Journalists Zaid Jilani and Michael Tracey discuss Trump's Iran threats, JD Vance's online debate over deportations, and more. ------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Good evening. | |
| It's Wednesday, Hump Day, April 16th. | |
| Now, I don't know who wrote Hump Day in my script here, but I just want to chastise them for being inappropriate. | |
| This is a family show. | |
| Either way, 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. | |
| I'm Michael Tracy, filling in for Glenn, who is off gallivanting around somewhere. | |
| On one of his mysterious misadventures. | |
| Tonight, we will cover what appears to be telegraphed as an increasingly likely march to war with Iran. | |
| You would think this would be dominating the headlines, or at least getting a bit more airtime than it has thus far. | |
| And the war may not yet, may not happen, who knows, but the groundwork is certainly being laid, so it would seem. | |
| For this to happen rather imminently. | |
| So we will be covering that in addition to Zed Jelani who come and talk about what everybody is talking about, which is the administration, the Trump administration's threat letter to Harvard, which Harvard has defied on the ground that it would essentially turn the university into a vassal. | |
| Of the Trump administration and Harvard seems not inclined to particularly capitulate to that demand. | |
| So we will get all into that soon. | |
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| Okay, so there was a lot of attention this week or has been on the White House meeting that took place between Donald Trump and President Bukele of El Salvador. | |
| Because apparently what we all are supposed to believe is so obviously within America's interests and advance our country's core interest in an America first way is to establish some sort of penal colony in El Salvador, | |
| thereby importing, it would seem, the governance and the political and social customs of El Salvador into the United States, or at least venerating. | |
| The governance of El Salvador. | |
| Because even though we have all this shiny prison infrastructure in the United States that the taxpayers, for better or worse, have spent a lot of money establishing, a penal colony in El Salvador is the thing that we're told is obviously in our national interest. | |
| And we'll cover that a bit later with... | |
| Zed Jelani, who actually, interestingly enough, had an exchange today, or was it last night, recently, on Twitter slash X with none other than J.D. Vance himself on that issue. | |
| So we'll go over that. | |
| But I think there was another aspect of that Bukele meeting that hasn't gotten enough coverage, which is that Trump was asked about the Iran negotiations that are ostensibly underway between The United States and Iran. | |
| It's the first known senior level contact between American senior leadership and Iranian senior leadership since the Obama administration when infamously Donald Trump decided to withdraw after the Obama administration from Obama's signature foreign policy diplomatic achievement. | |
| You can Criticize that achievement or herald it, but it was his signature achievement, I think it would be hard to dispute, which was the Iran nuclear deal or the JCPOA. | |
| Trump campaigned for president in 2016, denouncing that deal. | |
| I vividly recall him appearing at a Tea Party Patriots protest in September of 2015 alongside Ted Cruz that was devoted to Announcing the JCPOA with Trump saying he had never seen a worse negotiated deal in his entire life. | |
| But anyway, direct negotiations, or at least direct contacts, we don't really know the full extent of what's been discussed as of yet, have begun between the United States and Iran as of this past weekend. | |
| And Trump was asked about those negotiations. | |
| So let's hear what he had to say. | |
| You said yesterday that you're making a decision on Iran very quickly. | |
| What do you mean by that? | |
| Is that a decision to strike Iran? | |
| The problem very quickly. | |
| Iran wants to deal with us, but they don't know how. | |
| They really don't know how. | |
| We had a meeting with them on Saturday. | |
| We have another meeting scheduled next Saturday. | |
| I said, that's a long time. | |
| You know, that's a long time. | |
| So I think they might be tapping us along. | |
| But Iran has to get rid of the concept of a nuclear weapon. | |
| They cannot have a nuclear weapon. | |
| He can't have a nuclear weapon. | |
| Nobody can have it. | |
| We can't have anybody having nuclear weapons, you know? | |
| We can't have nuclear weapons. | |
| And I think they're tapping us along because we're so used to dealing with stupid people in this country. | |
| And I had Iran... | |
| Perfect. You had no attacks. | |
| You would have never had October 7th in Israel. | |
| The attack by Hamas. | |
| Because Iran was broke. | |
| They were stone cold broke when I was president. | |
| And I don't want to do that. | |
| I want them to be a rich, great nation. | |
| The only thing is, one thing, simple. | |
| It's really simple. | |
| They can't have a nuclear weapon. | |
| And they've got to go fast. | |
| Because they're fairly close to having one. | |
| And they're not going to have one. | |
| And if we have to do something very harsh, we'll do it. | |
| And I'm not doing it for us. | |
| I'm doing it for the world. | |
| And these are radicalized people. | |
| And they cannot have a nuclear weapon. | |
| Does that include a potential strike on Iranian nuclear facilities? | |
| Of course it does. | |
| Okay, so that's Trump being asked, is he contemplating or does the outcome envisioned here include? | |
| A strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, and Trump says, of course it does. | |
| Now, Trump has been becoming more and more brazen with these overt threats against Iran, particularly since March 30th, when he decided to place a phone call to Kristen Welker of NBC News, the host of Meet the Press, and tell Kristen Welker that if Iran does not submit to a deal, | |
| That is satisfactory to the United States. | |
| There will be bombing, like the movie There Will Be Blood. | |
| Remember that? | |
| It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before. | |
| That's what Trump called up Kristen Wilk of NBC News and told her in a phone interview. | |
| Now, there could be an extent to which people are inert by this. | |
| Because Trump says a million things every day. | |
| Some are deliberately incendiary. | |
| Some are sarcastic. | |
| Some is trolling. | |
| Some may be earnest. | |
| Who knows? | |
| We can never quite settle on what the proportion is here in terms of how we're supposed to interpret the endless cacophony of Trump remarks on a given day. | |
| But it is really worth noting that presidents hadn't tended to come out and publicly threaten Iran. | |
| That they will be bombed in a time-bound period if they don't capitulate to U.S. demands. | |
| You have had previous presidents, including Obama, say stuff to the effect of all options are on the table with respect to Iran. | |
| But it was seen as so obviously bellicose and so obviously Impermissible diplomatically to come out and just blatantly threaten to bomb Iran. | |
| Why? Because in the case of Obama if there was some potential diplomatic arrangement in the offing which Obama subsequently did attain in 2015 then running around threatening to bomb Iran Might be an impediment to achieving that because it could cast aspersion, | |
| grave aspersion, on the intentions of the United States in its attempt to interact with Iran. | |
| So I actually went and asked a bunch of, or a handful of people who are Iran kind of policy experts who... | |
| Are involved with Iran policy professionally, know the history of Iran and U.S. relations really well. | |
| And I asked them, is there a precedent of a U.S. president cavalierly coming out and just saying there will be bombing of Iran if X, Y, and Z doesn't happen? | |
| And they say no. | |
| No, this is unique to Trump, with the exception of Trump's first term, when he did threaten... | |
| After the Soleimani assassination in January of 2020 to bomb Iranian cultural sites. | |
| Maybe we could bring up that tweet if somebody could find it or put it in after the show. | |
| But Trump did in January of 2020 threaten to bomb Iranian like ancient cultural sites after retaliation was threatened for his drone strike assassination of The top general of Iran and one of the most renowned national figures in Iran, | |
| Soleimani. But other than that, it's really not customary for presidents to be so bombastic in their public utterances with respect to Iran. | |
| Now, there are certain ways in which Trump really does defy foreign policy convention in a way that is salutary. | |
| One hallmark example from the first term is when after some initial bluster, he did initiate direct diplomatic relations with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. | |
| Now, the negotiations with North Korea didn't ultimately result in a settlement because, for one thing, Trump and his administration at the time insisted on maximalist demands. | |
| around denuclearization that North Korea, as a matter of national pride, or even personal pride on the part of Kim, was never going to agree to. | |
| But nonetheless, it did break a significant taboo for those direct talks to even happen in the first place. | |
| And it likewise breaks a taboo. | |
| For Trump to be threatening to bomb Iran so openly, pursuant to some cobbled-together negotiations, which it's not even clear are in particularly good faith. | |
| So that just is an indication of how it could be a double-edged sword, meaning defying foreign policy convention can at times be salutary because foreign policy consensus is rife with failure, | |
| rife with insular click-type thinking, and often revolves around people who have a demonstrable track record of myopia and inhospitability to criticism or contrary ways of thinking. | |
| So Trump has, at times, the ability to disrupt that. | |
| But the double-edged sword is he could also say he's defying foreign policy convention because it hadn't previously been conventional to just be openly threatened to bomb Iran as he's doing now repeatedly. | |
