was What enabled her to have this kind of surge in polling was, okay, she's just not an old 80-year-old that we've seen and heard from for decades or for the last...she was like a novelty, and that's what people wanted.
The problem is is that that novelty was only going to last so long.
At some point, obviously, people are going to want to understand, wait a minute, who is this person That we're excited about and are being told we should vote for that.
We might make president in two years.
What does she believe?
What are her values?
Who is she?
What does she intend to do?
We've heard nothing about that and that is why you've seen an erosion and weakening of Kamala Harris' polling status over the last couple of weeks because that's not going to work.
Here from the New York Times on, I think this is...
I don't think this is August 8th.
I think this is a much newer poll.
Can someone check that?
I think it was the most recent poll from, yeah, September 8th.
So it was just last week.
Here you see, Trump and Harris are now neck and neck after a summer upheaval, the Times-Siena poll finds.
And this is part of what it said, quote, the survey finds that Donald J. Trump is retaining his support and that on the eve of the debate, voters Voters are unsure they know enough about where Kamala Harris stands.
So the New York Times is basically saying that right on the eve of the debate, the reason things are now deadlocked is because voters don't really think that they know where Kamala Harris stands on anything.
The last time she had to express policy views that she supported was when she ran in 2019 in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and her strategy then was she had to run To the left of Joe Biden, because the whole centrist mainstream lane obviously was occupied by Joe Biden.
If you wanted a centrist defender of the status quo, you're going to pick someone who's been a senator for 50 years, who was eight years vice president.
There was no way to displace him as the kind of centrist establishment candidate.
But she also couldn't go too far to the left because Bernie Sanders was there, so she had to position herself in the middle.
And so she supported a bunch of policies that are actually pretty further to the left than she has ever been.
Things like single-payer health care, a ban on fracking, financing gender surgeries and therapies, including for undocumented aliens and people in prison.
That was something that CNN recently discovered that was part of her campaign in 2019.
And essentially all she's done, not even herself, but just through her campaign to say, I no longer support any of those things.
I'm now not in favor of a ban on fracking, knowing that you can't win Pennsylvania if you're in favor of a ban on fracking.
I'm not, of course, now not in support of single-payer health care.
She's jettisoned all her views that she had just four years ago, not 30 years ago, just four years ago.
And so trying to place who she is and what she stands for is extremely difficult, as voters are sensing, because the reality is she is nothing.
She's empty.
She's an empty vessel.
She's an opportunist and a careerist who has no fixed views about anything.
She will morph into whatever she needs to be, as Jill Stein said last night on her show.
And voters are starting to perceive that, and that's starting to harm her standing.
And here was the poll results that started to send Democrats who had been overconfident into a panic.
Where you see this question here, and if in the 2024 to 2024 presidential election were held today, who would you vote for if the candidates were Kamala Harris and Donald Trump?
And there you see Trump leading Kamala Harris by 1%, 48 to 47.
And the reason that's so upsetting to Democrats is because in order to win, everyone knows Kamlo's probably going to win the popular vote on the whole because millions and millions and millions and millions of Democrats live in California and New York and are going to give her this huge margin that doesn't make the slightest different for the Electoral College.
And so in order for her to have a chance to win, she needs to be two or three points ahead of Trump in order to consolidate the votes of the Electoral College that she needs.
And what the New York Times is saying, I think, is clearly true, which is that the reason she's starting to fall back is because you cannot run a campaign where you stand for nothing.
Here's part of what the Times said, quote, the survey found that 28 percent of likely voters said they felt they needed to know more about Kamala Harris, while only 9 percent said they needed to know more about Trump.
These voters, when taken with these voters, when taken with the 5 percent of voters who said they were undecided or did not lean toward either major party candidate, paint a portrait of an electorate that could be more fluid than it seems, some who are considering Ms.
Harris said they still hope to learn more before solidifying their decision, and two-thirds of those who want to know more said they were eager to learn about her policies specifically.
Quote, I don't know what Kamala Harris's plans are.
You know, I really do believe this.
You know, I really do believe this.
I know this can sound patronizing or trying to romanticize ordinary people or whatever.
Obviously, if you were to do some sort of trivia quiz about politics, people who work in politics, who pay attention to it every day, who are paid to be journalists or pundits or operatives, are obviously going to know more information, just raw information, than the average American who doesn't pay a lot of close attention to politics.
I I remember a poll where they asked Americans to name one Supreme Court Justice and it was only something like, you know, 15% of Americans could name one Supreme Court Justice and something like 5% of them could name two.
And obviously, anyone who works in politics can name probably all nine or close to all nine.
So in that sense, people who work professionally in politics and pay attention to it know more.
But in terms of...
Perception of just the reality of things, the ability to not be drowning in the propaganda that people who work in media, work in politics are submerged every day in.
I really do believe that people who have a greater detachment perceive things more accurately.
And this idea that these Democratic politicians, journalists, and operatives had that Kamala Harris is going to win by saying nothing about what she thinks or believes, by making no policy commitments, is such a condescending view of how stupid Americans are.
