Biden Welcomes "Hitler" Back To The White House; Trump's Latest Appointments: What Do They Mean?
Glenn Greenwald reacts to Trump's latest picks for the next administration, including Marco Rubio, Matt Gaetz, and Tulsi Gabbard. Plus: Joe Biden warmly welcomes Donald Trump back to the White House after Democrats warned that Trump was an existential threat to democracy.
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
The principal liberal and media theme of the 2024 campaign was that Donald Trump did not merely have a bad ideology and is not merely a bad person, but he is a fascist threat to American democracy.
A literal Hitler figure who intends to impose violence and permanent dictatorship on our nation, even sending dissidents to camps.
How odd, then, to see the American Hitler invited today by the sitting president to the White House, where he met with Joe Biden, who warmly shook his hand, expressed fondness for him, and vowed to provide him with all of the assistance he asked for in facilitating his path back to power.
If Democrats actually believed anything they had been saying about Trump and the singular threat he poses, all of this should seem bizarre and, in fact, should never happen.
But it did happen, and very few people found it odd, precisely because few in the media or politics actually believed the fears they were trying to gin up about what a Trump re-election would entail.
Obviously, you don't invite and embrace Hitler to the White House and offer him all of the assistance he asked for in his path back to power.
Then, Donald Trump has announced a spate of appointees for key positions in his cabinet and in his next administration since we last week evaluated his initial choices.
Today alone, he chose Marco Rubio to be his Secretary of State, Tulsi Gabbard to be his Director of National Intelligence, and in perhaps the most surprising choice of all, announced Matt Gaetz as his pick for Attorney General.
Yesterday, in another major surprise, Trump announced combat veteran and Fox News hoed Pete Hegseth to be his Secretary of Defense and Mike Huckabee to be his Ambassador at Israel.
Obviously, Israel is the first country which gets an ambassador because in American politics, Israel comes first.
Now, understandably, people seek to read into every one of these choices certainty about what Trump's new administration will do and what it will be.
But did anyone watch Trump's first administration?
The reason that so many people left with such bitterness and rage toward him, from John Bolton to John Kelly and countless others, is because Trump so often rejected their advice, pitted factions against each other, and refused to follow their preferred policies.
Whether Trump will rely on Marco Rubio or J.D. Vance or Matt Gaetz or just Trump himself or whoever he's listening to is very difficult to ascertain, let alone with certainty.
Now, there is clearly a lot in common with Trump's national security choices in particular.
They are almost all fanatically, I'd almost say religiously, loyal to the Israeli state, far more than many Israeli citizens are.
And at one point or another, all of them, or most of them, expressed views that one could easily describe as classic establishment Bush-Cheney foreign policy views or even outright neoconservatism.
Marco Rubio is probably the pick that most vividly exemplifies that, though there are many others.
Perhaps it is true, as many are arguing, that these appointments signify that Trump in his second term will now just be a standard adherent to the DC foreign policy blob and will pursue policies of confrontation, militarism, and war in his new administration and have chosen these people for that reason.
I understand why that conclusion is tempting.
I certainly am far from a fan of all of his choices thus far, to put that mildly, though I am a fan of several.
But I think the picture is far more nuanced and ambiguous and uncertain about who will wield power in the Trump administration and how they will do so.
And so we wanted to devote the bulk of our show to digging into these choices to find out what they likely do and do not signify, since there seems to be such definitiveness and certainty being expressed with every choice that he unveils.
Finally, Jeffrey Lafredo is an outstanding independent journalist whose work we have previously featured on our show.
He is an American citizen whose reporting has primarily been done with the gray zone.
He has spent the last year focused on critically scrutinizing the Israeli destruction of Gaza and the role of the U.S. and extremist ideologies play in all of that.
Agree or not with each one of his views, that is the work of a journalist and Lafredo is an American citizen.
Yeah, last month, Lafredo was arrested at a West Bank checkpoint by IDF soldiers, and then he was blindfolded and put into solitary confinement.
His crime?
He reported on the damage done in Israel by Iranian cruise missiles that Iran launched because Israeli officials had falsely claimed that none of those missiles landed and did any damage, and Lafredo then went and documented the damage to disprove the statements of the Israeli officials.
Despite the fact that Lefredo's reporting was cited and divulged by Israeli outlets, his arrest was clearly punitive retaliation for the criticism and critical reporting he's done of Israeli occupation and war.
We'll talk to him about what he endured.
It was not a very pretty or process-driven imprisonment, to put that mildly.
And we'll also talk about what it means about Israel's attitude toward journalists, given how many have been killed in Gaza and Lebanon, and whether, quote, the region's only democracy still really deserves that term.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
As you don't need me to tell you, the primary theme of the 2024 election is that Donald Trump was a singularly existential threat the primary theme of the 2024 election is that Donald Trump was a He was frequently compared in what was intended to be a literal comparison with Adolf Hitler.
And we frequently heard that he would be an existential threat to American democracy, that this would perhaps be the last election we'd ever be able to vote in, that he would impose a fascist, fascist dictatorship on American political life, that he would send dissidents, both in fascist dictatorship on American political life, that he would send dissidents, both in politics and journalism, to concentration camps that we were told he
And that essentially he would recognize no limitations in the Constitution or in American law, that his will would be supreme.
And his will is to impose a dictatorship, not just of authoritarianism, but of tyranny and fascism in the mold of Adolf Hitler.
That is what we were told explicitly.
And that is what makes this scene that happened today at the White House so either bizarre, depending on how you want to see it, or so revealing.
The sitting president of the United States, nominally, you may have remembered, is the Democrat Joe Biden, who originally thought he was going to run against Trump, and they said all sorts of incredibly acrimonious things about each other, as happens in elections.
Joe Biden frequently said that Trump was a fascist.
That was the main closing argument of the Kamala Harris campaign, to suggest that he is a fascist, to say so explicitly over and over.
And yet Joe Biden did something that Donald Trump did not do when he was in his transition and then ultimately left, which is he invited Donald Trump to the White House today.
There's nothing obligatory about that.
It's purely optional whether the president wants to do that or not.
And he sat down next to Donald Trump and the White House said the reason they were doing it is because it's a White House tradition and custom.
And Donald Trump's not anything out of the ordinary.
He's just like any other president who was elected.
And deserves all of the same treatment and civility and accommodation as anybody else, which is extremely odd if you actually believe any of the things you were saying about Donald Trump during the election that just concluded with his sweeping victory.
Here is Joe Biden today in the Oval Office, where he invited Adolf Hitler to sit with him in the Oval Office.
And here's how Joe Biden treated him.
Well, Mr.
President-elect and former president, Donald, congratulations.
Thank you.
And looking forward to having a, like we said, smooth transition.
Do everything we can to make sure you're accommodating what you need.
We're going to get a chance to talk about some of that today.
It's good.
Welcome.
Thank you very much.
and politics is tough and it's in many cases not a very nice world, but it is a nice world today and I appreciate it very much.
A transition that's so smooth, it'll be as smooth as it can get and I very much appreciate that.
You're welcome.
That was so moving.
Biden said to him, congratulations.
Why would you congratulate someone you believe is a fascist, someone who's about to end American democracy, someone who's about to send People on your party, like AOC, into camps.