| In hopes, presumably, that it could result in some diplomatic settlement because Iran is just going to be so bludgeoned into submission that... | |
| They're going to agree to maximalist demands imposed by Trump. | |
| But who knows? | |
| It could also be a pretext for war. | |
| Trump could say, look, we made every effort to negotiate with Iran. | |
| We even defied some convention by resuming high-level contacts between the U.S. and Iranian senior leadership. | |
| But they were so obstinate that we had no choice but to launch this bombing campaign with Israel. | |
| That we've been threatening for weeks. | |
| And actually, even in the 2024 campaign, Trump threatened it publicly then. | |
| So, let's take a look at what Steve Witkoff, who is becoming an all-purpose Trump envoy, initially focused on the Middle East, and that is still his official title. | |
| But he's also leading negotiations with Putin in Russia. | |
| But he was on Sean Hannity's show on April 14th, and he was asked by Sean Hannity about these ongoing negotiations. | |
| Now, there's an undercurrent of humor here because Sean Hannity would have blown a gasket in any other circumstance in which a senior U.S. official was trying to justify The utility of directly engaging with Iran. | |
| Namely, during the Obama administration, I can vividly recall Sean Hannity thinking that even the mere fact of talking to Iranian senior leadership was an abandonment of core American values or whatnot and giving credence to this Islamic terrorist regime or what have you. | |
| But nonetheless, of course, in the presence of Whitcoff, he has to remain cordial. | |
| But anyway, Steve Witkoff here gives some details as to what the conditions might be to obtain a settlement with Iran. | |
| So let's take a look at that. | |
| Let me go to Iran, if I may, and meeting face-to-face with the Iranian foreign minister, the first known contact with the U.S. and Iran since the president took office. | |
| Same question, but a different context. | |
| Are the Iranians trying to buy time? | |
| My understanding and public disclosures have the mat and the IAEA report about 60 percent enrichment. | |
| To get from 60 to 90 percent, which is weapon grade enrichment, is a very short period of time. | |
| Then they would need a delivery system. | |
| So my question is this: Both you and the President have been very adamant that the Iranians cannot get a bomb. | |
| I agree with both of you. | |
| I'm skeptical, like a lot of other people, how do you have a conversation with people that believe in a caliphate, convert or die, and the notion that they've got to wipe Israel and the U.S. off the map? | |
| I don't know if it's ever going to be possible to get a deal with people that have that ideology and mindset. | |
| How'd it go? | |
| Well, Sean, the president's message of peace through strength, it resonates throughout the world. | |
| This is not a threat on my part now. | |
| It is just a simple fact. | |
| The president means what he says, which is they cannot have a bomb. | |
| The conversation with the Iranians will be much about two critical points. | |
| One, enrichment. | |
| As you mentioned, they do not need to enrich past 3.67%. | |
| In some circumstances, they're at 60%. | |
| In other circumstances, 20%. | |
| That cannot be. | |
| And you do not need to run, as they claim, a civil nuclear program where you're enriching past 3.67%. | |
| So this is going to be much about verification on the enrichment program and then ultimately verification on weaponization. | |
| That includes missiles. | |
| The type of missiles that they have stockpiled there, and it includes the trigger for a bomb. | |
| And I think we're here to have, as the president indicated, and I take my direction from him every day that I go to work, we're here to see if we can solve this situation diplomatically and with dialogue. | |
| The first meeting was positive, constructive, compelling. | |
| I'm a trust but verify guy. | |
| Would it include, Steve, anywhere, anyplace, anytime, U.S. inspectors, not U.N. inspectors? | |
| That would have to be critical. | |
| I don't trust the U.N. I don't think you do either. | |
| Now, look, the devil, as you know, we've talked about this, the devil will be in the details of the document, and hopefully we'll have that high-quality problem of getting a document drafted. | |
| Verification will be the key point that undergirds this agreement if we're fortunate enough to get there. | |
| Okay, so that was interesting because Whitcoff says the issue would be that Iran couldn't enrich its uranium in its civilian use nuclear program above 3.67%. | |
| And why that appearance from Whitcoff sent Iran hawks sputtering with rage is because that's the exact threshold which the JCPOA negotiated under Obama, which Trump then withdrew from on the grounds of it being a woefully inadequate deal that empowered the Islamic terrorist regime, | |
| etc. 3.67% was the uranium threshold that Iran was permitted per the terms of that deal. | |
| To remain at. | |
| So that sounded like, potentially, Whitcoff at least tacitly acknowledging that per the terms of some eventual arrangement between the Trump administration and Iran now, basically they could reintroduce a core component of the JCPOA, | |
| which became this bugaboo for Republicans, including Trump himself. | |
| Who claimed it was so incompetently negotiated. | |
| It also tacitly assumes that Iran can have a nuclear program to begin with. | |
| Others in the administration, like Mike Waltz, many Republicans in Congress, are adamant that Iran must not be permitted to have any nuclear program whatever because they will always lie, cheat, and steal and evade inspection. | |
| And their ultimate aim is to develop a nuclear program to target Israel or even the United States. | |
| So for Whitcoff to at least express a seeming openness to permitting Iran to retain a nuclear program at all was a huge red flag for the hardcore anti-Iran hawks who have pervaded the Republican Party and to a smaller but still sizable extent the Democratic Party. | |
| For many years. | |
| So there was a backlash to Witkoff's appearance there on Hannity's show on Monday night. | |
| And then, lo and behold, the following day, an official statement goes out from Steve Witkoff's government exit count. | |
| So he says, a deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal. | |
| Whatever that means. | |
| I guess we have to read the art of the deal and hear about how Trump negotiated to refurbish the Woolman Rink in Central Park in 1987 to understand how that could be extrapolated into the contours of a deal with regard to Iran's nuclear program. | |
| But Wyckoff says, Any final arrangement must set a framework for peace, stability, and prosperity in the Middle East, meaning that Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program. | |
| It is imperative for the world that we create a tough, fair deal that will endure, and that is what President Trump is asking to do. | |
| So that was an apparent shift within a matter of hours between Wyckoff indicating that it might be acceptable... | |
| Or it would even be, it would be acceptable. | |
| He stated it as fact. | |
| For Iran to retain its nuclear enrichment program at or below the previous JCPOA levels, then there was this flood of fury from the usual suspects who have always craved a war with Iran, | |
| who are hardcore Israel hawks, and obviously toppling the Iranian government is like the fever dream. | |
| Of Netanyahu in particular, but also much of the Israeli political culture writ large. | |
| And then after that backlash, Witkoff comes out and issues that statement in which he ups the ante, it would seem, and says that, nope, never mind. | |
| Iran must eliminate its nuclear enrichment weapons and weaponization program entirely. | |
| Now, as Witkoff said in that video, the devil is always in the details, so there's always a way to, like, lawyer you out of some of the wording of these things. | |
| And who even knows, really, to what extent Witkoff, when he goes on a Hannity show and is kind of freelancing, to what extent he reflects the will of Trump, or is he reflecting his own volition? | |
| I think it's probable that people within the administration don't even know much of the time because Trump likes to leave things a bit ambiguous as to who is most in concert with his agenda on any given issue. | |
| But it tells you directionally where things could be going, right? | |
| The administration rushes to clarify a potentially Conciliatory statement from Whitcoff and then as a matter of official policy has him put out a maximalist demand that would mean Trump actually is not willing to replicate the JCPOA which allowed Iran to maintain a nuclear enrichment | |
| program below a certain threshold. | |
| Now, is Iran going to agree to, quote, eliminate its nuclear enrichment program? | |
| Anybody who knows anything about Iran, and I've never been there, I'll admit that, but there seems to be almost universal consensus, even among pro-Iran hawks, anti-war people, etc., that the idea of Iran agreeing to totally dismantle or, | |
| quote, eliminate... | |
| Its nuclear enrichment program is a complete non-starter. | |
| Again, it's a matter of national pride. | |
| But this is the rhetoric that is in keeping with what Netanyahu said last week, and Glenn, I believe, covered this on the show. | |
| I certainly covered it. | |
| Netanyahu reported after he met with Trump on Monday of last week that they jointly agreed that diplomacy could be feasible with Iran, but it would have to culminate in what... | |
| Netanyahu said would be a Libyan model whereby Iran, for some unknown reason, would agree to, under US supervision, | |
| dismantle or even blow up, to quote Netanyahu, their own nuclear program at the behest of the US and Israel. | |
| Now, it's true that Iran has been weakened considerably over the past year and a half. | |
| They even lack the state capacity to prevent their president from dying in a helicopter crash in inclement weather. | |
| So it's not like Iran necessarily is the most formidable foe of the United States that the U.S. could ever have. | |
| But it's still a big country. | |
| There is like an ancient culture, an ancient Persian culture that could be drawn upon, you would think, that would maybe make it politically untenable for Iran to just become subservient to the U.S. in this way. | |
