Glenn Reacts to Breaking News: American Pope Chosen, Trump and Netanyahu Split Over War with Iran, MAHA Drama, and More
The U.S. celebrates the conclave's election of the first American pope while commentators scramble to parse his political beliefs. Is Pope Leo XIV MAGA? Is he a "Woke Marxist Pope?" Then: Is Trump really splitting with Netanyahu and pursuing his own America-First policy in the Middle East? Finally: Casey Means's nomination exposes a rift in MAHA world and Trump selects another Fox News host for a key position. -------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn
I just want to make a correction for the- Record, welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every single Monday through Friday, every single Monday through Friday, no exception, starting at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
The headline news in most countries in the world is the selection of Cardinal Robert Prevost to be the new leader of the Catholic Church, replacing the prior Pope Francis, who died late last month.
Prevost is now known as Pope Leo XIV.
Born in Chicago, he is the first ever American pope in the history of the Catholic Church.
Though as a fluent Spanish speaker, he has also done substantial work.
in the church in Latin America.
He's widely viewed as a close ally of Pope Francis, and to some extent, at least likely to follow in his footsteps.
Now, I'm not a theologian or a historian of the Catholic Church or even a member of the Catholic Church, so I don't want to posture someone with expertise in the conclave or in church matters.
But what I do think is worthy of attention is the reaction of political and media figures in the U.S. to his selection, as is true for almost everything now.
His life and worldview were instantly reduced to a handful of tweets and then grinded through the ideological and political prism to instantly determine whether he's good or bad.
It was very strange discourse, especially for someone that nobody really who was commenting on him knew anything about prior to the moment he was unveiled and will tell you all about it.
There are all sorts of significant movements and events taking place in the Middle East, including reports of a clear split between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu and thus between the US and Israel.
Now, I am far from convinced that this split is real, or at least that it will be anything close to permanent.
But there are signs that suggest this divergence, and so given the stakes involved, starting with the potential bombing of Iran, it is very worth reporting continuously on these developments, and so we're going to do so tonight.
We have several other topics.
It was a big, big news day, big news day the last 24 hours that we will get to, including Trump's selection of the close RFK junior ally Casey Means as Surgeon General, the announcement of which caused far more indignation and accusations than at least I expected,
including from RFK's Make America Healthy Again base, and most significantly from his vice presidential running mate and his largest funder, the billionaire Nicole Shanahan, who made All sorts of accusations and grievances in light of this announcement.
Now, there is definitely something going on here in terms of RFK that is not fully visible, namely constraints on RFK Jr. that are not typical for a Health and Human Services secretary, and we definitely intend to examine all those.
And then, time permitting, we will also explain the withdraw, Trump's withdraw of Ed Martin.
To be U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
Trump is very close to Ed Martin, but he became too controversial.
He likely wasn't going to get enough votes in the Senate.
Many GOP senators were not willing to vote for him.
And so Trump withdrew him this morning.
And then just moments ago, Trump announced his new selection to serve as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
And that person is Jeanine Pirro.
Better known to Fox News viewers as Judge Jeanine.
Not Judge Judy.
But Judge Jeanine.
So we'll tell you about all of that.
And then previewing tomorrow night, when we'll be speaking with the economist, Yanis Varoukoufis, who...
Varoufakis, who, among other things, served as Greece's finance minister during the country's 2015 debt crisis and fought against Germany and France and the EU and the World Bank.
Agree with him or not on specific questions, I personally find him one of the most informed and thoughtful analysts of political developments around.
He's very independent, very heterodox, and we are excited to be able to talk to him tomorrow night.
Before we get to all that, a few program notes.
First of all, we are encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app.
If you do so, it enables you to follow the programs you most like to watch on this platform.
Once you do that, you can activate notifications, which we hope you will.
And that means the minute any of those shows begin broadcasting live on the platform, the ones that you like and follow, you'll be immediately notified by email or text, whatever you want.
All the options in the world that you can choose to be notified.
They can call you.
They can pretty much do anything.
It's all your choice.
And then you just click on the link and you begin watching live.
It really helps the live viewing numbers of every Rumble program and therefore a free speech cause of Rumble as well.
As another reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all their major podcasting platforms where you rate, review, and follow, not just rate and review.
Rate, review, and follow our program on those platforms.
It really helps spread the visibility of the show.
Finally, as independent journalists, as independent media, we really do rely on the support of our viewers and members.
In order to do that, you can become a member of our Locals community.
If you do so, you get a wide range of...
Interaction and benefits of all kinds.
We have a lot of exclusive content that we put there.
We take questions every Friday night from our local members and answer those.
And most of all, it is the community on which we really do rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
Simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update after this message from our sponsor.
System Update.
System Update.
Thank you.
Now, I know you've heard all the hype.
You've heard all of it.
Tons and tons of hype.
Maybe you've seen the new launches sell out.
I don't know for sure, but it's a very good possibility that you have.
But if you still haven't tried 1775 coffee yet, like, why wouldn't you have?
I've been talking about it for months now.
This is your shot because they've just launched their 1775 starter kit.
And the first drop is limited to just 1,000 units.
This starter kit isn't some basic sampler pack.
No, it is not.
It's a full-on pack of caffeine freedom.
A ball dark roast that hits hard and strong.
A smooth medium roast for strength without bitterness.
And then there's Vitality Mushroom Coffee for clean energy, laser focus, and zero crash.
All single origin, small batch, mold-free, and toxin-free.
Plus, you're also getting...
Okay.
I think you should write this down because it's an amazing list.
Very, very significant list.
You're getting a gold spoon clip because plastic has no value in real coffee or real value, so you get the gold spoon clip.
A frother built to last.
It's not one of those temporary frothers that just, like, break after a couple weeks.
This one is built to last.
And you get a Mate Black 1775 Tumbler to drink your coffee in style.
$170 worth of coffee and gear, yours for $99.
It's like, how can you refuse that?
This is for the ones who have been watching 1775 Blow Up on Rumble, wondering if it's actually worth it.
Spoiler, it is.
Go to 7075.coffee.
Coffee.com /Glen and grab your starter kit before they're gone.
Bold beans, clean fuel, and a morning routine that stands for something just like Rumble does.
Start your day with coffee that actually backs what you believe in and seeks to support your rights.
Music.
Early this morning, white smoke emitted from the Vatican, which, as most of you know, signifies that the conclave of cardinals assembled in the Vatican have chosen a new pope.
And the new pope that they agreed on is the first ever American pope.
He was born in Chicago.
He is fully American.
He obviously speaks English in an Americanized way, which would be very strange hearing the pope speak in Americanized English.
He obviously, that's his first language, although he speaks several others as well.
Here from the Wall Street Journal, American is elected Pope for the first time.
Quote, American Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost has become the 267th pontiff of the Global Catholic Church, taking the name of Pope Leo XIV.
The new pontiff, the first from the U.S. in Christianity's 2,000-year history, appeared on the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica on Thursday afternoon to a huge cheer from tens of thousands of Catholic faithful and curious tourists gathered in St. Peter's Square.
Poplia was expected to be a unifying figure after years of fractious ideological tensions between the progressive and conservative wings of the Catholic Church.
As a Cardinal, Pope Leo rarely took an outspoken stance on the Church's polarizing issues, such as priestly celibacy or blessings for same-sex couples.
Leo signaled continuity with the inclusive spirit of Francis's pontificate, stressing the importance of synodality or gatherings of bishops and dialogue with laypeople to discuss the major challenge facing the Church.
That practice, promoted under Francis, caused much anxiety among conservative Catholics.
Quote, "We must try together to be a missionary church, a church that builds bridges and dialogue," Pope Leo said.
He then led the faithful in the Hail Mary Now, as I said at the start, he was a close ally of Pope Francis, who was regarded as a reformer.
On the more progressive wing of the Catholic Church, although the progressive wing of this Catholic Church is still quite conservative.
It's a very conservative institution by its very nature, by its age, by its function, by its purpose, by its dogma.
But one of the things that Francis did was he was very, very outspoken about the growing income inequality in the world, the need to be humane to immigrants.