She predicted she was on her way to camps.
Rachel Maddow said that.
Keith Olbermann said that.
Many, several of the women on The View said that.
It was a common theme of this last election that Trump is not like Hitler, but in fact is a Hitlerian figure.
No, that's not to say that Democrats should refuse to allow him to enter the White House, but why would you normalize him that way?
Why would you shake his hand so warmly and he prays on him that way and congratulate him if you actually believed anything that you had been saying about him for the last eight years, certainly the last year?
Just as a reminder of what some of that was, here from Politico, in December of 2023, the Biden camp posts a graphic with Hitler pictured next to Trump or with Trump pictured next to Hitler.
The move was both highly aggressive and part of a calculated effort to link the 45th president and the Nazi leader.
The Nazi leader who sat by Joe Biden's side today in the Oval Office at his invitation.
Here was NBC News in January of this year.
Biden argues that Trump remains a threat to democracy.
A case his campaign thinks resonates with voters.
Guess what?
It didn't.
Both because they didn't believe it and because that isn't the sort of thing that they're worried about.
Now we can move to the next one.
The...
Next one we have here, which is from AP, October 2024.
The headline was, what is fascism?
And why does Kamala Harris say Donald Trump is a fascist?
This has been the theme for at least a full year.
And then the New Republic.
Which has become, once again, a popular magazine among the Democratic establishment, published a full article, a full magazine in June of this year, June of 2024, entitled American Fascism, what it would look like.
And there you see what it would look like.
It's Donald Trump with a Hitler mustache.
And they explained at length why they believe this comparison is not just metaphorical, but actually quite literal.
Now, either one of two things are true here.
Either Democrats, liberals, the people in the media who were saying these things so insistently over and over didn't actually believe them.
They were just trying to scare the American people into believing that we were about to be taken over by Hitler, in which case...
Well, to put it mildly, they are and do everything they accuse others of.
But I think the bigger point here is that I know there are some liberals who really do believe this.
Some prominent ones.
some ones in media who have just worked themselves into this kind of frenzy.
They all really do talk to and for each other and hear no dissent outside.
Earlier today, The Guardian announced that it was leaving X.
It was no longer using Twitter at all.
And many liberals have done the same thing.
They're now seeking out other platforms where only liberals reside there.
Only liberals use it.
They never have to hear any dissent.
That is the world that they try and create everywhere they go.
That's really the world in which they live.
And as a result, when everyone in your world, your little cloistered world, is telling you the same thing over and over every day and you're saying the same thing over and over every day, which is that Trump is Hitler, that he's a fascist threat, that he's going to put people in camps, you actually do start to believe it.
Many of them do.
And I think if you actually believe that, you ought to be out in the streets protesting.
You ought to be enraged that Joe Biden would invite Hitler to the White House.
You ought to be doing things like what a thousand or so Trump supporters did on January 6th.
Not just protesting in Washington, but breaking into buildings.
I mean, after all, you're saving American democracy from Adolf Hitler.
You're saving all the people he's going to persecute, all the people he's going to put in camps.
There's such a mismatch between the things they work themselves up into believing and their actions and their behavior.
Obviously, they believe that Trump is going to be just any other president who got elected by the American people deserves the full powers of the White House.
In fact, just as it happened in 2017 when Democrats were claiming that Trump was this Hitler figure, that he was an authoritarian, And Democrats in Congress, including Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, voted to give, to renew the domestic surveillance powers under FISA to give to Donald Trump,
the same person they were accusing of being a Hitler figure in authoritarianism, they then voted six months after he was in office to hand him unlimited spying powers.
In fact, Nancy Pelosi and Democrats like Adam Schiff block any attempt just to limit or reform those powers.
Why would you vote to give Adolf Hitler domestic spying powers?
And then earlier this week there was a bill that would empower the president unilaterally to declare certain NGOs to be advocates of terrorism.
And based on that unilateral, unchallenged finding by the president, their tax-exempt status would be revoked.
And obviously it was intended to allow Trump To do what this bill is intended to do, which is target critics of Israel, pro-Palestinian groups, and punish them for their speech by removing their non-profit status.
But it would also obviously allow Trump to do that to any NGO that he wanted.
The ACLU, Planned Parenthood.
If you really believe that he was a Hitler figure, why would you then go and vote?
To give that to him.
Now we'll cover that tomorrow.
It actually didn't pass, although it almost did.
Fifty-two Democrats joined all but one House Republican, which was Thomas Massey, in order to support it.
But you see this gigantic breach between what these people claim they believe over and over and over every day and what their behavior actually is.
And I think it's very worthwhile to keep that in mind the next time they resort to one of their conspiracy theories or frenzied hysteria, which will be very, very quickly.
Anyone who watches this show does not need to be told that trust in the media is at an all-time low.
And I think it's not debatable that that's a very valid outcome, given their behavior.
We're always seeing how often we're only being shown one side of the story.
That's why I started my show here, because I believe in covering things that aren't being covered in free speech, having candid conversations, reporting about what's really going on.
Recently, there is a platform that came and spoke to us and believes in that, too.
It prioritizes transparency in reporting and in media and lets you see the full picture without anyone filtering what you get to know.
That platform is Ground News, which is an app and website that gathers related articles from around the world in one place, highlighting every source's potential benefits.
Political bias, corporate influence, and factual reliability.
These are not disinformation arbiters or anything like that.
They're using data about whether these outlets are more supported or cited by the left or by the right or by centrist, what their corporate funding is, what their corporate influence is, and ultimately what people determine on their own, their factual reliability is.
So you can see the differences in how any particular news outlet, including ones you don't know, chooses to cover the exact same story.
Here's an example of what I mean.
She had a report about trust in mass media.
And on ground news, I can see barely any corporate media or left-leaning media covering this because they support the corporate media.
They don't want to say that corporate media is collapsing in its trust and faith.
More than 80% of the coverage is coming from right-leaning sources.
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All right, so there's a lot to talk about in terms of the last several days.
There's been this flurry of announcements.
I think some of them are clearly timed strategically in order to control the reaction.
Today, for example, Donald Trump announced what was speculated for several days and was not well-received by a lot of his more populist and anti-war base, which is that Marco Rubio is likely to be Secretary of State.
The delay made people think, and I heard from people close to Mar-a-Lago, that there was actually an attempt to prevent that at the last minute from happening.
But he did announce Marco Rubio today, but knowing that that would be disappointing to a lot of his supporters, he also announced two other choices.
That have generated a great deal of excitement and support within the more MAGA wing of the Republican Party, which is Tulsi Gabbard, who was named to be his Director of National Intelligence.
and then Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz to serve as Trump's Attorney General.
Now, to say that those last two choices Have created a lot of backlash and anger and rage, not just among Democrats, but Republicans as well, is to put that mildly, but that's actually the point.
And that's what makes them such interesting choices, is the whole point of the election was that the D.C. swamp needed to be drained, the Washington establishment needed to be radically overhauled, and obviously anybody who comes to do that is likely to be a threat to establishment powers in both parties, right?
