The Key Issues Determining the Trajectory of the Second Trump Administration: From Israel and Ukraine to Populism and Free Speech
Glenn looks ahead to the key issues facing the second Trump administration: from Israel and Ukraine to the future of populism and free speech. Plus: he shares the incredible rescue story of his dog, Nico, in another System Pupdate segment.
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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.
Even though I said that this is a live nightly show, it almost always is live every night.
Tonight we are recording at just a couple hours early just for logistical reasons.
I don't even know if that's necessary to say.
I think it is probably in the spirit of transparency, but it is a live nightly show.
We're just not live right this second.
For tonight, there are many reasons that much of the political and media establishment in the US fear and despise Donald Trump.
Some of those reasons are ideological, some psychological, some emotional, and many motivated by pure self-interest.
But one of the most significant reasons for this fear and hatred is that Trump is deeply unpredictable.
One barely knows from one day to the next which orthodoxy he might embrace or reject.
Which faction he will empower or humiliate?
Which previously expressed view of his he will jettison?
Which mood of his will predominate on any given day?
And the one thing that the ruling classes in general crave everywhere is predictability, stability, to ensure that their prerogatives remain shielded from attack.
And this predictability is one of the many things Trump simply cannot or will not provide.
While Trump's unpredictability often frustrates establishment power centers, it also can frustrate his own supporters.
And it makes punditry and predictions virtually impossible.
Anyone placing authoritative bets on what the second Trump administration will do in all but a small handful of areas is making a fool's bet.
Indeed, even his cabinet...
And the other key nominations present an utterly confused picture.
Some supreme establishment choices are there.
Those are the ones the Democrats and the media are happy with.
People like Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik and John Ratcliffe at CIA. But there are also some truly anti-establishment choices that D.C. widely distrusts, even despises.
People like Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. and others as well.
Now, only Donald Trump could construct an administration where people like Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik serve in key positions alongside people like Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr.
But that's exactly what makes him and his administration so unpredictable.
While predictions are foolish, laying out the framework for how to navigate 2025 and Trump 2.0 is actually quite vital.
There are multiple crucial policy and cultural areas that are highly consequential, ones where we cannot know for certain what Trump will do.
But where it is nonetheless enlightening and even vital to analyze what is at stake and what to look for.
So we will devote tonight's show to doing exactly that in the most comprehensive way we can.
Not making predictions or telling you what's going to happen because I don't think anybody knows.
But instead trying to lay out the roadmap for what to look for and why it matters.
And then finally, as many of you know, we end each week now on this show, meaning the last segment on every Friday night with our new segment called System Pupdate.
I know it's so clever.
Where we highlight the life story and trajectory of one of our many rescue dogs.
Either the ones that are at home with us or in our homeless run dog shelter in Brazil.
That's called Hope Shelter.
Tonight's starring dog is Nico.
And I know I always say this because I'm enthralled by every one of our dogs.
In fact, by every dog.
I know I always say this, but he really does have one of the most remarkable rescue and evolution stories of any dog I've ever known, and so we're really excited to show you the video we produced about Nico, about his life, and what meaning I think can be derived from it.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
There are an endless number of ways to talk about Donald Trump, the first Trump presidency, the imminent second Trump presidency, Donald Trump's dominance of American political the imminent second Trump presidency, Donald Trump's dominance of American political life and therefore political life in the West over the last almost full decade now and four more years, presumably are There's so many things that one can say about it.
I don't think there's any question that Trump is one of the most, if not the most consequential presidents of our lifetime.
That's neither praise nor critique.
That's just an observation that I think is undeniably true.
The impact that he has had on media, the impact that he's had on political coalitions, the impact that he's had on policy, on political culture throughout the West and beyond, I think is far beyond any other specific president.
Maybe Richard Nixon is the president who competes with him in terms of how consequential he was and his presidency was for better or for worse.
But I would say Trump is probably the most consequential.
And the main reason for that, in my view, is how much he deviates from prior presidential patterns, certainly in the modern political age.
He deviates comportmentally, He deviates rhetorically.
He deviates ideologically.
And he just deviates in terms of the entire way that he presents himself, the entire way that he speaks and acts, the things he says, the way he treats media.
And In a way that makes it exciting to pay attention to journalism, to pay attention to politics because it is a kind of transformative moment.
Whatever you say about Donald Trump, you cannot say he's an ordinary political figure or an ordinary president.
One of the things I think is most worth noting about Trump, the thing that For me, has always been a vessel of potential.
A reason why I think that there's something not only interesting but positive in Trump's emergence on the political scene is precisely the fact that, unlike virtually every president from either political party in my lifetime, Who was sort of a person that you just wind up and they reflexively embrace the most sacred authorities of DC's power centers in part because they are byproducts of them.
They're sort of strivers, people who have been training their whole life to become president.
They're trained above all else in how to say and believe the things that advance their careerism and their self-interest and their political agenda.
They just are reflexively unrevolutionary, eager not to alienate powerful people, and therefore they're very reliable vessels for establishment dogma.
Trump has spent his entire life doing exactly the opposite.
The fact that he wasn't even in politics at all in any elected capacity as a candidate basically until 2016 when he was 72 years old, 71 years old.
I think is what enabled him to be so willing to just reject ideas and positions and pieties that presidents previous to him, major presidential candidates previous to him, would never even dreamed of rejecting just because the cost is too high, the anger on the part of powerful and influential people is too intense.
And yet, for whatever reasons, Trump has constituted in such a way as to not really care about that.
I think he does crave, on a certain level, gaining approval and being liked, but there's a bigger part of him that is willing to incur the wrath of the people who are most powerful.
And as a result, this unpredictability, what I began by talking about...
I think is central to understanding Trump, to understanding who he is, what he's done, but also the potential that his presidency, both the prior one and his candidacy in 2020 and now his second presidency in 2025, what, in order to understand it, I think that is the crucial characteristic, this idea of unpredictability.
My longtime colleague, the investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, with whom I founded The Intercept, and is now at DropSite News, which he created with Ryan Grimm and left The Intercept to do so, is obviously somebody who's not a fan of Donald Trump.
I think Jeremy is very squarely situated on the left.
He's a hardcore critic of the Democratic Party, but he's generally done his politics and his journalism on the left-wing sector of American political life.
And yet, in October of this year, just a month before the election, he went on to counterpoints, the counterpoints.
And he talked about this attribute of Donald Trump that not only makes him unpredictable but fills him with potential to destroy the worst parts of Washington, parts of Washington that otherwise, in the absence of Trump, would be invulnerable.
Here's how Jeremy described it.
Donald Trump is in power.
Now, this goes to your other question.
This happened to Ryan, too.
When Trump was president, I mean, clearly Donald Trump is not someone who represents much of my worldview, but there were elements of Trump's foreign policy that represented a departure from what we saw under the eight years of Barack Obama or kind of the elite consensus in Washington, D.C. And any time we would point out, like I did a story at one point where I was talking about Trump's kind of stated opposition to forever.
And I wrote something and did a podcast on it that said that Trump might be our best bet to actually get out of some of these.
And I was making a complicated argument that had to do with the nature of this alliance between the neocons and the Democrats and how Trump, whatever you think of him, represented, you know, Cy Hirsch said at the time he was a circuit breaker.
This isn't to praise him, it's to state facts.
Well, people went completely nuts.
Oh, Scahill is pro-Trump.
Oh, you called Trump the dove?
I never called Trump the dove.
The guy expanded drone strikes.
He used the mother of all bombs.
He assassinated Qasem Soleimani.
Trump was a highly militaristic president.
But he had certain basic things that he had put on record that were a departure from the way that Democrats and Republicans talk.
And I think we have an obligation to point that out and not just treat it as, you know, orange Hitler is coming back into power.
Like, we have a responsibility to say what's true and what's not.
Okay.
Now, you can quibble with certain characterizations, but the core point, I think, is not just so important, but so true.
The mere willingness of Trump to disrupt the D.C. bipartisan consensus that has dominated Washington for decades is intrinsically valuable, even if the way in which he deviates is a way that if you think he's going and making things worse or going even if the way in which he deviates is a way that if you think he's going and making things worse or going in the wrong direction, just the fact that he's willing
They create theater about certain kinds of disagreements.
We have talked before about how, in fact, last night, about how Joe Biden, in the context of giving Liz Cheney a presidential medal, in 2008 said, Dick Cheney is the most dangerous vice president this nation has ever had.
He's a threat to all things decent, all things constitutional.
That was what all Democrats were saying about Dick Cheney.
And then just a few years later, when Dick Cheney's bust, his marble bust, was unveiled...
To sit in the House of Representatives, Joe Biden not only eerily went as the vice president, but he preys on Dick Cheney and said, I have this secret to share with you.
I like Dick Cheney.
And then, of course, Dick Cheney ended up endorsing Kamala Harris, as did Liz Cheney.
And Liz Cheney became an icon and a hero of the Democratic Party because this bickering is all theatrical.
They call each other names in public to give the illusion that they're at each other's throats, to make people think that the two parties are irreconcilable.
It's the same thing with George W. Bush and Nancy Pelosi.
