Trump Fosters A Peace Deal With Israel & Gaza; Trump's Pressure On Israel Embarrasses His Enemies & Provides Foreign Policy Clues; Rubio & Hegseth On War And Militarism
Trump's envoy finally achieves a ceasefire deal, ending the horrific carnage in Gaza. Nonetheless, Joe Biden, the very same person with the melting brain who has unconditionally funded and armed the Israeli destruction of Gaza for the last 15 months, had the audacity to claim credit for the deal. Plus: Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio's confirmation hearings reveal more about the next Trump administration's foreign policy.
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, after 15 continuous months of truly heinous and incomprehensible carnage in Gaza at the hands of Israel and their patrons in Washington, A ceasefire deal has finally been announced that, at least nominally, is intended to end all hostilities between the two sides.
The deal is to take formal effect on January 19th, one day before Trump will be inaugurated, which is exactly the date by which he demanded that Israel agree to a deal.
And while much is clear in terms of what the future entails, what remains is in doubt, much of it, including whether the violence will in fact end.
Whatever else is true about any of this, this is an inarguably and comprehensively positive event.
And the people who have been most brutalized and savage since October of 2023, namely the people of Gaza, are out in the streets celebrating it as such for understandable reasons.
Anything that puts an end to the constant bombardment and famine and arbitrary detention and torture and constant loss of innocent lives that they have endured for 15 months must be seen as an event to celebrate.
Whatever else is true about it and whatever the future might entail.
For days now, anyone with any basis for knowing about what this process has entailed has said that the only reason this deal is finally happening is because Donald Trump not only insisted on it but applied exactly the kind of pressure on Israel and Netanyahu that Joe Biden simply was unwilling and or unable to apply.
This is the consensus of anyone with knowledge of the negotiations, including many of the Israelis on Netanyahu's right, who are enraged that this deal is being done and are blaming Trump for doing it and view it as a betrayal of Israel.
Nonetheless, Joe Biden, the very same person with the melting brain who has unconditionally funded and armed the Israeli destruction of Gaza for the last 15 months, incapable of imposing even a single limitation or having his word honored at all, had the audacity to stand in Qatar today and aggressively take credit for this deal as his own diplomatic success.
That's nothing short of laughable.
But it does raise two important questions that we want to examine.
The first is, what does all of this signal about a Trump presidency and his foreign policy?
Many of the loudest Democratic Party politicians and pundits and media outlets, the AOCs and Bernie Sanders and many Hassans of the world, spent all of 2024 viciously mocking the idea that voting for Trump due to outrage over Biden's Gaza policy might actually make spent all of 2024 viciously mocking the idea that voting for Trump They insisted that clearly Trump would only make things worse in Gaza, and they deserve accountability for everything that they said that was so blatantly wrong.
But it also raises the question of what this deal will actually lead to.
Will it really finally restrain Israeli aggression against Palestinians?
Or were the Israelis promised things like the right to annex both the West Bank and Gaza in return for agreeing to a deal right before Trump assumes the presidency?
We'll examine, question, and cover all of that.
And then finally, two of Trump's key national security cabinet choices, Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio, testified at their confirmations hearings yesterday in the case of Hegseth and today for Rubio.
Both of them made some notable statements about wars in foreign policy.
In the case of Rubio, ones that are clear deviations from what he has long maintained, particularly about the war in Ukraine.
And those also provide some substantive insights into what a second Trump president's he made look like.
And so we'll take a look at those as well.
Before we get to all of that, we have a few quick...
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
For reasons I think ought to be obvious, there are a few topics, if there are any, that we have covered more frequently and more extensively over the last 15 months than the Israeli that we have covered more frequently and more extensively over the last 15 months than the Israeli destruction of all civilian infrastructure and much of civilian life in Gaza as a response
And as we've repeatedly pointed out, this isn't really an Israeli attack as much as it is an American attack, given that the United States single-handedly enabled these attacks to take place by paying for the Israeli attack and assault, arming everything Israel was doing inside Gaza,
so much so that often when things were blown up, including residential buildings, killing huge numbers of civilians, And it became increasingly
clear.
But even if it meant that they would lose the election, which was a definite possibility, given how many traditional Democrats in places like key battleground states in Michigan were saying that they would possibly refuse to vote for Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris, or even would vote for Donald Trump, overrage at Biden's support for the Israeli destruction of Gaza, even though they knew it might end, it might severely harm their ability to beat Donald Trump, who they were claiming was Adolf Hitler.
Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris were completely unwilling, probably unable as well, but certainly unwilling, to impose, apply even the slightest pressure on Netanyahu.
As I said, we had all the leverage in the world the U.S. government did.
Without the U.S. government paying for the war, without them arming the war, without them diplomatically protecting it, there could never have been an Israeli destruction of Gaza.
Joe Biden had the power to end that the minute that he wanted.
All kinds of Democratic pundits.
And officials in the Democratic Party mocked this idea that Joe Biden had that power.
But of course he had it all along.
He just never tried to use it.
Even when he was humiliated by the Israelis, which were often, when, for example, he ordered them not to invade and attack and bomb the refugee camp in Rafa, which is where the Israelis told the 90% of the Palestinian population that was displaced to go.
And immediately Netanyahu laughed it off, even though Joe Biden called that a red line for him, which his president speak for, not only are we asking you not to do this, we're telling you not to do it, and there will be consequences if you do.
And yet Netanyahu laughed in his face, said they don't care about Biden's red lines, that they're of course going to go into Rafa.
And they not only went into Rafa, they destroyed it, killing untold thousands of people.
And Biden just continued to send money and arms to Israel, showing his subservient posture to them.
So there was no leverage, no pressure that Biden could impose on Israel, that he wanted to impose on Israel, even though it was all there right in front of him.
This deal only happened, and we never even really got close to an actual peace deal, an actual ceasefire deal, other than very temporary ones where they would exchange a few hostages in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners that would last a couple days or a few days.
We never really got near a peace deal that was intended to be a comprehensive one that would guide the two parties into the future and try and end hostilities until Donald Trump got elected president two months ago.
And ever since then there has been continuous progress in negotiating a peace deal and then Trump had said repeatedly both before the election and after that he wanted this war over before he became president because he wants to focus on The domestic priorities that he promised his voters he would pursue and not be caught up in, not just in Israeli destruction of Gaza, but all the instability in the Middle East that creates.
He also wants to forge peace deals involving Saudi Arabia and Emiratis and Qatar with Israel, none of which is remotely possible if Israel is still bombing Palestinians.
And so he repeatedly said, I want this war done before I become president.
He then dispatched a very aggressive Envoy to the Middle East, a longtime friend of Trump's.
He's a Jewish Zionist, longtime supporter of Israel, extremely aggressive businessman who has worked in New York real estate with Trump.
And he got extremely aggressive because Trump told him, I want this to come to an end.
And by all accounts, where Joe Biden couldn't and wouldn't end this war, in fact, where he fueled it and paid for it and funded and armed it and fueled and made it worse, Donald Trump's victory quickly led to a peace deal that by no means is certain in terms of whether it will really end in any kind of permanent way, Israeli violence in Gaza, but at least it gives them the best chance possible.
and all you need to do to know that is to look at the streets of Gaza where you see Palestinians who have been savage and brutalized for 15 months out on the street, very emotionally celebrating for reasons that ought to be self-evident.
As far as the deal itself, here's the Wall Street Journal from earlier today.
Israel and Hamas agreed to a deal to pause fighting in Gaza.
The foes struck an agreement they had resisted for months as broader shifts pushed them together.
Quote, the first stage of the deal would pause the fighting in Gaza and allow for the release of some Palestinian prisoners held in Israel in exchange for the release of 33 hostages being held in Gaza.
The hostages to be released would include women, children, people with severe injuries, and those above the age of 50. According to a draft seen by the Wall Street Journal, Hamas would also hand over dead bodies.
The real test for the ceasefire could come after the first 16 days when the parties will begin debating whether to extend the pause into a permanent end to the fighting over the second and third stages of the deal.
These stages would also include the release of all the hostages and eventually a plan to rebuild Gaza.
Far-right members of Netanyahu's government have publicly denounced the deal, which they say will end Israel's war in Gaza without uprooting Hamas.
But in recent days, Netanyahu has made headway towards shoring up support for the deal within his government, even without far-right votes.
According to people familiar with the matter, the terms of the agreement aren't substantially different from those that were available months ago, when more Israeli hostages remained alive and before thousands more Palestinians lost their lives.
but several factors pushed the parties closer recently.
Both sides have been galvanized by President-elect Donald Trump's imminent return to office.
The incoming president said a week ago that, quote, all hell will break out in the Middle East if the hostages aren't released by the time he is inaugurated on January 20th, repeating a threat he had made earlier.
He hasn't explained what he meant, but said last week it wouldn't be good for Hamas or, quote, for, quote, frankly, for anyone.
Every single sector of information that has actual knowledge about the process, The Israeli media first, enraged allies of Netanyahu who see this deal as a massive threat to Israel and as the wrong decision and who blame Trump for it.