The choices that he made that are aligned with establishment factions, people like Rubio and Elise Stefanik, who's his ambassador to the UN, or people like Mike Huckabee, his ambassador to Israel, or John Ratcliffe, the new CIA director, these are people who likely are going to just sail through the Senate because these are the kinds of people that the Senate wants to see and that Republican senators in particular who tend to be more establishment-oriented,
they just elected as the new Republican leader replacing Mitch McConnell, they just elected as the new Republican leader replacing Mitch McConnell, John Thune, who is basically a Mitch McConnell clone, even though most Trump supporters preferred Senator Rick So the Republicans in the Senate in particular are very protective of establishment prerogatives and they dislike many of these choices, the ones that I think are the more interesting ones.
Here, to begin with, the least interesting one and the most alarming one, I think, is Trump's statement today.
And there you see it on the screen, quote, It is my great honor to announce that Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is hereby nominated to be the United States Secretary of State.
Marco Rubio is a highly respected leader and a very powerful voice for freedom.
He will be a strong advocate for our nation, a true friend to our allies, and a fearless warrior who will never back down to our adversaries.
Now, it's interesting because Marco Rubio has always been perceived as kind of a Lindsey Graham, John McCain type when it comes to foreign policy.
He typically defends every war.
He wants to go to war all over the place in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, the Middle East to protect Israel.
He's just constantly calling for more war.
He wants to bomb Iran, wants seemingly to go to war with China.
And so you can say, well, look, if Trump's choosing people like Marco Rubio, this must mean that his whole anti-establishment persona and brand is a fraud.
After all, why would you choose Marco Rubio if you want to challenge establishment foreign policy dogma, given that Marco Rubio is as pure and loyal of a servant of that establishment dogma?
And that's a reasonable question.
I just think it's a very simple-minded question as if within each of these individual picks You can find the definitive truth about what the Trump administration, which hasn't even begun, is going to be.
Do I wish that Marco Rubio had not been chosen for Secretary of State?
Yes, I absolutely wish that.
Would I have preferred any number of other alternatives, including the one that was reported to be his primary competition, Rick Grinnell?
Yes, I would have, even though I have issues with Grinnell as well.
He would have been wildly preferable to someone like Marco Rubio.
For me, Marco Rubio is about as bad as it gets.
But the president is going to be Donald Trump.
And if you want to say that Marco Rubio is somehow a pure representation of what the Trump administration is going to be in the second term, what does the pick of J.D. Vance say for vice president, who's now Trump's vice president?
What does the pick of Tulsi Gabbard as DNI say?
What does the pick of Bat Gates say?
Other picks are coming as well.
You can't just look at one pick in isolation and say, oh, this person's going to run foreign policy for the United States.
Trump's whole first term was characterized by going to war with many of his aides, by purposely selecting ones sometimes that were more warmongering or threatening, that he viewed as a weapon that he could use, people like John Bolton.
His first administration was filled with all kinds of militarists and warmongers and neocons.
And yet the fact is, the undeniable historical fact is, that Donald Trump was the first American president in decades...
Not to involve the United States in a new war, much like President Biden and Harris did, and Vice President Harris did, involving heavily the U.S. in the war in Ukraine, multiple wars in the Middle East involving Israel and Gaza, Israel and Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, which the United States just this week again bombed.
So this attempt to try and suggest that any time Trump picks anybody other than a pacifist, It means that his whole anti-war agenda is somehow fraudulent, I think is extremely simplistic.
And it also relies on this equally simplistic binary that either Trump is going to be a hardcore anti-interventionist peacenik who never will start wars or launch bombs or shoot missiles anywhere, or Trump is going to be the living, breathing embodiment of a pacifist.
And there's just nothing in between.
He's certainly not going to be a pacifist.
The question is, where on this scale is Trump going to fall?
You can certainly look, I think, more toward his first term than you can toward each individual pick in order to determine that.
You can certainly look at the picks as a whole, as we're about to do, and try and draw some meaning from that.
And that's what we're going to try and do now.
So let's begin, first of all, with Rubio.
And obviously, some of the most scathing things that have been said about Marco Rubio were said by Donald Trump, particularly in the 2016 campaign.
As you might remember, the primary preferred candidate of the GOP establishment was Jeb Bush.
And when his campaign flopped, when Trump quickly dispatched of him, the establishment moved to Marco Rubio.
That was their second choice.
And here are some of the things that Trump said about Marco Rubio.
This was when Trump was running in 2015 and 2016 against him.
Quote, I agree, said Trump.
And then...
He also said in September of 2015, quote, Rubio is totally owned by the lobbyists and special interests, a lightweight senator with the worst voting record in the Senate.
Lazy.
And what's interesting about that is that Sheldon Adelson was a huge funder of Marco Rubio at the beginning because he really did believe that...
Marco Rubio would be the most loyal to Israel, which is Sheldon Adelson's only cause.
And yet, as we reported on two weeks ago, Sheldon Adelson became a massive supporter of Donald Trump's.
And Trump himself said that in exchange for those tens of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars that the Adelsons were giving to the Trump campaign and the Republican Party, he said, Trump said, that Sheldon and Miriam Adelson were the people who were in the White House more than anybody else except for those who worked there.
And Trump talked about how he gave them everything they wanted for Israel and even more, including recognizing the sovereignty, Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is something that Trump said was always considered very extreme in this context, and it was.
And he said, I gave that to the Adelsons.
And he said, every time you give the Adelsons something, they come back right away demanding more for Israel.
And I was like, give me two weeks to breathe, and then I can do something more for Israel.
And as it turned out, Miriam Adelson was Trump's biggest or one of his top two or three biggest donors in the 2024 election, giving him $100 million or so.
So it is interesting that Trump was accusing Marco Rubio of turning into a puppet for the Israel lobby through Sheldon Adelson's money, and now that's a claim that a lot of people are suspicious about when it comes to Trump.
Here is...
Rubio, in 2020, when Mike Pompeo was the Secretary of State, the position that Marco Rubio, if he's confirmed, is about to hold, asking Rubio about things like Venezuela and whether or not the United States is doing enough to engineer regime change in Venezuela and standing up to other dictators around the world to try and remove them as well.
As you're well aware, there have been press reports, speculations, commentators and the like that have made much about Recent allegations and in one case an interview the president gave in which they took from it that the president would be willing to engage in negotiations with Maduro and the Maduro regime in Venezuela.
As you understand our policy being in the position that you're in, could you envision as long as this administration is in office we would ever negotiate with the Maduro regime for them to remain in power?
Absolutely not.
Our policy is not to negotiate with him for anything other than his departure from ruling that country.
All right, so Marco Rubio is somebody who very much believes in these kind of interventions.
We want to isolate all these governments around the world that have nothing to do with us and aren't threatening America in any way, including Venezuela, Cuba, and dictators all throughout.
Central and South America, he's fine with the dictators that we support that do our bidding, like in Saudi Arabia or Egypt.
That's just classic neoconservatism.
It's classic militarism.
It's the D.C. blob for the last 60 years.
We're going to control and pick and choose which governments are here and which factions are going to be ruling this country, and we're going to pick the ones and do coups for the ones we don't want, go to wars with the ones who aren't sufficiently pliable.