| And so you have to wonder, are these negotiations a pretext to make way for What seems to be a building clamor for war with Iran. | |
| Now, you would think the Democrats, or maybe you wouldn't think, but you might hope, or at least envision, that the Democrats would come up with a critique on this. | |
| That they would be sounding the alarm, look, we could be marching to war with Iran. | |
| The president is openly telegraphing it. | |
| He apparently has no compunction about stating his aims here. | |
| Do we want another war in the Middle East? | |
| Do we want to build up our military assets as is happening right now at the Diego Garcia U.S. base in the Indian Ocean to threaten Iran as the U.S. is also waging this campaign against the Houthis in Yemen? | |
| The Democrats, you know. | |
| They are never animated by the genuinely egregious behavior of Trump on the international scene. | |
| If anything, they often try to attack Trump from the opposite direction. | |
| So when Trump had his negotiations with Kim Jong-un, one of the conventional lines of critique from the Democrats was to denounce Trump for coddling a dictator. | |
| Or for relinquishing American prestige on the altar of his obsession with negotiation. | |
| Now, there is something a little bit weird about any quote-unquote negotiating move that Trump may ever make being held up and exalted as this stroke of brilliance. | |
| It almost sometimes appears that Trump supports just negotiating for its own sake because he likes the idea of negotiation. | |
| And he feels that he has such a prescient insight into every manner of domestic and international affairs that his negotiating will trumps all else, to use a pun. | |
| But either way, Democrats often have not been a very helpful force in curtailing or counteracting Any of Trump's more bellicose instincts on the international stage. | |
| And this is another example where they're basically nowhere to be found. | |
| Sure, there's plenty going on. | |
| But you would think that given the gravity of this, really? | |
| The U.S. and Israel jointly bombing Iranian nuclear facilities? | |
| Who knows where that would end up? | |
| If you cross that red line... | |
| What's to stop the U.S. and Israel from just going all the way and achieving regime change? | |
| Which has always been the goal, openly stated, of Netanyahu in Israel and many in the United States. | |
| So once that Pandora's box is opened, there's no telling where it could actually end up. | |
| But the opposition party right now... | |
| Doesn't take much interest. | |
| And just to complete my little monologue here on this point, there's an aspect here that I think also is worth being cognizant of, which is that Trump has been told that Iran has been plotting to assassinate him. | |
| Now, the basis of that claim might be a little questionable. | |
| But nonetheless, Trump has been led to believe it. | |
| The Biden administration actually put out this claim during the 2024 campaign. | |
| And the claim was taken so seriously that Trump was given a directive to divert his plane when he was traveling around for campaign events and use like a decoy plane to throw off these alleged Iranian assassins. | |
| And his current CIA Director John Ratcliffe actually went around proclaiming that it's already settled knowledge that Iran attempted to assassinate Trump. | |
| And according to Ratcliffe, that alone justifies this joint Israeli-US bombing operation. | |
| So let's take a look at that clip of John Ratcliffe, the current CIA Director, from last fall. | |
| It's no secret that the Democrats want to obtain a ceasefire in advance of the presidential election coming up to help Kamala Harris. | |
| And in so doing, they're really willing to put... | |
| You know, politics above our national security. | |
| And it is troubling, Maria, because how far are they willing to go? | |
| Well, as you point out, they're willing to ignore acts of war. | |
| I mean, when our own intelligence community tells us that they're hacking into the Trump campaign to help Kamala Harris win the election, when they engage in an act of war of trying to assassinate President Trump, and perhaps most importantly, | |
| when they engage in the act of war of Of firing through its Houthi-controlled rebels ballistic missiles at three U.S. warships, and there had been no actions and no consequences to those acts of war by Iran, it unfortunately tells you how far the Democrats are willing to go to stop Donald Trump. | |
| And, you know, I think larger at play here, Maria, is not just this short-term election, but that it really reveals the failed strategy of the Democrats over the last 10 years in dealing with You know, the famous Obama doctrine, | |
| which was that, look, we can deter Iran diplomatically and it won't come at the expense of Israel. | |
| Well, Barack Obama was wrong. | |
| He misunderstood the lethality and the evil nature of the Iranian regime. | |
| And what Israel has done is essentially employ the Trump doctrine, a pressure, maximum pressure campaign, understanding that the only way to deter terrorists like Iran and their proxies is to put your foot on their throat. | |
| And Israel has done that. | |
| We should be assisting Israel in doing so. | |
| But again, political expediency and the quest for power by Kamala Harris and the Democrats is resulting in American national security taking a back seat, unfortunately. | |
| That's quite disturbing. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Okay, so that's John Ratcliffe, when he was technically still a private citizen during the 2024 campaign, saying that Iran has already committed"acts of war" against the United States, including by allegedly hacking Trump campaign emails and, | |
| more grievously, allegedly Plotting to assassinate Trump. | |
| So you already have this rationale baked in, according to the current CIA director, for a war on Iran as of six months ago or more. | |
| So there are elements within the administration that have already been laying the groundwork, even before they entered the administration, to present an argument that is tailored to Trump's sensibilities, meaning they tried to assassinate you, you need revenge, | |
| blah, blah, blah. | |
| Who presumably have his ear to some extent and are contributing to this growing kind of clamor for some war with Iran. | |
| And finally, Tom Cotton echoed this yesterday after there was the wave of consternation over Whitcoff's comments about the nuclear enrichment threshold, | |
| which he then seemingly proceeded to repudiate. | |
| And Cotton knows what is most emotionally resonant with Trump here, or what is potentially the most salient point to make. | |
| Iran is a terrorist regime that has tried to assassinate American officials on American soil, including President Trump. | |
| As President Trump said, the only solution is completely dismantling its program, or we should do it for them. | |
| So, this is being very openly telegraphed. | |
| I would doubt that even Trump himself or even the senior most officials know whether it's a sure thing, one way or another, that a war would happen. | |
| I'm sure that they would probably prefer if it was achievable. | |
| Iran just diplomatically agreeing to totally capitulate to the United States and Israel and dismantling its own nuclear program and submitting themselves to the so-called Libyan model, where after getting rid of its nuclear program, The leader of Iran gets regime changed anyway by the United States and then bludgeoned to death in the street and anally raped, | |
| which is what happened to Gaddafi in Libya. | |
| But a cynic, I think, could reasonably wonder if a lot of this is being set up as a pretext for a march to war with Iran. | |
| You would wonder why this isn't generating more interest in the wider media. | |
| Obviously, the immigration stuff and the multitude of other issues that are going on right now also are significant. | |
| But if within just like three or four months of Trump taking office, he decides to go to war with Iran, that would be major. | |
| And people might wish in retrospect that they paid a little bit more attention to the lead-up. | |
| That's where I come in, I guess. | |
| Now, we will go to Zed Jelani. | |
| Zed, I do want to get to your Twitter exchange with none other than the Vice President of the United States, which is sort of interesting that that's a thing that happens in its own right. | |
| But I don't know how much you heard of my... | |
| Spiel just now on this war with Iran seemingly being telegraphed, or at least the groundwork for it being laid. | |
| And, you know, the directionally kind of the big piece of evidence I cite from this week is that Steve Whitcoff did go on Sean Hannity's show and suggest a tentative openness to Iran being permitted to retain its nuclear enrichment program pursuant to these... | |
| Direct negotiations or indirect negotiations that started over the weekend. | |
| And then there was this backlash from a lot of the kind of standard pro-Iranian hawks in and out of the Republican Party. | |
| And then all of a sudden, the following morning, Witkoff, from his official envoy ex-account, puts out a statement seemingly repudiating what he had said the previous night on Hannity and declaring that Iran would have to, quote, eliminate. | |
| It's a nuclear enrichment program, which I think most people who have any familiarity with this issue realize is a non-starter for Iran. | |
| So what do you make of that? | |
| And what do you make of the prospects of war with Iran? | |
| Because it seems like it's getting more imminent, potentially. | |
| And I think people are going to, if it does happen, people are going to maybe regret not following the lead-up a little more closely. | |
| Well, I think it's becoming a bit of a pattern with the administration and foreign policy, right? | |
| Kind of stick their necks out and try to maneuver towards diplomacy, compromising, so on and so forth. | |
| We saw this with Witkoff, right? | |
| Witkoff came out and said, look, our red line really is weaponization. | |
| We can deal with some amount of enrichment, kind of like the Obama deal, right? | |
| He was instantly attacked by kind of neoconservatives, by people on the hard right, Tom Cotton types. | |