He was also a very vocal, I suppose you could say, critic of the destruction of Gaza, but certainly a defender of the rights and suffering of the Palestinian people.
And whether Pope Leo XIV follows some of that or all of that remains to be seen.
He's been a little bit of a cryptic figure, not really seeking out.
Those kind of controversies.
And so it's a little bit unclear, I think, even to church insiders where he stands on them.
Here is the scene at St. Peter's Basilica early this morning.
You see the new church standing on the balcony with people cheering.
This is his first public appearance as the new Pope.
Thank you.
All right, so that ovation went on quite a long time.
Obviously, the faithful of the Catholic Church are always going to welcome a new pope with that sort of extremely happy and welcoming and loving and positive emotion.
And that's what you saw today.
Now, it is always interesting about the pope because, as I said, I'm not a theologian.
I'm by no means a historian of the Catholic Church.
But the pope always does have this religious role, obviously.
He's the head of the Catholic Church, this 2,000-year-old institution.
But he also then typically has a political profile.
I mean, he's the head of the Vatican, which in theory is an independent state inside of Italy.
And popes have always played a significant political role.
I talked about some of Pope Francis's views.
I remember growing up in the 1980s when Pope John Paul II was aligned very much with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
There's times when the pope...
Follows the church's long-standing opposition to and contempt for communism given that communism by its dogma seeks to eradicate religion.
It's the opiate of the people as communists see it.
So there was always a strong political alignment among some popes with conservative politicians and then recently there has been a greater alignment.
I don't want to say with left-wing politicians because certainly on social issues the church still has very Positions widely considered conservative on things like abortion, which they vehemently oppose, as well as same-sex marriage, which though they've softened a little bit the rhetoric about, obviously they still oppose that as well.
And they also, though, have been traditionally associated with certain, I guess you could say, left-wing positions, because after all, if you read the gospel, the gospel is not a teaching of Support for elites or for venerating the wealthy.
Jesus spent his time, according to all four books of the gospel, with ministering to prostitutes and to lepers and to the most downtrodden.
And so that has always been part of the church's mission, to minister to the poor, to care for the poor.
And then also the same position that makes him so opposed to abortion, namely the sanctity of human life and the sin of extinguishing it, has also led them to be vehemently opposed to the death penalty.
And that was certainly Pope Francis' position, and I believe it's Pope Leo XIV's as well.
Here is Donald Trump's reaction, because again, I understand why people want to put him immediately through a political prism.
Of saying, oh, is he like MAGA?
Is he like Republican?
Is he Democrat?
Is he liberal?
even though the church really does transcend those kinds of characterizations, especially just trying to reduce someone who's been in the church their whole life to a few tweets you found and then want to place them on the political spectrum.
It almost is like a non sequitur, but that's what a lot of people were doing.
Donald Trump did not do that.
He posted this, quote, Congratulations to Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who was just named Pope.
It is such an honor to realize that he is the first American pope.
What excitement and what a great honor for our country.
look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV.
I saw somebody...
He's satirizing Trump by saying tomorrow he's going to say, hey, there are a lot of people who are saying the reason an American pope got chosen for the first time is because of me.
I don't know if it's true, but it probably is.
That's a very Trumpian way to say it.
But obviously that was satire.
What I just read you is what he said.
Very, I would say, proper and well-crafted congratulations that it's appropriate for a president.
His vice president, J.D. Vance, interestingly, is about to show you, is somebody who...
This new pope has criticized on social media at least twice in the last six months.
And here is what J.D. Vance said, also an appropriate statement, no acknowledgement of the fact that the pope has criticized J.D. Vance personally and things he believes in and things he has said.
J.D. Vance is Catholic, and so obviously he is expressing the sentiments of...
What I would assume is the sentiments of most Catholics around the world where he said, "Congratulations to Leo XIV, the first American pope, on his election.
I'm sure millions of American Catholics and other Christians will pray for his successful work leading the church.
May God bless him." Now, I would say within minutes, I was online when this happened.
I went online actually when I heard that there was a new pope selected.
It's obviously a significant moment for anyone who pays attention to The world and world events and world politics and also religion, obviously.
And there was this hour period between when the white smoke was emitted and signaling the selection of a new pope and before the pope was announced, who the pope was, were a very conservative cardinal.
For whatever reason, people started assuming that that's who was selected.
And in the betting markets, he just skyrocketed to like 70%, 80%.
Everybody else who were the favorites or dark horses started dropping.
And so people were very happy because he was a conservative choice.
But then when they unveiled the pope, it wasn't him that conservative.
It was instead Robert Prevost.
And at first, people, American politicians and pundits, were celebrating the fact that we now have an American pope for the first time.
In the history of the Catholic Church, in the history of the United States.
But immediately people started to find tweets.
He didn't tweet often about non-church matters.
He tweeted very sporadically about the Pope and the Pope's health and just generalized kind of conventional sentiments that cardinals express in behalf of their Catholicism.
But he did actually have some political tweets as well that One after the next, every sort of 20 minutes emerged and a lot of MAGA people, a lot of right-wing people went from celebrating this choice to immediately panicking almost, or at least denouncing the choice on the ground that this is not somebody who aligns with their political ideology.
So here's something he posted in February of this year, so just two months ago.
The tweet that he wrote says, J.D. Vance is wrong.
Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others.
And then it links to an article that he didn't write.
But that was the headline of the article.
He wasn't necessarily writing.
That's not his sentence.
That's really the headline of the article.
But he's obviously endorsing it.
And what happened there was J.D. Vance had given an interview where I think somebody asked him about the religious mandate.
The Catholic imperative to care for immigrants and to care for people who are expelled from their country or stateless.
And to defend on a religious ground why he believed in a hard-line stand, J.D. Vance said there's a Catholic doctrine that says first you take care of your family and then you take care of your community and then you take care of your city and your state and your country and then after that, only then do you care about...
The rest of the people in the world.
And there is a Catholic doctrine that was affirmed more or less that way, but it's been rejected by the church.
It's not the prevailing view of Catholicism.
It doesn't really reflect Catholic action in terms of how it reacts in the world.
And this is what the new pope was pointing to, was an article arguing why J.D. Vance's views of what The teachings of Catholicism are when it comes to prioritizing who you care about and who you don't is Catholic dogma, and the new pope said, if we could just go back to that tweet for a second, when he says, "Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others," that you're basically your love for humanity, for other human beings, is just the love of Jesus.
That was his view.
Now, in 2015, when Donald Trump was running for the first time on a very anti-immigrant platform.
Not just a platform, but the way he was speaking about immigrants.
It didn't sit well, apparently, with the new pope either, because on that date he published, or again cited, an article by Cardinal Dolan, the title of which is "Why Donald Trump's Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric is So Problematic." And then Laura Loomer, the quite effective, influential, I guess you could call her Trump whisperer.
I mean, she's one of the few people who gets away with constantly bashing the administration in the White House.
And yet, still, the more she does it, the more her influence seems to grow with Trump, the more her credibility seems to grow with Trump.
When she complains about people, they often end up being dispatched of quite quickly or fired in the case of some people as well.
But she replied to that tweet today with this comment: "Woke Marxist Pope." So I guess she thinks the Pope is both woke and Marxist.
Laura Lemire's not a member of the Catholic Church.
She's Jewish.
But within, like, I guess two hours, she was able to summarize his entire worldview based on a few tweets.
And she's here to say that this Pope is both Marxist and woke.
It's kind of odd for her.
A deeply religious figure, someone who's devoted his entire life to spreading the word of Jesus to simultaneously be Marxist.
It's sort of an incompatible doctrine.
But who knows?
Maybe she's right.
I don't think there's a lot of evidence for that, but she seems to think so.
Here is Sean Davis, who is a very smart right-wing commentator and analyst.
He's also Catholic.
And he said, quote, "The new pope seems to be anti-Trump." And pro-open borders.
Which, again, if you look at just these, you know, disconnected tweets, you could put those together and make a lot of leaps of reasoning and maybe assume that.
But, you know, certainly he's pro-immigrant.