He was a supporter of the Iraq war, the war in Syria, to remove Assad, the war in Libya, to remove Gaddafi, and has been a very vehement and vocal supporter of funding and arming Ukraine until the very end, until we finally defeat Putin and the Russians.
And there are multiple picks that Trump has made who have very similar views to Marco Rubio.
They're basically the views of people like Liz Cheney, but also remember Trump began this whole process by announcing that he wasn't going to choose Mike Pompeo or Nikki Haley to serve in his administration.
And a lot of people applauded that, but as it turns out, there are people, many people of these choices who have very similar foreign policy ideologies to Liz Cheney, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pompeo.
I would be lying if I tried to deny that or if I tried to mitigate that in any way.
The question, though, is I don't think it's going to be Marco Rubio, little Marco, running foreign policy.
Trump is going to be the president.
And what has been happening over the past several years is even a lot of these people who hated Trump previously and said they did because of his foreign policy, that it was too isolationist, too anti-interventionist, have begun seeing that the Republican Party is a Trump-led party.
And if they want to wield influence, they need to mold themselves to that ideology.
Donald Trump is going to be the president, not Marco Rubio, Not Mike Huckabee, not any of these other people who we've been discussing.
And so, as I said, there are people in the administration already who have a lot of different views, such as Tulsi Gabbard, such as J.D. Vance.
And nobody knows who's going to wield power.
A lot of times it's just who Trump listens to last or who he instinctively wants to empower or punish or freeze out.
Anyone telling you that they can divine definitive signals about what the Trump administration will be based on his cabinet choices either had no idea what happened in the first Trump administration or simply being extremely binary in a very simple way.
Here is another announcement that Trump announced, I think one that really surprised a lot of people and is already creating a lot of horror and contempt and disgust, not just among liberal elites in Washington, although of course that is true, but also among establishment Republicans as well.
Here's what Trump announced earlier today.
It is my great honor to announce that Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida is hereby nominated to be the Attorney General of the United States.
Matt is a deeply gifted and tenacious attorney trained at the William& Mary College of Law who has distinguished himself in Congress through his focus on achieving desperately needed reforms at the Department of Justice.
Few issues in America are more important than ending the partisan weaponization of our justice system.
Matt will end weaponized government, protect our borders, dismantle criminal organizations, and restore Americans' badly shattered faith and confidence in the Justice Department.
On the House Judiciary Committee, which performs oversight of the DOJ, Matt played a key role in defeating the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax and exposing alarming and systematic government corruption and weaponization.
One of the things that happens is, and this has been going on for quite some time, is that Even though it is not really the relevant framework for understanding American politics, it has been for decades, and so a lot of people are still stuck in this archaic framework that everyone tries to understand things according to what is more conservative, what is more liberal, what is more right-wing, what is more left-wing.
And there is an assumption in Mainstream liberal discourse, media discourse, even in GOP establishment politics, that the more pro-Trump somebody is, the more far-right they are, the more hardened conservative they are.
When in reality, Donald Trump ran in 2016 not as a continuation of Republican dogma, but as somebody who wanted to overturn the prevailing dogma of both parties, both in foreign and economic policy.
He railed against Republican pieties at least as much as Democratic Party pieties.
And for that reason, a lot of the people most associated with the MAGA wing of the Republican Party are more interesting, more heterodox, more anti-establishment, more radical in terms of changing the way D.C. works than the standard Republican establishment that continues to despise Trump,
not be able to stand his stench, But they finally accept that they have to accommodate him because there really is no Republican Party or winning Republican Party without Donald Trump.
People like John Thune were elected and are there to stifle Trump and do everything they can to stop what they regard as more extremist or threatening decisions.
And for sure one of them that they're going to see is something that needs to be stopped is Matt Gaetz's nomination as Attorney General.
Precisely because Gaetz is not some Jeff Sessions or Bill Barr figure who seems like the kind of person who would get chosen to be Attorney General.
Someone taken from the Senate.
He used to be Attorney General of Alabama like Jeff Sessions or Bill Burr who was Bush 41's Attorney General.
Back in the day, they sailed through Senate confirmation.
Matt Gaetz is not going to, precisely because he's a much more interesting figure.
I'll just give you a little bit of taste of what I mean by that.
First of all, Matt Gaetz, during the transition and heading into the 2020 election and then into the transition, once Trump was declared the loser of the election, before Biden was inaugurated, was one of the top, I would say, four or five candidates Most relentless and tireless advocates of trying to convince Trump to pardon Edward Snowden and to defend Julian Assange.
Just as one example, Matt Gaetz, here's a tweet from him on September 3rd, 2020, very simply wrote, pardon Snowden, using his Twitter name as definitive and unflinching as it gets.
Rand Paul was another person who worked with Matt Gaetz.
There were four or five people who came very close to convincing Trump to pardon Edward Snowden.
Less close to pardoning Julian Assange, but much closer to pardoning Edward Snowden.
I was involved in those discussions.
I know exactly what happened there.
Matt Gaetz was critical in trying to make that happen.
The reason it didn't happen is because he was still, people like Mike Pompeo still had the ear of Trump and convinced him that he shouldn't.
So that alone makes Matt Gaetz already a threatening figure to establishment authority.
I genuinely believe, and I've done reporting on this, that one of the primary reasons that second impeachment was brought, which never made any sense, Trump was on his way out, and Republicans weren't going to convict him.
They didn't convict him.
But they needed that second impeachment as a sword of Damocles to hold over Trump's head to say that if you do anything, That we regard as too radical or extreme or threatening like pardon Edward Snowden or pardon Julian Assange or declassify the JFK files or other CIA files.
This is the retaliation we're going to have against you.
And I think Trump became nervous and scared that if he did any of those things, he would be declared he'd be convicted by the Senate.
In his impeachment and then rendered ineligible to run ever again.
That was the strategy of the Senate GOP to keep Trump in line in that transition when he was on his way out.
There's another interesting aspect of Matt Gaetz, which is that one of the most interesting and consequential appointees, I think one of the best appointees, of the Biden administration was Lena Kahn to run the Federal Trade Commission.
Because she has been so devoted to standing up to monopolistic power to prevent gigantic corporations that have just grown and grown and grown from denying consumer choice and as a result of consumers not having choices to just run roughshod over their interests, to provide no customer service, to cheat them out of things all the time because there's nowhere else you can go with a lot of these gigantic monopolies.
And the idea of standing up the corporate power in defense of consumer rights is part of right-wing populism.
It's something that Donald Trump and other MAGA people like Matt Gaetz have been railing about.
The smarter ones have been doing that.
People like J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley.
And as a result, Matt Gaetz became one of...
The most vocal supporters of Lina Khan, who a lot of Democrats, especially Democratic funders, big donors, want to see gone precisely because she confronts large, unaccountable corporate power too much.
If you want to say you're here to defend the working class, the American worker, you can't at the same time allow Amazon and airline companies and Tech companies just merge and merge and merge and become these gigantic conglomerates that are accountable to nobody.
That's what makes the lives of people in the United States so miserable, is these corporations just run roughshod over them.
And that's the point of antitrust law, is not to impede capitalism or the free market, but it's to prevent antitrust.
Competition, which is monopolistic power from emerging.