Even anti-Trump media outlets in the West, including the New York Times and the Independent and many others, all of them by consensus.
Even some Biden officials.
I'll say the same thing.
There's only one reason this deal got done.
And that was because Trump not only wanted it done, but escalated the tone and the pressure placed on Netanyahu to accept the deal.
A deal that was available for a long time.
It was the deal Biden had advocated.
He just couldn't get Netanyahu to accept it because Netanyahu never cared about what Biden said.
And I don't blame him.
Biden repeatedly made clear that even if you ignore everything I say, even if you laugh in my face, even if you defy everything I ask, I'm still going to send you billions of dollars and all the weapons and money that you need.
Why would anyone listen to somebody that submissive?
Despite all that, Joe Biden stood up and caught her today.
They flew him over there with Kamala Harris and Antony Blinken.
And he very assertively tried to take credit at a press conference for Having done this deal, and he congratulated himself for freeing the hostages.
Before that statement, before that press conference, he issued a written statement that read as follows.
Quote, Surge much needed humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians and reunite the hostages with their families after more than 15 months in captivity.
I laid out the precise contours of this plan on May 31st, 2024. Seven months ago.
After which it was endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council, it is the result not only of the extreme pressure that Hamas has been under and the changed regional equation after a ceasefire in Lebanon and weakening of Iran, but also of dogged and painstaking American diplomacy.
My diplomacy never ceased, and my diplomats never ceased in their efforts to get this done.
Imagine the audacity needed to have spent 15 months overseeing this war, funding it, having your word utterly ignored.
Not even getting close to a peace deal.
Six days before Trump's about to take office, less than two months after, just a little bit more than two months after Trump's victory in the 2024 election, finally there's a peace deal.
Everyone who's for the deal and everyone who is against it emphatically say the only reason Netanyahu finally accepted it, and he was the impediment, was because of Trump's pressure.
And then Joe Biden, who doesn't even know where he is, Stands up and says, oh, this happened because of me, because I was so tough and strong, I freed the hostages.
Here is Biden at the press conference, courtesy of Al Jazeera and Qatar, where he was asked who deserved credit for the deal, and this is what he said.
I'm confident.
Thank you.
Is that a joke?
Oh.
Thank you.
Well, that clearly wasn't a joke, and that was Biden's passing words there.
He's just so curmudgeonly and so aggressive always in these latter days.
It's like, I don't know if you've seen before, but when people go into nursing homes, I remember my grandmother was in a nursing home for almost three full years.
She had a stroke prior to her death, though.
I spent a lot of time in nursing homes when I was in high school visiting her.
And there was often the case that, especially the men who had dementia or Alzheimer's, they would get very angry easily, very aggressive too.
Actually, some of them got quite strong because of their dementia.
Biden has been just very bitter and very threatening with every time he's confronted with any kind of a question.
No, it's not a joke to ask who he thinks deserves credit for the deal.
and he thinks that he's so obviously the one who did it.
That to even ask the question is insulting, even though his own team, even though American diplomats have said that the only reason this got done was because of Trump.
Now, the whole mythology and deceit over the last 15 months came when the Biden White House and the Democratic Party started realizing what trouble they would be in because Muslims and Arab voters and leftist voters and younger voters...
In large numbers, potentially, we're going to refrain from voting for them or even vote for Trump out of disgust and anger over Biden's unstinting support for Netanyahu and the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
And so there constantly was this series of preposterous theatrical leaks about how angry Biden was with Netanyahu, how much he disliked him, how he's had enough.
And then a week later, there'd be a news item saying that Biden just authorized or sent another $4 billion to Israel.
Here's one example from Business Insider.
These happen almost every two weeks, February of 2024. Quote, Biden is taken to privately calling Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, quote, an asshole.
Report says, ooh, he called him an asshole.
He must really mean business this time.
That was almost a full year ago.
No ceasefire deal, no honoring of anything the U.S. wanted, full-scale destruction indiscriminately of Gaza.
And Biden can act like he was a tough guy because he told his aides that he thinks Netanyahu is an asshole, and then they leaked it to the press to make it seem like to deceive voters into believing that Biden was actually standing up to Netanyahu.
The Israeli Daily Heretz, which has done a good job reporting on a lot of what was going on in Gaza, and also debunking a lot of lies told by the Israeli government about it, even though they editorially supported the Israeli attack on Gaza, published an article yesterday even though they editorially supported the Israeli attack on Gaza, published an article yesterday that asked this question in the title, quote, that Gaza's ceasefire and hostage deal is the same one Why did Netanyahu accept it now?
And then there you see the image, the picture that they put To accompany that headline, which basically answers the question.
The answer is because of Donald Trump.
In case you're wondering what Trump has to say about this, he said exactly what you would expect him to say, which is, I'm the one who did this deal and this is a great deal.
And he obviously is worried about his right in the United States, many of whom, both pro-Israel fanatics but also Republican senators who are also pro-Israel fanatics, are starting to get restless about their dislike of this deal.
Their bloodthirst is by no means satiated.
They want to see a lot more dead Palestinians.
They want to see the Arabs pushed out of Gaza into the sea or into Jordan or Egypt or wherever, just so that the Israelis can take over Gaza without the people, the two million people, the two million plus people who live there bothering them.
And none of that has happened yet.
Hamas has not been destroyed, which is the stated goal of the Israeli government at the start.
So Trump, also while taking credit, needs to say that this is a great deal for Israel, even though the Israeli right and a lot of hardcore supporters of Israel in the United States know that it isn't.
Here's Trump today, quote, This epic ceasefire agreement could only have happened as a result of our historic victory in November as it signaled to the entire world that my administration would seek peace and negotiate deals to ensure the safety of all Americans and our allies.
Is there any question about that?
But the only reason this deal happened is because of Trump's victory in 2024. Do you think that if Kamala Harris had won after saying all the time that she would continue Biden's policies, after having read from her script at AIPAC over and over,
after getting into the Senate in 2018, or rather 17, and one of her first acts was to criticize President Obama for having Do you think that Kamala Harris would have bucked the U.S. security state and stood up to Netanyahu and
sent an envoy there to badger him almost insultingly in order to get a deal?
Does anyone actually think there's even a point?
Zero, zero, zero, one percent chance that Kamala Harris would have done this had she won, that this would have happened.
Of course it's because Trump won.
It's not even worth debating.
Although I will show you a lot of proof for it beyond what I've already showed you.
He goes on, quote, Throughout the region as we build upon the momentum of the ceasefire to further expand the historic Abraham Accords.
This is only the beginning of great things to come for America and indeed the world.
Now Trump considers a signature foreign policy legacy of his to be these Abraham Accords that started to try and normalize relationships between everyone in the Middle East except for Iran centered around Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and then also Israel.
And one of the major impediments to Trump doing deals with the Saudis and the Emiratis, and he loves the regimes of Saudi and the Emiratis because they do a lot of business with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and with the Trump organization itself.
They're extremely wealthy people.
They have billions and trillions of dollars to spend on whatever they perceive to be in their interest.
So Trump really likes them, likes to have good relationships with them.
And he wants to forge a peace deal that will normalize once and for all relationships between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the Emiratis and other Gulf state governments without any kind of further hostility.
But the only way that could have happened is if the Israeli attack on Gaza ended.
And that was one of the main reasons why Trump wanted it to end.
Here is an Israeli news outlet called Walla that is more to the right, sometimes pretty extremist.
And just to give you a sense for what the Israeli right, the more extremist in Israel are saying about this deal, it's here in Hebrew, but we translated it to English.
The headline is, Netanyahu agreed to Trump's outline, even at the cost of the hostages' lives.
So even the people who hate this deal, including in Israel, see this as Trump's doing.
Quote, "Nedanyahu has convinced himself to accept Trump's outline, which was already being considered in May.
All that remains is to mourn the lost time, the hostages who were murdered in captivity, and the fighters who were killed in vain." Quote, "The mistake of all those who demanded early elections to end the war and secure the return of the hostages was that they demanded early elections in Israel.
They should have demanded early elections in America." I'm confused with something else that I read.
This is actually happy about the deal, but recognizing that it's for Trump.
And they were saying, essentially, this could never happen without a Trump victory.
And for that reason, people who wanted an end to this war and who were demanding an early election to get rid of Netanyahu should have instead been demanding an early election in the United States to get Trump in earlier, which would have been the only thing that could have ended this war.
The article goes on, quote, If there are no last-minute mishaps, the kind that has happened more than once, the framework for the release of the hostages, which Israel and Hamas are expected to reach, is the result of explicit threats from the incoming U.S. President Donald Trump, The same applies to the explicit signs indicating the approaching end of the war in its current form.
Because with all due respect to ideology principles, the quote, absolute victory and all those empty posturing driven by nothing but fear of the far-right Israeli minister Ben Javier, all of this melts away within seconds when faced with Trump.
Netanyahu has done his calculations he can handle Ben Gavir.
Dealing with Trump will be more difficult.
He doesn't want to end up like Canada or spend his retirement in Greenland.
His plan right now is to wrap up the Gaza issue and then proceed, perhaps even rush, to an agreement with Saudi Arabia.