| And then the next day, or maybe even before 24 hours, he puts out a statement on Twitter saying, look, Actually, we don't want enrichment either. | |
| You know, what is their position? | |
| It's hard to someone, right, when their position changes day by day. | |
| And we don't know what he was saying in Oman or what he's going to be saying in Rome this weekend. | |
| But yeah, they have to be able to hold a position and carry it through without worrying as much about pressure from domestic hawks, from the Israelis who aren't even party to the agreement, but they always weigh in anyway. | |
| And they have to be able to carry it through, actually, to the end. | |
| And I think it's a pattern that we've seen. | |
| I mean, the same thing happened with Adam Bowler, who was actually, I think, Jerry Kushner's roommate, going back. | |
| And, you know, he had done some one-on-one negotiations with Hamas. | |
| And he has done something like, you know, America is not an agent of Israel. | |
| Like, you know, we have our own interests. | |
| We've got to pursue this. | |
| And then he was attacked in the same way, and he basically was dragged out apologizing within a few days as well. | |
| So like, you know, the question is, is like, can the administration actually, like, do they actually want an agreement or they just want to be positive? | |
| The same thing with the tariffs where... | |
| Trump had pursued a trade war against everybody in the markets. | |
| The bond markets got angry. | |
| He saw Jamie Dimon on television and he caved, right? | |
| Are they going to do the same thing with foreign policy? | |
| Because to do things like this, you kind of have to stand your ground. | |
| I mean, Obama, people may not remember this, but even when Obama was pursuing a deal with Iran, they were members of his own party, you know, like Chuck Schumer even, who were opposed to that deal and who were criticizing him. | |
| But Obama stood his ground in order to get the deal done, right? | |
| And Trump would have to do the same thing. | |
| And as far as the reporting suggests, it's... | |
| Pretty much what you would expect, that some people within the administration are for the more compromised position. | |
| That would be Wyckoff himself, Vice President J.D. Vance. | |
| Other people are against it, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the National Security Advisor Waltz. | |
| So, you know, it ultimately comes down to Trump, right? | |
| Does Trump want to kind of be a chump and not get this deal done and have there be a war or something like that because he can't handle criticism from people? | |
| As far as we know, the JCPOA, the deal that Obama negotiated with Iran, more or less held. | |
| Iran held to it. | |
| It was America that pulled out of it. | |
| It was Trump that pulled out of it, right? | |
| So, like, Trump is now talking about— Trump was told by—remember, I don't know if you recall this, but Trump was told by Rex Tillerson in the first year of his first term, just what you said, that the deal was holding, that Iran was basically compliant. | |
| Right. We need to remember that— Trump eventually withdrew anyway. | |
| Yeah, we have to remember that Trump actually did not withdraw from it, I think, until the second year of his presidency, right? | |
| Yeah, it was May of 2018. | |
| So he abided by it for the first 15 months. | |
| Yeah, and that may have been an ego thing. | |
| Like, okay, Obama negotiated this, Trump would rather have his own deal, blah, blah. | |
| But again, it gets back to, will Trump even have the gumption to follow through with that and achieve that? | |
| Or is he too intimidated by the... | |
| You know, external criticism he's getting. | |
| Now, it should be said that, like, part of this is navigating politics, right? | |
| Like, Whitcoff could just be trying to manage the Republican coalition and also try to appease the Israelis a little bit to, like, so that they don't go and start a war and drag America into it. | |
| So they could be doing public statements that way. | |
| I mean, it's often difficult to know what's happening, like, behind the doors, you know, privately, so on and so forth. | |
| But I don't know. | |
| We saw it with that signal exchange over Yemen, right? | |
| When there are disagreements about... | |
| The course of action, you know, someone like J.D. Vance will speak up and say,"Well, I don't really think that's the way to go. | |
| It's not really good for us." But at the end of the day, when someone puts a decision down, he's going to go with it. | |
| They ought to stand on one kind of shoulder-to-shoulder publicly, right? | |
| So, yeah, I mean, a lot of this will come down to Trump and what he wants. | |
| You know, we can always say,"Well, oh, it was Rubio's fault because Rubio was advocating the hot position." Or,"Oh, Wyckoff didn't have enough influence." But look, the buck stops with Trump. | |
| He makes the decision. | |
| At the end of the day, Wyckoff does not make the decision. | |
| Trump makes the decision. | |
| So he's the one who's going to ask to be accountable if we see another conflict. | |
| Yeah, I always thought the most telling part of that signal thread was J.D. Vance expressing some reservations about the bombing, but not on the merits, but just in terms of how it could complicate what J.D. Vance took to be Trump's broader messaging around Europe. | |
| So J.D. Vance didn't want to, quote, bail out Europe, and he thought that Bombing the Houthis in Yemen would function as bailing out Europe. | |
| But then when he's told what the deal is by Stephen Miller, who relays that he understood Trump to already have made the decision to launch the renewed bombing offensive against Yemen, | |
| J.D. Vance is all on board. | |
| He totally discards whatever reservations he had kind of very tentatively expressed. | |
| And then when Waltz tells Vance that the U.S. just bombed an apartment building because the missile guy was supposedly in there, which we later heard was based on Israeli human intelligence, because the missile guy was apparently totally violating all Islamic customs in Yemen and going to meet his single girlfriend alone in an apartment building, | |
| but we'll leave that aside. | |
| J.D. Vance responds within a matter of seconds and says excellent. | |
| He needs no further information about the prudence or justifiability of that strike to declare excellent. | |
| Now, we don't want to read too much into a single or a text exchange, but I thought it was pretty illuminating. | |
| But just in terms of like, okay, so these competing factions within the administration, I think a lot of what the Trump administration does makes more sense if you just accept. | |
| That there really is no unified position that's administration-wide. | |
| And that might be even by design. | |
| Trump was re-elected on the grounds that he had, like, this world-historic negotiating acumen. | |
| And his intuitions are what is paramount. | |
| And his, you might even call whims or caprice. | |
| That's what dictates policy. | |
| People, even in the administration itself, might not know what his whims or intuitions are on a particular day. | |
| Their job is to best channel what they perceive to be Trump's intuitions and try to exert influence from that perspective. | |
| And you even see this to some degree with the tariff business, right? | |
| I mean, nobody could figure out what the unified administration policy was. | |
| You have, like, Howard Lutnick and Besant. | |
| And the trade representative and the director of the National Economic Council saying seemingly contradictory things at any given moment, and Trump himself saying, this is not a negotiation, these tariffs are final, and then within a matter of days, he watches Jamie Dimon on Maria Bartiromo's show saying that this could be a problem and decides to declare a 90-day suspension of the bulk of the tariffs with the exception of China. | |
| That's a perfect kind of case in point of how it's just a matter of channeling whatever Trump's day-to-day intuitions are. | |
| So you have to expect some erraticism or some inconsistency. | |
| And I think there's a similar dynamic potentially going on with Iran. | |
| And so I guess if people just kind of accept that it's virtually impossible to divine a unified, consistent policy... | |
| Trump might not even have one in his own head, then I think a lot becomes more decipherable about how the administration operates. | |
| I do think that Trump wants a deal because he's always talking about having a deal with Iran. | |
| He's been talking about it since last year on the campaign. | |
| He has been goaded in the other direction. | |
| Someone was like, oh, I remember an Israeli reporter was at the White House. | |
| They were like, isn't Iran weak right now? | |
| Shouldn't we strike him now? | |
| And he's like, well, no, actually, they're kind of strong. | |
| I feel like Trump has this attitude of getting along with these kind of strongmen-type leaders like Erdogan or Orban or North Korea's leader or Iran. | |
| And he kind of, I don't know, maybe he even respects them more because he thinks they tried to kill him, which is what the U.S. government alleged. | |
| You know, he kind of, like, sees them on his level. | |
| It might be how Trump thinks. | |
| But the problem is, though, like, the people around Trump will tell him, okay, maybe you can get them to have a deal where they just don't have any nuclear enrichment, which is very unrealistic because... | |
| Why would Iran give up all their nuclear enrichment when they had already been part of an international deal where they were enriching but they were not weaponizing and everything was going okay? | |
| It would be like a huge cave from them for really no reason. | |
| And if people had that kind of deal and he holds out for that, it's probably not going to happen, right? | |
| Versus what Wyckoff was saying originally, it was like, okay, look, we can basically go back to something very similar to what Obama had. | |
| That's realistic, and I think Trump could pull that off. | |
| It's not clear whether Trump actually understands this dynamic, right? | |
| I do think it's possible that Whitcoff was being a little bit overrated in terms of his alleged diplomatic acumen. | |
