Jake Tapper Pretends He Didn't Know About Biden's Decline; Trump's Saudi Arabia Speech: A New Foreign Policy?
CNN's Jake Tapper is now pretending he didn't know about Biden's obvious cognitive decline even though he was among the corporate media pundits attacking those who doubted Biden's mental fitness. Plus: does Trump's Saudi Arabia speech signal a new vision for U.S. foreign policy? ------------------------------------------------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every single Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern.
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Tonight, one of the worst traits of the American corporate media, and there are obviously many of those on that list, is the way they consciously engage in deceitful propaganda campaigns for blatantly partisan ends.
Only to pretend the whole thing never happened once the election is over and they get caught.
We've seen this over and over in the last several elections.
There's no more brazen example than the way they all pretended to be so shocked.
Oh, my God, we're so shocked when they saw the Trump-Biden presidential debate and then noticed how melted Joe Biden's brain was.
Oh, my God, we never imagined, they said, even though most of the country knew by using their own eyes that for years Joe Biden was in cognitive decline.
They were the only ones apparently who didn't know it.
This week we are being treated to a master of the genre of media fraud.
Really should be hung in the Smithsonian because there's a new book out that is co-authored by two very different journalists.
One is Alex Thompson of Axios, who really was one of the very, very few reporters in the corporate press who actually pursued this story and intrepidly reported on Biden's cognitive decline and then has every right to write a book about that.
But his co-author, whose name appears first on the book, is CNN's Jake Tapper.
Who, in stark contrast to Thompson, actually actively and aggressively covered up Biden's decline.
And not only that, but he led the way in attacking the people who actually noticed.
And all of this is illustrative of the broader media pretense that, as always, they bear no blame whatsoever for the lies that they told because they were simply misled and deceived in good faith by a White House whom they trusted.
This book will get substantial attention, so it deserves ours, but not only for that reason, but also because it's reflective of a much broader media pathology that has played a very significant role in the justifiable destruction of their credibility.
But in this case, it's so extremely, so we just want to go through some of that to illustrate how blatant it is.
President Trump started his trip to three different Gulf state dictatorships by landing today in one of them, Saudi Arabia and announcing a major investment deal with Riyadh.
Which entails the Saudis buying $150 billion or more, including of military weapons and other products from American companies.
This was something that Joe Biden could have done but refused to do because he demanded that there be no deal with the U.S. until the Saudis normalized their relationship with Israel.
Joe Biden said, I know it's a good deal for the U.S., but you have to first normalize relations with Israel.
Trump, by contrast, dispensed with that requirement.
He said, if it's a good deal, we're going to sign it whether you have a good relationship with Israel or not.
And after the deal was signed, Trump delivered a speech to a room of a few thousand people, which in large part blatantly repudiated what has for decades been the core dogma of the bipartisan D.C. swamp.
And he laid out, I want to say a fundamentally different vision, but I think maybe significantly different vision.
For the U.S. role in the world and in the Middle East, and it's really worth taking notice of that, and we'll tell you all about it.
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
All right, so there's a new book out this week that most of the media is talking about.
It was highly anticipated.
It reports to tell the story of how the White House and the Democrats, quote, covered up the story of Joe Biden's cognitive decline and the implicit premise of that, which they are all very eager to promote, is a fairy tale, namely that...
The Biden White House covered it up and therefore the media had no way of knowing.
It's a book by CNN's Jake Tapper, who, as I said, was actively involved in this cover-up.
He was the one demanding and insisting, as we'll show you, that nobody talk about Biden's cognitive decline because it wasn't real and wasn't true and he claimed it was just a stutter.
And he accused those who brought up the cognitive decline or pointed it out.
Not only of spreading right-wing disinformation, but also cruelly stigmatizing children with a stutter by mocking what he said was Joe Biden's stutter.
And so, Jake Tapper writing a book pretending to have uncovered the cover-up that he participated in would be exactly if Nancy Pelosi wrote a book denouncing the immoral corruption.
Of members of Congress who profit off the stock market, you'd be like, what?
How does Nancy Pelosi write, of all people, write a book on the immorality and the corruption of having House members get very rich by trading on the stock market while they're in office?
It would be absurd.
Everybody would laugh at that.
That's how people should receive Jake Tapper's book as well.
Or not necessarily the book itself, but the fact that Jake Tapper is an author of it.
Here from CNN is...
A announcement of the book, new book on Biden by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson reports a, quote, cover-up about Biden's mental decline.
So this has been coming for a long time.
Now, one of the really interesting things to recall here is there's an excerpt in The New Yorker by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.
It's an excerpt from their book, obviously, designed to generate interest in it.
And it's describing these passages, I'm sure many of you remember, There was a huge, glitzy fundraiser in Hollywood for Joe Biden in the middle of 2024.
And that was when Obama had to lead Biden off the stage because he obviously and blatantly didn't know where he was.
And a lot of people said, Joe Biden's just lost.
He has no idea where he is.
That's why Obama had to, like, take him by the arm the way you do, like, a relative in a nursing home.
And you kind of help them walk.
You guide them to make sure, you know, they're a little confused.
That's what Obama did to Biden.
And here's the video just for your memory.
It was June of 2024.
There's Obama and Biden on stage.
And Obama's trying to walk off, but Biden's not really doing so.
And he's just kind of standing there, aimless.
Not really sure where he is.
Obama's waving, trying to get off, and then he grabs the grandfather by the wrist, puts his hands on his back, and kind of guides him offstage, because otherwise Obama would still be there.
Biden was never going to leave that stage.
He had no idea where he was, how to get off.
And we've seen that many, many times.
This is by far the first time, not the first time that we've seen Joe Biden obviously completely lost about where he's supposed to go, where he is.
And when people pointed this out, when people pointed out that Joe Biden was blatantly confused and had to have Obama guide him off the stage, the media and the White House in unison went berserk and started claiming that anybody who looked at this video and used it that way was using what they called a cheat fake, a play on the word deep fake.
Which is when you actually altered the video, but they were trying to claim this is a video taken out of context.
It is, if you look at it from different camera angles, you get a completely different impression.
It was about two weeks after Biden had that moment at the D-Day celebrations in France with the other EU leaders, where he just had to, where the Italian Prime Minister, Georgia Maloney, had to kind of walk over to him after Macron told her to and pull Biden back into the picture.
And when we saw him in Brazil, too, when he went to the Amazon, he just, like, gave a press conference, and he thought he was in the White House, so he just, like, turned around and started walking back.
But he walked into the jungle, to the Amazon.
He didn't know where he was.
He was often lost and confused.
And everybody saw this.
The polls reflected people overwhelmingly believed he had cognitive impairment, was too old to run for re-election, that he wasn't capable of doing the job, and the only people who pretended not to know were the media.
And that fundraiser in particular is just so telling of the whole fraud that took place here because in their book, in this new book, they excerpt this Part of the story about what happened that night, namely George Clooney, who has been a huge Democratic fundraiser.
He was at this fundraiser for Joe Biden.
He's known Joe Biden forever.
