DOGE: Promises vs. Reality; Ukraine's Drone Attacks on Russian Air Bases; Gaza Ceasefire Deal Developments
Journalist Michael Tracey examines the legacy of DOGE and its promises to dismantle the "deep state." Plus: Steve Witkoff draws an impossible red line in Iran nuclear deal negotiations and the U.S. continues to allow Israel to decimate Gaza while ceasefire negotiations drag on. Finally: Ukraine strikes Russian air bases in an attack Politico Playbook compared to "Pearl Harbor." But, if this analogy holds, why are people openly celebrating such a potentially apocalyptic escalation? ------------------------- Follow Michael Tracey 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 brand new edition of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble.
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I'm Michael Tracy.
Whether you like it or not, Glenn Greenwald is out and about doing his thing.
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Soon enough.
And you're stuck with me.
Tonight, Doge seemingly terminated.
Elon Musk announced that he is hitting the road, Jack.
Might he come back?
It's possible.
However, I think we're at this point obligated to at least give a preliminary assessment of what Doge really was.
What did it accomplish or not accomplish?
Were we told the correct information about what to anticipate, etc.?
We will explore that.
Next, as seems to be constantly the case these days, hair-trigger, tight-wire negotiations are underway in a variety of hotspot geopolitical arenas, not least Iran and Gaza.
So, is Steve Witkoff, who is the special envoy, appointed by Trump to handle an astonishing multiplicity of portfolios?
Is he on the cusp of saving humanity from ruin?
Or are we destined for some kind of doom?
We will review.
And then finally, on Ukraine, much of the media, much of the war bloggers, much of the commentators have been celebrating that yesterday, Ukraine
launched what is widely regarded to be one of its most audacious attacks on Russia yet, thousands of kilometers inside Russian territory, and a bunch of people...
I don't know.
Seems a little ominous.
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Okay, so last week Elon Musk announced that he was departing the government effectively.
He was a special government employee.
And therefore had a time-limited tenure, it would seem, in terms of his day-to-day activities in the Trump administration.
And that was seen to be on course to expire around now, end of May, early June.
But this has led to a good number of people thinking that it's probably timely to evaluate the record of documentation.
being afforded with this historic opportunity to kind of, but not really run the government.
What's sort of odd about Doge is, You can't FOIA Doge.
The Trump administration is litigating against attempts to submit Freedom of Information Act requests, which are very standard practice for journalists who want to get information about what government agencies are doing.
And the Trump administration has argued that DOGE is not a...
So the definitional kind of categorization of DOGE is still somewhat nebulous.
But let's go back to—let's cast our minds, shall we?
Back to November of 2024.
This is just after the election.
Donald Trump had won handily.
All the swing states, as we're still regularly reminded, etc.
Elon Musk was getting the people going.
He was fostering excitement among his supporters and dread among his detractors.
And here's one thing that he dangled in front of us that Doge would purportedly be doing.
His PAC, called America PAC, complained, reasonably enough, that the Pentagon had failed its seventh audit in a row.
The Pentagon or Department of Defense is notoriously immune to any kind of thoroughgoing auditing and seems to resemble, in terms of the overall federal budget, something like A black hole.
And Musk was made abreast of this, and he said, haha, sounds like a job for Doge.
A lot of people found this heartening, found this cause for optimism.
Even Bernie Sanders, probably not the first guy that you would expect to come out and applaud Elon Musk, given Musk having...
The Pentagon is a chronic failure in terms of minimal budgetary oversight.
It loses track of billions of dollars.
This should be right up Doge's alley if it's supposed to be...
This should be perhaps even at the top of their list of priorities for what functions of the government to apply their energies to.
Cenk Uygur, in the same little excited tweet thread, declared that he asked to be put in charge himself of this, not yet existed, but maybe forthcoming, No offense to Cenk,
I'm not sure why he would necessarily be the most apt choice for the role of Pentagon auditor in an Elon Musk Doge formation in the Trump administration, but hey, You got to respect the hustle, I suppose.
And so let's...
After all the fanfare, Elon Musk, in conjunction with Trump and other Republicans who were very enthused about this current administration, were saying that Doge was the Rosetta Stone to dismantle the deep state.
Because among other things, finally, after all these years of bureaucratic inertia and waste and opacity, somebody would finally have the wherewithal or the stature to take a microscope to the
Pentagon in a way that was necessary in order to, expose its chronic Oops.