He used to say the most vicious things about each other.
But all along, according to Nancy Pelosi's daughter Christine, George Bush was like a member of the Pelosi family.
They loved each other, Nancy Pelosi and George W. Bush, and still do.
It is a ruling class that finds self-identity in one another far more than anybody else.
And that's what Trump, more than anything, has disrupted.
Not completely, not perfectly.
Not entirely, but far more than any other viable political candidate.
As Jeremy said, Seymour Hersh, and I think this is the perfect description, called Trump a circuit breaker.
But you just have this piety, this system of orthodoxies that Republicans, Democrats alike, without even talking about it, We rarely hear about the debates where the two parties agree because they agree and so the media just doesn't even pay attention to it and so it creates the misperception that the two parties disagree on everything because the only time we hear the media covering the two parties is when they disagree and so it ignores and suppresses
the fact that in 90-95% of the major Stories in the major policy debates, they actually agree.
Just as one example, the fact that Trump has been questioning the viability of NATO. Tell me a single presidential nominee, or for that matter, a single congressional leader of either party in the last 50 years, who would have ever dreamed,
would ever considered questioning the ongoing viability of NATO. NATO has been utterly central to American foreign policy since the end of World War II. And Trump is the only person willing to stand up and say, why are we in NATO? Why do we pay for NATO? It was created so that Western Europe would be safe from the Soviet Union.
There's no Soviet Union anymore.
Western Europe is quite rich now.
Why are we paying for all their defenses?
And of course, this is something that's horrifying to the endless war machine, the military industrial complex, but this is what Trump does.
And that is why it not only makes his administration so full of potential, but also it makes it very difficult to anticipate what he's going to do because that's not the only part of Trump.
There's also parts of Trump that came from American elite sectors.
He's spent almost all of his life as a famous billionaire.
He was a highly paid and valued television host for NBC News for a full decade before he went into politics.
So it's not like he just came out of A union hall somewhere in western Pennsylvania, there is a part of him that also shares that elite consensus, but for all sorts of reasons that I indicated earlier, there's a big part of him that is highly disruptive of it.
You just don't know exactly where the disruption is going to come from or how it's going to manifest or when it will, and that's what makes predictions so difficult, but it also makes...
The potential is so much higher than it is for the ceiling, so much higher than it is for any other presidential candidate, at least ones that have been viable candidates.
Now, one of the sort of traditions of Washington punditry is that after a president wins an election, you try and read the tea leaves of who their nominees are.
Oh, they're picking...
Nominees who believe in this, who are characterized by this approach.
And generally, it's a very coherent picture.
There's, of course, some token exceptions.
If Democratic winners are going to pick mostly centrist and people from the right wing of the Democratic Party, but they'll throw a couple bones to the left wing base, like the Secretary of Labor or the Secretary of the Interior.
But in general, you can get a coherent view.
With Trump, you absolutely cannot.
Some of his appointees, his most important appointees, Are the exact kind of people who Ron DeSantis would have appointed, Mitt Romney would have appointed, John McCain would have appointed, putting Marco Rubio as the Secretary of State, putting Elise Stefanik as the ambassador to the UN, Mike Huckabee as the ambassador to Israel, people like his National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz.
These are all very traditional, hawkish people.
Political figures who have long embraced foreign policy consensus in the United States, but then you put them alongside people like Tulsi Gabbard, who he chose to lead the intelligence community.
He obviously tried to put Matt Gaetz as attorney general, but that was a bridge too far, though not really for ideological reasons, but for ones of scandal and personality.
RFK Jr. is the Health and Human Services Secretary to run the entire healthcare apparatus in the United States, the public health policy apparatus.
People like Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense.
So there's this hodgepodge, this conflicting hodgepodge of people, and that's to say nothing of the fact that arguably his most significant, and at the time I would say promising choice, was to opt for J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate, now the vice president, instead of people like Marco Rubio or Tim Scott or a bunch of other ordinary Republicans whom he was considering.
And that happened because a lot of people in the Trump coalition who were close to Trump who are far more populous, far more anti-intervention So the question,
of course, is, for example, what role will J.D. Vance have?
Will he have an influential portfolio?
Will he be the last person in the room who talks to Trump?
Will he be utterly sidelined?
What will be the role of Elon Musk?
Same questions.
You just don't know.
The New York Times, however, despite these choices that I just referenced in November, in the week after the election, November 12th, ran a news article with this headline, quote, Once they were neocons, now Trump's foreign policy picks are all, quote, America first.
President-elect Donald J. Trump is considering nominees who fit more comfortably within his often erratic worldview in which dealmaking reigns over ideology.
Now, I don't think that's true, but it tried to make the case that That the most important characteristic for anyone to gain Trump's trust is loyalty to Trump.
And so even hardcore hawks and neocons like Rubio, like Elise Stefanik, like that whole crowd, Have begun to mold and shape their advocacy to more comport with Trump's worldview than their own worldview, whether that's fraudulent the way it was from Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley, who also earned Trump's trust despite being completely adversarial to his worldview, or those generals like General Mattis and General Kelly.
Whether it's genuine or whether it's just manipulative, it is true that they have begun at least somewhat shaping and shifting their worldview, but clearly there's a huge amount of heterodoxy and conflict and division inside the Trump coalition, not just in his base, as we just saw with this outbreak of tensions between the MAGA base and big tech executives, but also within the top level of his cabinet.
Now, Donald Trump, when he's not reading from a script, when he's not being super diplomatic, If you just kind of put Trump in a room and let him speak, he will ultimately start expressing obviously genuine, deeply internalized and I'd say very righteous hatred for neocons.
Yesterday we covered the Liz Cheney comments that he expressed right before the election where he started basically trying to make the point that, "Oh, all these people in Washington who love war but who never go to war, let's put Liz Cheney in a war."
But he got very graphic about it, very vivid about it because he obviously was so angry at it, at this dynamic that he started talking about the exact kind of guns that would be shooting at Liz Cheney's head and that's what made the idiots in the media lie and say that Trump was talking about putting Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad, but it's because he really feels strongly about this.
He does have a reflexive hatred for neocons, notwithstanding the fact that he chose a lot of neocons for his first administration and allowed them to embed and infiltrate that administration, but he also has chosen neocons to be in his second administration.
It just seems, and I've talked to people very, very close to Trump, I've talked to them on the show.
I've talked to them in private.
And they all say the same thing, which is that Trump and the people he trusts most...
Understand that the problem with the first administration, the biggest problem was that Trump got manipulated.
He didn't understand Washington well.
He got convinced to trust people he shouldn't have trusted, including neocons.
And this time they're determined to make sure that the people he has working for him in the cabinet and elsewhere are actually on board with his agenda and not subverting that agenda.
We'll see, A, how genuine that resolution is, and B, whether he's capable, even if it is genuine, of carrying it out.
I mean, the executive branch is gigantic.
It's hard for anyone, let alone someone close to 80 years old, to micromanage it, to guard against every conceivable subversion.
I don't think they did a very good job in the first administration, but he swears that's his most visceral goal.
And if you listen to Trump talk in the unscripted way, I think you see that that is a very deeply held and genuine, authentic conviction of yours.
Here he was on Joe Rogan's show the month before the election, just a week or so, 10 days ago, 10 days before the election.
And here's what he talked about hiring people in general, but also hiring neocons specifically.
Okay.
The biggest mistake I made was I picked some great people, you know, but you don't think about that.
I picked some people that I shouldn't have picked.
I picked a few people that I shouldn't have picked.
Neocons?
Yeah, neocons, or bad people, or disloyal people, or...
People that were just bad because you got bad advice.
Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, you're reading about them a little bit today.
A guy like Kelly who was a bully, a bully but a weak person, you know.
You know more about bullies than anybody probably around because you deal in a certain sport where the bully...
The biggest mistake I made was I picked some people in a certain sport where the bullies are exposed very quickly.
But you know, he's bad.
Bolton was an idiot, but he was great for me because I'd go in with a guy like a John Bolton.
You know John Bolton?
He called me up.
I was picking Bolton.
He's a very smart guy.
His name is Phil Ruffin.
He's a very rich guy from Las Vegas.
He's a great card player.
He doesn't play cards, but he's a great card player.
He's just a natural.
He's got poker sense, right?
You know, the good old poker sense.
And Phil Ruffin is a very, very wise kind of a guy and one of the richest people around and has had great success and understands people.
So it was in that I was picking Bolton or I picked Bolton.
He called up.
He said, don't pick him.
He's a bad guy.
Now, he wasn't in politics at all.
He's in various businesses.
He said, he's a bad guy.
It always works out bad with that guy.
And I said, I wish you told me this two weeks ago.
I already hired him.
He's here.
And he was right.
But he was good in a certain way.
He's a nut job.
And every time I had to deal with a country...
When they saw this whack job standing behind me, they said, oh man, Trump's going to go to war with us.
He was with Bush when they went stupidly into the Middle East.
Now, I think it's a very interesting analysis because people...
Often debate and dispute whether neocon, that term, holds any real concrete meaning, any specific meaning.