And Lena Kahn has been very aggressive and challenging a lot of that.
And one of the people who has been most vocally supportive of her, aside from Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance, is Matt Gaetz.
You're from Notice, the site Notice, in March of 2024.
The Biden official with MAGA admirers.
Lena Kahn's chairmanship of the Federal Trade Commission is getting a lot of love from progressives and Matt Gaetz.
Quote, I hope her work continues in the Trump administration, Representative Matt Gaetz said.
Her work against data brokers has been very important.
Her work against some of the consolidated market power that hurts consumers has really inspired me.
Kahn and Gates worked together on the House Judiciary's Antitrust Subcommittee five years ago, and he's praised her work in the agency from his perch in Congress last summer when he interviewed her on the air during a stint as a guest host on Newsmax.
Gates said, quote, she has brought litigation against big business more aggressively than any person to hold her position in a generation.
Quote, a lot of these people that go to work in government positions that interface with big business, they want to create the virus for the sole reason of selling the antidote when they got out, Gates said.
She's not.
She's actually doing good work.
That's a pretty significant component of Matt Gates and J.D. Vance.
That they have actually been not just talking about economic populism, but pursuing it.
Remember, it was Josh Hawley.
Who stood by Bernie Sanders' side in 2020 and filibustered the COVID relief bill because it had no direct payments to ordinary Americans.
It was designed to give billions and billions of dollars to big business and both Josh Hawley and Bernie Sanders said, we're not going to allow this bill to pass unless it has direct payments.
Finally, they put in a $600 payment.
They approved it.
That got sent to Donald Trump and he vetoed it on the ground that the payment should be higher.
It should be $2,000.
So you've seen this economic populism not just as a campaign branding exercise but as actual policy and Matt Gaetz has often been in the forefront of that.
Here's an amicus brief that he filed in support of the FTC in June of 2024 when they were being sued for alleged abuse of power and he sided with the FTC because he said that they were doing important work in in In standing up to corporate abuses.
Now, one of the things that I find most impressive about Matt Gaetz is that he has most aggressively argued for the entire interventionist view of foreign policy of almost anybody in the Republican Party with a few allies there.
And I remember very well, I reported on it at the time, the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing that I watched for two full days.
And it was because Donald Trump had presented his plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
And obviously, there was a lot of opposition to that.
And so people like Liz Cheney, as well as Mike Waltz, who Trump chose as his national security advisor, were outraged at the idea of withdrawing from Afghanistan.
They joined together with pro-war Democrats and tried to defund Trump's plan to withdraw from Afghanistan.
Another thing that happened to stop that was that a couple of weeks after Trump announced his plan, that was when the New York Times published that false CIA story.
That the Russians had put bounties on the heads of American soldiers by paying the Taliban to kill American soldiers so that people like Liz Cheney could stand up as she did and say, we can't leave Afghanistan now.
The Russians are paying the Taliban to kill our troops.
If we leave now, that's going to be seen as a cut and run and all the things Liz Cheney always says.
And Matt Gaetz was one of the people.
He joined with people like Tulsi Gabbard and Ro Khanna to vehemently argue against that That attempt to impede Trump from leaving.
Here's part of what I wrote, quote, "Opposition to troop withdraw in both Afghanistan and Germany was not unanimous.
There were elements of the progressive left and the pro-Trump right who supported these withdraws, not just from Afghanistan, also to leave Germany.
Why are we in Germany?" they asked.
Yesterday on Twitter, Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, the former co-chair of the standards campaign, and Republican Matt Gaetz traded mutual support and vows to work together to defeat the Crow-Cheney amendment.
That was the amendment to defund Trump's withdrawal plan from...
Afghanistan.
Here you see Ro Khanna saying, let's team up, Matt Gaetz, to stop the Cheney Crow Amendment that prevents a withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan.
The American people want our troops home and the war ended.
They want $50 billion a year to create jobs here, not thousands of miles away.
Matt Gaetz responded, agree 100%.
I'm your Hucklebee.
It's past time to end the war in Afghanistan.
Now, specifically at the Justice Department, Matt Gaetz has been an outspoken opponent of the way in which the Justice Department has been weaponized, the way its power has been abused for political ends.
That's obviously part of why Trump finds him such an attractive choice.
And here is just part of what the kind of thing that he said.
Actually, he said this to me in an interview we did with him in February of last year about the Justice Department abuses.
But it is troubling when Powerful entities and media and government try to take you off the chessboard with false accusations.
And they hope that the accusation is so searing, even though it's not supported by facts, that it can still derail opportunities to serve.
And in my particular case, to oversee the precise activities of the Department of Justice and the FBI. I'm on the Judiciary Committee.
That's part of my work here in Congress.
It's one of the things I focus on.
It's one of the things I focused on During my first term when they were working to impeach President Trump over the Russia hoax.
And it was a little surreal today, Glenn, that as I got this news from my attorneys, I was literally sitting in a transcribed interview of an FBI whistleblower there complaining to the Judiciary Committee with allegations that the FBI had upped Now part of what he's talking about there is the
fact that, as you probably recall, a criminal investigation was opened by the Biden Justice Department To determine whether or not Matt Gaetz committed any crimes in connection with these allegations that he paid underage prostitutes to travel across state lines, which could be considered sex trafficking, in order to have sex with people who are underage.
And obviously that's being used by not just a lot of Democrats today, but a lot of Republicans to say Matt Gaetz shouldn't be The Attorney General running the Justice Department because he committed these crimes.
And the reality is that, as the New York Times reported, not only was Matt Gaetz not ever convicted of that crime, something that ought to be a prerequisite to considering him guilty, But the Justice Department investigated for almost two years and concluded there was no evidence that would allow them to prove his guilt in court.
Here from the New York Times, February of 2023, Justice Department won't bring charges against Gates in sex trafficking inquiry.
Quote, Now,
maybe I'm old-fashioned about this, but I actually do believe in due process.
I actually do actually think that in order to consider somebody guilty of a crime...
You have to first investigate, and then you have to indict them once you find that there's sufficient evidence to justify that.
Then you have to present that evidence in a court and obtain a guilty conviction after a jury trial or a bench trial.
They have to be found guilty.
It's not enough to convict them in the media.
And the Justice Department obviously desperately wanted to prosecute Matt Gaetz, but concluded that there was no evidence to do so.
And that, to me, should be the end of the story.
And if it's not, why is it that every four years Bill Clinton is invited to go speak at the Democratic National Convention where Democrats stand and cheer and swoon for him when there are all kinds of credible rape accusations and sexual assault accusations about Bill Clinton?
My reason why Bill Clinton should be allowed to walk around free is because he was never indicted for those crimes.
He was never prosecuted for them, just like was true of Matt Gaetz.
And I think part of what Trump obviously identifies with is that based on what was leaked about Matt Gaetz and what was done with this very flamboyant public DOJ investigation that ultimately concluded that he did nothing wrong, Trump identifies with that because Trump, too, has been accused of all sorts of crimes.
Including collusion with Russia in the 2016 election that prosecutors ultimately said he...
There was no evidence to prove he did that.