Musk has now left the government, and spoiler alert, there has been no audit of the Pentagon.
Now, given that Musk himself was always a prominent defense contractor, his companies, like SpaceX, contract With the Pentagon, he himself, meaning Musk, was on the receiving end of even classified contracts that the average citizen couldn't himself inspect.
So it always seemed a little bit far-fetched to me that he would want to totally disrupt.
the standard operating procedure in the Pentagon, given that it at least partially subsidizes and enables his many projects, commercial projects, that is.
But even if you were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he did have this big revelation and he felt this dreadful Well, he didn't do so.
Now, Doge has done some other stuff, but the crown jewel of government waste, if that's how we want to conceptualize less than desirable government expenditures, Was the Pentagon, and the Pentagon more or less was let off scot-free.
What did Musk really spend a lot of time focusing on, and what did his Doge apparatus spend a lot of time really going at full throttle?
Consumer Protection Financial Bureau.
National Forest Service.
Department of Veterans Affairs.
Now, when I think of the deep state, I don't immediately think of, for instance, park rangers at a national park.
Like if I want to stroll into Yosemite National Park or the Grand Canyon and have a friendly guy or gal...
I don't immediately think of that person in terms of their supposed allegiance with the deep state or their wily manipulation of state power in the way that one would associate with the deep state, if we're going to use that terminology.
Nor do I really think of...
The government does a lot of stuff that isn't always self-evidently in the interests of ordinary people, but if they can at least marginally clamp down on overdraft fees or on the ability of credit card companies to extract as much revenue as they possibly can from consumers.
Often egregiously, then, I don't know, that's not an action necessarily I would immediately associate with the malevolent deep state.
And the local VA, like the Veterans Administration, yeah, throughout the years there have been complaints about the lack of efficiency.
In the Veterans Administration, although I have to say that I have a very elderly grandfather who, at times, I have taken to get medical services at the VA, and mostly it's perfectly efficient.
I'm not going to necessarily generalize my experience to everybody in the United States.
But either way, even if there's an inefficient VA clinic someplace, is that the deep state that we were supposedly talking about?
Is that the deep state that Musk and Trump and whomever else were in vain against?
Probably not.
That deep state would have been more akin to, I don't know, the military-industrial complex, defense contractors, Pentagon expenditures that are not transparent enough that they can never be successfully audited, the intelligence agencies.
Like the sprawling surveillance apparatus, like that stuff would be more redolent of the so-called deep state if that's a term that we're still going to use in normal parlance.
But most of that side of the government seems to have been basically exempted from the most stringent of the doge cuts.
So what was DOGE really in its essence?
Was it about cutting the size of government?
Was it about reducing deficits and reining in the national debt?
Or was it some kind of revolutionary project?
Because a lot of people, as I recall, were super excited about this Doge effort as though But according to Musk himself, although on the one hand he'll say, yeah, Doge is somehow going to dismantle the deep state, we're going to do bold and audacious stuff like auditing the Pentagon.
On the other hand, as the second Trump administration got underway, Musk clarified, I think accurately, How we would be better suited to understand what Doge fundamentally is.
In March, he apparently happened upon somebody tweeting at him with a clip of Barack Obama in 2011 touting an initiative that Obama had announced to streamline the government, The technology, which is perpetually antiquated in the government.
And according to Musk, what Obama was doing in 2011 was exactly like what Doge was supposedly doing.
This was supposed to be, I guess, some big own of Musk's critics, so of frantic Democrats or panicked.
Liberal pundits who were castigating Musk, Musk was trying to tell them, look, this is just the latest incarnation of what your savior Obama was doing.
Musk also had said, this was in February, quote, what Doge is doing is similar to Clinton-Gore democratic policies of the 1990s.
The current Democratic Party has just gone so crazy far left that it isn't recognizable anymore.
Now, there is a kernel of truth to this.
The Doge effort is very much reminiscent of previous efforts in Democratic administrations to cut waste, to get rid of superfluous or redundant expenditures in the federal government, to upgrade technology, which would then...
Thank you.
produce savings for the taxpayer because it would digitize things that had previously been on paper, et cetera, et cetera.
But if this really was just the latest manifestation of a fairly unremarkable, banal, longstanding cross-administration effort to do the basics of kind of
as I recall, as this kind of groundbreaking, earth-shattering initiative that Musk, with his outsized personality and his Engineering know-how was going to bring this revolutionary energy to.