It probably has been watered down a little bit from its original interpretation, but I think it clearly denotes a set of views about war and foreign policy and how American interests should be understood, especially in the Middle East, that continue to be very valid.
But if anybody is a neocon, if anyone deserves that term, it's John Bolton.
He is as fanatical a warmonger as anybody in the United States.
Up there with Lindsey Graham or Liz Cheney, just people, Marco Rubio, unfortunately, people who just see any opportunity for war, any opportunity to use the U.S. military to kill people, to bomb people, to change governments, and they automatically want to do it.
They never met a war they were opposed to, not a war we fought, nor a war that was proposed.
And obviously, when Trump selected John Bolton, a lot of people said, oh look, anyone who thinks Trump is heterodox when it comes to foreign policy consensus is an idiot.
He just picked John Bolton, the world's worst warmonger, to be right there in his White House in a key policy position.
How can anybody possibly believe Trump is sincere about his stated views to end the war machine when he has warmongers all over his White House, including John Bolton?
Now, the fact that Trump...
Says he got advice from people not to hire John Bolton, but he never really understood who John Bolton was, never understood the reason not to hire him, and then said, oh, sorry, I already hired him.
That's exactly the sort of thing that Trump's closest supporters will insist, that he just didn't have a good understanding of Washington, of who everybody was, who should be trusted, because he had never been there before.
But that is his claim is, yeah, I will pick people who are warmongers.
And I, Trump, will even express bellicose or unhinged threats like he did with North Korea, North Vietnam, North Korea rather, when he talked about how his button is bigger than Kim Jong-un's button, basically threatening Kim Jong-un with nuclear war, how he's done the same with Iran and Russia.
He supposedly threatened Putin.
We know where you live, and we can send a drone and a bomb over your house if you continue.
He likes that very bellicose rhetoric, but in his view, it's not because that's how you get involved in wars, but how you prevent wars.
And he's saying, to have John Bolton on my side, somebody even more unhinged, is a valuable asset because I can just say, look, this guy is ready to go to war at any moment, and it scares people, and it makes them want to do deals, which is ultimately what I want.
Now, whether you believe that or not, whether...
You're assuaged by Trump's view of what these people's utility is in terms of putting them in his administration.
That's clearly at least how Trump is thinking.
And I think it's a valuable insight into the way he thinks about these appointees.
Not that everyone has to have a wrong record of thinking exactly what he does but that they have to have some utility to him in terms of what he wants to achieve.
And as I said, I think the biggest question of the Trump administration, 2.0, is whether Trump will be at all disciplined, at all aware, all competent, all devoted or committed to controlling these various factions around him and preventing them from subverting what he has promised his base will be the...
Prevailing worldview and ideology of a Trump presidency.
Now, one of the things that I think is actually most encouraging is that despite the fact that the primary dominant accusatory narrative from Democrats and the media, their media allies to redundancy, is that Trump and his movement is basically a cult, that they have leader worship, that they will never question the leader.
In fact, MAGA world and the Trump coalition not only have a lot of different strongly held views that conflict with one another, but they're very willing to not just debate them, but work hard and attack anybody who's threatening what they understood was the commitment that Trump made when he won.
And we've seen that over and over and over again.
And that, to me, is incredibly healthy for a coalition to have all sorts of different factions who believe some things in common, but many, if not most things, very, very at odds with one another and are willing to fight over that and to debate it and try and pressure Trump in order to be on their side or not.
Unlike the Democrats who...
Used to be notorious for being so in disarray and unorganized, but who have become really a party that marches in lockstep.
I mean, for me, the biggest example is that the United States decided to heavily involve itself in the war in Ukraine to fund it.
It was a NATO war, the kind of thing that people on the left have long opposed, and not a single Democrat, not one, not one token dissenter in the House and the Senate, really in all of official Washington's You see a little bit of it with Israel,
but very little bit on the very far margins and a small number of people.
But by and large, the Democrats snap into line in a way that you're seeing what MAGA World not do.
Here's Foreign Policy Magazine in November of 2024, right a week after the election, after Trump won.
The title was MAGA World is Divided Over Trump's Foreign Policy Picks.
Quote, Hawks Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz are being eyed with concern amid calls for U.S.
So it isn't as though Trump won and then his supporters said, yeah, do whatever you want.
They said, why Marco Rubio?
Why Elise Stefanik?
Why Mike Waltz?
And in fact, they were so concerned about Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley returning to hardcore warmongers that Trump was pressured to come out with a statement, which he did, preemptively announcing neither Mike Pompeo nor Nikki Haley We'll be members of my administration and clearly both were expecting that they would.
Certainly Mike Pompeo was, but that was the pressure that came from Trump supporters that we don't want these kind of people who are establishment Republicans who would fit into a Bush administration or a Rodney administration.
How that foreign policy conflict works out, I think, is crucial to what the Trump administration will be.
Hear from the Washington Examiner in early December of 2024, right after the election.
I keep saying 2024 is this year, but probably sometime in March I'll realize that 2025, but December 2024...
They focus on the same conflictual dynamic in the Trump coalition, but with respect to economic policy.
The title was A Working Class Party, If You Can Keep It.
Quote, The problem with the Republican Party being a working class party is that for decades the Republican Party has been a corporatist party.
The Republican Party was dependent upon Wall Street financing, serving the interests of huge corporations.
That's who Mitt Romney was.
That's who John McCain was.
That's who George Bush and Dick Cheney were.
That's Republican orthodoxy going back to at least Ronald Reagan and really before.
And so for the Republican Party to now become the working class party There are economic populists inside the party, but there are a lot of people who only continue to care about corporate profit.
And that was the dispute, the very vitriolic dispute we saw expressing itself in the last couple of weeks of December over the question of whether or not the Trump administration should import foreign workers on H-1B visas because that helps corporations.
Thrive and profit by being able to get in low-wage workers who are dependent upon them, who have to work 90 and 100 hours a week with no complaint for lower wages because it's the only way they can stay in the United States.
If they lose their job, they lose their visa.
Or whether or not those jobs should go to Americans.
And there are a lot of other places, as we'll show you, where this similar conflict over whether Trump will be an economic populist or whether he'll be a corporatist will continue to manifest.
Now, obviously, one of the big changes between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is that most of big tech decided to, for very opportunistic and self-serving reasons, side with Donald Trump, Once it became apparent that their preferred candidate,
Ron DeSantis, wasn't going to win in the GOP primary and especially once it became more or less clear that Trump was likely to win the general election and there was an infusion of big tech support, big tech money for Donald Trump, and if you give a presidential candidate $10 million or $50 million or $100 million or $250 million, you're obviously going to expect Probably reasonably to get something in return, something that you want.
The president's not going to be a free agent.
He's going to be beholden to the donors that enabled him to win.
That was Trump's own...
The realization in 2016 that he said over and over was, I'm a different politician.
I'm not beholden to anyone.
I can fund my own campaign.
I don't need to rely on big donors.
That all changed in 2024 when I think Trump got more desperate to win because his only two choices were win the election and the presidency or go to prison.
Democrats absolutely would have put him in prison had he not won.
I'm convinced of that.
And he did what he had to do to win and that included accepting not just major donations from big tech executives but all the strings that go along with it that get attached to it that he now has to decide how he's going to navigate.
It's not that easy just to tell people who just gave you tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to go away.
That they're not entitled to shape policy, especially the policy that matters most to And of course, one of the primary people, if not the primary person who exemplifies that conflict, is Elon Musk.
And there's already starting to be a slight amount of conflict between the two.
The Democrats purposely tried to create this narrative that the real president was Elon Musk, obviously, and very...
Self-evidently trying to manipulate Trump's ego and his insecurities.
Oh, you're not the real president.
Elon Musk is your boss.
And it prompted Trump to address that in late December by saying, as NBC News put it, Trump addresses Elon Musk's growing influence.
Quote, he's not going to be the president.
So you see this kind of And then the article says after Musk helped tank a bipartisan bill to fund the government, Trump told conservative activists that he hasn't, quote, ceded the presidency to the tech billionaire.
That was, of course, prior to the whole war that broke out when first Vivek Ramaswamy and then Musk died.
Trump strongly advocated an increase in H-1B visas, an increase in the number of foreigners who come to the United States to work and basically take jobs that American workers would want but don't get in the process of driving down wages.
And then Trump reversed himself from his first administration position where he was opposed to H-1B visas and tried to limit them, and he sided with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy signaling to a lot of people in the MAGA base that At least for a while, big tech executives are going to prevail over what they thought was the America first nationalist populist ideology.
One of the big question marks is the role that G.D. Vance is going to play, as I suggested, here from Business Insider in July of 2024. Of all the people in Trump's administration...
Who I think are genuinely opposed to longstanding Republican orthodoxy, not in every area, obviously, but in many, is J.D. Vance.
The problem is he doesn't have any official portfolio.
He's the vice president.
Trump could just freeze him completely out, give him no portfolio, much like what was done with Kamala Harris.
Biden said, yeah, go fix the root causes of immigration in Central America.
Go fix Central America so that there's not as many people wanting to come here, which was obviously an impossible task.
But nobody inside the Biden White House close to Joe Biden respected Kamala Harris.
Nobody gave her any real role.