This is what happened when he walked up to Joe Biden, according to this book, quote, how Joe Biden handed the presidency to Donald Trump.
So they're blaming Biden for this, which he certainly deserves a lot of the blame, but by no means the only part of the blame.
And the book says this, quote, at a fateful event last summer, Barack Obama, George Clooney, and others were stunned by Biden's weakness and confusion.
Why did he and his advisors decide to conceal his condition from the public and the campaign for re-election?
It wasn't concealed from the public.
The public saw it.
You can go back in time and see all sorts of people.
I was one of them saying, Joe Biden's like, he doesn't know where he is.
It was so obvious.
It was the media who covered it up.
And attacked everybody who pointed it out as being right-wing disinformation agents, probably Russian disinformation agents engaging in cheap fakes.
The only people who covered it up were the media in unison with the White House.
Nothing was concealed from the public.
This is what happened, according to the book, when George Clooney went up to Biden.
Quote, thank you for being here, the president said to guests as he shuffled past them.
Thank you for being here.
So that was a phrase he used with everybody.
And that's because he didn't recognize anybody.
And then it says, And then an assistant aide told the president, Yeah, yeah, the president said to one of the most recognizable men in the world, the host of this lucrative fundraiser.
Thank you for being here.
Hi, Mr. President, Clooney says.
How are you, the president replied.
How was your trip, Clooney asked.
It was fine, the president said.
It seemed clear that the president had not recognized Clooney.
Quote, it was not okay, recalled the Hollywood VIP who had witnessed the moment.
Quote, that thing, the movement where you recognize someone you know, especially a famous person who's doing a fucking fundraiser for you, it was delayed.
It was uncomfortable.
George Clooney, the aide, clarified for the president.
Oh, yeah, Biden said.
Hi, George.
Clooney was shaken to his core.
The president hadn't recognized him, a man he had known for years.
Clooney had expressed concern about Biden's health before.
White House aide had told him a few months before that they were working on getting the president to take longer steps when he walked, but obviously the problem went far beyond his gait.
This was much grayer.
After that event, maybe a month or so after, George Clooney wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, which created a lot of stir.
It was something most Democrats were afraid to say, but George Clooney is a very loyal Democrat, always has been.
Big fundraiser of the Democratic Party, the Clintons, Obama, Biden.
And so he wrote this article in July of 2024, headlined in the New York Times, headlined George Clooney.
I love Joe Biden.
But we need a new nominee.
And this is what he wrote.
Now, keep in mind, that debate was the turning point where they were all insisting, no, there's nothing wrong with Joe Biden at all.
He's absolutely, totally fine.
And it was only once he went to that debate and practically drooled on himself, constantly, like, lost track of what he was saying in the middle of sentences, just kind of drifted off, put words together that were completely nonsensical and had that, like, vacant stare of somebody whose brain's not functioning the whole time, basically looking 90 or 100.
It was only then that this all became untenable, and it was only then the media started saying, oh, my God!
We didn't know.
It looks like Joe Biden's cognitively impaired.
I never would have imagined that.
This is the first time we're seeing it.
Even though Clooney ended up admitting that he saw it at that fundraiser when people were saying it and still getting attacked by the media for it.
Jake Tapper appeared on one of the CNN programs today.
I don't know who this host is.
They're all interchangeable and poorly watched.
But he was talking about...
His book, promoting his book, talking his book, is that, again, he was the one who uncovered the story when he was the one who helped conceal it, as we're about to show you.
And they obviously have a couple parts of their book.
They're trying to spread the media, generate interest.
And here's the little tidbit that he said.
I'm curious about what his advisors were saying at the time as you look at this, as you reported out this book.
So the White House physician, Dr. Kevin O 'Connor, was telling White House aides that President Biden's deterioration of his spine, the degeneration, was so significant that if he fell one more time, that he might have to be in a wheelchair and serve in a wheelchair for his second term.
But everybody pushed off the notion that he used a wheelchair until after the election.
This is all part of a larger hole where the Biden White House tried to hide the extent of his deterioration, both physical and cognitive, as much as possible.
In fact, as we all know, we all saw.
Do you see?
That's the whole formulation.
This was all part of the White House's effort to cover up and conceal.
What was actually going on with Biden?
They're turning themselves into the victims.
They're basically in the posture of when they all circulated the lies about WMD because Cheney was leaking it and Paul Wolfowitz and that whole crew.
And then afterwards, when it turned out there were no WMDs there, they weren't like, oh yeah, we were to blame.
Actually, the New York Times did take a little blame and said we probably should have been more skeptical of these assertions without evidence.
Oh, you think?
But mostly it was them trying to depict themselves as victims.
Like, yeah, we had the wool pulled over our eyes by this government that we trusted.
They're back 20 years later making the same exact excuse.
Yeah, we spread a bunch of falsehoods and lies, but it wasn't our fault.
We're as angry as you are.
We're the victims of the exact same thing.
Except, again, they were the ones who knew it as well as anybody because they were at the White House talking to these people all the time.
A friend of the show, Barry Eisler, said on Twitter today, the Jake Tappers of the world are in a really difficult position.
They basically have two choices, none of them good.
Either, number one, you admit that you knew and were complicit in the cover-up to try and make sure Donald Trump lost and Joe Biden won, which is the truth.
Or, number two, you admit that even though you call yourself a journalist, You are incapable of noticing or discovering a fact about Joe Biden that ordinary people who aren't paid to do that work all saw for themselves with their own eyes.
So either you're corrupt or just incredibly ignorant and dumb.
Let me play the rest of this.
To hide the extent of his deterioration, both physical and cognitive, as much as possible.
In fact, as we all know, we all saw as his shuffling gait got worse and worse from 2003 to 2004, they started putting AIDS around.
He meant from his shuffling gait got worse.
2023 to 2024, and I want you to remember that because you're about to see Jake Tapper attacking people who were noticing it at the time.
In 2004, they started putting aides around him as he walked to Marine One, the helicopter that was to kind of hide from public view how bad his gait was, how bad his walking was, his shuffling, and also in case he stumbled again to make sure somebody was there.
And this is just of a piece of an overall campaign to try to conceal from the American people the extent to which the president was really struggling to do his job.
I can't tell you how sick that makes me to watch.
I mean, these are the people who perpetrated the deceit and the crime.
And they're there saying, yeah, we wrote a book because we're so angry that the White House covered this up and made it impossible for us to know in the media what was going on with Joe Biden.
I mean, you would see him walk on and off the stage.
You would see him shuffling.
But that wasn't even...
The worst, nobody really cares if there's some physical deterioration.
I mean, if he was old and he had to sometimes be in a wheelchair, you know, so what?
FDR had polio and was in a wheelchair and most of the media knew and they kept it from the public because it was just a physical condition.
It didn't affect his brain or his judgment.
The real issue is that Joe Biden's brain was melting, not that his spine was degenerating.
Here is a compilation from our friends at Gravian of all the times that Jake Tapper attacked people for having suggested there's something wrong with Joe Biden over the years.