If it's just like the latest version of what Obama and Clinton did, I can't imagine people being that excited had it been initially presented that way.
Now, it's notable that Musk eventually figured out that what he was doing was essentially a repeat with...
Some more bells and whistles of what Bill Clinton did in 1993, along with Al Gore.
Because if you go back and study a little bit, as I have been doing for the past few days, this Clinton-Gore initiative in 1990s, it's pretty interesting.
And in certain ways, you might even call it slightly more radical than what Musk qua Trump have been doing.
Here's a...
And if you open this report, you'll see stuff that I guess might be construed as fairly radical, at least in terms of What the Democratic Party's kind of status quo had been.
Gore reproduces one of Bill Clinton's most famous and widely commented upon quotes, which is, quote, the era of big government is over.
By 1996, Gore was touting that the federal government workforce had been reduced by 240,000.
Now, Musk has also gone through with his wood chipper or his bulldozer or his chainsaw, and he has encouraged or pressured various agencies to reduce their workforce.
but this is kind of just a cyclical thing.
The Clinton-Gore Democratic administration was...
By the end of the Clinton administration, it was significantly higher.
Clinton and Gore even did this thing that Republicans and Democrats both do, which is that they come into office and they somehow discover...
what seems like a wacky expenditure, something that is absurd, that people would laugh at, they can't believe that the government would actually be funding this, and that becomes then representative of wasteful or capricious government spending.
And those anecdotes then are cited for everybody to rally around in terms of why we need to focus on downsizing the government and bringing it up to...
So one thing that Al Gore and Clinton and pundits in that era love to talk about was that there was this obscure board called the Tea Tasters Board that was a relic of like the early 20th century, I believe, where in order to import tea into the United States, you actually had to have a federal panel that would convene in a warehouse in Brooklyn and taste The various teas.
And then rate the taste or describe the taste.
It wasn't even so much a safety things as a requirement that this board of tea tasters taste the tea.
And that was eventually gotten rid of.
And Clinton and Gore were very proud of that.
They even say, we're radically changing government.
Wow, sounds amazing.
Government workers are being saved from all the illogical and bizarre rules and regulations.
We've negotiated better deals versus services that the government uses, and we're saving a lot of money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
This is kind of boring stuff.
This was called the National Partnership for Reinventing Government.
Maybe some of these measures were warranted.
Maybe they were rational.
Maybe they did save some money.
Would anybody think back on this and kind of call it some kind of revolutionary overhaul of the federal government or of dismantling the deep state?
You could even go and find the archive of the ancient-looking website that Gore, who loves to tout his role in bringing about the internet indirectly, the website's still up.
You can go look at it.
Is this bulldozing the deep state?
Like, if Musk is doing the latest iteration of this, where does the deep state get bulldozed exactly?
Now, one thing that was interesting that I came across was this former Doge employee who worked briefly, like, for about six weeks at Doge.
Young guy, software engineer, I believe.
Seems relatively intelligent.
His name is Sahil Living here.
And He went in really amped up, really excited, really optimistic.
And then he says, quote, the reality was setting in.
Doge was more like having McKinsey volunteers embedded in agencies rather than the revolutionary force I'd imagined.
It was Elon in the White House, Stephen Davis coordinating, and everyone else scattered across agencies.
Meanwhile, the public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming Doge was directly responsible.
In reality, Doge had no direct authority.
The real decisions came from the agency heads, appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let Doge act as the fall guy for unpopular decisions.
What was Doge exactly if it didn't even have the authority that constantly got imputed to it?
And why did this guy writing this blog post presuppose or go into the job assuming that it was going to be this revolutionary force only to be somewhat disenchanted?
I don't know.
I guess all this hoopla, all this fanfare.
Gave a lot of people the impression that something revolutionary was happening when it really was just a reheated Clinton-Obama thing with some unique touches.
They did take a kind of unapologetic approach to kind of slamming a certain faction of federal employees with ultimatums about how they could take a buyout.
Or how they had to submit by email a performance review, like what are three things that you did, or was it five things you did last week, etc.
So that was a bit new.
That was Musk ringing, I guess, in his Silicon Valley type ethos.
But where did it go wrong in that the deep state hasn't been dismantled?