| When the Trump administration came into office, Whitcoff was being praised to high heaven for supposedly negotiating the ceasefire deal with respect to Gaza, in conjunction with his counterpart in the outgoing Biden administration, Brett McGurk. | |
| And yes, there was an initial ceasefire. | |
| There were some hostages released. | |
| But Trump and others in the administration then proceeded to systematically undermine the continued viability of that ceasefire deal, culminating in Trump giving a, quote, green light to Netanyahu to resume the war in Gaza even more aggressively after transporting Israel higher and higher grade munitions that they complained. | |
| The Biden administration had placed some restrictions on, despite having given Israel more munitions than any U.S. president ever. | |
| Yeah, well, I think we have to remember, I think we just have to remember, like, the buck stops at the president ultimately, right? | |
| Like, Wyckoff will do what he's authorized to do, right? | |
| Like, I think, as far as his diplomatic skill goes, I think it probably helps somewhat to have someone who's outside the normal Republican and state foreign policy establishment because they have very narrow views. | |
| Not very good at diplomacy, actually. | |
| And, you know, having someone who's a personal friend of Trump also insulates him somewhat from criticism. | |
| Like, a lot of neocons wanted Whitcoff fired after the ceasefire went into place in January. | |
| I don't think Trump wanted to fire him because he's known him for, like, 20-plus years, and he likes him, blah, blah, blah. | |
| So, like, he's an asset in that regard. | |
| And wasn't Whitcoff with him? | |
| Wasn't Whitcoff with Trump on the golf course during the second assassination attempt? | |
| Oh, I don't know. | |
| who was hiding outside. | |
| I'm pretty sure that Whitcoff was actually with Trump during that second assassination. | |
| Obviously, it didn't result in any bullets being fired, but that kind of does create another layer of a bond. | |
| What I was saying is he has tasked Whitcoff with all kinds of things. | |
| He sent him to Russia, and he's doing some hostage negotiation about Russia and all those other things. | |
| It's almost like Trump doesn't really like | |
| Marco Rubio very much, because Rubio's not doing all this. | |
| Wyckoff is doing it. | |
| So it's a weird dynamic. | |
| I think, to your point, it ultimately comes down to Trump. | |
| Wyckoff cannot make Trump do something he doesn't want to do. | |
| If Trump doesn't want to really exert enough pressure to get any of these things done, it just won't happen, right? | |
| It doesn't matter, because Wyckoff is not the one in control, right? | |
| I think it comes back to him, ultimately. | |
| But it is an interesting dynamic that he has picked his personal friend to go do all these things, and he doesn't even really seem to rely on his own Secretary of State or his NSA or these people. | |
| Well, he has dispatched—I mean, I actually think that one of the interesting stories of this administration is the rapport between Rubio and Trump. | |
| And actually, over the past several years, it kind of went under the radar, where people weren't expecting Rubio to— Be in the running for a vice presidential pick, but most of the reporting that I've seen indicates that it came down to either Vance or Rubio. | |
| And arguably, Secretary of State is a more significant position than vice president, which, as we know, is very constitutionally ambiguous as to what its roles even are. | |
| But I think there's a parallel here with the North Korea negotiations from the first term. | |
| Trump did want a deal in the abstract with North Korea. | |
| He liked the idea of negotiating. | |
| And even breaking a taboo by engaging in direct diplomacy with North Korea. | |
| But then what happened? | |
| People in the administration, with varying degrees of influence, at that time it was Bolton and Pompeo, imposed maximalist demands on the North Korea negotiations, which ultimately did not result in anything other than a temporary cessation or a mini-detente with North Korea where they did cease firing We're good to | |
| go. North Korea was never going to conceivably agree to the maximalist nuclear disarmament plans that the Trump administration was then trying to impose. | |
| Then what good is the negotiation for its own sake other than a public spectacle? | |
| Yeah. Also, I think something Trump probably needs to understand is that I don't think that they're that impressed in this region by threats of force. | |
| Everybody in this region... | |
| It's kind of used to being at war with each other. | |
| They're kind of always prepared for it. | |
| It's kind of built into their domestic politics. | |
| So, like, purely sticks is not the greatest thing in the world when approaching these kind of countries. | |
| I think having some carrots, some kind of, like, long-term, this is what you'll really get out of this, this is how you can change your relationship with us, might be more beneficial in cases like this. | |
| I don't think that Iran is super impressed by this. | |
| These threats of war, I mean, they've been preparing for them for years, because, like, America and or Israel have been making them for many years. | |
| They've made them under previous presidents. | |
| And so I think he has to figure out some kind of broader framework for why Iran might want to take part in this again, particularly because Trump is the one who pulled out of the last agreement, right? | |
| Like, Iran's just like, oh, we're going to do this again for a few years, and then it's going to be gone a few years later. | |
| And Trump is given a two-month deadline. | |
| Whereas the JCPOA took 20 months with like seven different parties, including Russia and China, negotiating. | |
| So if Trump is saying, look, I'm getting fed up, he said this in the White House actually with Bukele, I think they're like dragging us along after the negotiations literally only started last Saturday. | |
| So he can't even like wait a few days before he's getting aggravated about the lack of progress. | |
| And you got to wonder about the sincerity of the negotiating overture to begin with. | |
| Anyways, I want to move on. | |
| So you had an interesting exchange. | |
| Was it today or yesterday with J.D. Vance? | |
| It was last night. | |
| Last night. | |
| So first of all, we can pull that up hopefully on the screen. | |
| It was about the deportations that are going on and the apparent decision that it's totally America first to have a penal colony in El Salvador with no due process to speak of. | |
| And the Trump administration seemingly defying more and more judicial orders, even after admitting that the deportation was effectuated on this one particular individual, Abrego Garcia, by error, they claim. | |
| And so it's leading to this debate. | |
| I think the Trump administration believes that they probably have the better end of the political argument here, because a lot of people, a lot of ordinary Americans don't have a whole lot of interest or investment in. | |
| The technicalities of due process, if they hear that this guy was an accused gang member and he was illegally in the country to begin with, then I don't think there's a supermajority of Americans who are going to be that concerned with the manner in which he was expelled from the country. | |
| Now, having a penal colony that he goes to and has maybe disappeared in for life without getting an opportunity to contest any claim against him. | |
| That might be a little bit different. | |
| However, in terms of just getting illegal immigrants out of the country, I think the Republicans currently have that argument in their favor. | |
| Anyway, you had this exchange with J.D. Vance first. | |
| I wanted to ask you, what do you think of just the principle of the vice president debating media personalities on Twitter? | |
| I think there's something useful about it. | |
| People sometimes mock him for like, Having the time to even do that. | |
| Whereas, I don't think there's anything inherently discrediting about engaging with people online. | |
| Obviously, that's a platform that people debate all day, every day. | |
| So what do you think of just the concept of him engaging with you? | |
| I think you might have done it once before, actually. | |
| And the substance of the exchange. | |
| Yeah, a couple times. | |
| I mean, I think that for him, he sees himself as kind of like... | |
| You know, he is the lawyer for the Trump administration, right? | |
| He's the one who's going to be arguing their case in detail at intellectual level, legal level, historical levels, so on and so forth, right? | |
| He's done this with a number of journalists. | |
| He's done this with a number of politicians. | |
| He's had back and forth with Ro Khanna, who's been targeting him more directly as well. | |
| And I think that for him... | |
| It's also kind of probably a response to the actual powers of the vice presidency are pretty limited, right? | |
| Like, he doesn't really have to do that much other than, like, break tie votes in the Senate if he has to, which he's had to before for nominees. | |
| But, you know, what he can do is he has one of the most powerful soapboxes in the country, right? | |
| He can speak his mind and he can make the case for the administration and so on and so forth. | |
| So I think that's kind of how he's responding to things. | |
| He's also a millennial. | |
| You know, I think he might be like... | |
| Two, three years older than me. | |
| He's not that much older than me. | |
| And I think he has always been someone who reads voraciously and likes to be part of intellectual debates, even before he was formally involved in politics as a senator. | |
| And so I think he's just naturally continuing to do it. | |
| And I think, if I had to guess, the Trump administration probably likes how he does it, right? | |
| They feel like they have someone who's kind of above Trump's level in terms of argumentation and book-smart intellect. | |
| It's probably a pretty good fit for him to be doing that. | |
| It's more useful than whatever Kamala Harris was doing. | |
| You can't imagine Kamala Harris engaging in long back and forths with people online. | |
| She'd be too intimidated to do it. | |