And the first one is Laura Trump, who said that in an interview or an event that when she watches Joe Biden, she feels sorry for him.
And she's saying, come on, Joe, get out the sentence, finish the sentence.
And here's what Jake Tapper said it was.
How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?
It's very clearly a cognitive decline.
That's what I'm referring to.
It makes me uncomfortable.
It's so amazing to me that...
A cognitive decline.
President Biden embraces his stutter talking about it while Trump mocks it, exaggerates it, belittles it.
He's sharp physically.
I mean, mentally.
I think the question is physically, right?
Right.
And the guy who's his chief opponent is only three or four years younger than him.
I mean, you have questioned President Biden's age, mental fitness, ability to lead of those supporting Biden.
You said, quote, shame on all of you, pretending everything is okay.
You're leading us and him into a disaster.
This is all 2024.
Here he is interviewing Dean Phillips, the Democratic congressman from Minnesota, who ran against Biden, even though the DNC wouldn't allow a primary.
And he said to Laura Trump, you're talking about Biden's inability to get out a sentence?
He has a stutter that nobody ever noticed before.
He has a stutter.
How dare you?
Do you have no shame?
How does that make children with a stutter feel, knowing that you're mocking them?
And she was like, what am I?
I didn't even know he had a stutter.
I've seen him talk for a long time.
I didn't even know he had a stutter.
I was talking about his cognitive decline, his inability to think and reason and speak.
And Jake Tapper, who now has written a book purporting to tell the whole story, blow the lid off, this campaign of deceit, said to her, oh, yeah, okay, I'm not even going to let you question his cognitive ability.
You have no basis whatsoever for doing that.
And then here's the same thing he did with Dean Phillips.
I mean, you have questioned President Biden's age, mental fitness, ability to lead of those supporting Biden.
You said, quote, shame on all of you pretending everything is OK.
You're leading us and him into a disaster.
Do you worry that you damaged him at all?
I don't doubt that you got hugs and handshakes behind closed doors today and maybe even publicly some of them because they like you personally.
But I've heard a lot of really nasty stuff about you from your Democratic colleagues.
I mean, just like, what is he thinking?
Exercise in narcissism.
I mean, false claims to the Wall Street Journal about President Trump.
Do you see what Jake Tapper is doing here?
He's vicious.
I mean, he's so visibly angry.
He viciously attacks anybody who questioned Joe Biden's cognitive fitness.
So again, everybody around Jake Tapper knew.
The whole public knew.
He said Laura Trump was...
Attacking and making life difficult for children with stutters and telling Dean Phillips, yeah, you may have some friends who said you're great, but the people I heard from absolutely hate you.
But the whole time people are telling him, look, Joe Biden has a problem with cognitive decline.
And Jake Tapper was the one, one of the primary people in the media, not just covering it up and denying it, but aggressively attacking and maligning.
The character of anyone who was raising this, as recently as last year, presumably when he was working on his book, or at least anticipating the book.
I think actually they announced the book in early 2025.
It usually takes a lot longer than three, four months to write a book like that, but they're probably rushing to do it so they could be first.
So maybe he wasn't writing the book at the time, but this is all what Jake Tapper is purporting to blow the lid off of what he was doing.
Narcissism, I mean, false claims to The Wall Street Journal about President Biden's mental fitness and acuity.
He's 81 and his memory, you know, it doesn't seem great.
It's not horrible, but I don't understand the outrage.
Well, behind closed doors, Biden's shows signs of slipping.
Unquote.
The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp, which is run by the Murdochs.
So, there was an extremely long and well-reported Article in the Wall Street Journal in July or August of last year.
Obviously, the Wall Street Journal is a respected newspaper, especially among them.
And it described all these people saying, Joe Biden's brain is fried.
You know, like, you sit in a room with him.
He can't even follow a conversation.
Like, sometimes he's better than other times, but often he's just, like, doesn't know where he is.
He can't follow anything.
And you had, like, Kevin McCarthy went on the record, most of them off the record, you know, anonymously, but including Democrats.
And did you see the snoddy little way that Jake Tapper tried to disparage the story by saying this comes from the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by News Corp, which is controlled by the Murdochs, trying to act as if the Wall Street Journal's reporting was the partisan hit job rather than what Jake Tapper was doing.
The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp, which is run by...
They're Murdochs.
Beyond the headline, there is some critical nuance here.
The article is mostly based on observations of Republicans, with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy the only one going on the record.
They do note in the article that most of the criticism comes from Republicans.
Have you heard...
Any concerns from anyone who has met with President Biden about him seeming a little slower?
No.
The Russians are trying to make us and the public not trust our election integrity.
So he did blame it on the Russians, of course.
And there he's saying the Wall Street Journal is only interviewing Republicans about it.
Then he goes and asks Chris Coons, the Democrat from Delaware, Biden's home state, oh, have you noticed this?
And he's like, no, I haven't noticed anything.
Biden seems great.
Now, here's the cover of the book.
It's called Original Sin, President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.
Can you imagine being Jake Tapper and having done all this?
I'm going to write a book about the people who covered this up, like those people over there, because I'm really angry about how they deceived the country.
The country wasn't deceived.
The country knew it all.
The only ones pretending not to know were people in the media like Jake Tapper.
Public not trust, our election integrity, Joe Biden has dimension, all this stuff.
All right, so that's a good compilation of him just ranting and raving on multiple occasions.
Now, as I mentioned, the media frequently attacked those who pointed out what everyone could see, what George Clooney ended up admitting.
That these videos, the one in France with Biden meeting the EU leaders to commemorate D-Day, and then the event, the big glitzy fundraising event that George Clooney and others in Hollywood hosted, where Obama let him off the stage, and people started saying, look, you can just see the generation of his brain right there.
And this is how the media treated it.
Quote, from the Washington Post in June of 2024.
Quote, cheap fake Biden videos enrapture right-wing media but deeply mislead.
So they were saying this is just a scam coming from the right-wing.
And it's all misleading.
So we, the Washington Post, are here to tell you the truth if these videos don't show anything wrong with Joe Biden.
Quote, the RNC posts a clipped video.
Then the New York Post, the Telegraph, and other pro-Trump outlets follow suit with the same deceptive framing.
And they're basically saying like, yeah, they make the video look like this.
It's a real video, but it's just because it's the wrong angle.
If you looked at it the real way, you would see that he's completely fine.
This is June of 2024.
Here from Newsweek, June of 2024, White House calls Biden videos fake, sparking Republican outrage.
The White House called those videos fake.
And there was George Clooney knowing that he had just met Biden at that event.
And he said his throat dropped into his stomach.
He was so horrified to realize that there's no more Joe Biden.
Here from NBC News, In June of 2024, the headline is, misleading GOP videos of Biden are going viral.
The fact checkers have trouble keeping up.
Quote, the lie is sprinting the 100-meter dash, and the fact check is taking a stroll on the beach, so it's never going to catch up, said one Democratic strategist.
Do you understand what they did?
They didn't just say, we don't see evidence of it.
They called the people who saw it liars and misinformation agents and Russian agents, people needing a fact check.