In fact, it seems to have been empowered and further entrenched because the Trump administration
So whatever minimal savings that DOGE, whatever its precise role, was able to uncover, and estimates vary on this, it's hard to get especially credible or verifiable information about what tangible savings have been definitively produced.
There are some estimates that...
But it's a range, and unless you can get corroboration for the claims of the people within Doge, you can't be absolutely sure that any of the data or the findings that they're citing are valid.
But clearly, whatever savings were accrued had nothing to do with dismantling the deep state or going after the Pentagon or doing any other of these so-called revolutionary things that a lot of people have been led to believe were in the offing with Doge.
Now, I think this is kind of well represented by the confused and even somewhat cynical This is a conceptualization of deep state that people like Musk evidently have.
Here was Musk conversing with none other than Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, in March, where Netanyahu complains that he's basically being tyrannized by the equivalent of the deep state in Israel.
He says, whenever a strong right-wing leader wins an election, the leftist deep state weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people's will.
They won't win in either place.
So he's connecting himself to the heroic saga of Trump and Musk, who also have been pestered and harangued by the so-called leftist deep state in the United States, just as he is allegedly being in Israel.
And Musk replies with his little dopey 100 emoticom thing as though he's seconding that definition of the deep state.
So now we have such a detached, such a amorphous, such a almost like such an ever evolving concept of deep state that now,
That just goes to show you that Deep State has lost much of whatever utility it once might have had in terms of describing real phenomena in the government.
There is a national security bureaucracy.
It does tend to transcend partisan administrations, successive partisan administrations, and develop even a kind of autonomy.
And it is something that is worth studying and examining.
But if we're going to get this superficial, kind of dumbed-down, low-IQ, partisan or pro-Israel version of a deep state to pacify ourselves with, then the deep state is never going to be actually dismantled.
In fact, it's going to be further empowered and further enriched.
So let me give you an example.
A memo that Pete Hegsev, the defense secretary, put out in March to chronicle all these far-reaching, long-overdue cuts that the Pentagon was making, vaguely under the auspices of Doge, although it's hard to tell what expenditure would necessarily be attributable to Doge in any given instance.
But Hexeth did come out and at least claim that there's a new sheriff in town and they're going to be seriously sifting through the bloated Pentagon budget.
Wow.
Sounds okay.
Sounds maybe like what we were sort of vaguely promised in November.
And Hegseth announces that those contracts for like DEI services have been canceled.
But it's a pittance.
It's an infinitesimal fraction of the overall contract.
It's hardly even worth giving you the full number because it's like in the decimals,.02%, something like that, of the overall Pentagon budget.
Then, on top of that, Hegseth says, yeah, we're going to cancel these contracts, but then we're going to reshuffle the savings.
Into stuff at the Pentagon that we like.
Stuff at the Pentagon that we say is consistent with Trump's agenda.
Like refurbishing the various missile systems.
Or updating various facets of the nuclear arsenal.
So the savings are just being redirected to other initiatives.
But then they're going to claim that these savings are emblematic of a government that is finally living within its means or something.
Meanwhile, they explode.
All right.
So that's the legend of Doge, or at least my initial foray in examining what the I guess in sum, I would say that the discursive function was that in the early heady days,
in the hectic days of the incoming second Trump administration, the function was to light up social media with these little nuggets or these shiny objects of government expenditures, oftentimes having something to do with a Dopey and largely indefensible, meaning no one would even attempt to defend it.
Quote-unquote woke program or project like trans operas in Colombia.
liberals don't even bother defending that.
And Doge kind of then develops this public perception that they're ferreting out all these hidden misappropriations of funds.
Meanwhile, when the rubber hits the road and Congress actually appropriates pursuant to a new budget and Trump pushes the so-called big, beautiful bill and
Or deficit reduction?
Or reining in the debt?
No, clearly, it wasn't about that.
It was about serving other political aims.
And I think that's hard to avoid.
Anyway, I'm now gonna move on to one of the hotbed geopolitical conflicts that is But something odd happened.
These Iran negotiations are fitfully underway.
Steve Whitcoff, who's the special envoy that Trump appointed to handle a wide array of disparate portfolios, whether it's Negotiations with Iran, negotiations with Israel and Hamas, negotiations with Russia.
He's a busy beaver.
It seems to have possibly come to a head today, or at least there's a new development that kind of could maybe dictate where things are headed.
This morning, Reuters had what it purported to be an exclusive story.