She was purely just a kind of token, a symbol, a mascot.
Whether J.D. Vance is going to be relegated to that role, whether he's going to be given real power in order to exert this dissidence from a Republican Party orthodoxy, both in economic policy and foreign policy, is one of the huge question marks for me.
Reason Magazine, at the same time, right after Vance was picked, July of 2024, had this headline, quote, J.D. Vance thinks Lena Kahn is doing a great job.
Lena Kahn, of course, is one of the more controversial Biden appointees.
She was tapped to head the Federal Trade Commission because or despite the fact that she had long been a hardcore advocate of more rigorous enforcement of antitrust law and regulation, which big corporations hate.
She fought against proposed murders.
She argued that allowing big conglomerates to merge destroys the interests of the consumer, is anti-competitive, allows these gigantic centralized corporations to just run roughshod over consumers and citizens who are left with no choices in the marketplace to express their dissatisfaction.
And J.D. Vance, Matt Gaetz as well, Josh Hawley, other people who are genuine populist, economic populist, or more populist than the Republican Party, were huge fans of Lena Kahn, but a lot of the corporatists in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party hate Lena Kahn.
And so if J.D. Vance is influential, that will mean a certain sort of impact on economic populism, and if he's not, it will mean something else.
Now, this elite MAGA versus the MAGA base, which you can more aptly define as people who are supporters of Trump but who are not necessarily true believers in MAGA, versus the MAGA base, the people who are with Trump since 2015 because of the America First ideology, because of economic populism, because of anti-interventionism and foreign policy, clearly have a lot of conflict coming.
Because a lot of these people who are the elites and the big funders of the Trump campaign are new arrivees in the Trump world.
They were people who hated Donald Trump or who supported other people who never were interested in Trump, who thought Trump was kind of a little bit repellent, embarrassing, and only joined recently when his victory seemed inevitable.
And this conflict, how it plays out, is going to be a major factor in what the Trump administration in the second term is, but we have no idea how that will play out.
Here was AP summarizing that.
quote, an online debate over foreign workers and tax shows tension in the Trump political coalition.
The H-1B issue is so interesting because when Trump ran for president in 2016, and then when he was president in the first term, he waged war on H-1B visas.
He was opposed to H-1B visas.
He thought they were an attempt to replace American workers with foreign workers to drive down wages.
His first administration did what they could to limit the number of H-1B visas.
In other words, the exact opposite view that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy expressed that triggered this most recent internal conflict.
Here was Trump in 2016 on H-1B visas in the Republican debate.
The H-1B very well, and it's something that I frankly use, and I shouldn't be allowed to use, we shouldn't have it.
Very, very bad for workers.
And second of all, I think it's very important to say, well, I'm a businessman and I have to do what I have to do, and it's sitting there waiting for you, but it's very bad.
It's very bad for business in terms of, it's very bad for our workers, and it's unfair for our workers, and we should end it.
I mean, that's as definitive as it gets.
So if you were an early Trump supporter back in 2016 and you watched him surrounded by people like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio who had all the funding of the Bush-Cheney coalition, the longtime dominant Republican coalition, who obviously were very corporatist, who don't care about the American worker. who obviously were very corporatist, who don't care about the That's why the American worker has been so troubled on because no one in either party and the establishment wing cares about them.
And Trump comes along and says, "H1 visas are wrong.
We shouldn't use them.
We shouldn't use them just because I'm not going to unilaterally disarm as a business person, but they are American workers." And suddenly you watch Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy come out and herald H1B visas as this sacred, noble instrument of American greatness.
And then several days later, Trump has asked about it and then asked again, and he makes pretty clear that he's siding with Elon and Vivek, not only against his longest term supporters, but also against his own position.
Very clearly expressed in the 2016 campaign, as well as in the first administration, that H-1B visas are a threat to the American worker.
They're a corrupt tool of corporate interests.
To watch him flip on a dime in order to avoid alienating Elon and the rest of his big tech companies, His new big tech allies was pretty concerning from the perspective of a MAGA voter who has to start to suspect that the economic populism they thought they were getting with Trump will be under direct,
eminent, and very real threat from the billionaires and other tycoons who are now in Trump's years down in Mar-a-Lago because of how much money they gave him during the campaign.
Interestingly, one of the people who sided with the MAGA base who opposed not just to illegal immigration but also expanding legal immigration was one Bernard Sanders.
It was very interesting because this had long been a left-wing view, a left-wing populist view.
It had always been the case for a long time.
That the American left was deeply skeptical of immigration.
In fact, when I started writing about politics in 2005, open borders immigration or much more permissive immigration policy was viewed as a Republican, Bush, Cheney, Chamber of Commerce policy.
They're the ones who wanted a lot more infusion of foreign workers because the more workers you have, obviously, the more supply there is of workers and the price goes down.
With just supply and demand.
The more workers you have available to do a job, the more you can depress the wage because you could find somebody to do the job for the lower wage and it hurts American workers.
And labor unions and left-wing, like traditional, classic left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders have long been opposed to untremeled immigration for that reason.
And so to watch Trump abandon that position in order to side with Elon Musk and Big Tech Illustrates a sort of left-right populist coalition that Trump, in my view, uniquely made possible.
Bernie, actually, his 2016 reiteration, was saying all sorts of things like this, that Bernie is mostly gone because he became obsessed with Russiagate and Trump is Hitler and just became an ordinary partisan Democrat, which took away all of his appeal from 2016. But back in 2016, Bernie's appeal was that he was talking about trade, In immigration, in wages, that was what he was focused on.
That's what just won Trump the election.
And he was doing so in a classically left-wing populist way.
That sounds a lot like right-wing populism because they arrive at the same conclusion for the same reasons.
The problem that happened on the left wing of the Democratic Party was that immigration stopped being viewed as a class issue or a wage issue and started to be viewed instead as a It got put through the prism of identity politics and anyone at all concerned about open borders immigration or favoring any kind of restrictions on immigration got accused of being a racist and white supremacist, white nationalist.
And that's when most people on the left had to abandon any skepticism of immigration.
But for decades before that, it had been viewed as a class and economics issue.
And open borders was considered, as Bernie Sanders put it in 2016, a Koch brothers plot.
So here is what Bernie Sanders said with that tweet on the screen.
He said, quote, Which was exactly, exactly what Trump's more populous MAGA base was saying.
And I think it indicates the broad appeal of this economic populism that Trump was going to have a lot more difficult time implementing.
In reality, his first term, and I go back to this all the time, I think the pivotal moment of the first Trump term was when Steve Bannon was working alongside Jared Kushner in the White House, obviously each in Trump's ear.
Bannon, because he had architected Trump's successful 2016 campaign, had been a major player in right-wing politics with Breitbart, and Jared Kushner simply by virtue of the fact that he was married to Trump's daughter, Ivanka.
And you have Jared Kushner, who's just a classic standard establishment Republican in foreign policy in the Middle East in terms of corporatism.
He was born to a billionaire and inherited massive wealth and thinks about the world through a corporatist lens, through a neocon lens.
But Steve Bannon was the opposite.
Steve Bannon's vision of the first Trump term was come in, raise taxes on the wealthy or around the corporations, use that money to both enact a bipartisan infrastructure bill that would spend billions and billions on renewing American infrastructure and putting people to work on those use that money to both enact a bipartisan infrastructure bill that would spend billions and billions on renewing American infrastructure and That was Steve Bannon's vision.
Instead, within six to nine months, Bannon was gone.
Jared Kushner became the dominant person in the White House.
And then Trump instead not only didn't raise taxes on the corporations, but cut their corporate taxes significantly and is promising to do so again.
But you see a lot of these tensions here that are definitely going to play out again.
And Steve Bannon predictably sided with the MAGA base, with Bernie Sanders against Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, arguing that increasing the number of foreign workers that come to the United States, even legally under an H-1B program, is a core betrayal, a severe betrayal of the worldview and the promises that Trump in 2016 made.
One of the ways that this conflict is manifesting as well is with the extreme amounts of dissatisfaction within the House Republican caucus with Mike Johnson as House Speaker.
Now, it just turns out, just a few minutes ago, Mike Johnson just got enough votes to be re-elected as House Speaker.
But it was touch and go.
It looked like he may not because there were two or three Republicans determined to vote no and that's all it takes to sabotage it.
The only thing that saved Mike Johnson was that Trump ended up backing him because Trump wants a certain level of stability.
He wants to avoid that kind of...
Chaos and drama that took place when Kevin McCarthy was deposed as House Speaker here from Newsweek at the end of the year, December 31st, quote, MAGA lashes out at Donald Trump's backing of Mike Johnson.
So Trump backed Mike Johnson and his own supporters, again, were infuriated by this.
And I think that is crucial that Trump constantly hears from his own supporters whenever he appears to be siding with the slump.
Here from Time Magazine, just to underscore the point about J.D. Vance, there you see the headline J.D. Vance's Populist Push, talking about how J.D. Vance probably, in my view, is the most authentic populist, economic populist in the Trump administration and also the most authentic opponent of...
Corporatist policies.
Now, and intervention and wars as well.
Now, obviously there are two ongoing wars.