And then here was the debate where they couldn't pretend anymore.
They finally had to come clean like, oh yeah, it turns out.
And by the way, I just want to point out one incredibly funny but also very pathetic thing.
When Joe Biden walked onto that debate stage and immediately started acting like what he is, which is a very, very old person with a degenerating brain, and it became extremely obvious, I'll never forget this to the day I die.
Media outlets started rushing to Twitter and other social media to say, breaking, the White House tells us Joe Biden has a cold.
They were still ready to cover it.
They were still trying to cover it up in the first half an hour of this debate by lying and saying he has a cold and that's the problem.
They got that from the White House.
They're like, he has a cold.
Don't worry.
I know he seems like he has Alzheimer's and dementia, but no, it's just a cold and a stutter.
And here is just part of it, but this was very illustrative of the whole evening.
All those things we need to do, child care, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our health care system, making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the COVID, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with, look, if...
We finally beat Medicare.
All right, so, you know, but the thing is, it wasn't new for anybody except the media.
And you see Trump looking at him with, honestly, like almost a certain level of empathy and pity.
I mean, Trump was not his usual aggressive self.
He was like, yeah, when they asked him, Mr. Trump, do you want to respond to that?
He's like, I don't really know what he said, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't know what he said.
You know, but like almost in a gentle, Because it is sad.
It's sad to watch.
I mean, I always felt like that.
It was sad to watch.
But it was also enraging how I hate the word gaslighting, but this is like the one time it really actually is appropriate.
The media was gaslighting.
They're like, yeah, I know you think you're seeing Biden completely degenerating, but no, it's not true.
You're crazy.
You're the one who's crazy if you think that.
You're looking at the wrong video, the wrong angle.
And that's what they all did.
Now, I just want to say, because I think this history has been forgotten, that it wasn't only once Biden was the president did people start seeing, even though the media denied it, that Joe Biden was obviously mentally impaired.
This went back all the way to 2018, when Joe Biden was making clear that he wanted to run for president.
And Democrats in the In Washington, in the professional class, in the media, were petrified that if Biden ran, he likely was going to get the nomination.
Because that's how Democrats vote.
That's often how politics works.
He was the vice president for eight years.
He stood loyally by Obama's side.
They had just witnessed the defeat of Hillary Clinton.
I think they wanted a white guy who everybody knew and sort of trusted or has been around politics.
And they thought and proved to be There were
debates.
Other Democratic candidates obviously implied and sometimes explicitly suggested that Biden was no longer there, that he had no memory, that he didn't really know what he was saying.
And then it was amazing.
They were doing that all the way up until basically the only two choices were Biden or Bernie.
Everybody else had dropped out by that point.
And then once...
It got down to Biden and Bernie.
Obviously, they were never going to let Bernie be the nominee.
They cheated in 2016 to make sure he wasn't.
So then when Bernie Sanders' supporters were saying, look, the problem is if you nominate Joe Biden, he's not going to be able to endure the rigors of the campaign because he's cognitively impaired.
Those same people who created that narrative trying to stop Joe Biden turned around and said, how dare you, Bernie Sanders supporters and Trump supporters, suggest that Joe Biden is cognitively impaired.
That's disgusting.
That's a low blow.
And I read an article in 2020 as I started hearing this.
This was right in the middle of the Democratic primary where it was down to Biden and Sanders basically.
When they started basically saying these are all lies coming from MAGA and from Bernie supporters.
And the title of my article was Democrats and their media allies impugned Biden's cognitive fitness.
Now they feign outrage.
Remember, this is March of 2020, before Biden was even elected.
That's how far back this discussion goes.
It wasn't just 2023 and 2024 when the media was coming up.
It was so evident for so long.
I mean, the only reason Biden ended up winning, despite these impairments, was because 2020, of course, was when the COVID pandemic came.
And they had a very good excuse for keeping Joe Biden locked up in his basement.
He didn't have to go and give speeches.
He didn't have to go to fundraising events.
He barely did any media appearances.
And they had COVID as the excuse.
Like, oh, he can't go out.
Not because he's old.
He'd love to go out.
But just, unfortunately, there's a pandemic.
Now, the subheadline of this article is concerns about the former vice president's cognitive decline came from his supporters, not from Trump or Sanders.
I just went through a list of examples which we're about to show you, but before I do, I want to just emphasize how widely this was known, how widely this was discussed, well before Biden even won.
I went on Joe Rogan's show on October 28th, 2020.
As it turned out, it was the day before.
I decided to quit The Intercept because they wouldn't let me publish stories about the Hunter Biden laptop claiming the CIA told them it was Russian disinformation and therefore it couldn't be written about.
Another absolute media deceit that they engage in in 2020 and 2016, of course, it was Russiagate.
So the last three elections they've engaged in a campaign of lies to help the Democrat win.
And Joe Rogan asked me about...
How can they nominate Biden and get behind Biden when he obviously doesn't have a working brain?
And here's what we said in response.
Again, this is 2020.
You probably have had that experience when you go and, like, you visit an old relative, like, one of your grandparents who's, like, in a nursing home.
And, you know, you go in and, like, kind of, like, soften your voice so you don't, like, you don't want to be, like, feel, like, scare them or, like, feel abrasive.
And, like, if they make kind of anything resembling a joke, like, you sort of fake laugh, right?
Like, that's how they talk to him, interviewers on television.
They, like, treat him like an old, ailing grandparent.
One who is beloved.
This is the most amazing thing about this whole thing with cognitive decline, which anyone who watches him for 15 minutes knows is true.
The people who were the first ones to disseminate that storyline were not supporters of Bernie Sanders once the primary got down to Biden and Bernie.
It was in 2018 and into 2019 when Biden was by far the leading Democratic candidate because of his name recognition and because of his eight years as vice president standing next to Obama.
It was Democratic establishment operatives, strategists, consultants, just like that whole D.C. professional Democratic Party class.
Which was petrified that he was going to get the nomination.
When I started talking about cognitive decline and people started saying, this is a shitty low blow.
You're just doing this to sabotage his campaign to help Bernie.
And I was like, are you fucking crazy?
You're the ones who have spent the last year and a half on Morning Joe in the Washington Post op-ed pages.
I don't know if you remember, but there was a CNN debate when Julian Castro...
They interrupted Biden and accused him of having contradicted what he had said three seconds ago.
And he was like, Joe, did you just forget what you said 20 seconds ago?
And then they interviewed Cory Booker and he said, yeah, you know, if you listen to Joe Biden, you really wonder whether he's capable of carrying the football over the...
They were the ones petrified that he wouldn't be able to withstand the rigors of a campaign.
The only thing that saved him was the coronavirus pandemic, which let him sit at home.
And now they've declared what we can all see with our own eyes.
And what they themselves are saying all this time, it's declared off-limits to say it, even though they're the ones who recognized first that it was true.
And that's the kind of stuff that gets really creepy.
And again, that was the 2020 campaign.
And obviously he got worse each year that passed by.
But it wasn't like only in 2024 or 2023 when people perceived this.