Exclusive news alert.
Exclusive.
Iran poised to dismiss U.S. nuclear proposal, Iranian diplomat says.
Iran is poised to reject a U.S. proposal to end a decades-old nuclear dispute.
An Iran diplomat said on Monday, dismissing as a non-starter the Trump proposal or the Whitcoff proposal because it fails to address Iran's This anonymous Iranian diplomat told Reuters that Iran is drafting a negative response to the U.S. proposal, which could be interpreted as a rejection of the U.S. offers.
So this could be a turning point for the whole pretense of having negotiations, right?
Because Iran finally was going to come out and just outright reject, which they haven't so far.
They've engaged diplomatically with the United States, even though the U.S. prescriptions for Iran have been very clearly tantamount to a non-starter in that Trump and Rubio and Whitcoff have consistently said that in order for a resolution to be attained, Iran would have to agree.
To eliminating its capacity to enrich uranium completely, dismantle essentially its nuclear arsenal or its nuclear capacities, and stop all enrichment.
Anybody who's followed the issue for 10, 15, even 20 years knows that that would be perceived by Iran as a national humiliation.
Where they're almost forfeiting their sovereignty to what they regard as this domineering imperialistic power on the other side of the world, the U.S. And so if that was going to be one of the conditions imposed by the Trump administration to obtain a, quote, deal with Iran, if they have to submit to this self-inflicted humiliation, then you could see why the negotiations might not really go anywhere.
Why it could instead potentially serve as a pretext for the U.S. to say, oh, look, we tried to negotiate with Iran.
We approached it in good faith.
However, they were so intransigent that it turns out we now have to take some potential retaliatory military action or enable Israel to do so while the U.S. plays a complementary role.
In ways that haven't yet been fully defined.
So the day started today with what seemed poised to be a rejection by Iran of any even pretense of further negotiations with the U.S. because the U.S. demands were so obviously intolerable.
And then within a few hours,
I would think if I had to infer, I don't know for sure, obviously, that whoever told him, whoever fed him this little latest scoop probably was affiliated with Israel.
He is an Israeli.
And he says, scoop, U.S. nuclear deal offer allows Iran to enrich uranium at low levels and doesn't include full dismantlement of the nuclear facilities.
Wow, that's significant.
That would be contrary to everything that the primary diplomats in this whole arrangement from the American perspective have been saying for the past several weeks or months.
Witkoff, Rubio, et al.
had been saying that Iran could not be allowed to enrich.
They had to accept zero enrichment, or in other words, they had to accept this self-inflicted humiliation and capitulation.
So if something had changed, that would certainly be notable.
Maybe that would make some kind of nonviolent outcome here a little bit more And then shortly after that, here's the trifecta.
Donald Trump himself takes to Truth Social and he says the auto pen should have stopped Iran a long time ago from enriching.
I guess he means Biden or whatever kind of broadly distributed bureaucratic counsel would have represented Biden when he was in office.
Trump says, under our potential agreement, we will not allow any enrichment of uranium.
Okay, so that's Trump then reiterating the hardline position that that first story from Reuters this morning seemed to convey was the United States position and Iran had reacted to it such that it basically decided it had no choice but to simply reject what the U.S. was demanding.
And then we would potentially enter a perilous period where it seems like maybe the military action that people have feared is more likely.
Barak Ravid gave us then a little burst of potential optimism, and then it all came crumbling down.
So just to remind you, here is how Whitcoff, the special envoy, described the Well, the president has been very clear.
He wants to solve this conflict diplomatically and with dialogue.
And he's given all the signals.
He's directly sent letters to the Supreme Leader.
I have been dispatched to deliver that message as well, and I've delivered it.
But on the other hand, we have one very, very clear red line, and that is enrichment.
We cannot allow even 1% of an enrichment capability.
We've delivered a proposal to the Iranians that we think addresses some of this without disrespecting them.
And so that's important.
We want to get to a solution here.
And we think that we will be able to, but everything begins from our standpoint, John, with a deal that does not include enrichment.
We cannot have that because enrichment enables weaponization and we will not allow a bomb to...
Okay, so if that really is the true position and there's not some surreptitious back-channel secret negotiating...
stratagem that we're not aware of, then why would Iran continue to entertain this facade of negotiations, except to just hold themselves out there as some little inferior entity that the U.S. can just bludgeon into submission?