| She wouldn't have thoughts about a lot of things. | |
| She'd have staff doing it for her. | |
| It's different with him. | |
| He's almost like... | |
| He's almost like a pundit himself, right? | |
| Like, he's just kind of controlling. | |
| He was. | |
| I mean, not almost. | |
| He was. | |
| I mean, that's how he gained his national profile. | |
| He had a successful book. | |
| And then he was brought on to lots of TV shows and things to talk about the book. | |
| And then, inevitably, in 2016, he was asked about Trump and the dynamics around the election that year. | |
| And he gained a punditry profile. | |
| And that's what then served as the basis for him to seek to run for. | |
| Senate in Ohio. | |
| So yeah, this is kind of, in some certain ways, his natural state. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I think it's a development of his skill set as a, like you said, as a pundit who turned into a politician, but who still kind of retains some of those attitudes and some of the demeanors and so on and so forth. | |
| So I think that he's going to continue to do it. | |
| I mean, I don't really see it. | |
| Number of downsides. | |
| The only downsides would be if he strung out positions that aren't the Trump administration's positions, and then he ended up, like, tweeting in them into having entirely different positions, which so far he hasn't. | |
| He hasn't been fairly disciplined about that, kind of staying with the party line. | |
| But yeah, last night— Yeah, how about the substance of the exchange? | |
| And let's pull that up on the screen if we can, because we have it ready. | |
| But it's pretty interesting. | |
| The vice president decided to debate you. | |
| Yeah, so last night he was basically, he was making an argument. | |
| You know, the administration's been getting a lot of flack because, as you all have covered on your show, they have been using a prison in El Salvador, which they are subsidizing through a contract, to deport people, right? | |
| A lot of those people who are being deported are not being given, like, the even very narrow. | |
| Due process, meaning like a deportation proceeding before a judge, right? | |
| Where they get some time to defend themselves. | |
| Often these are very quick, like five minutes, literally in some cases. | |
| A lot of people have not gotten that, and the concern is that some of them just don't even have... | |
| Do they have a criminal record in the country illegally? | |
| Why are they being sent to a prison? | |
| Can't they just be deported to some country, a country of origin? | |
| Some of them are not even Salvadorian. | |
| And then one gentleman was actually, even the administration's lawyers admitted that there was an administrative error in sending them. | |
| They didn't actually mean to do it. | |
| So the question is like, that went all the way up to the Supreme Court. | |
| The Supreme Court is like, you need to facilitate his return to the United States. | |
| The administration will not do it. | |
| They will not try to bring him back. | |
| They'll not even ask the president of El Salvador to bring him back. | |
| And then the president of El Salvador is like, I can't bring him back if they don't want him. | |
| They're both kind of pointing the finger at each other. | |
| So anyway, Vance, I think, has been seeing all this criticism aimed at the administration. | |
| And so he was like, look, dude, Biden brought in so many people. | |
| There is no way... | |
| That we can give all those people this standard of due process that our critics are talking about. | |
| It would take too long. | |
| It's inefficient. | |
| He cited a number 20 million. | |
| I don't think there's 20 million people in the country illegally. | |
| I think that's really inflated. | |
| But whatever the number is. | |
| So I engaged with them. | |
| I was like, dude, I do think that if you're accusing someone of a crime, a trial is appropriate. | |
| Remember, at what point... | |
| Go ahead. | |
| At one point, J.D. Vance, this was a few weeks ago, said that this guy was a convicted MS-13 member, implying that he had been convicted of a crime associated with his purported membership in this gang, | |
| which was not the case at all. | |
| No, I mean, first of all, you can't be convicted. | |
| Being in a gang is not a crime inherently, right? | |
| What had happened is an informant had accused him of being part of MS-13. | |
| It never really went anywhere. | |
| The court did not convict him of any crime. | |
| There were a lot of holes in what the informant had said, and oftentimes, please get things wrong. | |
| That's fine. | |
| But that's why you have due process, right? | |
| And then, like, you know, Stephen Miller has called him, I think, a terrorist. | |
| I don't know anyone he's terrorized. | |
| He's never been convicted of blowing it into the opera shooting it. | |
| Yeah, Bukele called him a terrorist too. | |
| Bukele said at the White House meeting with Trump,"What am I supposed to do, smuggle a terrorist into the United States?" Disclaiming any ability to facilitate, as the Supreme Court ordered, | |
| the return of this individual to the United States. | |
| So yeah, there's some irony in that a lot of these MAGA people will claim that they are these big opponents of Bush and Cheney, the despised Bush and Cheney, and yet they're incredibly eager to deploy the rhetorical and legal architecture. | |
| Of the war on terror period by just declaring whoever they want to be a terrorist, and then any due process, protections, and civil liberties that might be afforded to that person dissipate. | |
| So they're actually, in a way, the proper successors to Bush-Cheney in their capricious use of this terrorism label. | |
| Yeah, I mean, my counterargument to Vince was that, you know, basically that he's saying it's inefficient, right? | |
| There's two different things going on here. | |
| One, if someone's a terrorist or a criminal or some kind of crime, yeah, you have to put them through a trial. | |
| Lakin Reilly's killer, the murderer in that case in Georgia, they cite Lakin Reilly all the time. | |
| He did get a trial, right? | |
| And he was convicted. | |
| He was sent to prison. | |
| And I don't recall anyone in the state of Georgia, the most conservative Republicans, saying, no, he shouldn't be afforded a trial. | |
| We should just throw him away, knock out the key. | |
| Everyone thought it was common sense. | |
| Yeah, if someone's accused of a crime, send him on trial. | |
| So that's one thing. | |
| If you're actually accusing people of these serious crimes, which they are like every day, like Stephen Miller, Bukele, blah, blah, blah. | |
| The other thing is like deportation. | |
| For a deportation, you don't usually get a jury trial, but you do get a judge, right? | |
| And the judge looks at your case, looks at the facts. | |
| Okay, you stay, you leave, whatever. | |
| Those are often very quick. | |
| They can be like a few minutes long, right? | |
| So it's not like it would take a century to just allow that basic amount of due process for these people. | |
| And then, yeah, like in the case of when you're accusing people of crimes, you actually have to prove it through a trial. | |
| You can't just call someone a terrorist or, you know, so on and so forth. | |
| And so, you know, the Vance Miller argument, Homan also, the guy at ICE, is basically that it takes too long. | |
| And I'm like, you can make that argument for anything in government, right? | |
| Like, it takes too long for Congress to make a law. | |
| So why not just let the president make the laws, right? | |
| It takes too long to debate whether they're going to war. | |
| Why doesn't the president just go to war? | |
| I mean, that's kind of what we do now. | |
| Congress barely votes on wars that we can party, right? | |
| So this devolution of power towards the top, it's kind of like a road to tyranny. | |
| And one of the arguments that's actually in favor of a tyrant, and usually what tyrants argue, is that having these emergency powers help speed things up so they can respond quickly. | |
| It makes things more efficient. | |
| You know, they can actually tackle a huge problem that all these checks and balances and bureaucracy and red tape wouldn't let them do. | |
| And they're doing the exact same thing here now. | |
| And actually, the quote that Vance told me, and people kept quoting this back to me after he did it, was that I was hiding behind due process. | |
| I was like, hiding behind due process? | |
| It does kind of sound like something a dictator would say. | |
| And I would think, I would hope that JD would not, would realize the problem with saying something like that. | |
| Well, yeah, I mean, they're affording... | |
| Trump is arrogating to himself so many emergency powers now that people lose track. | |
| And this trend of governance by emergency decree is not unique to Trump. | |
| It was overused, at least from my perspective, during COVID at many levels of government. | |
| But Trump is like saying, look, I can single-handedly overturn the global trading system by declaring a national emergency. | |
| That apparently stems from 1934 because that's the date, that was the year that's cited in the executive order from April 2nd, that posited the origins of this trading imbalance that damages the United States. | |
| And I can just declare anyone a terrorist and that kind of activates certain powers in my command to do as I please with them. | |
| And yeah, Congress is basically supine. | |
| Very few Republicans, if any, are going to take much concerted action to rein in the powers of Trump. | |
| Now, if his approval rating continues to gradually go down, maybe there will be more of a political will to do that, but probably not for quite some time. | |
| And so, yeah, what would you say to... | |
| I'm sure you've gotten this retort from people. | |
| Look, he was in the country illegally. | |
| I don't care. | |
| If some judge in 2019 issued a stay of deportation that barred the government from deporting him to El Salvador because he might have been killed or targeted by some rival gang, he wasn't even in the country legally in the first place. | |
| So why should I care about any due process that may or may not be afforded to him? | |