Serious, dangerous, bloody, costly wars that the United States is funding with billions of dollars.
Not just funding but heavily involved in operationally.
One of them is the war in Gaza waged by Israel, financed by the Biden administration, armed by the Biden administration, diplomatically protected by the Biden administration.
It's now going on for a year and three months, no end in sight.
By all accounts, it has been the worst humanitarian war in decades.
Not just in terms of the number of civilians is killed, the number of children is killed, but the destruction of all civilian infrastructure, making Gaza basically inhabitable, ethnic cleansing, mass starvation, deliberate campaigns of hunger, collective punishment.
It's a historically sickening war waged by Israel.
And Trump has said he wants it to end, but what that means is unclear because he is, if nothing else, the one thing all of his appointees have in common.
Is that they are fanatical Israel supporters from RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, to Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik and Mike Huckabee, every single one of them.
There's not a peep of dissent on Israel, not in the Secretary of Agriculture, not in the Secretary of Interior or Labor.
And one of his biggest donors, his biggest one, in fact, after Elon Musk, which was Miriam Adelson, we did a whole show on her.
Her only issue, the only one she cares about, is having the U.S. do everything possible to Support Israel and all of its aspirations.
And that doesn't just include destroying Gaza but also expanding its territory in the West Bank, annexing it, annexing Gaza, annexing parts of Lebanon, and now parts of Syria as well.
Here from Al Jazeera, December 8th, Israel grabs land in Syria's Golan Heights, warn villagers to stay home.
Quote, So it's an expansionist war.
It's a destabilizing war.
It's a bloody war.
It's a war that's making people in the Middle East hate Israel, hate the United States even more.
How Trump handles that, it looks by all accounts that he's going to give the green light to Netanyahu to do anything and everything he wants, which basically is what Biden did as well, will be very significant.
Here from the United Nations Human Rights Organization, just to give you a sense for the extremity of what this word has become, Israel's assault on the foundations of international law must have consequences, say UN experts, quote, indiscriminate attacks, indiscriminate attacks, Including on shelters for displaced persons and the Kemal Adwan Hospital and its vicinity and the intensification of siege conditions on northern Gaza for the last three months run contrary to Israel's legal duty to ensure the protection of the civilian population, the experts said.
So here's Trump.
Elected on a platform to keep America out of wars that don't directly threaten American territory, saying that we can't continue to fund other people's wars, saying that about the war in Ukraine, but not only not saying that about the war in Israel, but saying that the United States has to do everything it can to advance Israeli interests.
He's even threatened Hamas and said, we're going to destroy you if you don't give back the hostages.
He's threatened Iran.
We may have to go and bomb Iran's nuclear facilities.
In fact, when Israel was considered bombing Iran, its nuclear facilities or its critical petroleum infrastructure, Trump said, yeah, go ahead and bomb its nuclear infrastructure, despite how obviously risky that is, giving Iran's power and reach in the region.
Here is Trump on Hugh Hewitt's show in April of 2024, talking about exactly these issues.
Well, that's all the advice you can give.
I mean, that's the advice.
You got to get it over with and you have to get back to normalcy.
And I'm not sure that I'm loving the way they're doing it because you got to have victory.
You have to have a victory.
And it's taking a long time.
And the other thing is I hate they put out tapes all the time.
Every night they're releasing tapes of a building falling down.
They shouldn't be releasing tapes like that.
That's why they're losing the PR war.
Israel is absolutely losing the PR war.
That's how I read your interview.
I read your interview saying they're losing the PR war.
They've got to stop releasing bad video and win the war by going into Rafa.
They're releasing the most heinous, most horrible types of buildings falling down.
And people are imagining there's a lot of people in those buildings or people in those buildings.
And they don't like it.
And I don't know why they release, you know, wartime shots like that.
I guess it makes them look tough.
But to me, it doesn't make them look tough.
They're losing the PR war.
They're losing it big.
But they gotta finish what they started and they gotta finish it fast and we have to get on with life.
It's certainly a more mixed message than anything Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or their top national security officials were saying.
He's clearly irritated with what Israel is doing.
He made that very clear.
He said it's pretty stupid for these Israeli soldiers and the IDF to constantly post these videos of this sadistic, gratuitous destruction, collapsing residential buildings, putting it on the internet.
He's like, I think they think it makes it look tough.
I don't think it makes it look tough.
There's a lot of animosity toward Israel there.
And he definitely had some personal conflict with Netanyahu, for sure, during his administration.
But at the same time, that first administration was probably the most pro-Israel presidency in the history of the United States.
Trump himself boasted about that, about how the Adelsons would come to the White House more than anybody else, demand something for Israel, he would give it to them, they'd come right back, they'd demand more, he would give it to them again.
And even during the campaign, Trump vowed When speaking to an American Jewish group, a right-wing Jewish group, he said, we're going to make America great again.
We're also going to make Israel great again.
Imagine running on a platform of America First and saying, we're going to make this foreign country great again.
That's what my administration is going to be about, at least one of the things.
And obviously, the people in Israel heard that because here was a big billboard after Trump won in Jerusalem that was on the front page of the Of Herod, but also other media outlets that read, quote, congratulations, Trump, make Israel great again.
And there you see Israel great underneath it kind of broken out.
And then you see the American flag and the Israeli flag merged with pictures of Donald Trump.
So there are a lot of major supporters, major contributors to Trump who are expecting him to prioritize the interests of Israel.
And notice he's saying I want the war over, but he's saying Israel has to go in and end it.
Presumably meaning even more destruction.
He's saying I want the war over with, not in the sense that he wants the Russia-Ukraine war over with.
Obviously no one thinks that war is going to end with the expulsion of Russian troops from Ukrainian soil, but he's saying I want it over with, meaning they have to do even more.
So it's a very mixed bag.
I don't think I can get worse than what the Biden administration was.
It might get better.
But There's a lot of conflict about the America First ideology and how America is so devoted to the interests of Israel, but I would say the vast majority of his base, not all of it by any means, but the vast majority, both the more traditionalists and the more populists, for a variety of reasons, are just as devoted to Israel as he is.
And that seems unlikely to create the kind of internal tensions that other issues, the ones that we've already covered, will.
Then we have the war in Ukraine.
Which is now going into its fourth full year.
It began in February of 2022. So all of 2022, 23, 24, and now we're going 2025. And nothing good in this war is happening for Ukraine.
Russia is not rolling over them, but they're certainly been making progress.
They've paid a big cost for this war the Russians have and lives and money and isolation on the international stage, at least when it comes to the West.
But Trump's view is this war has to end because the United States is paying for it.
The problem is that if he takes any steps to try and end the war in a way that gives big parts of Ukraine to Russia, either as some semi-autonomous region or a buffer zone or part of Russia, he will be endlessly accused, including by people of his own party, of serving Russian interests, of being Russian agent, all the things that plagued him in the first term.
Conversely, there's no way for this war to end without Having major parts of Ukrainian territory end up no longer under the sovereign control of Kiev.
There's no possibility of that.
The Russians occupy too much of it.
They're not going anywhere.
They pay too much of a cost to give that up.
And so Trump is going to have to, if he really wants to end this war.
Do so in a way that a lot of people in the West will feel humiliated by because they said we're going to go and win this war and winning means expelling all Russian troops from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea.
It was always an idiotic, unrealistic, maximalist definition of victory.
The West basically pointed themselves into a corner by saying, well, we're going to support this war until victory is achieved.
Victory is only defined by this unrealistic goal.
And obviously we will be humiliated if the Russians win, but they defined victory in a way that almost made sure Russia was going to win, and so the idea is that the war has to go on forever.
It can never really come to an end.
How would people in the West just accept that Russia will occupy parts of Ukraine?
There are ways to do it semantically, but it won't be easy.
But there are a lot of people surrounding Trump, a lot of members of the Republican Party, whose criticism of the Biden administration when it comes to Ukraine is not...
That the Biden administration shouldn't have gotten involved in the war, shouldn't have funded the war.
There are obviously some Republicans who believe that, but not most.
Most, including ones embedded inside the Trump administration at the highest levels, criticize Biden on the grounds that he should have been doing more for Ukraine.
He should have been unleashing more weaponry.
He should have been bombing more deeply into Russian soil, meaning involving the U.S. even more in the war.
That's the critique of the Biden administration.
Many of the people surrounding Donald Trump Just like the critique of the Biden administration when it comes to Israel is not that the Biden administration harmed American interests by supporting Israel, that the Biden administration set billions and billions of dollars on top of what we give to Israel every year.
It's that we should have done somehow more for Israel.
So Trump is heavily surrounded by and influenced by people who want to involve the U.S. even more so in both of these conflicts.
And how Trump's instinct works out, how he's concerned about his legacy work out, which is very much based on the idea that he ends wars and not starts them, I think it's very much up in the air how this is going to manifest.
You're from BBC. This was yesterday.
The endgame in Ukraine.
How the war could come to a close in 2025. Quote, I must say that the situation is changing dramatically.
Russian President Vladimir Putin declared at his end-of-the-year news conference in December.
Quote, there is movement along the entire front line every day.