Like in order...
For there to be a diplomatic resolution in the framework that Witkoff said there was the red line, Iran would just have to accept defeat, essentially, at the hands of the United States.
Which I don't know why anybody thought was a viable outcome, except if it was always meant to be a pretext and...
Trump himself may be a little bit more pliable, but he at times has called for Israel to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, going back to the campaign last year.
And Witkoff made a point to go on national television and say, not just...
And Republicans, including Trump himself, will often still, like 12 or 13 years later, reference that infamous episode in 2012 when Barack Obama Said with respect to Syria that the use of chemical weapons by Assad would be a red line for the United States.
It was kind of a garbled and not particularly direct statement in terms of what action from the U.S. government would ensue.
But Obama did use the phrase red line, and then once the chemical weapons were allegedly used by the Assad government in an attack, Obama failed to...
And so there's been now this sort of dogma where you cannot any longer show yourself to be so weak that if you draw a red line, you'll then fail to enforce it.
And so I think that even that terminology of red line used by Wyckoff there is pretty instructive and potentially ominous.
And then here's what...
Let's go to that.
Mr. President, back out of Iran.
Did you warn Prime Minister Netanyahu against taking some sort of actions that could disrupt the talks there in a phone call last week?
Well, I'd like to be honest.
Yes, I did.
Next question, please.
I said, I don't think it's appropriate.
We're having very good discussions with him.
And I said, I don't think it's appropriate right now.
Because if we can settle it with a very strong document, very strong, with inspections and no trust.
I don't trust anybody.
I don't trust anybody.
So no trust.
I want it very strong where we can go in with inspectors.
We can take whatever we want.
We can blow up whatever we want, but nobody getting killed.
We can blow up a lab, but nobody's going to be in the lab as opposed to everybody being in the lab and blowing it up, right?
Two ways of doing it.
Yeah, I told him this would be inappropriate to do right now because we're very close to a solution.
Now, that could change at any moment.
It could change with a phone call.
But right now, I think they want to make a deal.
And if we can make a deal, I save a lot of lives.
So who knows at any given moment how much importance to assign to any given Trump comment, right?
I mean, this has sort of been a conundrum throughout Trump's entire time as a political figure.
He'll just say a lot of stuff.
Some of it might even be contradictory.
Or not precisely worded as to what kind of policy action is implied by what he's saying.
But when he made that remark last week, a lot of people took the most significant takeaway to be that he acknowledged that he had called Netanyahu and requested politely that Netanyahu not yet launch any kind of Israeli strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities while a potential US-Iranian deal was still pending or still potentially achievable.
But if you notice, Trump also said that per the terms of a satisfactory deal by his lights, the US would be able to, quote, take whatever it wants from Iran and blow up whatever it wants.
What would be a satisfactory deal, an acceptable deal, the end state of that deal would entail the United States being allowed by Iran to saunter into their nuclear facilities, I guess, and just blow up whatever the United States wants to blow up?
What is the scenario in which Iran agrees to that?
They're setting out these maximalist, almost inherently unachievable goals while doing this song and dance of having what ostensibly appears to be this ongoing negotiation that could always result in something great or which Trump likes to sort of urge on as going really well.
He's using his truthful, hyperbole, rhetorical style that he described.
Famously, in The Art of a Deal, our modern-day Bible, or Talmud, anyway, in which he said that, look, you ought to use positive psychology, Norman Vincent Peale, just kind of actualize things, Make them manifest in your mind and something positive will emerge.
Maybe that works in certain contexts, like in terms of personal life.
If you're like...
potentially?
I'm not sure that the connection necessarily follows.
So then, of course, now we have to go to Israel, Gaza, because it just won't quit as something that we have to be constantly abreast of.
It's amazing to me that the daily Israeli bombardments, which are not new anymore, obviously, but are so incessant, so unending, and are being carried out with such few constraints.
It's amazing to me that this is not a more prominent issue on the American political scene, because it's all being enabled just as it was during the Biden administration by the current Trump administration.
The Trump administration, from down on down, has apparently made a policy choice that they are going to enable through...
By virtue of the United States playing this role in relation to Israel, they're going to choose to, I guess, just allow Israel to extirpate or extinguish as much of Gaza as it wants with no limitations.
It's actually quite amazing.
Trump did briefly address this on May 30th, so let's hear what he said there.