I mean, the Catholic Church has always been pro-immigrant.
You can go back hundreds of years and you're going to find that.
Megyn Kelly, who was also Catholic, said after all these tweets emerged, "Is it too much to hope that some 20-year-old ran the new Pope's X account and he never looked at it?" That doesn't seem likely to me, to put it mildly.
And again, I just don't, I'm not really sure what, why people are finding these sentiments surprising.
They seem to align extremely well with what the Catholic Church is often, I don't want to say always, but often represented.
Mike Sternevich, another right-wing influencer, who I also often find insightful, said, quote, I suspect that this new pope, a shitlib, is going to have many Catholics exploring orthodoxy.
And there has been this sense for some time, again, I'm not a theologian, but there has been this sense that the Catholic Church, since the reforms in the early 60s, has basically been sacrilegious or even satanic.
True Catholics.
And those sentiments have sometimes grown among the Orthodox wing of the Catholic Church.
And I guess that's what's being channeled there.
Here is Jack Posobiec.
I always mispronounce his name.
I obviously know his work very well.
I don't know why.
It just doesn't stick in my brain.
But he is Catholic.
He was in the Vatican.
And he said this, quote, the Pope is not infallible on political matters.
And I do think that's an interesting observation because, as I said, the pope in the modern world at least, and actually in the ancient world going back many, many centuries to the time it began, always had this dual function of being the interpretative body that defines the meaning of God's word through Jesus Christ, but then also obviously playing a very political role.
The church is very powerful.
It's very wealthy.
It influences a lot of people.
And so it's inherently a political position as well.
And this is what you often hear from Catholics if the Pope says something on an issue that they dislike.
They're like, no, that's political.
That's not canon.
You don't have to assume that's the word of God.
And he's the most reasonable person, because again, a lot of this was a Based on a handful of tweets, that they were trying to reduce this pope to being, oh, he's not MAGA, he's anti-Trump.
They found some voting records that they claimed that proved he was a Republican, so maybe he was like an anti-Trump or a never-Trumper.
But then, obviously, some of them thought he was a woke Marxist as well.
And here's about Walsh, who is...
Not just Catholic, but someone who speaks a lot about the Church and Catholicism.
And he did not react well to this attempt to reduce the Pope to nothing more than Someone who you can just place on the American ideological spectrum.
And he said this, quote, if you aren't Catholic, then you don't believe that the Pope was elected.
If you aren't Catholic, then you don't believe that this Pope was elected through the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
So you'll troll through his Twitter feed and analyze his selection through a modern political lens, as if he were just elected to a seat in the U.S. Senate rather than the chair of St. Peter.
If you are a believing Catholic, then you do or at least should believe that his election is ordained by God.
You view it through the lens of 2,000 years of church history and the eternal will of the Almighty God.
From that perspective, playing the gotcha game with old tweets is silly and bizarre.
This is why any conversation about the Pope on this site is destined to be disjointed.
And there were other tweets as well that we didn't include where the new pope was, he retweeted a tweet from Democratic Senator Chris Murphy from 2017, when Trump just got elected, where Chris Murphy was basically saying, we need to do everything possible to fight against and resist this new authoritarianism or this new cruelty.
So the new pope retweeted Chris Murphy, the Democratic Senator.
He also had retweeted very recently, I think it was one of his last tweets, a different cardinal who was...
reacting to the meeting between El Salvador and President Bukele and President Trump in the Oval Office where they kind of mocked the whole notion of court-stopping immigrants from being sent to El Salvador.
And a cardinal reacted with horror and indignation that they seemed to be so cavalier about the fate of these people who hadn't even been given due process that they were just putting them into dungeons for life in a country they'd never been to.
A new pope retweeted that indignation from a cardinal in response to that policy of sending people to El Salvador.
So, again, I am not surprised personally that the pope is conservative on social issues, anti-abortion, opposed to same-sex marriage, opposed to the death penalty, which is not a conservative view.
I'm not surprised that he teaches compassion and empathy for Immigrants, including people who are not legally entering countries or illegally entering countries, this seems very consistent, very compatible to the Catholic Church, to me, as somebody who has not paid the closest of attention in a scholarly way, but certainly as someone who understands Catholicism to the extent I do.
So I don't really understand all this acrimony, all this kind of panic, this antagonism.
Also, when you're a cardinal or when you're within the Catholic Church, he rose pretty quickly as a result of his relationship with Francis.
There's not always total freedom to express your worldview or who you are and what you believe and what your priorities are.
And so we'll see with this new pope what he decides to make of his position.
And I think only then will we really know his...
Ideology or placed on the ideological spectrum, if a pope can even be placed on that, I think, as Matt Walsh actually said, and I basically agree with it, in a way the idea of the pope and the Catholic Church transcends modern political debates, even though they sometimes have an impact on it.
All right, let's move to the next topic, which is these reports that there has been a breach.
In the relationship between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Now, I think we have to be very careful about believing this, in part because there's never really been a real breach between an American president and an Israeli prime minister since you have to go back pretty much to the very early 1990s under George H.W. Bush.
Where his Secretary of State, James Baker, and his now Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, were extremely angry with Israel about expanding settlements in the West Bank because the U.S. position always was that it's in the U.S. national interest to achieve a two-state solution between the Palestinians and the Israelis, where they have two states side by side living in peace, because the U.S. always understood that tying itself at the hip to Israel, while this conflict flared...
Was creating a lot of anti-American sentiment, making it much more difficult for the U.S. to operate in the Middle East.
So in response to these expanding settlements in the West Bank, Bush 41 sought to tell the Israelis, if you don't stop these settlements immediately, we're going to cancel our loan guarantees.
There was this insane bipartisan backlash, calling Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft, you know what they called them, anti-Semites.
And when Bill Clinton ran against George H.W. Bush, Bush 41, in the 1992 election, Bill Clinton strongly suggested or even explicitly said that President Bush and his administration were anti-Semitic because of their refusal to support Israel.
Just showing you this bipartisan dogma that has existed for a long time.
Reagan actually defied the Israelis, including when he withdrew.
Marine barracks from Lebanon after there was an attack by Hezbollah that killed close to 250 American soldiers.
And the Israelis said, now you have to go to war to get vengeance.
And Reagan said, no, actually, I don't even know why we're in Lebanon.
Why do we have bases in Lebanon?
He pulled them back.
There's been other times as well.
But since then, there was a lot of tension between Obama and Netanyahu.
And other than this symbolic UN vote at the end of Obama's term, it never really transformed into policy.
It was Obama, in fact, that signed a...
$40 billion agreement, $38 billion agreement to pay the Israelis $4 billion a year for the next 10 years.
Some of that goes to buying American weaponry, but not all of it.
And so you really have to be very careful about any claim that the American and the President and the Israeli Prime Minister are having a real split because there's not been a split for a long time between the two countries.
They've almost merged.
And then on top of that, almost everybody who surrounds Donald Trump, we've talked about this before, he has a lot of diversity of opinion and pluralistic ideology in his administration.
He has hardcore hawks and neocons on the one hand.
Then he has like anti-interventionists and isolationists and more like paleo-conservatives and the Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, a strain of conservatives.
So he doesn't need homogeneity.
He doesn't like homogeneity.
Except on the issue of Israel, you don't have any people really questioning U.S. support for Israel who are in the administration at the top levels.
Every single person that he picked, that was basically a price of admission through the door.
And in part, that's because he was so heavily funded by pro-Israel interests, starting with Mary Middleton, the Israeli-American billionaire who inherited her husband, Sheldon Adelson's massive wealth, and uses it, as she openly admits, to make sure that the Republican Party stays vehemently and unyieldingly pro-Israel.
So, it's not just any American president, but particularly Trump.
I want to see evidence before I believe this.
But as I said, this is not just some conspiracy theory invented out of nowhere.
I want to show you the reasons why There may be grounds to believe that this is real, starting with the fact that Netanyahu and Trump have famously had tension in their relationship, going back to the first Trump presidency.