They had been seeing it for years.
That was me talking about obvious...
Cognitive decline of Joe Biden after Joe Rogan raised it and said, like, Biden obviously has cognitive decline.
How could he be president?
This was long ago.
Here was Andrea Mitchell, obviously a big supporter of the Biden campaign and Democrats in general.
This was prior to the first presidential debate.
Democratic primary presidential debate when there were, you know, 12 candidates, one of whom was Biden.
It was back in 2019.
And here's what she said sitting next to Michael Steele in talking about what to anticipate with this debate.
And, look, he has been a skilled debater.
We saw him with Sarah Palin.
We've seen him in the past.
The question is, does he still have his stuff?
Sponinating.
Yeah, and how sharp is he?
Does the Joe Biden tonight, is he the same Joe Biden who could respond with one word to a younger...
You know, you're raising the question by the question.
A younger Brian Williams.
You were raising the question.
So they're all cackling about the fact that everyone knows Biden isn't the same person who debated Sarah Palin.
That he may not...
And Chris Matthews laughed and he's like, obviously, by raising that question, you're answering it.
And this was commonly said in Democratic Party circles in 2019, 2018, 2019.
Here's one of the most supreme Democratic Party loyalists in the world, Mehdi Hassan.
This was 2019 as well.
And he retweeted a...
commented on a Trump tweet that mocked Biden's cognitive decline.
And this is what he said, quote, Democrats, this is your future if you nominate the ludicrous gaffe machine Joe Biden as your presidential nominee, a future in which Trump mocks your nominee's mental fitness and even attacks him from the left over racism and criminal justice.
FFS, for fuck's sake.
Here was the Washington Post in September of 2019 with the headline, Biden, make sure you have the record player on a night for children.
And that was like a concern that he was just getting so old that he was still talking about record players, which most young voters have never even heard of, let alone used.
And they said, Here was Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio in 2019.
He was a presidential candidate at the time.
And listen to what he said.
Again, this is 2019.
Here's what he said about Joe Biden.
And that's what I'm saying.
And as I said, there's sometimes a lack of clarity.
And I think that's what I'm hearing on the ground.
I think that's what a lot of people are thinking.
And, you know, we can't afford that at this point.
And that's what these primaries are for, to figure out who's the best person to put forward.
And it sounds like you really are taking aim, though, you know, at the former vice president by saying, you know, I just think he is declining.
I don't think he has the energy.
You see it almost daily.
And I love the guy.
And you said, well, you're not back.
Backtracking.
What do you really mean by this?
Look, these primaries are about us presenting our platform, which direction we want to take the country, but also a contrast to other candidates.
And on the debate stage, I was very clear about some positions that Democrats in this field are taking around, you know, taking people's private health insurance around free health care for undocumented.
People in the country, when other people in the country, citizens, are paying for their health care.
You know, these kind of issues are putting us in a position where we are not going to be able to win the states we need to win.
And I also think we've got to make sure we have a candidate that can be very aggressive against Donald Trump in the campaign.
And I'm not backing down from any of that that I've said.
So you're saying you don't believe that Biden can be aggressive.
You say he's declining.
In what way do you mean that?
Inference to his age or something else.
Well, I mean, he went on Colbert to address this very issue.
It's not like I said something that a lot of people aren't thinking or he wouldn't have went on Colbert to talk about it.
So this is an issue.
We have to be honest with each other.
There's so much at stake in this election.
We can't just put somebody up there who can't beat Donald Trump, whether it's on the issues or on the issues of energy or lack of clarity.
We've got to be very clear.
Lack of clarity, lack of energy.
I mean, this was all stuff they were saying in 2019.
Here is one of the Democratic presidential debates that was held on ABC.
Here is Julian Castro in his exchange with Joe Biden.
They do not have to buy in.
You just said that.
You just said that two minutes ago.
You just said two minutes ago that they would have to buy in.
You said they would have to buy in.
Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?
Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago?
I mean, I can't believe that you said two minutes ago that they had to buy in, and now you're saying they don't have to buy in.
You're forgetting that.
I mean, can you believe that these people in the media are trying to pretend that they didn't know until the debate happened when it was openly discussed repeatedly in their circles going back to 2018 and 2019?
After that debate, Cory Booker, who was also on the stage, spoke to CNN's Dana Bash, who asked him about that, and here's what Cory Booker said.
We have been talking about Napoleon Castro when he called out Joe Biden saying, well, you don't remember what you said two minutes ago.
Senator Klobuchar was just here telling us she thought it was a very uncool moment and rather Trump-like.
What did you think in that moment?
Well, if you saw Senator Klobuchar, we were on the end.
I think a lot of the debates, she and I just stepped towards each other and just talking about these notes.
Is that the cheap shot you were referring to?
I think that, look, I think that we are at a tough point right now.
Because there's a lot of people who are concerned about Joe Biden's ability to carry the ball all the way across the end line without fumbling.
So I can show you campaign rallies and speeches and interviews that Biden did, including compilations into the 2020 election, in which he is exhibiting very similar signs of not being able to follow a sentence, not realizing what he's saying, not being able to keep his concentration even through a single sentence.
And many Democrats were openly discussing this, as were media people, back in 2018 and 2019.
Imagine the audacity of the media now pretending, oh, I mean, we just didn't know.
We had no way of knowing.
And this was, even in 2020, the media did exactly what it did in the 2024 campaign, said that people bringing this up were lying.
Hear from the Washington Monthly, March 6, 2020.
The disinformation campaign being launched against Biden.
There is no doubt to support the allegation that he is in cognitive decline.
Politico, March 7, 2020.
2020 becomes the dementia campaign.
Biden and Trump partisans train charges of senility in an era of aging candidates.
Kieran Finney, who's a Democratic strategist, more in like the establishment camp, posted in March of 2020, replying to what Julian Castro and Cory Booker said about general allegations that Trump is incognitive.
She said, quote, "Truly a disgusting low blow.
Cory Booker and Julian Castro should denounce having their comments being twisted like this.
I had written a post basically saying that this is something that the Democrats first raised, not the Trump supporters of Bernie Sanders campaign, the one that I showed you.
And I posted that, and then there was a media figure.
I don't know what happened to her, but she was, I think, working for Slate at the time, Ashley Feinberg, who also wrote something about this, and Ryan Lizza, who was at The New Yorker, and then he moved to Politico, and now Politico fired him, and he's off on Substack.
This is what he said on March 8th, talking about our two tweets.
He said, part of the, quote, cognitive decline campaign being spread by MAGA slash Sanders Twitter...
Is to deny any coordination.
The idea is that everyone is just now noticing that Biden misspeaks and all the time, and they've suddenly been alarmed by it.
He's been like this for decades.
I mean, again, just utter, complete gaslighting that everybody was seeing exactly what was going on here.
So, I just don't want this history to be revised in a way that Is helpful to the frauds in the media?
Almost all of them who did what Jake Tapper did?
And I just want to say, the one reporter, and I was noting this at the time, who through 2023 into 2024 was intrepidly insisting on publishing article after article questioning Joe Biden's cognitive fitness was Alex Thompson, who is the co-author on this book.