They go, we're just going to win because we're going to do the politics of joy and Brat Summer.
That's really what they thought.
And they're seeing very quickly that, no, voters actually want to know more about Kamala Harris before they are willing to vote for her.
And you're seeing an erosion of the polls as a result.
That is obviously, in part, what led to Kamala Harris finally posting an issues page.
And yet, other than agreement with Joe Biden and the standard Democratic Party on pretty much everything, there's almost nothing specific here that you could glean anything from.
These are just kind of cliches that come out of the mouth of politicians that mean absolutely nothing.
So here from her website on the issues page with foreign policy, she says the following, quote, we're going to stand with our allies, stand up to dictators, and lead on the world stage.
Vice President Harris grew up in a middle class home as the daughter of a working mom.
She believes that the middle class is strong.
America is strong.
That's why as president, Kamala Harris will create an opportunity economy where everyone has a chance to compete and a chance to succeed, whether they live in a rural town, small town, or big city.
Vice President Kamala Harris has made clear that building up the middle class will be a defining goal of her presidency.
That's why she will make it a top priority to bring down costs and increase economic security for all Americans.
As president, she will fight to cut taxes for more than 100 million working and middle-class Americans while lowering the cost of everyday needs like health care, housing, and groceries.
These are just, you know, Like visions, these are aspirations about how the middle class is going to thrive if I'm president and costs are going to get lowered with no concrete policies about anything that she believes in that Americans debate every single day and want to be, need to hear in order to be convinced by.
Here is more on her foreign policy section and obviously one of the things that a lot of people on the left
When I say the left, I mean the left wing of the Democratic Party, not the real left, not the Jill Stein left, have been saying is, oh, well, we have been saying for a long time that we think that Joe Biden is guilty of complicity in a genocide for sending weapons and arms to Israel to use it to commit ethnic cleansing or genocide against the Palestinians.
That has been their position.
But of course, once you accuse somebody of complicity in genocide, it's very hard to justify how you're going to vote for them.
Even though it was so predictable these people were always going to end up urging a vote for Joe Biden, it was just a question of how and when.
But switching Biden out and putting Harris in gave them the excuse to say, based on absolutely nothing, oh, we think Harris is going to be better than Biden on Israel, different and better.
Even though she said nothing to give them any hint of a suggestion to believe that, and here's what she said on her site, quote, Vice President Harris will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to protect U.S.
forces and interests from Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups.
Vice President Harris will always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself, and she will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.
She and President Biden are working to end the war in Gaza.
Such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.
She and President Biden are working around the clock to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done.
Is there anyone who believes that Kamala Harris is working around the clock on anything other than ensuring she wins the election?
You think she's working around the clock to negotiate the details of a peace deal in Gaza?
And then she goes on, Vice President Harris has been a tireless and effective diplomat on the world stage.
She has met with China's Xi Jinping, making clear that she will always stand up for American interests in the face of China's threats.
She traveled to the Indo-Pacific four times, four whole times, to advance our economic and security partnerships.
She visited the Korean Demilitarized Zone to affirm our unwavering commitment to South Korea in the face of North Korean threats five days before Russia attacked Ukraine.
She met with President Zelensky to warn him about Russia's plan to invade and help mobilize a global response.
of more than 50 countries to help Ukraine defend itself against Vladimir Putin's brutal aggression, and she has worked with our allies to ensure NATO is stronger than ever.
This is just standard Democratic Party dreck.
And this is not just standard Democratic Party dreck, but also standard Republican Party dreck, which is exactly why people like Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney are saying we feel much more comfortable with all of this as a foreign policy vision than what we think Donald Trump is going to do.
But she's afraid to take a position on anything because the minute you take a position on something, on a controversial issue, you obviously can alienate a lot of people and she doesn't want to alienate anyone.
The problem is she's been encouraged to adopt that strategy for a while.
It looked like it could work.
And it hasn't been working and it won't work and it will continue to erode her whatever support she has.
And this issues page is sort of a very pathetic gesture to the need for her to finally say something.
The problem is that, as I said, she's really not anything.
I know a lot of people on the right think she's a communist or a hardcore far leftist.
She isn't.
She's much more similar to Barack Obama than she is to Joe Biden.
Barack Obama also had no fixed political beliefs of any kind.
He was the ultimate.
His talent was appeasing power centers and institutional dogma in order to make himself stronger politically and in all other ways.
That's really what he did.
He was beloved by Wall Street.
He was beloved by Silicon Valley.
He was beloved by the CIA and the Pentagon.
Obama was.
And Kamala Harris will be too.
That's who she is.
So there is no real Kamala Harris.
There's no actual authentic Kamala Harris to reveal beyond what she's already revealed.
The authentic Kamala Harris is actually quite alienating when she speaks without a script or without control, and that's the reason That they're not letting her do that.
We'll see tonight whether the format of this debate forces her at least a little bit to speak a little bit more authentically to try and see if she has an emotional reaction to something Trump says.
And I guess that's most of what this debate tonight will be about.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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