But here from the New York Times in April, last month, there was a report, and this reports everywhere in the media, not just the New York Times, quote, Trump waved off Israeli strike after divisions emerged in his administration.
You may remember that Netanyahu went to the White House not once but twice since Trump in the three months since he was inaugurated.
And the second time when he went, we were told that the reason he was going was because Trump had just imposed tariffs on Israel, which he did.
But the real reason, it was very clear and it turned out, including in what they said, the real reason was because Netanyahu wanted to meet Trump about Israel's desire to bomb.
Iran, which they could only do if the United States gets heavily involved.
They need American support in order to do it.
So you have to get Trump's permission.
And all reports from the White House, which were never denied, was that Netanyahu was very much trying to convince Trump to give the green light to an Israeli attack on Iran.
And Trump said, no, I don't want to attack Iran.
I want to see if we can get an agreement with them.
I prefer an agreement.
And this is something Trump repeated today, in fact, in the White House.
We're trying to work on Iran to get that solved without having to get into any bombing, as we say, big bombing.
I don't want to do that.
I want them to be very successful.
And this has been a very consistent position Trump has taken.
Who knows if he means it?
Who knows if it will sustain the pressure that will obviously be brought on him, that's already being brought on him, as we're about to show you.
And it's not that easy to get an agreement with the Iranians, because the agreement that you need the Iranians to agree to has to be substantially better, or at least somewhat better, than the deal that Obama got with the Iranians, because Trump has been saying for eight years now, That that was a terrible deal, a deal that was too weak.
So if you can't get the Iranians beyond that to make more concessions than they made to Obama, it's going to be very difficult to get a deal.
He can't get a deal that's identical to what Obama got.
Or people say, well, why did you withdraw in the first place?
I believe that Trump does want to get an agreement.
I don't think he wants a new Mideast war, major Mideast war.
He's talked for years about the horrors and wastes of Middle East wars.
But...
There's a lot of powerful people in Washington and elsewhere who want that war, including the people in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem and their network of funders and influencers and activists, not just Jewish ones, but evangelical ones, very neocon ones, pro-military ones.
There's a lot of factions in Washington that consider this relationship with Israel to be of the highest priority.
And for Trump to simply...
Defy that in the way this is being suggested?
I want to see a lot more evidence from that.
Here is Israel's largest newspaper, Hayam, that reported today, Trump sidelines Netanyahu in Middle East policy as relations deteriorate.
So it's not just coming from the American press or the Middle East or Arab press.
It's coming from establishment Israeli media outlets.
Quote, earlier this week, we reported that Netanyahu was frustrated with Trump.
Now it appears the American president has also lost patience with his Israeli counterpart.
Two senior figures in Trump's circle stated in recent closed-door conversations, whose content reached Israel Haim, that Trump has decided to stop waiting for Israel and instead wants to move forward with Middle East initiatives without Netanyahu.
The sources explain that the president wishes to make decisions he believes will advance American interests, particularly regarding Saudi Arabia and Gulf states.
Israel was supposed to participate in some of those steps, referring primarily to normalization with Saudi Arabia.
That has been the kind of golden goose that Israel has been chasing.
They hope to establish normalized relations with the Sunni states and especially the very wealthy Gulf state countries that are close to the United States and to the west, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
And especially Saudi Arabia, because then they would feel like they had a union against Iran.
The problem is the Saudis have said always that we can't normalize relations with Israel until they resolve the problem of the Palestinians being denied a state.
And there was probably not that much authenticity or conviction behind that Saudi position for a long time, but once October 7th happened, And the Israelis just openly began blowing up all of Gaza, and obviously people in the Middle East especially, are seeing that every day from Al Jazeera, from other outlets.
They see it even more than we do.
In fact, a lot more than we do.
It basically became just no longer feasible for even these tyrannical governments like Saudi Arabia and the Emirates and Qatar to normalize relations with Israel.
While they're destroying Gaza, without the Palestinians getting any consideration, and I think there's some extent to which people believe, and I think it's certainly viable, that part of Hamas's intent in attacking on October 7th was a fear that the Saudis were going to just go ahead and don't really care about the Palestinians, and we're going to just keep that on the back burner.
They were moving toward normalization, and they— This Israeli paper goes on,
quote, Until Israel takes its expected actions and is proceeding without Israeli participation.
Furthermore, Trump is furious about what he views as an attempt by Netanyahu and his team to pressure National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who has since been dismissed from his position toward military action in Iran.
Netanyahu claimed in response to the publication of this matter in the Washington Post that he spoke with Waltz only once.
However, Trump remained unconvinced.
So there's a lot going on here.
I just want to focus on a couple parts of it.
When Mike Waltz was fired as Trump's national security advisor, after barely 100 days, people were very surprised.
I was certainly surprised because Trump was unwilling.
He did not want to feed Democrats and the media a hat on a pike.
And that's why he defended Mike Waltz even after Signalgate, which of course should have resulted in his firing.
You cannot let a journalist accidentally into A planning room for a bombing campaign that you're about to launch imminently and then basically lie about what happened afterwards.
It just gave Mike Waltz a stench of loser-ness, which is the thing that Trump hates most.
But what really infuriated Trump was, and there were lots of reports about this, was that Mike Waltz was knowing that Trump wanted to avoid war in Iran.
Knowing that Trump was trying hard to get an agreement with Iran so that he doesn't have to go to war with Iran, was plotting with Netanyahu behind Trump's back on basically how to proceed with this Israeli attack, which would force the United States to be involved.
And I absolutely believe that Trump was enraged when he learned of that, and not just at Mike Walz, but at Netanyahu as well.
And then there's this other issue with normalization and Better relations that the U.S. might pursue with these Gulf state dictatorships.
The Biden administration could have reached agreements with the Saudis, with the Emiratis, with the Qataris for much closer ties.
But Biden was unwilling to do that unless Israel was satisfied.
Unless Israel believed that its interests were also being solved.
So yet again, Biden sacrificed American interests that Could have been advanced with agreements in greater proximity to these very wealthy countries Because he didn't want to upset the Israelis and Israel supporters in the United States and Trump seems to be saying and maybe this is for some venal reasons as well Trump is very very interested in the money that comes from the Persian Gulf and Jared Kushner went and signed a two billion He's
not gonna care as much as Biden did.
About whether it angers Netanyahu.
So it all makes sense.
It all makes logical sense.
And then on top of that, of all that, there is the decision that Trump announced just several days ago that the bombing campaign of Yemen, which Trump restarted once Biden left office and escalated, that he was stopping that.
He said, look, the Houthis, we've got to deal with them.
They basically promised not to attack American ships anymore.
But notably, they did not promise to stop attacking Israeli ships.
And the Israelis just bombed and destroyed their airport.
$500 billion of damage, including all sorts of civilian aircraft that Yemen has.
And the Houthis are striking Israel as well.
But Trump said, I don't care.
I'm not going to pursue a war that I don't think is in our interest any longer, since the Houthis are willing to vow to not attack us, just because...
Here from CNN today, quote, The Houthis acknowledged the agreement but made it clear their attacks on Israel would continue.
Senior Houthi leader Mohammed Ali al-Houthi said after the announcement that the agreement was, quote, "A victory that separates U.S. support for the temporary entity," which is how they refer to Israel, "and a failure for Netanyahu.
If others join us, our American friends all the better," said, The Prime Minister of Israel.
If others join us, our American friends, all the better.
And if they don't, we will still defend ourselves on our own.
Netanyahu said in a video posted on social media.
So, again, this feeds the idea that the Israelis are very much talking about, okay, the U.S. are going to defend us and do our bombing campaign for us.
We'll have to do it ourselves, which is exactly what the Israelis should be doing.
Not getting the U.S. to fight their wars for them, which they've been doing for many, many years.
And even with this supposed quote-unquote breach, the United States is still sending billions of dollars a year, giving Israel weapons.
So it's not as if the United States has let Israel be independent or self-sufficient, but any, any refusal on the part of the United States to give Israel everything it demands, when it demands it.
It's seen as some sort of moral outrage or offense in Israel, and that has been that way for quite some time.