President, can you give us an update to the latest ceasefire agreement that Israel has agreed to, but Hamas still considering?
Well, they're very close to an agreement on Gaza, and we'll let you know about it during the day or maybe tomorrow, and we have a chance of that.
I think we have a chance of making a deal with Iran also.
They don't want to be blown up.
they would rather make a deal.
Okay, so that's Trump saying on May 30th that he'll let us know either that day, May 30th, or the next day about what's going on with this prospective deal that the U.S. is...
Now, it's June 2nd, and there's no deal.
In fact, Witkoff, the man of a thousand portfolios, over the weekend put out a statement in which he essentially rebuked Hamas having received a term sheet.
Or a set of proposals, the outline of a proposal from Hamas as to how to bring about a cessation of hostilities in Gaza, resume the inflows of international aid, and eventually end the Israeli war or annihilation campaign in Gaza.
It wasn't that long ago that Hamas was led to believe, according to reporting that people should go read if they haven't in DropSite News, Jeremy Scahill, that Whitcoff and Hamas had arrived at an understanding that if Hamas released the last remaining American-Israeli national held captive in Gaza,
Edon Alexander, who was an IDF soldier, but had dual nationality.
And so the United States had a particular interest in extracting him from captivity.
There was an understanding arrived at between the United States as a mediator with Hamas, that if Hamas were to release Edon Alexander, which they did right in the run up to Trump's trip to the Gulf monarchies, that...
Witkoff would personally preside over an agreement between Israel and Hamas to end hostilities with a framework set up that's reminiscent of the one that was instituted in January to bring out a final resolution of the war to resume the transit of international aid and to have Israeli deployments in Gaza.
At least partially or largely withdraw so they're not occupying the territory any longer.
Apparently, Witkoff communicated to Hamas that this was agreeable.
And then Witkoff just threw the entire agreement in the trash.
And ever since then, Israel has been waging this apocalyptic end-state annihilation offensive in Gaza with As always, the backing of the United States.
Meanwhile, we're still doing this pantomime, it seems, of a negotiation in another context where Trump is always saying, yeah, it's looking good with Israel and Hamas.
Like, check back today or tomorrow, and then nothing happens, and Israel just continues to annihilate 30 or 50 or 70 people each day.
And then Witkoff confers with Netanyahu or Netanyahu's surrogates and adopts a joint negotiating stance with the Israelis that they also know Hamas would never countenance or is extremely unlikely to countenance in that the Israeli position is that Israel is never going to agree.
To a scenario in which they will cease the war.
They might, they could be compelled, potentially, to agree to a pause here and there to maybe retrieve the final Israeli hostages or captives.
But they're never going to agree to what Hamas has endeavored to achieve with this whole negotiating exercise, which is to end the...
Israel, conversely, has integrated the Trump plan, as Netanyahu puts it, which he praises as a brilliant and revolutionary plan, and one that has been absorbed into Israel's own war planning, which, as you might remember, is for...
This is what Trump proposed first in February, and he's mentioned it many times subsequently.
Expel all Palestinians from Gaza and take over Gaza.
The U.S. would take over Gaza, according to Trump, and turn it into some kind of military protectorate.
So that's the proposal.
That's the Trump proposal that Netanyahu very openly and in...
So if that's the objective, if that's the end state, and if the United States and Israel are united on that score, then what are these negotiations about?
Right?
Well, think of what was going on during the Biden administration.
There were always these ceaseless, tedious efforts to tell us, I mean, tell the American public, tell the international public, tell the Israeli public that the U.S. was really steadfastly, tirelessly working on a ceasefire.
Meanwhile, the facade of the supposed ceasefire talks gave political license for Israel.
To wage, without constraint, its annihilation campaign in Gaza.
So we have bipartisan continuity here.
Biden and Trump are basically doing the same song and dance.
Yeah, we'll throw a crumb and let people believe that we're engaged in genuine negotiations.
Meanwhile, we've staked out What is essentially a maximalist demand that we know it's impossible for Hamas to accept, but they're in no position to dictate to us.
Israel is obviously the superior military power.
We, the United States, are funding and enabling Israel.
So we'll just let it go for as long as it, quote, takes to achieve the
And lest you doubt that in the midst of all these seemingly Pointless negotiating exercises that Israel and the Trump administration are on the same page because, remember,
starting about a month ago, we were constantly being whispered to that there was some emerging rift, some shocking fissure between Israel and the U.S. Trump might be grumbling about Netanyahu under his breath, just like Joe Biden was reported to occasionally have a crossword to say about Bibi behind closed doors.