Steve Whitcoff, Trump's envoy, made it clear to Netanyahu that this is immediately achievable.
Trump essentially convinced Netanyahu to accept his own outline, an outline that first appeared in May and was still relevant in August.
There's no doubt that in order to get this deal done, Netanyahu extracted a lot of promises from Trump.
Certainly, one of the main ones was a promise that the Saudis are ready to do a deal with Israel the minute the war in Gaza stops, which is important to the Israelis because it will strengthen their hand against Iran.
It will unite Israel with a lot of longtime enemies in the Persian Gulf region that have...
Weakened Israel and its position in the region.
It will strengthen them by opening up those relations and, in their mind, further weakening and isolating Iran.
So that's an important priority for Netanyahu that Trump undoubtedly promised him.
It's also possible that Trump made other promises, including support for the annexation of the West Bank.
And that's why I say that what is going to happen remains to be seen, but there's no question that anything that ends This horrific and historically criminal war.
It's not really a war.
It's not a fight between two militaries.
It's a massacre of one country's military that is funded and armed by the greatest, most powerful country on Earth, which is the United States, and a completely helpless population.
Filled overwhelmingly, or more than 50%, with women and children who have borne the vast brunt of the fatal injuries in this ongoing assault.
Here's Heretz analyzing exactly what it is that led to this deal finally happening.
This is two days ago.
Analysis.
Trump's Mideast envoy forced Netanyahu to accept the Gaza plan he repeatedly had rejected.
This is an indication, it gives you a taste, a feel for how aggressive Trump's envoy was being with the Israelis.
Obviously, Trump said, I want this done.
Do whatever you have to do to get it.
And Steve Whitcoff, a long time, Very hard-knuckled negotiator in the world of Manhattan real estate, which Trump obviously knows very well.
It's where he comes from.
He also has credibility with the Israelis because he's not just an American Jew, but also a longtime Zionist, hardcore supporter of Israel.
So by dispatching him with this kind of tone that you're about to see, the Israelis obviously took it seriously.
Quote, last Friday evening, Stephen Whitcoff, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's Middle East envoy, The Israeli aides politely explained that it was in the middle of the Sabbath, but that the Prime Minister would gladly meet him Saturday night.
Witkoff's blunt reaction took them by surprise.
He explained to them in salty English, That Shabbat was of no interest to him.
His message was loud and clear.
Thus, in an unusual departure from official practice, the Prime Minister showed up at his office for an official meeting with Whitcoff, who then returned to Qatar to seal the deal.
He told the aide, I don't care about the Sabbath.
I don't care if religious Jews don't work on Saturday.
Now he's going to meet with me.
Can you imagine a diplomat in the Blinken State Department talking to Benjamin Netanyahu that way and to the Israelis that way?
But that's the kind of thing that was necessary to signal to them that they meant business.
Isn't this Israeli officials in the Israeli right making clear in the Israeli media that it was Trump who caused this deal to happen, even though Biden claimed credit today?
It's also Arab officials from the Times of Israel earlier today.
headline, Arab officials say Trump envoy swayed Netanyahu more in one meeting than Biden did all year.
Quote, the tense journalism Jerusalem sit-down led to breakthrough in talks with Israel and Hamas agreeing in principle with the hostage deal two days later.
Sides are now finalizing implementation details.
Even the Israeli government's spokesman in the U.S. media, Barack Ravid, who until 2023 was actually in the IDF, in the IDF reserves.
He had previously worked in a Sontorius intelligence agency.
The unit 820, he's now the star reporter for Axios who carries forth the message of the Israeli government and the Biden White House.
He received an award from the White House press corps at that nauseating Spectacle that they hold every year at the White House press corps in the White House where they all get dressed up in their gowns and pretend they're at the Oscars.
And Barack Ravid was given this award for mindlessly reciting what the Israelis and the Americans told him to say.
And Joe Biden hugged him.
He's the official spokesman for both governments, especially the Israelis, but there's been no daylight between the two.
So he's been able to serve both.
He went on CNN today and even he admitted the important role that Trump played in getting this deal done.
Here you'll hear it.
Yeah, so first about Donald Trump, I think Donald Trump was an important factor in this deal.
His involvement, I think, was, you know, the, you know, five cents to the dollar that was missing.
I think his public statement, threatening that they'll be held to pay in the Middle East if there's no deal, was extremely important.
I think the fact that he and the Biden administration, I think Joe Biden and Donald Trump did something that I think no US presidents and president-elect ever did.
They worked together during the transition period on a huge diplomatic deal and got it.
Biden's envoy, Brett McGurk, and Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff, sat together in the meetings in Doha in the negotiations.
This is what now Democrats are trying to resort to, which is, yes, Trump was absolutely critical, but so were we.
Even though we spent 15 months not even getting close to a deal, not even trying to get one, only got one when Trump showed up, we also mattered.
But the fact that they're even giving credit to Donald Trump.
After just running a campaign based on accusing him of being a fascist and a Hitler figure and a white supremacist and a dictator, they're just now connecting themselves, latching on to Trump and his success to try and have some of it spill over onto them.
Here is the State Department's spokesman, Matthew Miller, who has spent the last 15 months standing up every day at this podium, lying to the public, defending everything Israel did.
He's a lifelong supporter of Israel and his legacy in life will be spending 15 months defending not just Israel's destruction of Gaza but the decision of the Biden administration to pay for it and arm it and protect it.
Here was he, even he today stood up at that podium and talked about how critical Trump was to the success of this deal.
When it comes to the involvement of President-elect Trump's team, it has been absolutely critical in getting this deal over the line.
And it's been critical because, obviously, as I stand here today, this administration's term in office will expire in five days.
And one of the things that we have always said about this deal is that when you get from stage one to stage two, that the United States, Egypt, and Qatar are the guarantors of this deal.
And Egypt and Qatar will push Hamas.
To stay at the bargaining table and to get from stage one to stage two.
And the United States will push Israel to stay at the bargaining table to get from phase one and phase two.
So obviously those are promises we cannot make on behalf of the United States for any longer than the next five days.
And so it's critical that all of the parties to the agreement and the other mediators see that when the United States is in the room...
Those are lasting commitments that extend beyond this administration into the next one.
I would just say, lastly, I don't know if it's unprecedented to have envoys from an outgoing and an incoming administration sitting at the same table negotiating a ceasefire agreement of this kind.
But if it's not unprecedented, it's certainly unusual.
We, of course, thank the Trump team for working with this on this ceasefire agreement.
We think it's important that they were at the table.
Obviously, the question is, if this was something that the Biden administration wanted and had been pushing, why couldn't they get it done over the last year?
Why did it take the arrival of Donald Trump, the victory of Donald Trump, the imminent inauguration of Donald Trump to make it happen?
And the reason is twofold.
One is the Biden administration never really pushed for it, never really tried.
They just cursorily advocated for it, but with no backup, no leverage, no threats to the Israelis about what would happen if Netanyahu rejected it.
And so he just kept rejecting it because he didn't have any respect for Biden or his State Department officials.
But it's also because Trump actually applied that pressure.
Trump came in and made it clear that there could be consequences for Israel.
He used both the promise of benefits but also threats in order to induce Netanyahu to accept the deal.
And that's why everybody, again, credits Trump for it, including the most mainstream of all British newspapers, The Independent, sort of the New York Times of Great Britain, for better or for worse, here today.
Their headline says it all.
Trump is credited for the ceasefire breakthrough as the U.S. officials who resigned over Gaza war slammed Biden's inaction.
Officials said the breakthrough came when Trump applied pressure on the Israeli government, something Biden was unwilling to do.
That just is the crux of the matter.
Quote, this is a deal that, in its basic form, has been on the table for many months.
And it is an absolute travesty that the Biden administration never used any of the massive leverage it had to push it over the finish line, Josh Paul, who resigned from the State Department in opposition to America's policy of providing lethal arms to Israel for using Gaza, said.
The agreement, quote, demonstrates clearly that Biden could have achieved a ceasefire all along if his people were really serious about it.
Anel Shiline, who resigned from the State Department in February of 2024, told The Independent, quote, It's not as if suddenly the terms have shifted significantly, it's just that now you have an incoming president who is willing to actually use some pressure.
Shiline, who resigned from the Biden administration over the president's refusal to lean on the Israeli government to prevent more bloodshed in Gaza, said, Tariq Havash, the first administration appointee to resign in protest over the war, also pointed the figure at Biden, calling it, quote, The Washington Post also cited a diplomat briefed on the ceasefire negotiations crediting the influence of Trump's team, saying it was, quote, the first time there has been real pressure on the Israeli side to accept a deal.
These are not MAGA loyalists.
They're not Trump officials.
These are people who work inside the Biden State Department.
And they were clearly pretty much on the left, center-left side of the second, or maybe I'm not.
It remains to be seen.
It's in suspense.
I think it went away.
I don't know why.
I think when I talk about it, it goes away.
So these are not people that the Independent was citing who are...
They're not loyal to Trump.