I don't know if this is hurtful, but sometimes law enforcement agencies act in a politicized manner against their political opponents, leak that they committed crimes, even though there's no evidence to corroborate them.
If Matt Gaetz actually engaged in sex trafficking or paying prostitutes underage, he should have been prosecuted.
Those are serious crimes.
Obviously, the Biden Justice Department wanted to.
They did everything they could to leak incriminating information about him, but ultimately concluded that they couldn't even indict him, let alone secure a conviction.
I think that ought to mean something in terms of evaluating whether to consider him guilty of these crimes.
Here from the New York Times today is an article about Pete Hegseth, who is Trump's pick for defense secretary.
Now, Hegseth was a surprise choice because typically...
A defense secretary either is a general or a retired general who rises up through the Pentagon in the military bureaucracy and ultimately ends up running the Defense Department, or there's somebody that's taken right out of the military-industrial complex.
That's where Lloyd Austin, the current defense secretary, came from.
He was on the board of Raytheon.
And it's not so much the ideology of the defense secretary that people care that much about, because again, those decisions are made by the president.
It's that they oversee the agency with by far the largest budget, almost a trillion dollars a year.
And these are members of the Senate who get huge amounts of donations from Raytheon, Dynamics, Boeing.
And who are often in the pocket of these companies, when they leave the Senate, they go to work for them, sit on their boards, get a lot of stock as a reward for good service, and they want to make sure that who is running the Pentagon is a hardcore establishment acolyte who does not want to disrupt that very lucrative war machine.
And so while Pete Hegseth is somebody who certainly has advocated a lot of Wars, including the war on terror, and a lot of other very aggressive militarism, there's concern that because he doesn't come out of the military-industrial complex or out of the Defense Department that he's not really trustworthy as a pick for the competent position that I think the people in the Senate care most about.
Here's how the New York Times describes him.
Quote, President-elect Donald J. Trump has picked Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to lead the Pentagon and the 1.3 million active-duty men and women of the American military.
The choice of Mr.
Hegseth, 44, was outside the norm of the traditional defense secretary.
And I think this is what people have to understand, that Donald Trump has been running for eight years.
On a campaign to destroy these norms of how Washington works because they're protective of the bipartisan swamp, everything that is corrupt about the foreign policy blob.
If Donald Trump is going to do what he promised to do, he's not going to be able to do it with picks for the cabinet that people like John Thune and Mitch McConnell and Tom Cotton love.
They're going to want safe, secure picks who are part of the Republican establishment.
The New York Times goes on, but Hegseth was a dedicated supporter of Mr.
Trump during his first term.
Quote, But several Pentagon officials questioned Mr.
Hegseth's lack of experience other than serving in the military and raised concerns about his ability to win Senate confirmation, even with Republicans winning control of the chamber.
A Minnesota native, Mr.
Hegseth graduated from Princeton and has a master's degree from Harvard.
Here are other things to know about him.
He championed service members accused of war crimes.
After joining Fox News as a commentator, he repeatedly supported service members accused of war crimes, including Major Matthew L. Goldstein of the Army Special Forces, First Lieutenant Clint Lawrence of the Army, and Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher of the Navy SEALs.
In Fox appearances and interviews of family members of the accused, Mr.
Hegsgett portrayed the men as heroes and victims, wrongly prosecuted by stateside bureaucrats who did not understand the complexities of combat.
Notably absent from those interviews were the troops who served with the men, multiple platoon members.
Serving under some of those soldiers directly contradicted Mr.
Hexas' characterization in court, describing the killings by their leaders as cold-blooded, unnecessary, and in no way related to the confusion of combat.
Some of these people were charged with just recklessly or even deliberately shooting in Iraq and killing civilians.
And they were found guilty of that in a court-martial by the military.
And Pete Hegseth led the way to successfully convince Trump to pardon them, which he did.
He also, quote, served at Guantanamo Bay.
He served as a second lieutenant of the prison operation at Guantanamo in 2004 and 2005 with an infantry unit of the New Jersey Army National Guard.
He later visited there in 2016 as a member of the media for a report about life at the base in prison on Fox News.
He called for the expansion of the detention operation, which has 30 detainees now, down from around 600 when he served there.
He has also suggested, quote, expediting military commissions, the war crimes court with the men accused of plotting the September 11, 2001 attacks, and others are charged.
Now, here's the kind of thing that Hegseth has been saying that I think makes Some people who were looking for a different kind of foreign policy a little bit uncomfortable, which is that like so many of these choices,
like pretty much everyone, including Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard to a little bit of a lesser extent, but pretty much the rest of the foreign policy choices, John Ratcliffe and Mike Huckabee and Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, These are people who all went to Israel,
who all pledged undying loyalty to Israel, who adopted the most extremist views, even within Israel, that Israel deserves to annex the West Bank, to take over Gaza, to expand their territory, that anything Israel wants is what we should give them.
That is a view very common among every single Trump official.
It's almost like pledging loyalty to Israel is a price of admission just for being considered for a position.
Here's part of what Peace Hegs has said when visiting with a lot of the most extremist Israeli religious figures in Jerusalem in 2018.
And today, Jennifer and I and others had a chance to go see the western wall of the Temple Mount, the western wall tunnels, so much of the old city.
And as you stand there, you can't help but behold the miracle before you.
And it got me thinking about another miracle that I hope all of you don't see too far away.
Because 1917 was a miracle.
1948 was a miracle.
1967 was a miracle.
2017, the declaration of Jerusalem at the Capitol was a miracle.
And there's no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.
I mean, talking there about that Temple Mount is something that even conservative Israelis never believed in.
A lot of this is very religiously oriented.
The fact that Trump appointed a non-Jew to become U.S. ambassador to Israel is kind of amazing until you realize that Mike Huckabee is very representative of the evangelical wing of the Republican Party, who really does believe that full-scale, unlimited support to Israel is a religious duty.
They believe that God wants Israel to be united and strengthened.
And at the risk of simplifying religious doctrine, that is when There will be a return of the Messiah, and there will be a rapture, and he will send to hell those who don't believe in him and reward those who do.
And that's why, even more than Jewish Zionists in the United States, the evangelical wing of the Republican Party has in many ways become among the most extremist supporters of Israel.
And Mike Huckabee is very representative of that.
He was appointed to be Trump's ambassador to Israel.
And here's what he said when he made a visit to 2017 and said things that, even for that time, were taboo among most Israeli government officials. - My feeling personally, and I'm speaking only as a person, I think Israel would only and I'm speaking only as a person, I think Israel would only be acting on the property it I think Israel has a title deed to Judea and Samaria.
There are certain words I refuse to use.
There is no such thing as a West Bank.
It's Judea and Samaria.
There's no such thing as a settlement.
Their communities, their neighborhoods, their cities.
There's no such thing as an occupation.
That they get out of their minds.
Now...
The position in the United States government under Ronald Reagan, George Bush 41, going back even further to Nixon, through the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, the Bush 43 administration, Obama has been consistent with the entire world.
That the West Bank does not belong to Israel.
That the state of Israel is what it was with its 1967 borders.
And that annexation of the West Bank would be illegal just like military occupation by Israel is now.
And Mike Huckabee is there saying, I don't recognize the West Bank.
This is all part of Israel.