| If anything... | |
| I love the government doing this. | |
| I think we're in the midst of a demographic emergency that was accelerated by Biden letting in however many millions of people it was in this irregular immigration inflow. | |
| And I want to preserve our national character and this idea that you're going to blackmail us by saying that we have to be overly concerned about the due process rights Of this at least potential or probable gang member, | |
| even if it wasn't officially adjudicated. | |
| The idea that I'm supposed to be clutching my pearls about that when I have bigger fish to fry, which is that I got to save the country. | |
| We want to save the country. | |
| We want our strong leader to save our country from demographic destruction and this invasion of third world people who don't share our values and are also a public safety threat. | |
| So that's my best Yeah, I mean, look, if a judge offers you legal protection, that is the law, right? | |
| That's kind of our system. | |
| But to the other question of if someone had entered the country illegally, what are their rights, right? | |
| The question is, if you actually have unlawful status, either if you entered illegally or if you overstayed your visa or if you entered legally and you... | |
| Made an asylum application, which, by the way, some people who did that got sent to this El Salvador prison. | |
| I don't know why. | |
| I don't know what the grounds are to do it. | |
| But people who 100% follow the law are still getting deported in this way, which is kind of crazy. | |
| But anyway, if any of those things happen, like... | |
| That's unlawful, but it's like a misdemeanor. | |
| It's not even a felony, right? | |
| You don't even go to prison for doing that, right? | |
| So why do we have a contract to send people to a prison in El Salvador, which is their maximum security prison next to people who are murderers, rapists, serial killers, blah, blah, blah, right? | |
| That's the really crazy part. | |
| I think that if the Trump administration was speeding up deportations of people who happen to be unlawfully here for various reasons, but just sending them back to their countries of origin, it would be less objectionable because... | |
| They're not actually, like, trying to confine them and imprison them as if they committed some kind of serious crime. | |
| I mean, Christian Noem has even said that the people that have been sent to that prison in El Salvador should be there the rest of their lives. | |
| I think when Bloomberg, I think it was Bloomberg or 60 Minutes or probably both of them maybe looked into the backgrounds of these people, majority of them don't even have a criminal conviction for anything, right? | |
| Like, the worst a lot of them did was either an illegal entry. | |
| Or, in some cases, you know, they follow the law to the T, but they're still getting deported simply because, you know, I guess they don't want to accept their, you know, they don't want to put them through the asylum process or so on and so forth. | |
| Why is that life imprisonment in a prison somewhere, right? | |
| Like, the normal process is, you know, you deport someone back to their country of origin, they go and live there, like, you know, whatever. | |
| Like, you know, they're not, doing that one time is not a, it's not something that would even land you in prison in America because it's not a felony. | |
| Certainly is not life imprisonment and certainly not life imprisonment in a supermax prison as if you're a violent criminal or like, you know, you're like Hannibal Lecter or something, right? | |
| And that's how they're treating people. | |
| They're treating people like they're all Hannibal Lecter when a lot of them didn't even do anything. | |
| I guess the idea was that, I guess the idea would be or the rationale for that would be that this is a deterrent, meaning this is meant to send a message, do not come to the U.S. illegally because this is where you might end up and we're not... | |
| Playing games anymore, etc., etc. | |
| And there could be, I mean, there could be some deterrent value to it in that respect. | |
| It could be. | |
| It could be, although you would think that the best way to prevent something like illegal entry would just be to have a stronger border security, which is what the Republicans and Democrats always talk about. | |
| You know, if they're talking about kind of laying out extreme extrajudicial punishments, I mean, if you go further than that, you know, why not, instead of having El Salvador... | |
| Torture them on camera here in the United States. | |
| So why not torture their kids? | |
| Why not execute some people? | |
| I mean, it becomes a very extreme slippery slope once we start talking about handing out life imprisonment to people in a torture camp abroad for, in some cases, no one actually committed any crime, right? | |
| Like, you know, I guess you could always try to rationalize it as a deterrent to border crossing. | |
| Actually, Trump, I think there are many border crossings under Trump. | |
| And, you know, partly that's border security. | |
| Partly it's because there probably is an impression that just under Trump, the country is tougher on this stuff. | |
| So you're going to have less of a chance of getting an asylum claim filed and accepted and so on and so forth. | |
| I mean, they've also cut off many different legal avenues of immigration, right? | |
| They're cutting off parole systems. | |
| Well, Biden started doing that. | |
| Biden issued an executive order in June of 2024, after which the numbers of migrants fell pretty precipitously. | |
| Yeah, I mean, there's a lot you can do just with the border and with your changes to the law and the asylum process to try to cut down a number of people coming. | |
| And, you know, you can debate that. | |
| But I think, and some people would be against it because they think it's a new main and people have a right to come here, blah, blah, blah. | |
| But it wouldn't involve, like, extrajudicial... | |
| Without due process, sending people to a torture camp, right? | |
| So, like, they're jumping almost to the most extreme thing, right? | |
| And by jump, well, one of the more extreme things. | |
| They could go even further. | |
| I just mentioned some things earlier, some hypotheticals they could use if they really wanted to. | |
| Like, they used with child separation last time, right, in the first term. | |
| So, I think it's often kind of a strong man, like Vance was always saying. | |
| It's like, you know, he was kind of accusing me or other people. | |
| Being for open borders, I'm not actually opposing all these people coming here. | |
| And it's like, look, dude, there's all kinds of things you can do without jumping to the most extreme option. | |
| You know, you jump to the most extreme option, it actually might make what you're doing unpopular. | |
| Actually, in the YouGov poll, I think 60% of Americans said they didn't agree with sending people without due process to El Salvador, to this prison. | |
| So already Americans are turning against them on this plan. | |
| When just five months ago, immigration was arguably Trump's best issue, right? | |
| Everyone hated Biden over the issue, but he's already flipping the numbers by jumping these things because American public opinion is thermostatic, right? | |
| When you go too extreme in one direction, people tend to push back and want to go the other direction. | |
| So that may be what ends up happening. | |
| Yep. All right. | |
| Finally, Zed, with the few minutes we have left, I did want to ask you briefly about the Trump administration sending a threat letter to Harvard. | |
| Outlining a number of incredibly sweeping demands that they were compelling Harvard to comply with or else federal funding would be frozen. | |
| Now, it did turn out that Harvard took a stronger line against this than other universities like Columbia, which basically submitted to those demands, although the demands contained in this threat letter to Harvard were much more capacious. | |
| And extreme than even had been delivered to Colombia. | |
| And I wanted to bring up this one particular excerpt here, because this to me, I think, says it all. | |
| So this is an element here where the letter talks about reforming programs with egregious records of antisemitism and other bias. | |
| And according to this demand... | |
| Harvard would have been required to commission an external party to the satisfaction of the federal government that would audit programs and departments that fuel"anti-Semitic harassment" or reflect ideological capture, | |
| and that would be everything from the Divinity School to the School of Education to the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, of course, the Medical School. | |
| The Law School's International Human Rights Clinic and others. | |
| And there would then be this big audit of both faculty and students who discriminated against Jewish and Israeli students or incited students to violate Harvard's rules following October 7th. | |
| Now, that's kind of standard fare as to what the Trump administration has gone around demanding, but I thought it was amusing that in the very next paragraph, The Trump administration simultaneously demands the discontinuation of DEI, and that includes DEI-based disciplinary or speech control policies. | |
| So, on the one hand, they're demanding that Harvard take these sweeping measures to punish students and faculty who engaged in speech that could have been deemed inciting. | |
| Of students. | |
| Or motivated them to take part in anti-Semitic behaviors. | |
| On the one hand, they want to claim that they're advocating for Harvard to discontinue, quote, speech control policies. | |
| Whereas in the preceding paragraph, they're demanding these incredibly brazen affronts to the free flow of speech. | |
| Now, I think people understand, especially if they watch this show. | |
| That there's some irreconcilable tension or contradiction here, even hypocrisy. | |
| But I'm increasingly of the belief, or my working theory is increasingly that the contradiction is kind of the point. | |
| They're basically just using a blunt force instrument against institutions that are deemed to be hostile, like Harvard or other Ivy League colleges, and kind of saddling them. | |