He's basically the only one in corporate media who has the credibility to write this book.
At the White House Correspondents' Dinner held a couple months ago, in April actually, they had the audacity to bestow him with an award for great reporting, even though what he was reporting they were attacking him for and denying.
And to his credit, Alex Thompson stood up and he said something which I've been noting for a long time, nobody in the corporate media will ever say.
They'll complain.
That their credibility and the trust and faith that Americans have in them has been destroyed, but they almost never look in the mirror and say, did we play any role in that?
They blame everybody else.
Attacks on the media and fragmented media.
Being called fake news by Trump.
But they never, ever, while complaining about or noting the collapse of corporate media, ever, ever do any self-reflection.
And so when Alex Thompson stood up to collect this award, speaking to all these DC media people, this is what he said.
Serious note.
To my bones, I believe that reporting and the White House Correspondents Association is as necessary as ever.
President Biden's decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception.
But being truth-tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves.
We, myself included, missed a lot of this story.
And some people trust us less because of it.
We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.
I wouldn't say he got thunderous applause from the people in that room.
It was sort of like very scattered applause.
But again, credit to him for saying this.
Here's the rest of what he said.
I say this because acknowledging errors builds trust.
And being defensive about them further erodes it.
And he went on to suggest that there have been partisan inclinations in the media.
He's kind of standing alone in all of these ways, so credit to him.
And it took him a while to get to this story.
Certainly, you know, as I said, this has been going on for years.
People have been noticing this.
But at least he not only got to the story, he then told the media they're to blame for the loss of faith and trust in the public housing because of things like this.
And not just the lies they tell in every election, but then their refusal to admit it afterwards.
Remember in 2020, they said, oh, The Hunter Biden laptop should be ignored because it's Russian disinformation.
The intelligence community told us this.
And then once Joe Biden safely won and every media outlet started admitting, oh, no, you know what?
We've confirmed it's actually true.
None of them went back and said, hey, remember when we were telling you for six straight weeks or three straight weeks before the election that this was Russian disinformation?
It turns out we got it all wrong.
And here's why.
I mean, the real answer is because they didn't want to do any reporting that might jeopardize Joe Biden's election, which is the same exact motive they had in joining hands with the Biden White House.
The Biden White House was not their adversary hiding things or blinding the media from seeing the truth.
They saw the truth as much as anybody did.
And this is a revisionist story to try and say, although Alex Thompson admitted the media's at fault.
This whole narrative being reconstructed now around this book is that the media was basically the main victim that they just had no way of knowing.
They hit him.
They walked around him.
When he walked to the helicopter, they couldn't see his walking and how he was sort of like this old man's gait.
That's what they're trying to do.
it's a complete revisionist history to try and alleviate themselves of responsibility and guilt, even though, at least in this case, one of the people writing this book is one of the guiltiest of all.
And they can keep doing this, and I think they're just digging their own grave.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Here's a news story.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bensitt says the growing recession fears are, quote, media-driven.
WE'VE ALL SEEN HOW MAINSTREAM MEDIA MANIPULATES PUBLIC OPINION.
WE JUST SPENT AN HOUR SHOWING YOU ON THAT.
THEY PUSH THEIR NARRATIVES THAT SERVE THEIR INTEREST.
THEY TELL ONE SIDE OR ONE PART OF A STORY.
I started this show and then partnered with Ground News.
They're a platform built on the belief that you deserve to see the whole truth without corporate filters or political censorship.
For every story, their app and website pulls in every single report from across the political spectrum.
So all I have to do is swipe through coverage with tags exposing each outlet's bias, credibility, and corporate influence to find out the facts they're ignoring and why.
So take that story I mentioned about Scott Benson and Trump's tariffs.
Treasury Secretary Scott Benson called out the media for fueling unnecessary recession fears because the fundamentals of our economy are strong.
But when you look at who's actually reporting on it, every single outlet is coming from the right that's promoting that narrative.
There's almost no coverage from mainstream and liberal media on that.
And you know there's something strange going on when a story is being actively ignored by half the media.
That's why Ground News built one of their most important tools, the blind spot feed.
It exposes stories that either side of the political spectrum isn't reporting on so you can actually see the world as it is, not just the version they want you to see.
Ground News is rebuilding trust in news by giving power back to the public rather than concentrating them in the hands of media leads.
That's why they're completely independent and funded by readers like us.
But I got 40% of my viewers.
40% off the same vantage plan I've been using to get unlimited access to all of their features.
So you can go to ground.news /gg or scan that QR code and check out the link in the description and it will take you right to them.
value what we do here on this show, I think you'll find Ground News a very worthwhile resource.
Donald Trump landed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, early this morning to begin a trip that we've been talking about on this show that's notable, in part because he's visiting three different countries, three different tyrannies in the Gulf region.
And even though he's very close to Israel, he doesn't have any plan to go visit Israel or Netanyahu.
But he also announced beforehand that he's going to do deals with these countries, even though...
Biden had put a prerequisite that they have to first go and normalize relations with Israel.
And the position of these countries was, we're not going to normalize relations with Israel.
We can't.
Until they give the Palestinians a state.
And obviously, not only are they not going to be Palestinians a state, they're ethnically cleansing Gaza and killing huge numbers of people in the process to achieve that goal.
So obviously they can't normalize relations with Israel.
So Trump said, all right, I'm going to put America's interests first rather than Israel's.
And he didn't just make the trip, he also announced what the White House in a release earlier today called a historic $600 billion investment commitment in Saudi Arabia.
Donald J. Trump secures historic $600 billion investment commitment.
The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, who's effectively the de facto leader of that country, Mohammed bin Salman, went and met Trump at the airport, just to kind of underscore the importance of this trip.
And then after those two signed agreements between Saudi Arabia and the United States, they entered this massive, gigantic, ornate auditorium where it looked like a couple thousand, maybe several thousand people were speaking.
And Trump received a massive standing ovation from the Saudis, but also a bunch of corporate interests and financiers who are very interested in opening up the doors to do business with Saudi Arabia because of how much money they have.
And here's how Donald Trump was received.
Mm.
Mmm.
There's Mohammed bin Salman clapping, holding his heart.
There you see this massive auditorium.
There's Elon Musk right behind Mohammed bin Salman.
And they're just clapping, clapping, clapping.
And then Mohammed bin Salman stands up.
So, of course, the entire auditorium instantly does to give Trump a standing ovation.
And there's Marco Rubio as well.
So you see how Trump is...
Viewing Saudi Arabia as just from a transactional economic lens that there's huge amounts of benefits for American companies and for the United States and for the Trump family to pursue in Saudi Arabia, which is drowning in all kinds of petrodollars and is seeking to diversify their investments and to create a more positive image of themselves in the world, even if they're not necessarily loosening up any part of the tyranny of their country.
Here is an excerpt of something Donald Trump said in that speech.
In this speech, he kind of laid out a vision.