In fact, they resigned from the Biden administration over anger of the Biden administration's arming and paying for and protecting the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
And what they're saying is that Biden could easily have done what Trump just did, but he was just refusing to use any pressure at all.
It was like he didn't really want it to happen.
He wanted to pretend.
He wanted a ceasefire deal, but he had nothing to make it happen.
The only reason why it happened, said they.
It's because Trump came in and did exactly what Biden failed to do in 15 months.
Trump got it done in about a month, and he did it by applying the exact pressure that people had been urging Biden to apply, and he simply refused to do so.
Even the New York Times, in that famous phrase today, was forced to give Trump credit.
Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire deal, Biden says.
Quote, President-elect Donald J. Trump got ahead of the Biden White House announcement about a ceasefire deal.
Quote, we have a deal for the hostages in the Middle East.
They will be released shortly.
Thank you, he wrote.
But Trump's win in the election and coming return to Washington, as well as his team's work, was, according to multiple people, a factor in the deal getting done.
That's as far as the New York Times will go, to acknowledge that it was a factor, but clearly it was.
The Executive Director of CARE, which is the Center for...
It's the Council for America Islamic Relations, CARE. They are a group that advocates for Muslim civil liberties, obviously for the rights and lives of Muslims in the Middle East.
And this was the Executive Director, who I've known for a long time, Niyad Awad.
This is what he said, quote, Donald Trump, we commend you for pushing a ceasefire deal and reportedly warning Netanyahu that Israel too would face consequences for continuing to refuse to make a deal.
We urge you to ensure that the Israeli government does not sabotage this ceasefire deal.
It isn't just the Israeli right who perceives that this is a bad deal for Israel, that Israel is being forced into a deal for peace without achieving their goals.
including the goal of Destroying Hamas, which is what Netanyahu said the law was.
And as that Israeli paper pointed out, what is so sickening about this is that if Biden had applied pressure the way Trump did back in May and back in August when this deal was being discussed and had he gotten this deal done, thousands of Palestinian lives would have been saved, people who have been killed since then.
And dozens of Israeli hostages would have been saved as well, people who have died often from Israeli bombing or Israeli shelling or...
Other types of attacks.
Biden's refusal to apply pressure killed a huge number of people unnecessarily just to get to the same deal that he was incapable of inducing the way Trump just did.
But there are a lot of Israeli extremists but also pro-Israel fanatics inside the United States including in Trump's own party.
Who don't like this deal because they wanted to see a lot more dead Palestinians, a lot more destruction, the expulsion of Arabs from Gaza.
Hear from the Jewish Insider today, quote, Republican lawmakers raised concerns about the Israel-Hamas hostage deal.
Some Republicans worried the terms of the agreement currently being negotiated could hurt Israel's ability to defend itself and eliminate future terror threats.
Despite President-elect Donald Trump's push for a deal to secure the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza before his inauguration, some Republicans are raising concerns that the terms of the agreement currently being negotiated could hurt Israel's ability to defend itself and eliminate future terrorist threats.
Behind the scenes, Congressional Republicans have begun fretting.
that Trump could force them to back a deal that involves terms they've opposed for over a year.
Some lawmakers and senior staffers have privately discussed the issue among themselves, though none of them have taken additional steps beyond engaging with Trump's transition team about their concern.
None of the Republican lawmakers who spoke to the Jewish insider for this story praised or defended the terms of the deal as it is currently written.
The few Republican lawmakers willing to voice their skepticism publicly pointed to specific details that worry them.
Senator Tom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, said that he was, quote, really in the skeptical column for anything related to Hamas.
Tillis expressed concern that the terror organization was included in negotiations at all.
As though you shouldn't negotiate with the group that has the singular power to end the war?
Quote, I feel like they're the wrong people to be brokering the deal because in some respects that means you're a part of the future of Gaza.
That's a bad thing, he said.
Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said that while he wasn't read up on the specifics of the deal as it currently stands, he had reservations about some of the terms negotiated under the outgoing administration, pointing to the release of Palestinian terrorists being held in Israeli prisons.
So there are a lot of people inside the United States and a lot of people in Israel, the pro-Israel fanatics who think that this is a bad deal, who are concerned about it.
In fact, many of the Republican senators were attacking the Biden administration even for presenting the deal.
Saying it was a victory for Hamas.
And now that it's Trump who got this deal done, obviously they're in a very difficult mind because they don't want to criticize Trump, but they obviously can't endorse a deal that they publicly denounced when they thought it was associated with Biden.
Tom Cotton tried to, the Republican from Arkansas, one of the worst people in the Senate, tried to get out of that conundrum by lying and saying that credit for this deal is with Joe Biden.
This is Joe Biden's deal.
That's the only way he could condemn it as being pro-Hamas.
Attacking Biden for the deal when everybody knows and everyone reported that this deal was Donald Trump's, including Trump who took credit for it.
And there you have Tom Cotton just pounding the table saying, Joe Biden has compromised Israel.
There can be no deal unless Netanyahu accepts it.
There can be no deal unless the Knesset ratifies it.
And yet Tom Cotton thinks he knows better for Israel than the Israelis do.
Part of the Israeli right is furious with Trump because they know that's who caused the deal as well.
Here is Arel Seagal who went on to Channel 14. He is a close ally of Benjamin Netanyahu.
He hates this deal and he blames Trump for it.
And here is what he said.
When Trump was elected, what was I doing?
I was wrong and thinking that the first to pay the price would be the Ukrainians.
It might be we that are the first to pay the price for Trump's election.
Because in this deal, I don't want to say we're trying to get into it.
I wouldn't meddle in it, and I don't know all the details, so I'll be more cautious, etc.
But I don't think this is what we planned and what we expected.
We thought we were talking about—oh, sorry.
Let me just...
I accidentally stopped that.
We thought we were talking about other things.
We thought we could take control of the Northern Strip that would allow us to prevent aid from entering these areas, and thus we would pose pressure on Hamas.
What is happening, and we need to tell the truth to the viewers, is if a million Gazans return to the Northern Strip, the IDF will not return to the fight.
You won't redo this whole event and remove a million people from there It's not going to happen.
We need to tell the truth.
It might be that they will remain in parts in the...
But a million people returning to the Northern Strip ends the story.
And another thing, he talked very fast, apparently.
They will always have leverage in their hands.
So he's saying, obviously...
We wanted Trump to get elected because we thought he was going to give us the green light to do even more than we've already been doing.
We wanted to drive every Palestinian out of the entire northern strip, the Gaza Strip, and never let them come back.
We wanted to deny humanitarian aid there.
And what this deal does instead is it forces a withdrawal of the IDF from most of Gaza, allows a million people to return to northern Gaza, and we'll never get them out again.
And that's why he's furious at this deal, and he's saying, I thought the Ukrainians would be the first to pay the price for Trump's victory, but apparently it's us poor Israelis who are going to pay the price because of how bad this deal is.
Here is Edmar Ben-Gavir, who is one of the most extremist members of Netanyahu's government, who is also bitterly complaining about how bad he thinks this deal is.
The deal that is being done is a surrender deal to Hamas.
I call my friend, Minister Smomich, to join me and cooperate with me against the deal that is being developed.
They do not have the power on their own to prevent the deal, but together we can go to the Prime Minister and inform them that if he passes the deal, we will resign from the government.
I emphasize that even if we end up in the opposition, we will not bring down Netanyahu, but this cooperation is our only way to prevent the surrender deal, to prevent this terrible deal, and to ensure that the deaths of hundreds of soldiers will not be in vain.
So you get the sense for what the Israeli right thinks about this deal.
Here's a few other people who are expressing similar sentiments, including the completely demented pro-Israel extremist, Neal Berg, who isn't even Israeli.
She's Iranian, but she's Jewish, so she identifies with Israel a lot, I guess, is how she describes it.
She went on to Twitter yesterday and said, Israel just sent the following message to all its enemies.
Keep taking hostages.
Keep mass murdering and raping our people.
We will literally reward you for your efforts, and you will be seen as victorious heroes to terrorists everywhere.
We will never allow you to lose.
Here is Minister Smotrich, who Ben Javier was calling on to join him in opposing the deal, The emerging deal is a catastrophe for the national security of the state of Israel.
We will not be part of a surrender deal that would include releasing terrorist hostages, stopping the war, and dissolving its achievements that were brought with much blood and abandoning many hostages.
This is the time to continue with all our might to occupy and cleanse the entire Strip, just explicitly calling for ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip.
To finally take control of humanitarian aid from Hamas and to open the gates of hell on Gaza until Hamas surrenders completely and all the hostages are returned.
And then you actually have right-wing protests against Netanyahu in this deal that Trump facilitated from the Times of Israel earlier today.
Right-wing protesters rally against the hostage deal blocking traffic in Jerusalem.
Now, one of the really interesting parts about all of this is that Some people who are trying to defend the deal are trying to say, well, Israel won, they destroyed Hamas.
Obviously Hamas is the party negotiating for the deal.
Hamas is not destroyed.
There's all kinds of videos of celebrations where Hamas is being embraced by Palestinians who view them as their protectors and who view them as heroes for having stood up to the IDF and the United States and forcing them to end the war without those goals being achieved.