The entitlement of the Israelis to have American citizens die for them in wars, to have the American worker have to subsidize their military and their wars and their society, even though Israelis have a higher standard of living than millions of Americans, and we're still sending billions of dollars over there, the audacity of that, the arrogance of that is extreme.
Here is Trump.
When asked about the effect on the ending of the war with the Houthis, what effect it would have on Israel?
Mr. President, the Houthis are backing down.
We're seeing conflicting reports that they plan on continuing to attack Israel in support of Gaza.
Does that change the equation?
No, I don't know about that, frankly.
But I know one thing, they want nothing to do with us, and they've let that be known through all of their surrogates, and very strongly.
So, I will say, you know, I've been very critical of Trump of his foreign policy, his civil liberties attacks, when it comes to foreign policy, not actually pursuing an American First agenda, but continuing to tie itself at the hip to Israel.
And this is the American First mentality.
This is the American First posture, which is Trump saying, he's asked, like, hey, but why are you stopping the war with the Houthis?
They say they're going to continue to attack Israel.
And Trump's like, look.
I don't know anything about that.
That's not my business.
I'm not the president of Israel.
What I do know is they don't want to attack us anymore.
They don't want to mess with us, and that's what I care about.
So I stopped the war.
It's actually so refreshing to hear an American president.
Regardless of what else Trump does, I'm sure there's going to be horrible things coming in his foreign policy, especially regarding Israel and the Middle East.
Let's wait and see.
But hearing him talk this way...
Is not just refreshing because it actually does align with the America First worldview that Trump promised the American people, three straight elections he would pursue in foreign policy, but also to hear any American president just brushing off concerns about Israel that way.
Like, yeah, but what about the Houthis' intent to bomb Israel?
Like, how can you stop the war when they're going to now attack Israel?
And Trump's like, I don't know.
I don't know about that.
Didn't ask about that.
That's not my concern.
As long as they don't attack us, we have no problem with them, which is exactly how our country should be thinking, the president of our country should be thinking.
Nonetheless, there's more to it.
Here is the Israeli Daily Heretz earlier today as well.
U.S.-Saudi nuclear talks no longer contingent on normalization with Israel, sources say.
As I said, Biden's view is always we're not going to do a deal with Saudi Arabia until Saudi Arabia Normalized relationship with Israel.
So prioritizing Israel's interests above ours and getting a deal done with the Saudis.
And apparently this is no longer the view of the Trump administration.
Quote, So,
yet another time when Trump is pursuing foreign policy.
That for whatever reason, always had to be subordinate to Israel.
Biden said it wouldn't happen.
No deal with Saudi Arabia unless Netanyahu got what he wanted.
And now Trump's saying, look, I want to deal with Saudi Arabia.
I want to deal with all these Gulf state countries he's about to visit there.
I don't think he's planning on going to Israel.
And his view seems to be, I'm not going to deny deals that are in maybe my family's interests and my country's interests.
Simply because Netanyahu is not getting what he wants.
Netanyahu is not going to stand in the way between Donald Trump growing much closer to the extremely wealthy governments and oligarchs of the Gulf region.
And if you think about Trump, that too makes a lot of sense.
I found this very interesting.
This was an interview that took place on CNN International where Becky Anderson was interviewing Firas Maksad, who is one of these people who is in a DC think tank.
He believes very much in what has always been the foreign policy consensus of the United States.
He believes very much that it's in the United States' interest to continue this relationship with Israel.
But he's talking here about what he thinks is the real rift between Trump and Netanyahu and the reasons why he believes that rift has taken place.
Now, again, I'm going to want to see more evidence before I believe this.
As opposed to where I am now, which is I definitely believe it's plausible, but I want to see that it's real.
But here's the argument that he made that I found interesting.
And open the lens somewhat, as I say.
What do you expect from Trump in the Gulf starting Monday?
Let me say the following.
Many of us in Washington have made the case for greater American involvement in the Middle East based on the geopolitics of things.
Great power competition, the growing role of China, Russia and its relations here.
This is not what animates this president.
That's what he's saying.
He's with the Eurasia Group.
He's the managing director for the Middle East.
Very establishment, representing the D.C. consensus for a long time.
And he's saying, I think we should be more involved in the Middle East.
For all the reasons that the United States has been forever, all the standard arguments about competing with China and Russia and expanding our footprint there, what Trump ran on a platform of not doing.
And that's what he goes on to say.
He's like, we think that, but that's not how Trump thinks about the Middle East.
And this is how he described Trump's thoughts on the Middle East.
Power competition, the growing role of China, Russia and its relations here.
This is not what animates this president.
He is very commercially minded.
And transactional.
And so he's coming here because he believes it is in the interest of the U.S. economy, perhaps his interests and those around him, to have those deals here with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar.
So expect big announcements irrespective of the fact that there's no progress towards normalization between Saudi Arabia.
Is that off the table?
It is more than off the table.
I think normalization is dead, having just come from Riyadh.
And President Trump is going to proceed irrespective of where Bibi Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is.
Where does that leave, to your mind, Donald Trump's relationship with the Israeli prime minister?
It is a very checkered relationship at best.
I think Donald Trump never forgot that Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to congratulate Biden publicly on his win.
Back when Trump was still disputing that election results.
So the two have a checkered past at best.
And we saw whether it was that Oval Office moment, I would say almost a Zelensky moment there for Netanyahu when he was told the U.S. will initiate direct negotiations with Iran, or it's a ceasefire in Yemen that was announced and again caught the Israelis by surprise two days ago.
or normalization, as we're about to see with the GCC, that Trump will proceed in engaging this region, the Arab allies and partners, irrespective of any progress or lack thereof with Israel on normalization.
So it's a very troubled place for the Israeli prime minister to be with Israel's primary ally in Washington.
Now, I would really love to believe that.
I want to, like, soak all that up.
And by the way, he's not describing that favorably.
He's saying this is Trump's worldview that...
We don't think it should be his worldview to try and just withdraw from the Middle East, have a commercial relationship there only, separate himself from the Israelis.
But this is what Trump's ideology and worldview, as he described it for so many years, would actually compel him to do.
I just think that if Trump is really thinking about Abandoning Israel, really trying to sign a deal with Iran that would avert a war or a bombing campaign, not only by the United States, but by Israel as well.
If he's really proceeding with the Saudis and the Emiratis and the Qataris and not caring about any concessions for Israel, if this is really a breach, the first one in a long time, you would see immense amounts of attacks on Trump.
There's nothing Trump could do that would provoke greater attacks on him, abandonment by allies, than basically severing this multi-pronged and inextricable intertwining between American-Israeli interests.
That is a fundamental priority for huge numbers of powerful factions, and they will turn on Trump in a second if they really believe that's what he's doing.
I don't think we're seeing that quite yet, but we are definitely seeing some Republicans trying to sabotage what Trump is doing with Iran, namely trying to avert a war.
And just like Mike Walz went to Israel behind Trump's back, I mean, the trip wasn't behind Trump's back, but the planning of this war with Israel was, there are a lot of Republican members of the Senate and the House who are making very clear about— Really criticizing Trump?
That they don't accept the kind of deal that Obama got with Trump or even anything close to it.
They want a war with Iran.
Here from Jewish Insider today, Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, the normal suspects, warn that an Iran deal without, quote, complete dismantlement won't pass the Senate.
Senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton And let me just say, Iran has made repeatedly clear that they would never give up their right to have nuclear energy, to have reactors.
J.D. Vance said today, Sort of supporting the Lindsey Graham-Tomcott position, although lots of reports say J.D. Vance is on the side of getting a deal with Iran, that why do they need a nuclear program?
Every country that has a nuclear program eventually uses it to get a nuclear weapon.
There is no country with a nuclear program for energy that doesn't have a nuclear weapon.
That's completely untrue.
There's several countries.
Brazil was one of them.
There were others that have a nuclear program but don't have nuclear weapons, aren't pursuing nuclear weapons.
And Iran considers it a national humiliation that they will never agree to.
And they know that.
Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton know this, that they will completely dismantle their nuclear program.