| With these, like, contradictory demands, basically just to, you know, throw some egg on them, essentially. | |
| And particularly with the extremism of this letter, it was almost inconceivable that Harvard would accede to it and basically turn themselves over to be a vassal of the Trump administration. | |
| Again, it goes even much further than the Columbia threat letter. | |
| So, yes, obviously there is some glaring Hypocrisy or contradictions here, but I'm almost increasingly surmising that the authors of such letters or the authors of this broader anti-Semitism higher education crackdown initiative know and realize that there's a contradiction, | |
| and they don't care. | |
| They actually embrace it because it just puts the university in this difficult, impossible situation, and they like to see These enemy institutions like writhing in pain. | |
| And so that's my theory. | |
| Well, look, I think it's just a matter of them expressing all of their grievances at once against Harvard, right? | |
| They don't like that Harvard maybe doesn't let them, doesn't have enough conservative professors, doesn't have enough conservative students. | |
| It doesn't have enough leeway for them to feature coursework that would reflect their point of view on transgender issues or something, right? | |
| At the same time, they don't like the Palestinian movement. | |
| They don't like foreigners in general. | |
| It kind of seems a lot of Trump's donors in particular really don't like anyone opposing what Israel is doing in Gaza, which I think has led to a lot of these deportations of deportation cases against green card holders who are permanent lawful residents who have not committed any crime, by the way, which is kind of crazy. | |
| Which is a real escalation that I think would be hard for someone like Vance to defend, probably because he doesn't really want to do it, but it's something he has to defend as vice president. | |
| And I think that if you think about it that way, if you don't think about it as them trying to create some kind of consistent logic that universities need to operate under, but rather just taking out their resentments against institutions that just don't share their points of view, then it makes perfect sense, | |
| right? They would love to turn Harvard into Republican U, right? | |
| And Harvard actually, earlier this year, did make the decision to cut off ties with one Palestinian university, with downsizing or degrading some of their Middle East scholarship. | |
| They probably were facing some pressure internally from their own donors and administrators who also don't like the Palestinian movement. | |
| But I think the Trump guys kind of went a little bit too far because their actual demands to Harvard were not just, okay, make some changes around. | |
| How do you teach about Palestine or whatever? | |
| It was like, basically, put us in control. | |
| We will kind of control your admissions process. | |
| We will control the ideological diversity of your school. | |
| And Harvard didn't want to do that, right? | |
| Because they're still like, I don't know, 80%, 80%, 85%, 90% Democrats. | |
| And I think at that point, they were like, look, we have a 50-plus billion dollar endowment. | |
| Why are we so scared of cutting off some federal funds? | |
| Now, I think it still would hurt Harvard because, one, They can't draw on all their endowment, like, immediately. | |
| I don't know how much they can or, like, how quickly that can happen. | |
| So, like, they probably will have to take some cuts if the federal government cuts off, I don't know, $2 billion or something, whatever they were threatening. | |
| And then, you know, there's also, like, they don't know how long this is going to last. | |
| Like, is Vance going to be the next president after that? | |
| And he does that for four more years, eight more years, he can change his policy. | |
| Like, eventually it would kind of wear on Harvard. | |
| But I think, at this point, they don't want to cave any more than they already have. | |
| Because if they had agreed to the demands that you had just read, it would basically be putting the Trump administration in charge of Harvard, a private university, the government just taking it over. | |
| I don't think they wanted to do that. | |
| But if you just read it through this complex that's developed on the right to having a lot of resentment and attitude towards universities, and Harvard is kind of the marquee elite university. | |
| I mean, just look at the U.S. Senate or the Congress or the judiciary. | |
| Think how many people went to Harvard, including Republicans. | |
| It's kind of their crown jewel, right? | |
| So they think if we own the libs at the very cliff, the peak of their achievements at Harvard, that's the game over, right? | |
| And so I think, yeah, Harvard is kind of putting its foot down. | |
| Actually, right as we were speaking, I think news broke that the administration might try to strip Harvard of its tax exemption, which I don't really think they can do that. | |
| I don't think you can single out one school and do that. | |
| Harvard will probably sue them. | |
| Never say never anymore. | |
| Never say never. | |
| I mean, yeah, like, I mean, you could do it for a class of schools. | |
| Wasn't there a whole controversy about how Bob Jones, wasn't Bob Jones University threatened with losing its tax income status because they barred interracial relationships? | |
| Yeah, like, I think also the Biden administration might have kind of leaned on some of the religious schools around this, but like... | |
| Really, the way you would do this is you would go to Congress and you would say, okay, this is the new rule for tax exemptions and every school has to follow it. | |
| That would be the legally sound way of doing it, I think. | |
| I think if they're just trying to administratively do it to one school, my guess is Harvard will sue the pants off them and win. | |
| So much of this administration is just like the conservative culture war industrial complex, right? | |
| Like it's constant resentment. | |
| Like, okay, we hate Harvard. | |
| It's the liberal, the lib school, right? | |
| Like all the elite libs are there. | |
| So we're going after Harvard. | |
| It's not like Harvard has any more incendiary points of view about these topics than any other major university out there, right? | |
| But it's kind of the hill that the Republicans want to die on. | |
| Like they want to pursue this. | |
| The first time I ever saw J.D. Vance speak, it was at the 2021... | |
| National Conservatism Conference. | |
| So it's like populist nationalist formation that a lot of these people wanted to become ascendant in the Republican Party. | |
| And I guess perhaps to some degree it is, although what distinguished that ideological tendency from like mainline Republicanism? | |
| I was never quite sure. | |
| And the conservative movement is always kind of evolving and taking on different orientations depending on what's popular. | |
| But anyway, J.D. Vance basically did this Richard Nixon-style speech where he was saying, I'm paraphrasing, but it was like the pointy-headed professors are the enemy and they're going after middle America. | |
| It wasn't particularly impressive or novel to me. | |
| It could be effective, but it was really just a regurgitation of the culture war strategy that was employed by Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan. | |
| In the 60s and 70s. | |
| So yes, this is something that Republicans, if they have their wits about them, would probably always want to do. | |
| I mean, that's true. | |
| I'm sure I love if Harvard was the new Hillsdale College. | |
| Well, the thing is, like, I don't... | |
| I think the thing with the Nixon thing, though, is, like, the country was very different socially, politically, demographically back then, right? | |
| And I think that the Republicans are almost biting off a little more than they can chew with the universities because it's like... | |
| The country's already kind of polarized around education when it comes to politics. | |
| So, like, I don't know. | |
| It's not like there's a ton of college students that really want the Republicans to take over their schools, right? | |
| Like, eh, not really at this point, right? | |
| Like, it's almost just, like, purely they're doing, you know, purely just trying to take them down a few pegs, take the other side down a few pegs. | |
| But I don't... | |
| I don't see them transforming the higher ed sector into a conservative sector in four years. | |
| It just doesn't seem likely because what really makes that sector is the demographics of the people going into college, which are largely Democrats, right? | |
| There's a lot of education polarization in politics, so I don't know. | |
| It'd be interesting to watch what they would try to do. | |
| All right, Zed, we'll leave it there. | |
| Thanks, as always, for joining and remind people where they can follow you if they're interested. | |
| Yeah, I, you know, I have a presence on Twitter, but also I have a substack, the American Saga, theamericansaga.com, just published a story today about how HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. just hired a guy who was known for using puberty blockers, | |
| of all things, to try to cure autism, right? | |
| You know, the very thing that Republicans are trying to ban all over America for transgender treatment. | |
| Now they want to, you know, this guy was using it for autism, which, of course, was not appropriate, and actually got him sanctioned by the state of Maryland. | |
| But yeah, I have a good story about that up today. | |
| I hope everyone goes and reads it. | |
| All right. | |
| Thank you, Zed. | |
| All right. | |
| Thanks, Mike. | |
| All right, everybody. | |
| Thanks for tuning in. | |
| Thanks for sitting through my guest hosting experience here. | |
| I know sometimes you might find that hard to endure. | |
| But Glenn is off doing God knows what, and so I swoop in as the big hero to save the day. | |
| Remember to like, subscribe, and follow the show on all your favorite platforms. | |
| You can follow me at mtracy.net. | |
| That's Tracy with an E, and also mtracy on Twitter slash X. So with that, we will meet again if God will allow us. |