And just two days ago, The Wall Street Journal reported what should have been completely predictable, what we've seen continuously throughout the war on terror.
Hamas has another sinwar, and he's rebuilding.
Under Yahya Sinwar's younger brother, Hamas recruits fighters to Gaza, drawing Israel into a war of attrition.
Hamas suffered a severe blow last fall when Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, the group's leader and strategist behind the October 7th attacks.
But now the U.S.-designated terror group has another sinwar in charge.
Yah's younger brother, Mohammed, and he is working to build the militant group back up.
Israel's 15-month campaign has reduced Hamas' Gaza Strip.
Redoubt to rubble, killed thousands of its fighters and much of its leadership, and cut off the border crossings it used to rearm.
The well-trained and well-armed cadres who surged into southern Israel on October 7th are badly weakened.
But the violence has also created a new generation.
A willing recruits and littered Gaza with unexplored ordinance that Hamas fighters can refashion into improvised bombs.
The militant group is using those tools to continue to inflict pain.
That's what we saw throughout the entire war on terror ostensibly designed to destroy or weaken Al-Qaeda and yet every time we bombed another wedding party or sent drones to kill innocent people obviously a lot of young men in that region became enraged at the United States and wanted to join Al-Qaeda.
Their grievances resonated much more against the United States.
The more people you kill, the more children whose lives you end, the more women you blow up.
Obviously, the more people on that side are going to hate the country doing that and want to fight against that.
That would be true in the United States.
It's been true all throughout history, and it's obviously true in the Middle East as well.
Think how much the people of Gaza must hate the Israelis for everything that they've witnessed over the past 15 months.
Here's Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State.
speaking at the Atlantic Council just yesterday who made a similar concession about Hamas.
Avoid.
Indeed, we assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost.
That is a recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war.
The longer the war goes on, the worse the humanitarian situation gets in Gaza.
So, this is so predictable that...
I mean, who could have guessed?
That if you bomb Gaza and kill huge numbers of civilians, impose a blockade on them, cause mass starvation, bomb all their hospitals, reduce their neighborhoods to rubble, that you're going to increase the radicalization of the people of Gaza and make it far easier for Hamas to recruit fighters who want to go fight the Israelis, the people who just did that to them.
Here is some video today of Palestinians not only celebrating the announcement of this ceasefire, but also treating and hugging and celebrating the Hamas warriors as heroes.
I mean, here you have the Palestinians with the most primitive arms on the planet.
They don't have an air force.
They don't even have an airport.
Israel bombed the airport.
Doesn't allow anyone to leave Gaza.
The United States pays Egypt to keep its border closed.
Israel has the entire border closed.
Will shoot anybody who approaches.
People who try to leave by boat will be killed.
And Israel reduced their report to rubble, so there's no way to get out of Gaza, which is why it's considered an open-air prison, the largest ever in history, 2.3 million people.
At least that was before the October 7th attack.
Now it's 2, 3, 4% of the population at least that has died as a result of the war.
But there's still 2 million people plus there.
And they had arguably the two most powerful and vicious countries on the planet, the Israeli government.
And the United States right behind them, doing everything possible to drive them into the sea, to destroy them, and they're still standing.
And Israel's war wasn't going the way they wanted.
In fact, over the last several weeks, many IDF soldiers have been killed because there's so much unexploded inordinance in Gaza that the fighters are able to just repurpose that into Pretty primitive but very fatal.
IEDs on the side of the road are the kind the Taliban use to kill a lot of American troops that just explode when a car makes contact with them or a tank or a truck does.
There's been a lot of deaths from IDF soldiers just in the last few weeks alone.
And they're recruiting more, and there's more material there, and so it was not in Israel's interest to continue this war, and Trump was the one who made it possible, singularly, For all of this to happen.
And, like I said, there's a lot of questions about what will come.
I will not be the slightest bit surprised if six weeks from now, Israel is bombing parts of Gaza, claiming that there's a Moss activity, or if the two sides just end up derailing the process, and then we're back to Israeli bombs, even though the IDF likely won't be in Gaza.
The people will return to their destroyed neighborhoods in northern Gaza.
I won't be surprised if there's still violence.
But the Palestinians are celebrating very emotionally, very passionately, because anything that relieves the endless bombardment and siege and destruction and death that they've confronted for the last 15 months is obviously a positive event.
I don't care what Trump's motives are.
I don't care what else Trump promised the Israelis.
All of that can be assessed and analyzed and reported on, as I'm sure it will be when it happens, when and if it happens.
There's no question that what Trump did here is a positive development because it gives the people of Gaza a respite, the ability to regroup, to breathe for the first time, to try and, in some way, reconstruct their society and their lives.
Anyone who cares about human life, anybody who cares about the laws of war or ending war crimes or crimes against humanity ought to be thanking Donald Trump for facilitating this peace deal in a way that a lot of people insisted he would never do.
All right.
I want to talk a little bit about exactly those people, the ones that I just talked about, Worse in the war in Gaza.
It would be worse for the people of Gaza that he would not only encourage or permit, but demand that the Israelis kill even more Palestinians.
These were the people who were saying, when you had a lot of Muslim and Arab voters, Muslim voters in Michigan and elsewhere, saying we're not going to vote for Biden or Kamala because of their support for the war in Gaza, saying they might even vote for Trump, or leftist voters or younger voters saying we're not going to vote for...
I don't know how you could possibly make it worse.
There were no limits on the Israelis under Biden.
My view has always been, I don't know how many times I've said this, that Trump's greatest asset is his unpredictability.
That oftentimes he is willing, singularly, To break the inertia that carries force U.S. policy, Kamala Harris was the opposite.
She was the ultimate status quo perpetuator.
I would not have bet that Trump would have done this.
I would not have guaranteed it.
I would not have told people it would have happened.
But I certainly believed that an end to this war was far more likely with a Trump victory than it was with a Kamala victory.
And yet you had huge numbers of people aggressively insisting That the only chance for an end to the war in Gaza was with Kamala Harris.
Because their narrative about Trump, which has become a religion, doesn't permit them to see any of these things that Trump, just through his way of doing things, has the potential to foster in the world.
This instability, this deviation, this breaking of systems.
I don't want to exaggerate it.
Trump isn't some revolutionary.
There's going to be a lot that his administration does.
And foreign policy and war that I'm going to strongly dislike.
That's a continuation of what's been done.
But there's going to be a lot that isn't.
And this is an example.
And yet, let's look at some of the people who were just so self-assured and insisting that the opposite would happen.
And many of these people were just craven cynics and partisans who were saying this, not because they believed it, but because they were willing to say and do anything to make sure that as many people as possible voted for the Democratic candidate.
Here was the New York Times on November 7th.
Less than a week after Trump won.
Here's what they said.
Trump's win is likely to prolong the Gaza talk's uncertainty.
And the whole article describes that now that Donald Trump won, it's essentially impossible for there to be any peace deal before his inauguration, that he would complicate everything, that he would give the Israelis a green light, that the war would continue now, that he won.
Of course, it turned out to be exactly the opposite.
In April of 2024, Newsweek published a headline that summarized what they called an ex-Trumpate, who's actually a host of The View.
And she said Trump would, quote, level Gaza without a thought, she warns.
Mehdi Hassan, my former colleague at The Intercept, who was driven out of MSNBC recently, was probably the person most assertive I'm spitting rage and contempt at anybody who said, I'm considering not voting for Biden and then I'm considering not voting for Kamala Harris because of my anger at Gaza.
He would tell them all, are you people so stupid?
Don't you see how refraining from voting Democrat because of Gaza is the dumbest thing you could possibly do because Trump is going to make the violence against Gaza so much worse.
There's zero chance with Trump to get a deal, but...
At least there's some chance with Kamala Harris.
Everything that turned out to be completely wrong.
And of course, after having done that, he's now trying to pretend that he was the one who knew all along that this was going to happen.
Here is what he had the audacity to go post so shamelessly.
And if you're on Twitter, I really encourage you to find this tweet and look at the responses and the quote tweets because all it is is people telling him what an absolute liar and fraud he is.
Pretending that he knew this was going to happen when he was probably the leading voice saying, you have to vote for Kamala Harris, you have to vote for Joe Biden, even if Gaza is your most important issue, because Trump will destroy Gaza and only the Democrats will have any chance to save it.
Here's what he posted, quote, Some of us said a year ago that the U.S. president has the power to impose a deal and a ceasefire on Netanyahu and Israel.
If President-elect Trump can do it, Biden could have done it for the past year.
Shame on him and Blinken and the rest of the team.
That's true, but he neglects to mention that he spent the entire year telling everybody that there was zero chance that Trump would do it, that the only chance for it to be done is under Biden and Harris.
Back in October, obviously a couple weeks before the election, he went onto Twitter and he said, quote, for anyone who doubts Trump will be even worse than Biden is on Gaza, even worse than Biden is on Gaza, hears Trump saying, quote, Netanyahu is doing a good job.
Biden is trying to hold him back and probably should be doing the opposite.