They're willing to put caps on the kind of enrichment they can do.
They're willing to open their reactors up to inspectors and surveillance, like they had a regime of surveillance and inspection.
Once the Iran deal was signed, they're willing to do all those things, but they're never going to completely dismantle their nuclear program.
I don't mean pursuit of nuclear weapons, I mean the use of nuclear power.
And that's what all of these Republicans are trying to do.
So yeah, we support President Trump.
And if he can get a deal for complete dismantlement, we'd support it.
But otherwise, you'll never get it through the Senate, knowing that that's not possible for Trump to get.
The Senators issued the warning during a press conference at the Capitol on Thursday promoting the resolution, affirming that the only acceptable outcome of U.S. nuclear talks with Iran would be the total dismantlement of its enrichment program.
Lindsey Graham noted another requirement of a deal getting congressional support would be it addresses Iran's missile and terror proxy activities.
He said that he told Secretary of State Marco Rubio that, quote, a treaty with Iran in this space is only possible if you get 67 votes.
You're not going to get 67 votes for a treaty regarding their nuclear program unless they deal with the missile program and their terrorism activity.
So is it possible?
Yes, if Iran changes.
What they really want here, they're setting...
Standards that they know Iran and Trump can't meet because they don't actually want an agreement.
And when he says this is possible if Iran changes, what he means is a regime change.
That's really what they want.
They want to change the government of Iran.
That has been the dream of these neocons and Israel zealots for a long time.
The Senate Republicans put this out two days ago just to underscore that.
Many of them, if not most, believe this.
It says Iran's nuclear program must be, quote, totally dismantled.
Again, everyone knows that will never happen.
So by setting that as the bar for saying that's the only agreement, you're essentially saying we don't want an agreement.
We want to go to war.
And not just bomb them.
Like Lindsey Graham's now saying they have to get rid of their missiles, they have to get rid of their relationships.
And he said that can only happen if Iran changes, meaning a regime changes.
These people want another massive Middle East war.
They learned nothing from their support for the Iraq war.
They don't think the Iraq war was a mistake, except to the extent that maybe we didn't fight it hard enough or whatever.
Like the people who supported the war in Vietnam, even though we were there for, you know, 13 years, to this day, say, oh, yeah, we would have won if our hands weren't tied behind our back.
They thought, oh, yeah, what we should have done is even more weapons, more killing.
Two million Vietnamese was not enough.
Killing them, we should have done more.
That's the lesson they always are.
They just want more wars.
That's really what it is.
Here's the Senate Republican official account on X, the big picture of Tom Cotton, and his quote, quote, Any deal that lets Iran enrich uranium, keep centrifuges, or build missiles isn't a deal.
It's a delay.
Real peace requires real dismantlement.
So that's what I mean.
Even if Trump does want to just kind of push the Israelis aside, make sure to prioritize American interests, avoid words that aren't in our interest, he has a lot of barriers in his way.
This is the one thing Republican—do you notice this is the one issue Republicans will defy Trump on?
I mean, they were—they impeded a couple of his appointments, including Matt Gaetz as attorney general, and Trump's desire to appoint Ed Martin as U.S. attorney, which we'll get to next.
If time permits, we have another story to do.
First, probably won't get to that story fully.
So they have resisted a little bit here and there, but the one thing that they are making clear, they will go to war with him over, is, of course, Israel.
Because that is their priority.
They want the United States to go to war.
They want us to risk the lives of our service members.
They want to transfer massive amounts to the weapons industry.
These are the Republicans in Congress who pretend to, I've talked about this many times, they always pretend They support President Trump's view and MAGA and America First and all that.
But they absolutely despise that foreign policy.
And they will go to war, and not just them, but many others, if Trump really, in fact, tries to do what reports suggest and evidence also points to his wanting to do and whether he's willing to have that war, the war with these very powerful factors of Washington and Israel, if he prefers war with Iran to that war, On him, that is going to be the big test, and that definitely remains to be seen.
But there are a lot of very powerful people trying to prevent President Trump from reaching that agreement with Iran and averting war.
All right, we will continue with the news.
We have another story or two right after this message from our sponsor.
PDS debit debt adds up fast.
Credit cards and personal loans and medical bills.
Many people suddenly find themselves buried under interest with no clear way out and that's not a coincidence.
Creditors want you stuck.
They profit when you're overwhelmed, making it harder for you to move forward.
But you don't have to stay trapped in that system.
That's where PDS Debt comes in.
They don't treat you like a number.
They take the time to understand your specific situation and create a customized plan to help you pay off debt faster and save money without needing a minimum credit score.
Whether it's credit card debt or collections, personal loans, medical bills, PDS Debt has tailored options to help you take back control.
They've helped tens of thousands of people already, That's pds.debt.com slash Glenn.
pds.com slash Glenn.
I do want to cover this last story.
I'll talk about the Ed Martin thing and the nomination of Judge Jeanine to take his place just briefly when we get to it.
But this will be the last issue we really cover more or less in depth because I find it so interesting.
It seems like some callous intrigue and some interfactional drama, but I actually think it's a lot more than that.
So Casey Means is somebody who went to medical school.
She went to Stanford, one of the best medical schools in the country.
She apparently did well at medical school, but when she went into her residency, she dropped out before actually becoming licensed to practice law, the residency's requirement, because she said she was very disillusioned with conventional science and medicine.
She didn't think the way doctors were learning or were treating patients was adequate, and so she took a different path where she...
She recommends a sort of worldview that's based on metabolic activity and believes that certain negative mental states can cause things like cancer and the like.
I don't want to represent all of her views, but she's somebody who, to a lot of people, especially RFK Jr., has become a sort of icon or symbol of another way, a better way to think about health.
And she had a lot of support, has a lot of support.
She tied herself very closely along with her brother, Kali Means.
Both of them have kind of become spokespeople, public spokespeople, for RFK's Maha movement.
They appear on podcasts.
They're both very articulate and well-spoken.
And I was surprised, actually, that neither of them had been nominated for anything up until this point, because I assume both of them are going to be.
I mean, they're very...
Closely aligned with RFK Jr., they become among his leading spokespeople on podcasts and cable.
And yesterday, Trump chose Casey Means, the one who went to medical school but didn't finish her residency.
As Surgeon General, here was his announcement on True Social.
I am pleased to announce that Dr. Casey Means will be nominated as our next Surgeon General of the United States of America.
Casey has impeccable Maha credentials and will work closely with our wonderful Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr., to ensure a successful implementation of our agenda in order to reverse the chronic disease epidemic and ensure great health in the future for all Americans.
Her academic achievements together with her life's work are absolutely outstanding.
Dr. Casey Means has the potential to be one of the finest Surgeon Generals in United States history.
Congratulations to Casey.
Senator Kennedy looks forward to working with Dr. Jeanette Neslewit in another capacity I think she was somebody who was originally going to be chosen as Surgeon General, and then she was withdrawn, and then Casey Means was the new announcement.
Now, I had assumed, based on my observations and Reporting as well on Maha, we've had RFK Jr. on our show, I talked to a lot of people in that circle, that she would be a popular choice among RFK Jr.'s supporters and allies in the Maha movement because of how closely she's been aligned with and how vocal and supportive she's been of RFK.
The Hill today said that Trump chose her in large part on RFK Jr.'s recommendation.
There's the headline, Trump chose new Surgeon General pick on RFK Jr.'s recommendation.
Trump was asked why he chose Casey Means, a physician turned wellness influencer, with close ties to the Maha movement as his new pick to fill the role.
And Trump said, quote, because Bobby thought she's fantastic.
She's a brilliant woman who went through Stanford.
As I understand it, she basically wanted to be an academic as opposed to a surgeon.
Bobby really thought she was great.
I don't know her.
I listened to the recommendation of Bobbi.
I met her yesterday and once before.
She's a very, very outstanding person, a great academic actually, so I think she'll be great.
Casey Means, a graduate of Stanford Medical School, is the sister of Kaylee Means, a close Kennedy ally and a special government employee at HHS.
Casey Means is the co-founder of Levels, a health technology company that focuses on tracking health information through devices like continuous glucose monitors.