In eastern Ukraine, Moscow's war machine is gradually churning mile by mile through the wide open fields of the Donbass, enveloping and overwhelming villages and towns.
As the invasion reaches the end of its third year at an estimated cost of a million people killed or wounded, Ukraine appears to be losing.
Despite declaring last July that Ukraine was on a, quote, irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership, the alliance is divided, with the U.S. and Germany not yet in favor of issuing an invitation.
Kiev's allies have also continued to ratchet up sanctions on Moscow in the hope that Russia's wartime economy, which has proven stubbornly resilient, may finally break.
Quote, there's been deep frustration that sanctions haven't just shattered the Russian economy beyond repair, a U.S. congressional source said.
But how much more territory will Ukraine have lost and how many more people will have been killed by the time that point is reached?
The West already realizes, pretty much everyone but the blindest extremists, that Ukraine has lost this war.
They imposed a huge cost on Russia, for sure, but to the extent there's changes in movement in the war, even Western outlets now admit, something they refused to admit for a long time, They accused anybody who was saying it of being a Russian agent.
They're now all admitting, and they'll admit in every European capital, that this war has to come to an end, that Ukraine is going to have to give up territory.
The problem is that Russia is winning.
They're continuing to make progress.
And they're not just going to help out Trump by accepting some deal far less favorable to their interests than the one that they could get by continuing the war.
It's a very dangerous situation and how Trump reacts is something that I think is, unlike in Israel where it's pretty predictable, is very unclear.
Here from AP at the end of the year, December 28th, quote, bloodied Ukrainian troops risk losing more hard-won land and curse to Russia.
So that part of Russia that they invaded and occupied, they're losing that as well.
CNBC in December, December 8th, said President-elect Trump says Ukraine will possibly, quote, possibly receive less military aid.
How That works out given, again, all the people who surround Trump who believe that they deserve more aid, that they deserve more aggression to get a better deal.
Remains to be seen.
Here's white Mike Waltz when he was in Congress.
He's now Trump's National Security Advisor.
On Fox News in March of 2022, so the month after the war began, criticized the Obama administration for not sending even more to Ukraine.
I was sitting there this morning wondering, is this how members of Congress felt when Churchill was asking the United States and the United States Congress to step up To the invasion and to the atrocities of Hitler so many years ago.
I do think he moved the needle today.
He reminded us of who we are.
We're the United States of America.
We do not let thug dictators like Vladimir Putin dictate the terms.
And we have to stop letting him deter us and letting him set red lines that this administration is afraid to cross.
So where he's going to move the needle, look, President Biden, send the damn MiGs.
Send in the air defense systems that the Ukrainians have been asking for.
Send those anti-ship missiles so that they can defend their ports.
The Ukrainians are clearly willing to fight and die for their territory and we have a moral obligation to help them.
Alright, so that's about as hawkish on Ukraine as it gets.
Right when the war started, Biden said we're going to do everything we have to to make sure Ukraine wins.
He sent, I forget that initial number, the very first one.
It was something like $25 billion.
Shortly thereafter, he sent a package for $60 billion more.
We immediately began sending huge amounts of arms to Ukraine, making it very clear we consider this our proxy war along with NATO. And here was Congressman Walz going on Fox and bashing the Biden White House for not doing more for calling him Chamberlain and saying he was a P, all the cliches of neocons.
Trump presumably knows this.
This is the person he chose to be his national security advisor, the person who is in his ear more than anybody when it comes to foreign policy.
Now, again, I don't think that means that Trump is going to follow Mike Walz any more than it means he's going to follow Tulsi Gabbard or anybody else or J.D. Vance.
But it doesn't mean that...
I think it clearly means that Trump's not just going to go into office and cut off funding to Ukraine, even though that's a big part of what his base wants.
So that's the war in Ukraine.
Obviously, it's a big question mark how that war finally gets resolved.
Then we have the question of free speech.
Free speech has obviously been a major cause on the American right ever since Trump's victory and...
Big tech censorship and government censorship started to become institutionalized when they concocted a fraudulent expertise called disinformation experts.
They started funding disinformation groups that were to arbitrate what is truth and what is falsity.
They forced big tech companies to promise to obey the decrees by removing quote-unquote disinformation, which resulted in the suppression of all kinds of valid political debate.
It As Mark Zuckerberg admitted, led to Facebook and other companies actually removing content about COVID and other things that not only was legitimate and valid as a view, but turned out to be true.
They censored true statements because the government or these groups funded by various billionaires proclaimed it to be false.
As frontal of an assault on First Amendment rights and values as it gets, that has been a major cause of the American right, waiving the matter of free speech and the like.
But there's a lot of signs that while certainly the Trump administration can be very aggressive in attacking any platform or any company or even any other government that targets conservative speech, pro-Trump speech, MAGA speech, There's still a lot of question about how much Trump and the administration and his supporters are going to actually be devoted to free speech.
There are some troubling signs.
One sign that's promising is that the Biden administration signed into law and aggressively advocated for a ban on TikTok.
And although Trump advocated that as well when he was president, he tried to do it by executive order and the court said you can't do that by executive order, you have to do it by an act of Congress.
Trump has subsequently changed his mind for whatever reasons.
Maybe he had an eye-opening about it.
He's now on TikTok.
He likes TikTok because he says he thinks he does well there.
He now has his own social media platform and company that's a source of his wealth that makes him perhaps more sensitive to giving the government the power, the dangers of giving the government power to ban social media platforms.
Could be because a major TikTok investor, Jeffrey Yass, became a Trump donor.
And he obviously has a big interest in not having TikTok ban since he makes a lot of money from it as a big investor.
Probably some mix of motives, whatever it is.
Biden now supports the TikTok ban.
The Democrats support the TikTok ban.
Trump opposes it.
And he doesn't just oppose the TikTok ban.
He's taking action to prevent it from being implemented.
He ran into the Supreme Court.
And we talked about Trump's argument here a few days ago.
Actually, I think we did it last night.
Or maybe we haven't delved into detail on this, actually, because we're on vacation when it happens.
So we'll probably do this next week.
But Trump went into the Supreme Court and filed a brief because the Supreme Court is considering this fast schedule because the implementation date for the TikTok ban is January 19th, one day before the new president's inaugurated.
Obviously not a coincidence that they did it after the election so people wouldn't realize, wow, the Democrats and Biden just banned TikTok.
But also had it implemented one day before the new administration takes office so they didn't get blamed for it.
And TikTok is in court saying to the Supreme Court, this is an unconstitutional law.
Americans who use TikTok are in court saying it's an unconstitutional act of censorship to take away this platform that we voluntarily choose to use.
And Trump has gone into the Supreme Court and asked the Supreme Court to delay implementation of the TikTok ban so that he can try and resolve this.
Here's AP. Trump asked Supreme Court to delay TikTok ban so he can weigh in after he takes office.
And in this legal brief, he made very aggressive arguments about why allowing the government to ban an entire social media platform is very dangerous, is a threat to free speech.
He didn't take an ultimate position on the constitutionality.
That's for the courts to decide.
but he was very clear that although he does think China poses a threat, he thinks the threat is at least as big, if not bigger, to allowing the US government to simply shut down whatever social media platforms the president deems to be dangerous, especially one that huge numbers of Americans voluntarily choose to use as the place especially one that huge numbers of Americans voluntarily choose to use as the place where they get their news, express Again, this is a reversal of Trump's view about
Back in August of 2020, he issued an executive order addressing the threat posed by TikTok.
And in it, he basically ordered TikTok to be forced to divest or to be shut down in the United States.
And this is the exact view that he now—the exact policy that he now— Opposes.
Now, the reason, in my view, the TikTok ban is so dangerous, beyond the fact that it gives the government the power to ban other platforms in the future, not just TikTok, is because in 2020, when Trump did it, the reason he did it by executive order is because they didn't have the votes in the Congress to form a majority to implement the TikTok ban because the Democrats hadn't been in office yet, Biden hadn't started to advocate for it, and so Democrats were very reluctant to ban TikTok.
The only reason...
There was finally enough votes to form a majority to ban TikTok in 2024, which is when it happened.
As the lawmakers themselves admit, it's because they became convinced that the reason TikTok is a danger is not because China owns it or controls it, but because TikTok allows too much criticism of Israel, too much pro-Talistanian content.
And the hardcore pro-Israel segment of the Democratic Party, which is the majority, which includes Joe Biden, said, no, we need to shut down this platform because it's allowing too much Israel criticism.
It's turning our young people into opponents of Israel.
It's pure censorship.
This is a dangerous platform because...
The country we worship and love is allowed to be criticized there, and there's a huge number of people using TikTok in the United States to spread negative information about Israel, and that is what we can't allow, and that's why we have to ban it.
Here from Rolling Stone, lawmakers admit they want to ban TikTok over pro-Palestinian content.
As a potential ban looms over the platform, some are admitting that they hope the app's demise will help kill pro-Palestinian sentiments online.
That's the real reason for the TikTok ban.
Whatever Trump's motive is in opposing the TikTok ban, it's certainly the right position.
It's a very dangerous law, but it's one the Democrats decided to support purely out of anger toward the political speech that's allowed there.