This all belongs to Israel because he wants to unite all of greater Israel into one country because that's what he believes is necessary.
This is real extremism.
But again, I think the big question is, what will it really matter?
The reality is that the Israelis have already effectively occupied or annexed the West Bank.
They run it.
They rule it.
They rule over the millions of Arabs who don't have any political rights there.
They are already occupying Gaza, have destroyed it, are now rebuilding it with the intention to occupy that as well.
Also, they're going to rule over the Arab-Israeli citizens in their country, plus the Arabs in the West Bank, plus the Arabs in Gaza.
And everyone, including Israel, recognizes that that'll be classic apartheid.
Because the Arab people in that region, from the river to the sea, Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, will outnumber Israeli citizens, Jewish-Israeli citizens.
But obviously, Israel will never allow Israel to be anything other than a Jewish state.
But the only way to maintain that is by allowing the Jewish minority to rule over what will be the Arab majority.
Effectively, that's what's happening now.
On some level, it will be better If this kind of lie or illusion of the two-state solution is explicitly renounced, because that is the lie that enables Western liberals to tell themselves that it's justified to support Israel.
Oh, I'm doing this, but I believe in a two-state solution.
If Israel were to formally annex the West Bank, There could be no two-state solution, no two-state solution without a West Bank.
And the reality of Israeli treatment of Gaza and the West Bank would become more manifest.
No one could deny it any longer.
Now, the last...
And by the way, for all this talk about how the Trump administration will allow Israel to do whatever it wants, the Biden administration has obviously armed and paid for and diplomatically protected Israel's destruction of Gaza with no limits as well.
So while this is not my policy, I find this very disturbing.
I don't see it as any different than what the United States is currently doing.
If anything, it's just a little more honest.
And we'll see whether or not Trump is more eager to do something to stop the war than Biden and Blinken were.
Here, just as the last appointment that I want to cover from Donald Trump, this is also today, Tulsi is often misunderstood because she's often
railed against the evils of regime change war.
She doesn't want to go to places like Iraq or Syria or Libya and change the government and replace it with a new one.
She doesn't think that's the role of the United States.
The same reason she doesn't think we should be doing that in Ukraine, but instead facilitating a peace.
But that doesn't mean she's anti-war.
She very much believes that the United States should be extremely aggressive in fighting against what she considers to be Muslim extremist organizations.
But in terms of this position, her role would be to kind of root out the subversive elements in the intelligence community and prevent it from interfering in our domestic politics.
And there I think she could actually do a very good job.
The choice of Tulsi Gabbard was also something that produced enormous outrage on the part of the Washington establishment.
Not quite as much as Matt Gaetz, but almost as much.
And it's all based on this hysterical McCarthyite lie that they use against anyone who they disagree with in foreign policy, that she's a Russian agent.
Here was David Frum's reaction today.
Quote, And that was all begun when Hillary Clinton in this statement in 2019 tried to insinuate that Tulsi Gabbard's real plan when running for president was that she was being groomed by the Russians To pull out of the race when she was running as a Democrat,
run as a third party candidate to split the Democratic vote between Biden and Gabbard and help Donald Trump win as the Kremlin wanted.
Obviously, Hillary Clinton was lying.
None of what she said was happening actually ended up happening.
Tulsi Gabbard did drop out of the race, but she didn't run as a third party.
She dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden.
She was still in the Democratic Party.
She had just been, three years earlier, the vice chair of the DNC. Something that she resigned because she supported Bernie Sanders in protest of their cheating to make sure Hillary Clinton won.
But here's what Hillary Clinton said about Tulsi Gabbard.
This is the sort of thing that is now being used to try and stop her nomination.
The bizarre Hillary Clinton attack, Betsy, on Tulsi Gabbard.
First, I want folks to hear it.
I think they've got their eye on somebody who's currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.
She's a favorite of the Russians, and that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she's also a Russian asset.
Also a Russian asset.
Tulsi Gabbard responded, Betsy, you, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long.
It's now clear that this primary is between you and me.
Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies during the race.
Now, think about this for just a second.
People like David Frum, who in 2002 were writing the lies that George Bush was going to read to convince the country to invade Iraq.
He was, at the time, a speechwriter for George Bush.
Knowing that he, David Frum, would never get near the war, he was so desperate for whatever motives he wanted the United States to start by removing the government of Iraq and replacing it with a more pro-US, pro-Israel government.
He knew he was going to never get anywhere near that war.
Hillary Clinton voted for that war, advocated for that war in Iraq as well.
Obviously, the Clinton family has never gotten anywhere near the wars they support.
Tulsi Gabbard volunteered for the military.
She went and fought in that Iraq war that Hillary Clinton and David Frum were cheerleading from a safe distance.
She remained in the military to this very day in the reserves.
She's a lieutenant colonel.
Imagine going to war in a war that people like Hillary Clinton and David Frum send you to, knowing that they have no intention to go and get near the violence.
And then when you come back, those people impugn your loyalty and your patriotism by accusing you of being a Russian agent or a Russian asset.
Just imagine the audacity that takes, and yet that is becoming one of the main goals to stop Tulsi Gabbard.
I think Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Gaetz and possibly Pete Hegseth are going to be among the people of the current nominees encountering the most difficulty in getting confirmation even from the Republican Senate.
And that assumes...
That doesn't assume other nominees are likely to come, including RFK Jr., who is likely to lead some health agency, maybe the FDA, or be Secretary of Health and Human Services, something like that.
That would also encounter a lot of opposition.
Any one of these picks that is disruptive to or threatening of establishment power and establishment dogma in any way, those are going to be the picks that generate the most upset.
And that's true of Republican senators as well, many of whom are more like David Frum and Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney than they are like the Trump wing of the Republican Party that they mouth loyalty to, but are really there to prevent and limit it from doing anything other than cutting corporate taxes and appointing corporate conservative judges to the Supreme Court.
That's about all they really care about.
Now, I just want to conclude with this important question, which is, As I said, Donald Trump in 2016 ran on a promise to overhaul America's foreign policy.
He ranted and raved against the evils of the Iraq War.
He talked constantly about the deep state, the U.S. security state, how subversive and corrupted they are.
And that's only gotten more radicalized over the next many years.
He's often talked about the stupidity of wars.
Why are we in Syria trying to change their government?
Why are we in Ukraine spending all our money there?
And that really has changed the face of the Republican Party.
And a lot of people who have been conservatives for a long time in the Republican Party who believed in this more militaristic and neocon way, worldview, have started to slightly transform it, abandon it, even repudiate it, whether that's because they're careerists knowing even repudiate it, whether that's because they're careerists knowing that they have to sound like Trump in order to get the kind of appointments they just got, or whether it's because they really are starting to see the world a little bit differently.
It's impossible to know, but that definitely is what a lot of these people who we just covered, who are being, I think, rightly characterized as being more warmonger, more establishment foreign policy adherence than certainly Donald Trump was, whether that they have really started to more establishment foreign policy adherence than certainly Donald Trump was, whether that they have really started to take a different turn and given that it's Donald Trump and not Marco Rubio or at least Stefanik who will be president.
The New York Times, surprisingly...
Published a very nuanced article about exactly this question.