So, I thought, okay, that's an RFK person.
That makes sense.
And yet, there was a lot of negative reaction, very intense negative reaction, to the choice of Casey Means to be Surgeon General and not from conventional Republicans who hate RFK or from Democrats or any of that.
It came from RFK Jr.'s allies, many of them.
And the leading one was Nicole Shanahan, who, as you may recall, When RFK Jr. was running for president as an independent, he named her as his running mate.
The assumption at the time was he did so because she's a billionaire.
She is the ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Breen.
And in that divorce, she got roughly a billion dollars, maybe a little more.
Not really sure the exact amount, but she's definitely a billionaire.
And when you're running as an independent, you need somebody to finance your campaign.
And if your vice president, the one you choose, happens to be a billionaire, that's really good news because she can fund your campaign.
And in fact, she gave many millions of dollars, I think $21 million, something like that, maybe more, to RFK Jr.'s campaign.
And she was chosen for that reason.
Now, I had assumed that she was basically chosen only for that reason.
She was not a person of substance.
And then I interviewed her on this show.
Spent a good amount of time interviewing her.
And I actually walked away impressed, and I've been impressed ever since.
I take her seriously as a political figure, as a person.
I don't defer to her views.
She said some things I don't agree with at all.
But she's not just a money figure.
I think she has a very interesting, developed thoughts about the world.
She is successful in her own right.
She was a Silicon Valley lawyer.
I think she's very smart.
So this is what she said in response to the announcement of Casey Means as Surgeon General.
She said this, quote, it's very strange.
It doesn't make any sense.
I was promised that if I supported RFK Jr. in his Senate confirmation, that neither of these siblings would be working under HHS or in an appointment and that much more qualified people would be.
Now, a lot of people were saying like, What role did you play in RFK's confirmation?
You don't have any standing in the Senate.
But the reality is she did because she threatened any Republican senator who voted against RFK that she would pour a ton of money into funding a primary challenge.
And that is something.
When a billionaire says that against two senators who are...
Wobbling on this question of whether to vote for RFK Jr.
Remember, he had almost no margin.
If only one or two Republican senators abandoned him because of the close divide in the Senate, his nomination would have failed.
And so she said, look, I'm going to support you, but I want your assurance.
She said this is the assurance that she sought and received from RFK Jr. directly that if he's confirmed, neither of these siblings, not Casey Means nor Kaylee Means, Would get any kind of appointment or work in HHS.
She said, instead, people who are much more qualified would be.
And Kaylee Means is now a special employee to HHS.
I don't know if Nicole Shanahan considers that to be a violation, but she certainly considers a violation of the promise.
That she got from RFK Jr. to have appointed Casey Means as Surgeon General.
And this is what she went on to say, quote, I don't know if RFK very clearly lied to me or what is going on.
It has been clear in recent conversations that he is reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions.
And that person is not President Trump.
With regard to the siblings, there is something very artificial and aggressive about them.
Almost like they were bred and raised as Manchurian assets.
Now, that's quite a list of statements.
And I think the most serious one is he's saying that RFK Jr. is not somebody who has the normal powers of a Health and Human Services Secretary.
He doesn't make his own decisions.
He has to report to and is controlled by.
Someone else who's not President Trump.
And I think the obvious reference there is to Bill Cassidy, who himself is a physician and was extremely skeptical of RFK Jr.'s nomination by Trump to be HHS secretary.
He was deeply offended by and stridently opposed to RFK Jr.'s questioning of or skepticism toward vaccines.
He hates the anti-vax movement or anything that can be closely associated with it, which he thinks is RFK Jr.
And just other parts of...
Bill Cassidy, even as a politician, very swampy, uniparty, establishment type of politician.
Very old-school establishment, GOP, not at all MAGA.
And they needed his vote.
If they lost his vote, which they were very close to losing...
Then RFK Jr.'s nomination would have failed.
And Bill Cassidy very openly said, if you want my vote, you need to agree to a long list of limitations on what you can do, and you will be required to meet with me regularly and to include me in decision-making.
And if you don't, I'm going to call you before this committee and there will be repercussions.
And in order to get his vote, RFK agreed to these constraints.
And here was Bill Cassidy, when announcing his decision to vote for RFK Jr., saying that he got huge, very extraordinary and unusual concessions from RFK about limitations on his power and the role that Bill Cassidy particularly would play in all HHS decision-making.
Mr. Kennedy and the administration committed that he and I would have an unprecedentedly...
Close, collaborative working relationship, if he is confirmed.
We will meet or speak multiple times a month.
This collaboration will allow us to work well together and therefore to be more effective.
Mr. Kennedy has asked for my input into hiring decisions at HHS beyond Senate-confirmed positions, and he has also committed that he had worked within current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems and not established parallel systems.
It confirmed he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations without changes.
CDC will not remove statements on their website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism.
Mr. Kennedy and the administration also committed that this administration will not use the subversive techniques used under the Biden administration, like sue and settle, to change policies.
Mr. Kennedy, the administration committed to a strong role of Congress.
Aside from he and I meeting regularly, he will come before the HELP Committee on a quarterly basis if requested.
He committed that the HELP Committee chair, whether it's me or someone else, may choose a representative on any board or commission formed to review vaccine safety.
If he is confirmed, HHS will provide a 30-day notice to the HELP Committee if the agency seeks to make changes to any of our federal vaccine safety monitoring programs, and HELP Committee will have the option to call a hearing to further review.
If Mr. Kennedy is confirmed, I will use my authority as chairman of the Senate Committee with oversight of HHS to rebuff any attempt to remove the public's access to life-saving vaccines without iron-clad...
Causational, scientific evidence that can be accepted and defended before the mainstream scientific community and before Congress.
These commitments and my expectation that we can have a great working relationship to make America healthy again is the basis of my support.
He will be the secretary, but I believe he will also be a partner in working for this end.
I find that extremely creepy.
And I don't know if you noticed the graphic on the right side of the screen, which is also extremely creepy.
I don't know if this is a recognizable figure, but it's like some green person with nerdy glasses and spiked black hair circling his face, almost like he's in the middle of a black sun hanging over a dystopian city that seems polluted or whatever.
Anyway.
Just since it was hovering on the screen for two minutes, I thought I should note that.
That, too, is creepy.
That's just the graphic of the Twitter user who found this video and actually did a very good job of summarizing in text form exactly what these bizarre constraints are on RFK.
Now, Senator Cassidy himself said that these constraints are unprecedented.
And then at the end he said, yeah.
RFK Jr. is going to be the HHS secretary, but he's not really going to make decisions on his own.
He's going to make them in partnership with us, with me, as the chairman of this committee.
And apparently there are a lot of people who think that these means siblings are kind of grifters, that they really weren't part of this Maha movement until they joined very recently.
They don't have any expertise.
They have no credentials.
They just kind of hopped on the train, made themselves into podcast stars, went on Joe Rogan, did the podcast circuit, and then catapulted themselves into these positions.
And it's not just Nicole Shanahan.
I've seen other people who help the experts and vaccine activists.
Who were very supportive of R.K. and the Maha movement, who were extremely skeptical of this announcement and concerned that it signifies, as Nicole Shanahan said, that R.K. is not really making the decisions, that instead these decisions are being made for him.
And I'm not here to adjudicate that.
Like I said, it was surprising to me that there was so much negative opinion toward...
These mean siblings, given how much they've been associated publicly with RFK Jr., and how vocal they've been in advocating for him.
But I find the more interesting and really kind of disturbing aspect of all this that, of course, Congress should have oversight over the executive branch.
I think they've done a terrible job, in fact, when abdicating that responsibility far too much.
But this is not that.
As he said, it's unprecedented.
It's basically saying...
I'm going to be your boss, and I'm going to not just do oversight of the HHS department, but you have to go through me.
And you'll notice that this all has to pass—anything you do pass the test of the scientific establishment that got so discredited, rightfully so, during COVID.