He first talked about all the great things happening in the United States under his presidency, the normal things, closing the border, the tariffs and the stock market and all of that.
But then he got to foreign policy and specifically talked about the region.
Now, there's a lot in this speech that is kind of a continuation of the way Things are seen by the United States in terms of foreign policy.
He spent a lot of time bashing Iran as a source of all evil in the Middle East, but that's in large part because Saudi Arabia and Iran are very virulent enemies.
It's kind of the arch rivalry of the Middle East.
Part of it is religious.
Part of it is just geostrategic.
So, of course, Trump did bash Iran a lot, claiming that they were one of the major problems of the Middle East, but he also said...
We hope to sign an agreement with Iran so that they can thrive, just not without a nuclear weapon.
But he also attacked bipartisan foreign policy dogma that has prevailed in the United States for a long time, and specifically neocons and interventionists.
Here's part of what he said.
And it's crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionalists who are flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.
No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop.
Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities.
Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives, developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions and charting your own destinies in your own way.
It's really incredible what you've done.
In the end, the so-called nation builders...
Wrecked far more nations than they built and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.
They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves.
Peace, prosperity and progress ultimately came not from a radical rejection of your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions and embracing that same heritage that you love.
So, he's essentially saying, we've been trying for decades to interfere in your countries.
We come and give you lectures about what you should and shouldn't do, meaning like, hey, you probably should loosen up the tyranny a bit.
But mostly, he's saying...
This whole hubris of the United States and its neocons and interventionists that we have the right to go around the world remaking other countries in our image when we don't even know the slightest things about these complex countries and it's all been a failure.
As he said, these nation builders have destroyed more countries than they've built.
And that from now on, you have to figure out your own national identity.
It's not for us to decide.
And you're going to thrive, not because we tell you what to do.
Or change your country, but because you are figuring out what you want your country to be, and that's why we see all these buildings popping up.
So basically, I think it's important to realize that Trump is not jettisoning all of the vision of foreign policy that the U.S. bipartisan class has had for decades about the Middle East.
He's saying basically Iran is the main problem.
They're the source of The terrorists.
And that basically the whole Middle East can become like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
He left out Qatar because there's some conflict, but he's going to say the same thing in Qatar.
Doha is very similar.
You know, you have all these glitzy buildings and all these like, I mean, they look, those cities do.
Certainly Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai.
And Riyadh look far more futuristic and far more developed than most cities in the United States.
And so he's saying the Middle East should be like this.
Who cares if there's no democracy?
And that's kind of a side point.
This is the model of the Middle East.
Basically, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates joining together in order to live peacefully side by side and do business with one another.
And then all you have to do is just get rid of, in his mind, the people who are primitive, warmongers who want to keep the region in instability and fighting, namely Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis and Iran.
So it's not a very encouraging picture in the sense that he's certainly not coming and saying, we've got to get out of here completely.
He's saying, we still need to wipe out these factions.
Obviously, it doesn't include any sense of A Palestinian state.
Remember, Trump basically talked about Gaza and said, yeah, we've got to get all the people out there, and then we're going to basically build it to be like Dubai.
There's going to be casinos and resorts.
That's his vision.
Now, anyone who's been to these places, and I've been to Dubai and Doha several times, Abu Dhabi, it is true.
There's enormous amounts of wealth there.
And it's kind of like a playground for the world's rich.
And if you have a lot of money, there's a lot of things to do there that are enjoyable.
There's everything just kind of ornate and ostentatious.
But I always felt to have this kind of very uncomfortable feeling there because that glitz is for a tiny amount of the elites, and then the rest of these places are like slave labor with no rights.
Very few labor protections.
So many people died when Doha had the World Cup because of how they're treated.
Most of them are imported from other places to do the work.
You have all these rules, rigid rules, social rules about, say, homosexuality is punishable by prison.
And that is true for the ordinary people who live there.
But the elite of Dubai, trust me, it's like being in...
Greenwich Village in the 1970s, or West Hollywood now, there's tons of homosexuality because that's how this country is set up.
You have this tiny little class of extreme wealth here and the rest of the country there, and this is Trump's model for the Middle East.
He's saying, we want you to export technology, not terrorism.
Here's part of what he said about Gaza.
The people of Gaza deserve a much better future, but that will...
So they heard that as a pro-Palestinian statement, like, hey, Gaza deserves much better.
And obviously they're thinking, yeah, meaning, like, Israel needs to stop destroying all their society and engaging in genocide, but that's not what Trump means.
But that will or can not occur as long as their leaders choose to kidnap, torture, and target innocent men, women, and children for political ends.
The way those people are treated in Gaza, there's not a place in the world where people are treated so badly.
It's horrible.
Which is true, what he just said, but notice how he places all the blame on Hamas, saying everything's going to be fine once we destroy Hamas, which he thinks is what Israel is doing.
Here is Trump making an interesting passage on how he sees Iran, and he offers some generalized observations about having enemies in the world.
Here's what he said.
Yet I'm here today not merely to condemn the past chaos of Iran's leaders, but to offer them a new path and a much better path toward a far better and more hopeful future.
As I've shown repeatedly, I am willing to end past conflicts and forge new partnerships for a better and more stable world, even if our differences may be very profound, which obviously they are in the case of Iran.
I have never believed in having permanent enemies.
I am different than a lot of people think.
I don't like...
That's a really interesting concept because both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson warned about that exactly.
Washington in his farewell address, Thomas Jefferson in his second inaugural address said the United States has to avoid entangling alliances such as...
Tying ourselves to Israel and being constrained by this alliance with this other country that just goes on forever.
But also they warned about enduring enmities, enduring conflict with another country.
And that's Trump's taking that—it was a very non-interventionist—both of those by Washington and Jefferson were very non-interventionist views of what the role of the United States should be in the world.
We're not an empire.
We're a republic.
We don't go around looking for enemies or— Looking for allies, trying to dominate the world.
We'll defend ourselves.
Obviously, we have to, like we just did when we gained independence.
But the vision they laid out was not one where you have U.S. bases all over the world, where you're acting as empire, where you're constantly at war, and Trump is taking that language.
I don't know.
I assume whoever wrote this speech is very well aware of that.
And he's saying, yeah, people don't understand that about me.
I don't want to have enemies.
I don't want to have enduring enemies.
I want to avoid war.
Permanent enemies.
I am different than a lot of people think.
I don't like permanent enemies, but sometimes you need enemies to do the job, and you have to do it right.
Enemies get you motivated.
In fact, some of the closest friends of the United States of America are nations we fought wars against in generations past, and now they're our friends and our allies.
I want to make a deal with Iran.
If I can make a deal with Iran, I'll be very happy if we're going to make your region and the world a safer place.
But if Iran's leadership rejects this olive branch and continues to attack their neighbors, then we will have no choice but to inflict massive maximum pressure, drive Iranian oil exports to zero, like I did before.
If you know that, they were a virtually bankrupt So this is what he's been emphasizing.
Even with Iran, we want to get a deal done with Iran.
We don't want to...
Being in a war with Iran.
And Trump is doing everything possible to get a deal with them.