And here's what the title was, quote, Once they were neocons, now Trump's foreign policy picks are all, quote, America first.
Here's how the New York Times explored this question.
Quote, the Republican Party used to have a label for the kind of foreign policy hawk that President-elect Donald J. Trump named on Tuesday as his national security advisor and is considering as his secretary of state, meaning Marco Rubio.
Neocons.
But while they were once neocons, over the past few years, Representative Michael Waltz and Senator Marco Rubio both of Florida have gradually shifted their positions.
Sounding less like former Vice President Dick Cheney or John Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump's third national security advisor, they no longer talk about foreign interventions or the prospect of regime change.
Instead, they speak the language of the America First movement and fit more comfortably within Mr. Trump's often erratic worldview in which dealmaking reigns over ideology.
They're saying that's a bad thing.
His erratic worldview in which he prefers to make deals rather than go to war through ideology, which I think is one of the best things about Trump and hope that it finds expression.
The Times go on, quote, The result is that Mr.
Trump may end up with a foreign policy team composed of deep loyalists but with roots in familiar Republican approaches.
The shift that the two men have made, meaning his choice for National Security Advisor Mike Walz and the Secretary of State, Mark Rubio, the shift that those two men have made reflects the broader marginalization of neocons throughout the Republican Party after the disaster in Iraq and the rise of America First.
Mr.
Trump's loyalists and much of the party have now made a full conversion to that worldview, few more enthusiastically than Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host who was chosen as defense secretary on Tuesday.
This is the New York Times quoting Pete Hegseth, I think a lot of us who are very hawkish and believe in American military might and strength were very resistant to how candidate Trump characterized the wars, meaning the war in Afghanistan and Iraq when he was criticizing them.
He said...
I'm very hawkish and I was very resistant to Trump's criticism of the war, but then he went on.
But if we are honest with ourselves, there is no doubt that we need to radically reorient how we do it, how much money we have invested, how many lives we have invested, and how it actually has made us safer.
Is it still worth it?
For Mr.
Rubio and Mr.
Waltz, the drift from their previous positions to their current ones has been slow, evident in shadings of what they said at conservative conferences or in interviews on Fox and how they altered their votes at key moments in the past few years.
Ukraine has been a litmus test.
When Russia first invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Mr.
Rubio, the number two on the Senate Intelligence Committee, applauded the rush to send arms, aid, and intelligence to the Ukrainians.
So did Mr.
Waltz, a former Green Beret who enthusiastically supported giving Zelensky everything he needed to drive Russian troops out.
But by this spring, for each of their own reasons, Mr.
Rubio and Mr.
Waltz voted against the last major aid package to support Ukraine.
And to justify their new position, Mr.
Rubio declared that the United States could not afford to fight for Ukraine's freedom while illegal immigrants were coming over the southern border.
For his part, Mr.
Waltz wrote in an opinion essay for Fox News that President Biden, quote, has neither explained the American objective in Ukraine nor his strategy to achieve it.
Will American military spending continue until Ukraine has pushed Russia back to its pre-war boundaries, its pre-2014 boundaries, or until the Putin regime collapses?
Nearly 10 years ago, when Mr.
Rubio was running for the Republican nomination for president against Mr.
Trump, the Florida senator spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations, the heart of the traditional foreign policy establishment.
He quoted John F. Kennedy and made the case that the younger Mr.
Mr. Bush had made that American power must, quote, "be motivated by a desire to expand freedom rather than simply expand its own territory." Quote, "While America did not intend to become the world's indispensable power," said Senator Rubio, "that is exactly what our economic and political freedoms have made us." He castigated President Obama and the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for being too timid to face up to the dictators from Syria to China.
The free nations of the world will still look to America to champion our shared ideals.
That's pure neocon dogma.
And then the Times said this, quote, Outside experts say Mr.
Trump learned something from the chaos of the first term and has adjusted accordingly.
Quote, Daniel W. Dresner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, wrote this week in Foreign Affairs, quote, Trump is far less likely to meet resistance from his own political appointees.
Other checks on Trump's policies will also be weaker, he said, and the result will be, quote, that the United States will speak with one voice on foreign policy, and that voice will be Donald Trump's.
Now, I don't want to be nearly as rosy-eyed as the New York Times, for whatever reason, was in that article about the abandonment of neoconservative and warmongering ideology on the part of a lot of these choices that Trump has selected, such as Marco Rubio and Waltz and others.
But I do think that it is absolutely true that the Republican Party has been remade in Donald Trump's image.
And The first term of his presidency contains some of Donald Trump taking strong control and insisting that things be done with the way he wants, but others being places where a lot of his appointees who had much different ideology than he did, who wanted to sabotage his ideology, ran circles around him.
So that's why I say I don't know the answer to the question of what this actually signals.
Will Trump at 78 years old, now 8 years older than he was when he first took office in 2016, be energetic enough, vibrant enough, motivated enough, interested enough to take the reins and say, no, this is how foreign policy will be run?
And if he isn't, will he deputize someone like J.D. Vance or Tulsi Gabbard?
Or empower Matt Gaetz or other appointees that may be coming that definitely have a much different worldview?
Or will Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee and John Ratcliffe of the CIA and his National Security Advisor Mike Waltz simply be able to pretend all along that they were appeasing Trump, but in reality they have this same warmongering mentality.
Let's go have war with China.
Let's go to war for Israel.
let's banish and bequeath and banish and defeat Putin, and they'll be able to just get their way.
No one knows the answers to those questions.
But that's why I say, while I don't purport to have certainty about what these appointees suggest or signify about what the second Trump administration will be, and while I certainly dislike several of them, to put that mildly, I think to say, oh, this means that to put that mildly, I think to say, oh, this means that Trump's whole anti-intervention approach is a fraud, that's just It's just very binary thinking.
And I think that a lot of these choices, as the New York Times article suggests, are a lot more complex and nuanced, both in terms of what these people's beliefs are and how those beliefs, even if as bad as they always were, will find expression, if at all, in the second Trump administration.
I think this is going to take a lot of vigilance to prevent the second Trump administration from falling into old traditional Republican foreign policy dogma that has been so destructive.
But it's still the same Donald Trump, the same instincts that he's always had, and there are other people in the administration, beginning with his vice president, who very much have those same instincts, very much in conflict with the Marco Rubio's of the world, and that will be how this all shakes out, how this all emerges.
And a lot of people who voted for Trump or supported Trump or even who didn't will have a lot of say, a lot of role in determining what this foreign policy ends up being.
Alright, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As I thought would happen, we didn't end up having enough time to show on this live show our interview with the American journalist Jeffrey Gofredo, who was detained in Israel and mistreated quite poorly because of the pure journalism that he did.
As a result, we're going to live stream that interview on our aftershows on Locals, which is available solely for our members of our Locals community.
But then, as soon as we have the time in the next few days, depending on the news cycle...
We will show that full interview on this live show as well because we want to make sure that it's seen by everybody as much as possible.
And so right when we're done with the show, we're going to move to locals.
We'll have that interview with Jeremy about his perspective on his own situation and the ongoing war that he's been covering so effectively.
Otherwise, that concludes our show for this evening.
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