And this goes back to the Iran segment that we were just talking about as well, which is you can elect the president and— Especially in this honeymoon period, right after the president wins, gets inaugurated, people are excited, people are willing to give him a chance.
He has a good amount of power, a lot of political capital to expend.
And Trump in particular came in with a plan to limit or punish or target or silence any group or faction that might impede what he wants to do.
In fact, the law firms.
The biggest law firms that might litigate against him.
He's attacked media.
He's attacked universities.
But he has also kept the Republicans in Congress in line because he's still very popular among Republican Party voters.
And he has proven many times that he could remove people from the Senate or Congress.
Not 100%, but certainly put people in jeopardy.
By condemning them publicly, and they're afraid of that, and he's kept them in line.
But the establishment and authoritarian institutions do not give up power easily.
They don't just say, like, oh, well, someone won the election.
Is there against our agenda?
I guess we just have to accept that.
They have a lot of weapons.
That's why they're the establishment.
And they're not going to go down easy.
And you see this now emerging, this kind of old-school, warmongering neocons who are trying to impede what Trump clearly is attempting to do in the Middle East and with Iran, to force him to go to war with Iran even though he doesn't want to.
And you see it here with RFK having played a role in Trump's victory.
I mean, there are a lot of people who voted for Trump because of RFK Jr.
And that was part of what was ratified electorally.
Was this Maha movement?
Whatever you think of it.
It is, in many ways, divergent from establishment science, mainstream scientists, the health industry, the pharmaceutical industry.
That's why a lot of people support it.
That's what was ratified electorally in that you see these people stepping in who are arms of the pharmaceutical industry, the food industry, the health insurance industry, working to subvert the election.
Creating these impediments on people who were put into power because the American people wanted them to be there because they believed in their agenda.
And that's the most important part of the RFK thing.
All right.
Just briefly, very briefly, Trump withdrew a nominee of his, who's Ed Martin.
He is a hardcore Trump loyalist.
He had represented very zealously, as is his duty, a lot of January 6th.
But he also advocated for them.
He didn't just represent them as a lawyer.
And Trump considers him a loyalist.
Trump nominated him to be the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
Every district has a U.S. Attorney who's the top prosecutor in that district.
They report to Maine Justice in Washington and to the Attorney General.
Very autonomous in their ability to make prosecutorial decisions.
And Trump obviously considers Washington to be a very important place since that's where a lot of the lawfare that he sees it as was done against him.
Robert Mueller and Jack Smith and various lawsuits and various criminal actions.
And Trump wanted a hole in that with the loyalists.
The problem is Ed Martin offended some Republican senators because of his advocacy for January 6th defendants.
Tom Tillis, a kind of establishment, slightly more independent than the norm senator, announced just a couple days ago that he would not vote for Ed Martin, to confirm Ed Martin because of his work with and defense of what happened on January 6th.
Tom Tillis said that for him is a red line.
That if you support what happened in this building on January 6th, we're not going to give you power.
And there were at least five or six other senators who made clear that they also were not vote for Ed Martin.
They made that clear to the White House that Trump was forced to withdraw him.
I personally found Ed Martin very dangerous because as acting attorney, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia just in the last three months, he's done things like threaten media outlets with prosecution if they don't prove to him that they Publish conservative...
thinkers or conservative viewpoints.
Here, NPR reported at the beginning of this month, medical journals are hit with a threatening letter from the Justice Department, quote, It has been brought to my attention, it said, that more and more journals and publications are conceding that they are partisans in very scientific debates, wrote Edward R. Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for D.C., in a letter to the journal Chest.
Quote, we were surprised, said Dr. Eric Rubin, the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, one of at least four journal editors, to get a letter from Martin, probably the most prominent.
Quote, other journals have gotten letters before, so it wasn't a shock, but it's still a surprise.
In addition to Rubin's journal, Martin has sent letters to JMAA, which is published by the American Medical Association, Obstractics and Gynecology, a journal of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and Chess, which is published by the American College of Chess Physicians.
There may be others.
Rubin says the letter mentioned that the journal has toxin-exempt status.
It does feel like there's a threatening tone to the letter and is trying to intimidate us, Rubin said.
In March, Ed Martin wrote a letter to Georgetown Law, the dean of Georgetown Law, and...
Georgetown Law condemned him over a threat that the office that he runs would not hire Georgetown Law graduates unless they changed their teaching and policies that Ed Martin disagreed with.
And so there's a lot of things he's been doing like that that I think are wildly inappropriate.
So I'm glad to see him withdrawn, even though he'll probably end up somewhere else.
He wrote to the Wikipedia Foundation as well.
Saying, you may lose your tax exempt status if you continue to be anti-Semitic, meaning allowing too much criticism of Israel.
So using the powers for very ideological ends, threatening private actors, parts of the press, the media, whose freedom is supposed to be guaranteed by the First Amendment, with formal government punishments if they're not serving a particular ideology.
This is clearly an abuse of prosecutorial power.
It's the sort of thing that bothered me about the Trump administration.
And so I'm glad to see him withdrawn, even though he probably wasn't provoking resistance among Republicans for that reason, for my reason, but instead for his defensive journey with six defendants.
So that was just a couple hours ago.
And then very quickly, Trump announced moments before we went on air that his choice to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia is Judge Jeanine as Fox News.
Viewers long have called her.
She's been a pundit on Fox News for a long time.
Her real name is Jeanine Pirro.
And Trump said, quote, I am pleased to announce that Judge Jeanine Pirro, by the way, this judge thing, she was a judge in a Westchester County court, I think like 40 years ago, 30 years ago, for like nine months or a year.
And then she became the prosecutor in Westchester County.
And the Republican Party, she's a very, very attractive woman.
She married a very wealthy businessman who ended up being prosecuted for all sorts of tax fraud and tax evasion, which he had to do in his mind because they were living this extremely ostentatious, gaudy lifestyle.
Like the nouveau riche of Westchester County, they were spending money well beyond their means to maintain this lifestyle.
And so he started cheating on his taxes, taking all kinds of deductions to fund that.
Went to prison for, I think, a couple years.
Trump pardoned him 20 years later.
And she's had her own issues, but they wanted her to run.
Against Hillary Clinton when Hillary Clinton was first announcing her Senate run in 2000.
They thought she would be a good person to defeat Hillary Clinton.
She did announce her run.
She quickly withdrew.
It became evident Hillary was going to win.
She instead ran against Andrew Cuomo, who at the time was running for Attorney General, and she lost that election.
So that's pretty much the only time she's run.
She's mostly been on Fox News for the last 15 years.
That's the sort of thing that Trump...
He likes telegenic people who speak well on television.
In many ways, that's how Trump got to be president, was he's very good on television.
He had a hit show, a game show, or reality show, whatever you want to call it, for nine years on NBC Prime Time, and he was making a lot of money, and he did very well, and that, in many ways, catapulted him to the presidency.
Judge Jeanine, to me, You know, honestly, I would rather have Judge Judy.
I don't even know if Judge Judy is still alive or not.
I think she is.
She's very old.
But I think she would be more qualified, just having watched both of them on TV for quite a long time.
So we'll see if this produces any Republican resistance.
I don't have anything against her, per se, though I can certainly point to things that might be disturbing.
And we only had a little...
Bit amount of time for me to formulate my thoughts or to find stuff about her that were worth reporting because it literally happened, I think, 15 minutes before our show began.
So we'll probably report on that next week more as these events unfold.
That will do it for this evening.
We have come to the end of our program.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms where if you rate, review, and follow the show, it really helps spread the visibility of the program.
Finally, as independent media and independent journalists, we do rely on the support of our viewers and members.
The way to do that is by joining our locals community where you get access to a wide array of benefits including interactive features throughout the week.
Every Friday night we do a Q&A where we take your questions only from members of our local community.
We put exclusive video segments and interviews that we do that we don't have time for this show.
When the show goes very long we stream You get written, professionalized transcripts of every show we do.
We publish those there the next day.
And most of all, it's the community on which we rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
Simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
For those of you who have been watching this show, we are, needless to say, very appreciative, and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m. Eastern Live exclusively here on Rumble.