Here, NBC News, in August, once it was the TikTok ban was implemented and these protests over the summer on college campuses took place, Trump came out and said he has a plan to, quote, quell protest, which was, quote, deport pro-Hamas radicals.
So Trump said he wants to look at the people in the United States, evaluate their viewpoints when it comes to the Middle East and Israel, and pick and choose who should be deported based on whether they're pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian.
That's obviously a direct threat to free speech.
And I know people will say, wait a minute, these are foreigners in the United States.
They don't have First Amendment rights.
That's actually a huge misconception.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly held, the founders talked about how the First Amendment is not just a right given to American citizens, it's a restriction on what the US government can do.
And the U.S. government is restricted by the Constitution with respect to everybody that's inside the United States.
Regardless of whether they're citizens or legal immigrants.
Obviously, people legally in the United States can be deported without due process.
They don't have constitutional rights.
If people inside the United States are legally citizens, green card holders, student visas, work visas, the United States government is restricted to what they can do.
That's one misconception.
The other misconception is that people sometimes say, no one has a right to enter the United States, therefore you can be deported for any reason.
It is true that the United States doesn't have to allow people into the country who aren't citizens.
There's a lot of things the United States government does that they're not forced to do.
They give unemployment benefits to people when they lose their job.
They give welfare benefits to people when they're in need.
They give Medicare.
They give Social Security.
None of these things are required in the Constitution.
These are things the United States decided to give people.
And at any moment, the United States government could take away unemployment rights, could take away Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, welfare, these are all optional programs, discretionary programs.
Nonetheless, what the United States government can't do is say, we're going to offer you this benefit that we don't have to give you, and receipt of this benefit is conditioned on your not expressing a certain view that we dislike.
So in other words, the government could say, or Congress could pass a law saying, Anybody who criticizes Kamala Harris or the Democratic Party leadership shall be ineligible for unemployment benefits.
Now, if you're somebody who believes that as long as this right is optional, it can never be a violation of your free speech rights to be denied it because of your viewpoint, we'd have to say, yeah, of course the Congress can enact a law like that.
Anyone who receives unemployment benefits will lose their unemployment benefits if they criticize the Democratic Party.
And your argument would be, well, look, no one has a right to unemployment benefits.
And that's true.
The government could withdraw unemployment benefits for everyone.
What they can't do is condition the receipt of a benefit from And you're refraining from expressing a certain political view or requiring you to affirm it, even if they had the right to take it away for everybody.
The same is true for immigration.
Obviously, the U.S. government doesn't have to allow a single foreigner into the United States on a tourist visa, on a work visa, on a student visa, on a green card basis, on a naturalization basis.
They don't have to at all.
They could just deny everybody the right, anyone they want, to enter the United States.
But what they can't do Is take the group of legal immigrants and say your right to remain in the United States is conditioned upon you're not expressing certain views that we dislike.
So in other words, the government could say people who are here on work visas or student visas shall be permitted to stay unless they criticize the Republican Party.
As soon as they criticize the Republican Party they will be deported.
Obviously that's unconstitutional.
You can't condition the receipt of a benefit On somebody's willingness to suppress whatever views they have.
It's very clear in that example that that would be unconstitutional.
It's for the same reason unconstitutional.
To say we're going to allow people into the country on work visas, on student visas, on H-1B visas.
But the minute they criticize Israel, the minute they express support for the Palestinians...
Which is what Trump and people like him mean when they say pro-Hamas.
Obviously anyone who has ever criticized the United States, Israel, anyone who has criticized the Israeli war in Gaza, anyone who has expressed support for the Palestinian cause of statehood and sovereignty and dignity, you immediately get accused of being pro-Hamas.
You can't condition the receipt of immigration benefits...
On being willing to support the government's foreign policy or punish people by depriving them of those rights they've been given because you criticize the government.
And that's what Trump and a lot of Republicans are threatening to do in the name of protecting Israel.
Shortly after October 11th, in fact one week after October 7th, just a little bit over one week, Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has been a very outspoken critic of the U.S. intelligence agencies, for politicizing their activities and their powers for interfering around domestic politics wrote a letter to Merrick Garland,
the Attorney General in which he called on the Justice Department and the FBI to actively investigate any student groups We're good to go.
To investigate these organizations' funding sources.
The First Amendment protects the right to protest, but it does not protect the provision of material support to terrorist organizations, nor does it insulate financial transactions that threaten our national security.
Hamas, as you all know, is designated a terrorist organization pursuant to the INS law.
D.O.D. should deploy all appropriate authorities to investigate any potential links to organizations that operate with the United States.
Now, again...
There's a huge misconception in there, which is that you are guilty of materially supporting a terrorist organization if you express support for that terrorist organization with your speech.
That's not what material support means.
It's a crime to materially support a terrorist organization, which means the key word there is material.
You can't Send money to a terrorist organization designated by the US government as such.
The US government decides who is and is not a terrorist organization.
And once the US puts a group they dislike inside the terrorist categorization, it's a crime to send money to that group, to send arms to that group, to work for that group by going there and helping them launch attacks or fighting for them.
It's obviously not a crime to say, with your speech, I think Hezbollah is justified in using violence against Israel as a form of self-defense.
I think Hamas is justified in using violence as a form of resistance against Israeli occupation.
Those are political opinions.
You can't criminalize those.
You can't punish those.
You can't unleash the FBI to investigate people because they're against Israel.
You can't even unleash the FBI to investigate people who are against the United States, who are opposed to the United States government, let alone against Israel.
One of the more important points, I think, is that so often when conservatives who worship Israel or Democrats who worship Israel say, oh, people who support Hamas, meaning criticize Israel, should be deported, they're assuming, obviously, that those people are foreigners.
The reality is that a huge number, definitely the majority of people who are protesting against the Israeli war in Gaza are not foreigners, but they're American citizens.
Here NBC News says the vast majority of the protesters appear to be U.S. citizens.
Biden so far has not terminated any academic student visas due to participation in protests.
So when Trump says deport pro-Hamas radicals, the assumption is that all these people at these protests chanting globalized the Intifada or criticizing Israel for its war in Gaza are all foreigners who can be deported.
The vast majority of them are Americans.
Who don't want the U.S. government funding and financing Israel's military and its wars.
And obviously the idea of allowing the government to punish or investigate or put on watch lists, things that we covered yesterday a lot of conservatives are calling for, oh, if they're pro-Israel, if they're pro-Palestine or anti-Israel, put them on watch lists.
If you want to unleash the US security state and the FBI to start keeping dossiers on people and monitoring people because of their political views, if you want to punish them, not even because they're critical of their own government, because they're critical of a foreign government on the other side of the world, please just don't pretend that you are a free speech supporter, that you're an opponent of the US security state's abuse of its power for political ends.
All you want, you're not angry about censorship in general, you're angry that it's being directed at your allies instead of your enemies.
And you're not angry about the US security state's politicization.
You're angry that it's being directed at you and not your political enemies.
Which is absolutely no better.
Now there are a lot of international issues regarding censorship.
We have covered them many times before.
Other governments, like France, arresting Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, for not turning over private data about the users and not censoring on command.
Brazil banning Twitter acts in Brazil for not obeying censorship orders.
There you see France and Brazil.
There's an international movement, including especially, rather, in Europe, to try and force social media platforms to censor.
It's happening in Australia there as well.
You see it on the screen.
And it's going to take a very strong, aggressive effort on the part of the United States to resist this censorship scheme from other countries that don't believe in free speech.
But if the United States government itself is punishing political speech, is criminalizing criticism of Israel or support for the Palestinians, obviously the U.S. will have zero credibility to argue that case with any sort of moral conviction.
Alright, the final issue that we want to cover is the question of antitrust power and breaking up big mergers and conglomerates.
Lena Khan, as I said, was one of the people inside the Biden administration who's been most polarizing.
I think she's been one of the best appointments because I do believe that corporatist concentration just allowing one or two gigantic corporations like Amazon or Google We're good to go.
And therefore, it deprives those corporations of carrying what their users or consumers want, and therefore just making consumers completely powerless, no competitive alternatives, no consumer protections, is exactly the sort of thing that economic populism requires, a protection of the ordinary person, the ordinary citizen, against giant corporate power.
And Lena Kahn did that, and it's the reason why people like J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley and Matt Gaetz were such enthusiastic fans.
Trump's not keeping on Lena Kahn, but I do think it's worth remembering that the biggest antitrust suit, the most significant antitrust suit, is the one brought by the United States government against Google.
And that was not brought by the Biden administration, but by the Trump administration.
The antitrust division of the Justice Department and the FTC of the Trump administration initiated that lawsuit, and then it was carried forward by the Biden administration.
The new FTC chair that Trump wants to appoint is Andrew Ferguson.
And he is a fairly traditional Republican, does not believe in aggressive antitrust enforcement, believes that big mergers are positive.
The one exception is big tech, where he promises to be very aggressive in continuing the antitrust work of Lena Kong.
Quote, Ferguson, who has served as an FTC commissioner since April and is the former chief counsel to Senator Mitch McConnell, has pledged to crack down on big tech censorship, though he is expected to take a far more deal-friendly approach.