I'm glad that Bibi decided to do what he had to do.
Here was Mehdi on October 24th getting closer to the election, getting more and more desperate to make sure people vote for Democrats, saying, quote, not sure who is making the arguments that, quote, four more years of this will fix things.
He's responding to a tweet.
I don't know if we have it.
We don't.
Basically, From someone saying to him, you keep telling us to vote for Democrats, even if our main issue was Gaza, but we've seen the Democrats preside over 15 months of unrestrained destruction of Gaza without doing anything to stop it.
How can you possibly think that four more years of the same people will fix this?
And in response, this is what he wrote, quote, not sure who is making the argument that, quote, four more years of this will fix things.
Instead, the argument being made by AOC, by Ilyon, by Bernie.
And others on the left is that we have a, quote, tiny chance of ending this under one candidate and zero chance under the other.
That's the argument.
Now, it turns out that Mehdi was right, technically, about what he said.
There was zero chance of ending the war in Gaza with one candidate and there was some chance of ending it with the other.
It's just the opposite of what he tried to convey.
There was zero chance of this war ending if Kamala Harris got elected.
And at least there was some chance if Trump won.
And in fact, Trump ended the war before he even took office.
Here is Bernie Sanders, all these people using their credibility as Israel critics, even though Bernie, for the first two or three months of the war, when it actually mattered, kept opposing a ceasefire, saying that it would help Hamas.
He got public praise from AIPAC for doing that, but eventually he...
Said the things that he needed to say to keep credibility with the left.
But he spent all of 2024 saying that even if Gaza is your main issue, you still have to vote for Biden and Harris because Trump's worse on everything.
Here's what he told Jake Tapper in August of last year.
We know the election is going to be very, very close.
Michigan has a large Arab American and Muslim American population that traditionally votes Democrat.
But there's a lot of concern among Democrats that a lot of those voters are either going to go to a third party or not going to vote at all in protest of the Biden-Harris support.
What do you say to those voters who are thinking about sitting out this election or voting third party or maybe even voting for Donald Trump because they disapprove of Netanyahu and Biden-Harris' support for Netanyahu?
Well, what I say in my own view is, as I'm sure you know, I happen to believe that Hamas is a terrible terrorist organization that attacked Israel on October 7th.
Israel had a right to respond.
But it did not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people, kill 42,000, injure 100,000, and destroy almost all of Gaza.
That they don't have a right to do.
And I will be leading the effort to make sure that we do not provide more offensive military aid to Israel.
But to those people who are saying, well, I can't support Harris because she disagrees, Trump on that issue, even on that issue, is worse.
He will be closer to Netanyahu.
So if we are able to elect Harris, I think we're going to have an opportunity to move her on that issue, to make it clear we cannot allow children in Gaza to starve to death.
She will be open to that.
I doubt that Trump will.
We can't even get Republican support in the Senate for humanitarian aid to feed starving children.
You really want to vote for a Trump who holds that view?
I would hope not.
Maybe he was being sincere about that.
I can't imagine anybody who's been around Washington for as long as he has or even for about a week believing that Kamala Harris was going to get into office and stand up to Netanyahu.
There's absolutely nothing in her career or character that suggests she would ever remotely consider doing that.
Everything suggests exactly the opposite.
But that was the pitch Bernie was making.
That, oh, Trump's going to be way worse.
All right, so maybe he was just wrong in good faith.
And now we have Trump actually getting into office before he's even in office.
Getting a deal done to end the hostilities in Gaza, at least for now.
And then Bernie goes on to Twitter earlier today to talk about it without even an iota of accountability or regret for how wrong he was.
At best, how wrong he was.
I think he knew he was lying.
And was saying it on purpose because he was desperate for Trump to lose the election.
But even if you give him the benefit of the doubt he was trying to be authentic, he was absolutely completely wrong in everything he said so assuredly.
You would think he would acknowledge that, having just seen what he said.
Instead, he just went onto Twitter and posted this, quote, A ceasefire hostage deal in Gaza has been reached.
This is welcome, long overdue news.
Both sides must honor it.
The killing must stop.
The hostages must be released.
The UN must be allowed to provide humanitarian aid.
There must be accountability for war crimes by both sides.
Not even a, hey, by the way, I know I told you this wouldn't happen if Trump won, and in fact it happened because Trump won.
I guess I was wrong.
None of that.
Needless to say, AOC repeatedly echoed the same exact view, including when she spoke at the Democratic National Convention, where she tried to mislead some of the young voters and left-wing voters who actually still believe that she's a trustworthy person or whatever,
by telling them that only voting Democrat can have any chance to Bring about a ceasefire in Gaza.
Here's what she said.
Tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.
Can we start that over?
Let's play that from the beginning.
She is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.
I mean, that was such a blatant lie, unlike what Bernie said, where if I stretch really far because I feel incredibly generous, I can give him the benefit of the doubt.
The idea that in the middle of a presidential campaign, where Kamala Harris was waking up every day and going to rallies and fundraisers and interviews and speeches and meeting with advisors and consultants...
With an urgent attempt to become the President of the United States, the idea that she was simultaneously working tirelessly to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza was such a blatant lie.
She didn't spend one second on any of that.
You'd think Kamala Harris in the middle of the presidential campaign ever gave a single thought about Israel or Gaza except when she was asked about it and needed some diplomatic answer that was politically beneficial to her.
And AOC has the nerve.
To stand up and echo what the Democratic line was, which is Kamala Harris is working tirelessly, this renowned worldwide diplomat, the Henry Kissinger of our generation, flying around the world.
She is in the middle of the presidential campaign with tough negotiations, working tirelessly, 18 hours a day, barely sleeping, to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza.
And only if you vote for Democrats can that happen, said AOC. Probably the most craven and broken Democratic partisan whose every word that comes out of his mouth or his pen or his computer is designed to do nothing but venerate Democrats, Matt Iglesias.
In March of 2024, he said this as he was watching people angry about Biden's support for Israel, protesting the Democrats, in his typically snide, smug, and thought-free manner.
This is what he said, quote, I'm out of touch with the youth.
But my sense is that there are now millions of pseudo-informed people gassed up on TikToks and Instagram reels who believe there is some kind of, quote, permanent ceasefire button in the Oval Office that Joe Biden is perversely refusing to press.
Yeah, that's exactly what it was.
There was a permanent ceasefire button in the White House, which is called putting pressure on Netanyahu using the leverage that they were depending on us to pay for their war and arm their war and threatening to stop it if it didn't stop.
That he was perversely refusing to use.
Donald Trump used it.
And that's why Donald Trump got a deal done and Joe Biden didn't.
It's as simple as that.
Trump got it done before he was even in the Oval Office and in an extremely short amount of time.
And no matter how much you hate Donald Trump, no matter how much you question his motives, no matter how skeptical of this deal you are, all of which I understand, there's simply no denying the truth That without Trump, this deal wouldn't have happened, and with Trump, and because of Trump, it happened.
And that means that at least for some unknown period of time, the people of Gaza will stop being slaughtered, their children will stop being blown up, they'll have some chance to try and return to some semblance of a normal life for however long that takes.
Assuming the deal goes through, there'll be a surge of humanitarian aid that enters.
It's now safe for humanitarian workers.
It's part of the plan to rebuild Gaza to bring in humanitarian aid with the Palestinian people inside Gaza, which is a major victory.
There's no taking that away from him unless you are just willing to completely disregard truth for whatever agenda you decided is important.
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One of the arguments that a lot of people use to try and claim that Trump's anti-war posture was just that posture or a fraudulent branding tactic for the campaign was the fact that so many of the people that he chose for key national security positions in his cabinet more broadly are people who have very standard Republican, hawkish.
That includes people like Elise Stefanik, who he pointed to be his ambassador to the UN, certainly includes Marco Rubio, who he wanted to be as Secretary of State, and even includes Pete Hegseth.
Who he appointed to be the defense secretary who became controversial for other reasons, not because of his foreign policy ideology.
And what we try to emphasize all the time, while reporting on these nominees and making clear that they seem to be in many ways at odds, at least in their past advocacy, with a lot of things that Trump has advocated and that the MAGA movement says it stands for, that there's clearly a divergence in many ways.
It's very, very difficult and I think unwise.
I thought that always.
I still think that to try and derive massive amounts of meaning from every Trump appointee in order to predict with certainty what Donald Trump's going to do in his second presidency, in his second term, let alone to predict exactly what policies he's going to pursue.
Because in fact, there are people in his cabinet, people in his list of appointees who have different views.
And so even if you assume that Trump is a slave to or captive to the views of his Subordinates, which I think is a very dubious assumption, even there it's impossible to decide or know exactly what Trump's going to do because so many of these people have different views.
But even on the areas where they have the same views, like this pro-Israel fanaticism that most of them share, Trump just showed that he's willing to do a deal that I guarantee makes a lot of them uncomfortable, if not worse.
Because Trump views himself at the end of the day as the boss and he thinks all the people he's appointing Are there to serve his agenda.
He feels, he recognizes, not feels, that part of the problem of the first administration was that he allowed all these kinds of people who were there to subvert and undermine his agenda to do so by appointing people who deceived him and who were never on his side.