Here is one more clip from Trump that I just want to show you that, where he lays out a foreign policy vision.
5,000 people, young people for the most part, soldiers.
He's talking here about his attempts to end the war in Ukraine and to facilitate peace between Russia and Ukraine.
5,000 people, young people for the most part, soldiers from Ukraine, soldiers from Russia.
They're not from here and they're not from the United States, but they're souls.
They're souls.
I think usually, mostly they're young, beautiful souls that left their parents waving goodbye, left their brothers and sisters.
Goodbye, I'll see you soon.
And they got blown to pieces.
5,000 on average a week are dying.
And people are dying elsewhere in the region, but tremendous numbers like we haven't seen since World War II are dying.
And I want to stop it.
I want to stop it.
It's a horrible war.
Would have never happened if I was like it.
All right, so I always want to give this word of caution when we talk about Trump's vision of foreign policy and the...
Rejection of neoconservatism and the idea of using war as a constant tool, including for nation building, that there's not going to be any complete adherence to that vision.
I mean, the bombing of the Houthis is a perfect example where Trump just decided to bomb the Houthis, which Biden was doing throughout 2024.
And there's a lengthy New York Times article detailing this, which I would recommend.
The reason why Trump's decided to stop it...
Was because he was getting reports from the military that it was basically failing.
Here's the New York Times article.
It's entitled, Why Trump Suddenly Declared Victory Over the Houthi Militia, which is from yesterday.
And it basically describes how he was getting reports from the military that they hadn't even gained air superiority.
That in the last week...
American fighter jets, the most sophisticated in the world, came very close to being blown out of the sky by Houthi missiles.
And there were F-16s that fell into the water, two of them at least from the Harry S. Truman naval ship that is like the centerpiece of the U.S. Navy.
And at the same time, they were using so many precision missiles.
Just one after the next after the next that the military was warning that we were depleting our own stockpiles such that we wouldn't even be able to defend Taiwan, for example.
We were just depleting it so much.
And Trump realized that all the things he was told about the U.S. military's ability to destroy Yemen wasn't happening, that instead this was just going to be another endless Middle East bombing campaign that ultimately produced very little.
The Houthis were putting their stuff underground, as they always do.
They get more resilient.
And so he just found a way to declare victory and stopped it.
So that is an action that reflects this new vision.
And at the same time, you know, Trump is obviously in favor of and still funding and arming the Israelis as they destroy Gaza.
Hasn't really said a word about that, although he is trying to demand that the Israelis negotiate with Hamas in Cotter, and he's obviously trying to stop the war in Ukraine with Russia, and he's trying to get a deal with Iran.
So, you know, sometimes when you say this, the minute Trump drops a bomb, or if they can get into any kind of bombing campaign with Iran, people are going to say, oh, look, you were fooled, you were deceived, you fell for this scam.
So I'm not saying that this is some Fundamentally different vision of foreign policy, but it is significantly different directionally, in the sense that Trump is repeatedly emphasizing.
He wants to have the biggest military, but he doesn't want to use it.
And the purpose of it is to deter wars, to make sure wars don't happen.
And he's saying that's what he wants his legacy to be.
He ran as a peacemaker.
That's why I was so disappointed when he started bombing Yemen.
I was like, this is exactly what we were promised he wouldn't do.
In fact, he criticized Biden for having done it in 2024, bombing Yemen.
He was like, you don't have to bomb Yemen.
You just pick up the phone and solve it diplomatically.
We showed you that many times.
And then suddenly, Trump is back to a new bombing campaign in the Middle East, but he also ended it after a month because he started realizing this isn't producing anything.
So, hopefully, All this pressure that we've brought to bear on him, that is being brought to bear on him to enter new wars, including with Iran, as well as to continue funding Ukraine by blaming Russia, saying, oh, Russia proved they don't want to stop the war.
There's a lot of pressure on him from all these sides to do it, and whether he'll resist it fully is not something I'm ready to proclaim or believe in.
But, again, even the words themselves, even saying, like, We're the ones who have destroyed so many nations, not in the name of rebuilding them.
And we need to stop flying all over the world telling everybody how to behave.
There's this famous story of a president of, I think it might be Kenya, but it's a country, I think, in East Africa.
And they said, because obviously China is developing lots of Ties, growing ties with these countries that are moving more to Russia and China.
And he said, when asked about that, he said, when the Chinese come, you end up with a hospital.
When the Americans come, you end up with a lecture.
And that's how we're perceived in the world.
We just go around saying, you're doing this wrong, and you're doing this wrong, and how dare you do this in your country, and you need to change this.
And then I'll be using military force against them if they don't.
And this is what Trump's saying needs to end.
And this is not something he just invented.
He's been ranting about neoconservatives for a long time.
Now he has neoconservatives in his cabinet and the White House and the Pentagon all over the place.
And I think rebombing Yemen was a very kind of typical bipartisan warmongering thing to do.
But again, he ended it quickly.
And according to the New York Times, for the right reasons.
That he realized that the only option...
Other than stopping it was to end in another protracted, pointless, but destructive and expensive war.
So we'll see.
These things are complex.
I remember once Obama justifying his failure to fulfill his campaign promises.
He made up this kind of metaphor, very self-glorifying one, where he said, look, the United States is like a gigantic ship.
And like all ships, you don't just turn it around in one second, 180 degrees.
You just kind of have to keep moving it very slowly and incrementally and just kind of get it in a new direction.
And although I didn't think it justified what Obama did because he really wasn't even trying to do that, it might be that that's how Trump will have to proceed in order to change things, and that's going to mean a lot of deviations from this vision along the way.
But my view of Trump, with foreign policy especially, has always been that I think the floor is lower, meaning...
There's a lot of wars you could get into when you use military force very aggressively and irresponsibly, but also the ceiling is way higher.
But you knew if Kamala was elected or Biden was elected or any Democrat is elected, you're just going to get a continuation of status quo.
Of status quo foreign policy, this bipartisan, imperialistic, war-seeking posture of endless war, whereas with Trump, you might actually get worse than that.
But it's only really with Trump that you have a chance to break that.
He breaks things.
And in that breaking can come something better.
And time will just tell.
Will he end the war in Ukraine?
Will he facilitate an ending of the war between Israel and Gaza?
Will he avoid war with Iran?
But if he does all those things, then I think he will deserve credit for having embraced and introduced a foreign policy Again, he's not going to cut off funding to Israel.
He's not going to just sign any deal with Iran.
He needs it to be a deal that he can sell us better.
So there's still dangers along the way, but at least in terms of the direction of U.S. foreign policy, its orientation, its core premises, it will be very hard to deny that he has changed that and changed it in a very positive way.
But those are also big ifs.
Ending the war in Ukraine, facilitating a peace deal again.
One that endures between Israel and Gaza and avoiding war with Iran.
And then obviously avoiding other wars.
But if he can do that, and he's clearly attempting in some way to do all of those, that will be a very successful foreign policy reorientation of the kind that a lot of people, certainly including myself, have long believed is well overdue.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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