The Republican regulator, who also once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Claris Thomas, will replace current FTT chair Alina Khan, a Democrat who routinely infuriated Wall Street with a hard-charging approach to antitrust enforcement and merger review.
Immediately after being announced as incoming chair, Ferguson said he would, quote, end big tech's vendetta against competition and free speech and, quote, make sure that America is the world's technological leader and the best place for innovations to bring new ideas to light.
So, I guess it probably suffices to say, or at least it should, that he is someone who is a close ally of Mitch McConnell, arguably the least populous politician in all of Washington.
And although he talks a big, aggressive game about going after Big Tech, it's not because of an antitrust issue.
It's because they just want to prevent Big Tech from censoring conservative speech.
Not other kinds of speech, as we just reviewed, but conservative speech.
That's the only area in which Andrew Ferguson is...
Determined to continue with the rigorous antitrust enforcement, but in every other area, he seems to just say corporations can do what they want.
Now, there are countervailing trends, as is usually true with Trump.
He, as the head of the antitrust division inside the Justice Department, which brings lawsuits against corporations for antitrust, he appointed a very close ally, someone who was the chief of staff for J.D. Vance, who, as we just went over, is a big fan of Lena Kahn and favors her approach.
So you have two very different people there.
What happens with the FTC is it's always a three-to-two partisan breakdown.
The majority is always the party of the president.
And the minority is the opposition party.
So right now it's a three to two majority on the FTC with three Democrats led by Lena Kahn and two Republicans.
One of the Republicans who Trump appointed is also a fairly committed warrior against anti-competitive practices.
So it could be that one of the Republicans on the FTC can join with the two Democrats or even with the chair when it comes to big tech to continue antitrust regulation But this is going to be another place where there's a lot of division and even outright ideological conflict among Trump's key appointees.
And so how this plays out will be determined here from the Hill.
early December, Trump taps Gail Slater to lead the DOJ Antitrust Division.
Quote, President-elect Trump on Wednesday tapped Gail Slater, a former advisor to Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, to lead the Justice Department's Antitrust Division.
Quote, Big tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of many Americans, as well as those of little tech, Trump said in a statement.
The appointment is yet another indication that big tech can continue to face heavy scrutiny under Trump.
And notice there that Trump didn't just criticize big tech, Because it's censoring conservative speech, but he's also criticizing things like centralization of anti-competitive powers in Google and Facebook in a way that destroys the opportunity, as he called it, for a little tech to compete.
So this is one of those examples where Trump has a sort of reflexive support for the populist approach to antitrust enforcement as evidenced by the fact that it was his administration that initiated some of those important antitrust suits in the last five to six decades.
On the other side of that, though, is the fact that he is beholden to a lot of major big tech donors who obviously want to shield big tech from government scrutiny and regulatory supervision and not unleash the government on their industry.
But these conflicts are all over the Trump administration.
The TikTok ban, for example, you would think Elon Musk is the owner of one of the major social media platforms that competes with TikTok, would favor the banning of TikTok.
But in fact, he's come out opposed to it, saying even though it would benefit X, it's so dangerous and such a threat to free speech that I don't think we should allow the government to ban TikTok.
It could be because he's also in business with Chinese.
But this kind of ideological unpredictability Although not quite as good as being predictable in the positive way, being certain that they're going to come out on the right side of things, is infinitely better than what the Democrats would have been in terms of Kamala Harris just being an absolute servant of corporate and militaristic power the way the Democratic Party has been for many decades.
As I said, it makes it difficult to predict, but it also at least provides some cause for optimism and more so an opportunity for activism and for pressure on And for debate to actually affect policy, which ultimately at the end of the day is what a democracy is supposed to be about.
All right.
Probably you are familiar by now with our segment we call System Pupdate.
I still don't know the origins of that term.
I once credited a locals member with inventing it, and he himself renounced credit for it, saying that someone on our team actually invented it.
I think it might have been Victor Puget, who's our show's director and who's the co-host of our after show with me, and he said he doesn't think he did it.
Usually success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan.
In this case, the successful title is for some reason an orphan.
No one wants to claim credit for it.
I think it's great.
And the idea of it I think is even better, which is rescuing dogs is an incredibly profound thing to do, not just for the dog, but for the person.
It's something I devoted a lot of my life to doing.
I think every rescue story is different.
Every dog is different, and there's a lot to learn from every dog.
And so just as kind of a way to end each week on a lighter and more positive and inspiring and optimistic note, we're going to feature one of the dogs that we rescued, either who's now at our home, as in the case of Nico, the star of this segment this week, or at our shelter, where we the star of this segment this week, or at our shelter, where we have about another 150 to 200 dogs at I was being a little bit mocked by my colleagues here for always saying this.
I think I've said it every segment, but I'm going to say it this time because I really do mean it.
I've meant it the other times, too.
Maybe it's the fact that I'm enamored of all dogs.
I do find rescue stories so amazing, but Nico has one of the most extraordinary stories.
Of any rescue dog we've ever done for the reasons that you're about to see.
So we're going to show you this.
That will end the show.
And so thank you so much for watching.
We hope to see you back on Monday night and every night at 7 p.m.
Eastern live exclusively from Rumble.
I hope you have a great evening and a great weekend and enjoy this system update segment to end your week.
Today's guest starring dog, his name is Nico.
He's not exactly a lap dog.
I don't think I would say that I spend a lot of time with him in my lap like this, but he seems very happy.
Usually, he's just more running around.
Nico has an amazing story.
About 12 years ago, maybe, at the time, my husband David and I had six dogs, only six, and I was driving up the hill near our house, which was kind of in the middle of this forest, and I saw this old...
Debilitated dog doing her best to climb up this hill and really not being able to.
She was constantly falling down.
She was clearly not well.
I stopped.
She looked like she had a very distended stomach, which is common for dogs when they're starving or hungry.
At the time, we thought six dogs was too much, and I just, you know, have been yelled at many times if I take new dogs home.
So I tried to leave her there.
I had actually just come from the grocery store, so I fed her some food that I had bought.
And I went back home and I did everything to try and forget about her and I just couldn't.
So I, after a half an hour, went back to that spot.
She was barely, had barely moved.
She really, she had these like huge sores in her leg.
I picked her up and brought her home and things were okay at home about it.
I didn't get yelled at too much until that night when I brought her to the veterinarian and the veterinarian said, oh, good news.
She's pregnant and she's going to give birth to six dogs in about 10 days.
So I took her home and basically that meant that I had just doubled the size of our pack because we had six.
She was the seventh and six more was going to be 13. And then I did get in trouble domestically.
But at the same time, David fell in love with her and she gave birth to six puppies.
We found homes actually in the US for four of them.
I did a book tour with David.
We brought these dogs with us, dropped them off in different cities with the families that wanted each of them.
So we had two left.
One was Lug, who just died about two months ago.
It was a great dog.
That was one of her puppies.
And the other was Nico.
And they were inseparable, Nico and Lug.
They were brothers.
They were just, you know, the two left from the pack.
We had Mabel, of course, too, their mother.
And they were always together, kind of like as a family.
And sadly, Nico was sick from the time that he was born.
He had this stomach issue, an intestinal issue where he really couldn't process food.
And he died at the age of one and a half years.
It was so sad.
Nico was this very gentle, loving dog.
And Lou lost his brother and Mabel lost her puppy.
And it was just, we were all very sad.
And Nico was just such a kind, compassionate dog.
To see him die that young was amazing, was terrible and tragic.
And the amazing thing that happened is about six weeks after Nico died, this dog showed up right outside the gates of our house.
And he was a small puppy.
And we, of course, let him in and fed him.
And then immediately, not only did he become, of all the dogs we had there, I think 10 or 9 at that point, of all the dogs we had there, he picked Lug to attach himself to.
And all of his behavior was so similar to Nico, the way that Nico would stand up on his two hind legs and kind of hug you by putting his two paws on your shoulder, this dog started doing that as well.
And he had the same kind, gentle personality.
And, you know, you can say it's invented, you can say it's kind of a delusion, but we really felt like this dog was with the spirit of Nico.
I mean, they were identical in behavior, the fact that he was inseparable from Lug, We've never done this before, but we named him Niko after the dog who had just died.
And until Lou died two months ago, he and Niko were inseparable, as if they were actually brothers, like the first Niko.
And he's just an incredibly loving dog.
He can be aggressive when he's defending the dogs that he's very closely friends with.
He's older now, so he kind of has a lot of respect in the pack.
But he's never aggressive where he starts fights, he'll just, if a dog growls at a weaker dog or a dog that he likes, he will definitely defend that dog, but otherwise he's just a dog that is exactly like the puppy we found, full of love, very spiritually connected, Very peaceful, very tranquil, and it's very sad that Luke died because that was really his brother, even though not biologically, but spiritually for sure.
So we've been keeping an eye on him, kind of giving him a lot of attention ever since Luke died because he's obviously sad and misses the dog that he was closest to, but he continues to be just a very...
Happy, fun, playful dog and he's had an amazing life and he's still healthy even though he's getting up there in years.