People like Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley and the rest.
And all I heard from Trump associates, from close Trump associates, we've had them on our show, I've talked to them privately, Is that the one thing that changed about Trump is he realizes he got to Washington, didn't understand it well, was often outflanked by people who were thought to subvert him, and that the whole point of the second administration is to ensure that everyone who gets picked is a loyalist to Donald Trump and there to carry out his agenda, not theirs.
It definitely remains to be seen whether that will happen.
But I found the testimony both of Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth yesterday and Marco Rubio today, to be pretty illuminating.
When it came to Hegseth, there actually wasn't much time the Democrats spent badgering or interrogating him about his foreign policy ideology.
And the reason for that is that Pete Hegseth has had the pretty standard bipartisan hawkish view on foreign policy.
And the Democrats really don't object to that.
They can't object to that.
There are so many people, including the Biden administration and the Democratic Senate caucus, who agree with that.
What are they going to do?
Attack him for having served in the Iraq war when huge numbers of Democrats, including the current president, We're vocal advocates of the Iraq War, or the war on terror that Obama carried out, or regime change in Syria and Libya that Obama did, the NATO war in Ukraine that the Democrats support.
And so I thought what was most telling was not anything that Hegseth said particularly about foreign policy, but the way in which Democrats avoided it almost entirely in favor of dreary focus on culture war issues.
On whether the few hundred female infantry members in combat should be able to continue to fight in combat, about other comments that he made along those lines, but more so just delving into the grime of his personal life in a way that was very voyeuristic and morally disgusting.
Certain things that they raised about his drinking, if the Secretary of Defense has a drinking problem, and that...
It can be demonstrated.
I, of course, think that alcoholism, active alcoholism, can be an impediment to doing a job that important.
I think it's reasonable to probe if you have evidence for it.
But probing into his personal life, and by the way, a prior Defense Secretary nominee, John Tower, who was nominated, I'm pretty sure, by Bush 41, and he was in the Senate.
So all these were his colleagues and they thought his nomination would be secured for that reason.
The Senate very rarely rejects one of their own.
Ended up having his nomination either withdrawn or rejected because of concerns about his alcoholism.
I'm not going to say that's invalid if you have a basis for it, but this kind of inquiry that Senator Tim Kaine pursued, just delving into things like extramarital affairs and his children, This is the kind of thing you do when you don't have any substantive disagreements with the
and so you just try and Demean and humiliate and discredit him by exposing the parts of his personal life that, while not particularly noble, are not exactly uncommon either.
Here's part of what Tim Kaine, who, by the way, was Hillary Clinton's vice presidential nominee in 2016, you probably have forgotten that despite how charismatic and exciting that choice was, but here is what he tried to do to tear Pete Hexat down.
...that occurred in Monterey, California in October 2017. At that time, you were still married to your second wife, correct?
I believe so.
And you had just fathered a child by a woman who would later become your third wife, correct?
Senator, I was falsely charged.
Fully investigated and completely cleared.
So you think you are completely cleared because you committed no crime.
That's your definition of cleared?
You had just fathered a child two months before by a woman that was not your wife.
I am shocked that you would stand here and say you're completely cleared.
Can you so casually cheat on a second wife and cheat on the mother of a child who had been born two months before and you tell us you are completely cleared?
How is that a complete clear?
I'm not saying if that behavior is accurately described that it's admirable or noble, obviously.
Finally...
But these people are the party of Bill Clinton.
Every four years, stand on their feet for Bill Clinton and cheer for him.
Despite the fact that he not only had extramarital affairs, that according to many of the women, they were not consensual.
It was sexual harassment in the workplace.
In the case of Juanita Broderick, it was rape.
These are the allegations that have been made, and many of them have been substantiated, and these Democrats never cared at all, and he wasn't the Secretary of Defense, he was the President of the United States.
But I found so notable how so much of the confirmation hearing was not about his foreign policy views, but about these sideshows like this.
Because the Democrats just don't have many foreign policy disagreements with the Republican establishment.
That's why so much of the Republican establishment was aligned with the Democrats and behind Kamala Harris.
One of the only few people that asked him about his actual views on policy, was Tom Cotton, who arguably is the most fanatical warmonger in the U.S. Senate.
I think he's the most extreme authoritarian as well.
Everything the MAGA movement claims it stands for, Tom Cotton is the antithesis of it in almost every case, certainly on foreign policy and civil liberties.
But he actually did ask Pete Hegseth about a foreign policy issue, namely his support for Israel and its war in Gaza.
And it's very odd.
It seems like this colloquy took place.
Without any knowledge that Donald Trump was not just pursuing but on the verge of facilitating a peace deal that would call for the Israelis to stop their hostilities in Gaza and withdraw from there because Tom Cotton was insisting that Pete Hexeth affirm the right of Israel to continue to destroy Gaza with U.S. help.
Here's what that exchange was.
Many of them seem to be patriotic supporters of you, Mr. Hexeth.
Some of them seem to be liberal critics of you.
I would note that it's only the liberal critics that have disrupted this hearing.
As was my custom during the Biden administration, I want to give you a chance to respond to what they said about you.
I think the first one accused you of being a Christian Zionist.
I'm not really sure why that is a bad thing.
I'm a Christian.
I'm a Zionist.
Zionism is that the Jewish people deserve a homeland in the ancient Holy Land where they've lived since the dawn of history.
Do you consider yourself a Christian Zionist?
Senator, I support...
I am a Christian, and I robustly support the state of Israel and its existential defense and the way America comes alongside them as their great ally.
Thank you.
Because another protester, and I think this one was a member of Code Pink, which, by the way, is a Chinese communist front group these days, said that you support Israel's war in Gaza.
I support Israel's existential war in Gaza.
I assume, like me and President Trump, you support that war as well, don't you?
Senator, I do.
I support Israel destroying and killing every last member of Hamas.
It's so bizarre that they had that exchange one day before Trump said, I've got a deal for Israel to stop destroying Gaza.
I think what this shows is that there are a lot of people that Trump chose who have ideas that a lot of people pointed to to try and say, oh, anyone who's convinced about Trump's anti-war position is stupid, is naive.
Look at all these people he appointed.
This proves that he has no interest in any of that.
And what I think this proves is that the person who's going to be making the big decisions about policy is not Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth.
It'll be Donald Trump, at least in a lot of those cases.
And sometimes Trump is going to decide in a way that is very militaristic, but a lot of times he won't.
And this whole incident that we just are now going through with Israel is, I think, perfect proof of that.
Even more revealing to me was the testimony Marco Rubio gave today at his confirmation hearing, where he was treated very respectfully.
There are going to be a lot of Democrats voting for him, which I think speaks volumes.
There won't be voting for Tulsi Gabbard.
But they'll be voting for Marco Rubio.
They'll definitely be voting for Elise Stefanik.
I don't even know if she'll get any no votes.
But one of the things that Marco Rubio has been very vocal and outspoken on throughout his whole career is he is a hawk.
He's with Lindsey Graham and John McCain when he was around.
And that whole crew.
And constantly defending the...
Not just justifiability, but necessity and the wisdom of the United States going and overthrowing governments and invading countries.
And he has been a hardcore, outspoken supporter of U.S. support for Ukraine, saying we have to win this war, we have to drive the Russians out, we can't let the Russians win.
And that's clearly at odds with what Trump wants to do with the war in Ukraine.
He wants to end the war in Ukraine, too.
Another war that...
Has gone on for almost four years that Joe Biden not only did men, but kept fueling and instigating.
And I found it so notable what Marco Rubio said when he was asked about Ukraine and the way in which he abandoned his previous position and conformed what he's now saying to what he knows is Donald Trump's view on Ukraine.
Listen to this.
This is when he's being asked by Janine Sheehan, who's the Democratic senator from New Hampshire, and an absolute Can you talk about how your views on Ukraine have developed and where you are now and what you think is important for us to
do in order to ensure that there's the strongest possible negotiating position?
If Ukraine and Russia do get to the negotiating table?
Sure.
First, let me point out, and although I'll still speak to my view of the process, that I voted against that bill because I said I would not vote for a bill unless it addressed the crisis at our southern border as part of the overall arrangement.
That was not done, and so I voted against it.
That said, here's my view of a situation.
Once this war became what we now know it is, and that is a war of attrition, a stalemate, a protracted conflict, the dynamic on that situation has changed.
It has.
And I believe, and I think that this echoes with the President.
Let me first echo the President's words and what he said in an interview about a year ago.
He was asked about the war in Ukraine.
He says, I want the dying to stop.
I want people to stop dying.
I want the killing to stop.
And frankly, I don't know how anyone could say they don't.
The destruction that Ukraine is undergoing is extraordinary.
It's going to take a generation to rebuild it.
Millions of Ukrainians no longer live in Ukraine.
And the disruption, that means how many of them are going to come back and what are they going to come back to?
Even as I speak to you now, the Ukrainian infrastructure and their energy infrastructure is being decimated in ways that are going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild over the next decades.
So this is an important conflict and I think it should be the official position of the United States that this war should be brought to an end.
And the question becomes...
Now, this is nothing like what we've heard in Washington.
From both parties over the past four years.
Three full years going into the fourth year.
Nothing like it.
And one of the things that I do think is quite notable about Donald Trump, quite unique about him, is that in general when Washington talks about wars, especially wars that they're just funding and treating as a proxy war, but even sometimes wars where our troops are deployed, it's always done in this very abstract, bloodless way.
There's a lot of sitting around in think tanks, debating strategy and tactics and the geopolitics of the war, war aims and war objectives, and there's almost never any acknowledgement of the central fact of war, which is that massive amounts of blood is shed and huge numbers of people die tragically.
That's the reason to avoid war, is because of how much life it extinguishes.
And Trump, alone among major political figures, certainly among presidents in my lifetime, every time he talks about war, he begins with and talks passionately of the life that is being lost, the number of people being killed.
It's something very notable.
He doesn't just do it in passing.
It's not lip service.
He starts with that as the central fact for why these wars are hideous.
He is just somebody who hasn't been steeped in Washington speak about military conflict for decades and therefore still reads these reports and is most struck by what he should be most struck by, but what most people should be most struck by when talking about war, which is in Ukraine the loss of life is enormous and incredibly tragic.
An entire generation of Ukrainian men, two generations of Ukrainian men, have been either extinguished or crippled.
Or they fled Ukraine to avoid being killed as cannon fodder on the front lines.
And major parts of Ukraine are destroyed.
Their energy infrastructure, their buildings, their cities.
And of course the West is going to rebuild those all.
And the longer the war goes on, the more blood this is going to shed.
And that's why to hear Marco Rubio, of all people, talking this way and saying that the official position of the United States government should be not We're going to get total victory against Russia, the way D.C. and every sector and every crevice was saying for two years, two plus years, but saying that the official position of the United States government is that this war has to end and end as soon as possible to avoid the loss of life.
That's Donald Trump speaking, and you see Marco Rubio adapting himself to Trump's position.
Let's hear the rest of this.
Now the question that Rubio will raise is, okay, we want the war to end, but how is it going to end?
Because remember, at the beginning of the war, and for two years into it, the United States and NATO and EU countries and the militarists and warmuggers and the Green Party in Germany and the Labour Party in the UK and the Tories in the UK and the Macron government in France, they all define victory in the maximalist sense, which is we can only win if we drive out every Russian troop from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea.
And they said, we cannot let Russia win this war, which will happen if the war ends with Russia controlling or occupying any part of Ukraine.
And it was never a realistic definition of victory.
They were never going to achieve that.
The Russians would have used nuclear weapons before they gave up Crimea.
Because of how existential they perceive the access to the Black Sea and to the Crimean Peninsula is, that they would never allow NATO there.
Ever.
And they were never going to give up the provinces in eastern Ukraine that they had already been effectively occupying even before 2022 by arming the Russian separatists, the Russian ethnic Russian separatists in the Donbass.
And then when they gave all that life and blood and money and treasure to occupy those parts of Ukraine, of course they're not going to voluntarily leave and the West has proven they cannot dislodge them.
And so the war can only end in a way that...
Is a Russian victory as NATO and the U.S. stupidly defined it when they were all caught up in this war fervor around Ukraine and how we're going to drive the Russians out and save Ukrainian democracy?
And there were a handful of scholars like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs, people we've had on our show before, many others, but not many, not many, others, but not many, who are pointing out that no matter how well the Ukrainian fights, no matter how much we earn them, the sheer size difference alone will mean that Russia can never win.
That Russia can never lose, rather, that Ukraine can never win.
It's just a question of time and how many people die before the war is over.
And as Professor Mirschheimer often put it, Ukraine will be left with a rump state because Russia is now occupying and controlling roughly 25% of what had been Ukrainian territory before 2014. And none of that is going to change.
But you would be called a Russian agent for pointing out any of that until very recently.
And now you have people like Marco Rubio admitting the reality and saying, here's how this war has to end.
Brought to an end.
And the question becomes, you know, what role can we play?
And I think the first is by making that abundantly clear.
And my differences with the Biden administration throughout this process is that they never clearly delineated what the end goal of the conflict was.
What exactly were we funding?
What exactly were we putting money towards?
And on many occasions it sounded like however much it takes for however long it takes, that is not a realistic or prudent position.
The truth of the matter is that in this conflict, there is no way Russia takes all of Ukraine.
The Ukrainians are too brave and fight too hard and the country is too big.
That's not going to happen.
It's also unrealistic to believe that somehow a nation the size of Ukraine...
No matter how incompetent and no matter how much damage the Russian Federation has suffered as a result of this invasion, there's no way Ukraine is also going to push these people all the way back to where they were on the eve of the invasion, just given the size dynamic.
I saw a quote recently, and I wish I could attribute it to who it was, but the quote was, and I think it was very wise, where they said the problem that Ukraine is facing is not that they're running out of money, it's that they're running out of Ukrainians.
There's a size differential here that's important.
What Vladimir Putin has done is unacceptable.
There's no doubt about it.
But this war has to end.
And I think it should be the official policy of the United States that we want to see it end.
Now, what that master plan looks like is going to be hard work.
This is not going to be an easy endeavor.
But it's going to require bold diplomacy.
And my hope is that it can begin with some ceasefire.
And in order to achieve objectives like the one that needs to occur in Ukraine, it is important for everyone to be realistic.
There will have to be concessions made by the Russian Federation, but also by the Ukrainians and the United States lend itself there.
It's also important that there be some balance on both sides.
In essence, it will be difficult to achieve this objective of a ceasefire and ultimately a peace settlement unless both sides have leverage.
I can't stress enough how remarkable of an abandonment that is from what not just both parties, but Marco Rubio himself has been saying.
Their critique of the Biden administration was not That Biden failed to define victory or the war aims in a clearly delineated enough manner.
You can't criticize Biden for that.
Victory was defined in a very clearly delineated way.
What I just went through.
Victory was the expulsion of every Russian troop from every inch of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea.
And anything short of that was not victory.
If anything, the critique of Marco Rubio and his fellow Republicans and Democrats of the Biden administration was that, if anything, they weren't doing enough to help Ukraine.
They weren't giving enough.
They weren't giving enough money, enough weapons.
They were limiting the use of American weapons out of fear, I guess, which is an invalid fear in their eyes, of escalating a war with Russia, the largest nuclear power on the planet.
Everything Mark Rubio just said here was the province of people who were accused of being Russian agents at the beginning, but now he's acknowledging, and again I think it's because he's required to, because this is what Trump thinks and wants, that A, this war has to end quickly, and B, they're finally accepting that any resolution to this war is necessarily going to include concessions to Russia, that they will, whatever you call it, occupy...
A significant portion of Ukraine, whether you call it a semi-autonomous region or some frozen zone, or maybe they're going to want to try and save face and not acknowledge that this is now something that the Russians control.
But in effect, that's what it's going to be, and Marco Rubio is saying that.
I think you're seeing here, in some part, the inevitable acknowledgement that the war in Ukraine is a failure.
There's nobody who denies that, except maybe Zelensky.
And a couple of the people in Berlin and the Green Party and some of the Labour and Tory hawks in London.
But outside of that small circle, everybody understands that victory is not going to be achieved.
It's just remarkable to hear Marco Rubio say this as somebody who comes from that hawkish part of the Republican Party and who's about to become Secretary of State.
I think in a lot of ways it reflects...
Donald Trump's worldview and the fact that, more importantly, people like Marco Rubio know that they have to at least create the appearance, if not submit to the reality, that regardless of what position they're taking, regardless of how credible they're perceived to be in Washington, they need to be carrying out Donald Trump's agenda or else Trump will be alienated.
And he can disempower anybody at any moment that he wants.
You have to keep Trump happy in Trump world if you want to wield any power.
And this is why I've been very skeptical of this idea that every single Trump appointee signals exactly what the Trump administration is going to be, as though all of these people who are being appointed have full autonomy to carry out their own agenda.
I don't think that's the case.
And at least when it comes to Ukraine, what Marco Rubio is now saying is very encouraging.
In terms of reality finally setting into Washington, I absolutely think that Trump wants to begin his administration by being able to boast about the fact...
That he resolved the war in Israel and Gaza and the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Both wars that the Biden administration fueled and funded and paid for and armed.
Now, whether we end up in a conflict with Iran or some conflict with China, all of which is possible, I'm not predicting that.
But I do know that Trump went through four years as president.
I've pointed this out many times.
The reality is that he did not get the United States involved directly in a new war or indirectly involved in a new war.
The only president in decades for whom that's true?
You'd be foolish to try and predict the future but these signs are obviously very good ones in terms of Trump's clear desire to avoid new wars that go under his ledger and allowing the people he's appointing to pursue their own agenda and subverting his as opposed to doing what Marco Rubio is clearly doing here which is abandoning his own view and catering it to Donald Trump.
So I think there's a lot of insight here into what the Trump administration is going to be before it even begins in, which is five days from now.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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