And, oh, by the way, what difference did it make if the munitions keep flowing and Israel is able to conduct its offensive without any inhibition?
These little leaks or these little rumors that get spread are...
If you're going to continue to ship him an infinite supply of 2,000-pound bombs for him to obliterate apartment buildings with, then, like, it doesn't matter if you think he might be obnoxious.
Here's what Jeremy Scahill said yesterday after the negotiations did not bring about, as one might have predicted, any cessation of Israel's hostilities, but instead resulted in more bombings, more massacres, more famine and lack of Supplies being allowed into the territory.
He's saying that some in Gaza are calling this, meaning the mass killing that took place yesterday, the Whitcoff Massacre.
Because again, Whitcoff, as the Gazans perceive it, sabotaged what might have otherwise been a realistic ceasefire deal if the United States had in fact been A neutral arbiter or a good faith mediator.
But it seems as though the Gazans and or Hamas are increasingly concluding otherwise.
And this really all is not something that should have really been mysterious because here's what Wyckoff said on May 18th.
And if you just take, if you don't, So here's what Wyckoff said.
The president, John, is a humanitarian.
And I think that, Everyone is concerned about the humanitarian conditions in Gaza.
That said, it is a very complicated situation there, logistically.
I don't think there's any daylight between President Trump's position and Prime Minister Netanyahu's position.
I think the issue now is how do we logistically get all of those trucks into Gaza?
How do we set up the aid stations?
There are many initiatives that we're working on to address this.
So he says there's no daylight between the US and Netanyahu.
Between Trump and Netanyahu, if there's no daylight, meaning they have identical or perfectly compatible positions, then let's think about this.
What is Netanyahu's position?
Is it that there should be good faith negotiations undertaken with Hamas?
Has Netanyahu ever given even the slightest indication that that's his position?
No, his position is that Hamas are
And there needs to be also mass collective punishment inflicted on the entire Gazan territory because of how fundamentally evil and incorrigible and sadistic Hamas really is.
The only solution is not to reason with them, not to negotiate with them, not to talk to them, but to annihilate them and annihilate everybody else in their vicinity, whether or not they can be claimed to have been affiliated with Hamas in any way.
And so if there's no daylight between the Trump administration's position and that position of Netanyahu, Then why would anybody expect these negotiations to be conducted in good faith?
What you would expect if it is true that those positions are one and the same between Beebe and Donald, the logical extension is that these negotiations would just be a pretense, a pretext, a fake leaf, something to dangle, something to toy with.
And something to give political cover to Israel's relentless pursuit of its increasingly extreme objectives.
Okay, so finally, and thanks for bearing with me, everyone.
I know this is an incredibly exciting edition of System Update.
Maybe the best of all time.
Yesterday, I mean, I mean, can we go like a couple of days where we're not on a knife's edge or we're not like on the break of some kind of cataclysm?
Maybe I have a catastrophizing bias or something, just given how tumultuous these past few years have been politically and geopolitically.
But it seems like now things have really heated up and there's like a multidirectional...
Yesterday, media outlets, pundits, TV commentators, etc.
were thrilled that there was an unprecedented Ukrainian attack within Russia, deep inside Russia, thousands of kilometers.
Not just any old Ukrainian attack, because they've been doing this fairly consistently for a number of years now.
Their drone technology has obviously gotten more advanced.
They are able to strike Russian infrastructure, even in far-flung areas of Russia that in the early portion of the war would not have been foreseen as a realistic target for Ukraine, just if nothing, if for no other reason but Ukraine.
But now things have shifted quite dramatically.
Ukraine was able to successfully attack, we're told, a Russian airbase in Siberia, which, like, take a look at a map.
Note the distance between Siberia in the middle of Russia, a remote area.
That most Russians probably wouldn't even be overly familiar with because they're largely obviously in European Russia or in the West.
And a long ways from Ukraine.
But a Russian airbase in Siberia that houses Russia's nuclear-capable warplanes, or at least a significant number of Russia's nuclear-capable warplanes.
Was hit by this incredibly audacious, it would seem, Ukrainian drone attack where they stuck in their drones and threw some sort of subterfuge.
And now Russia's lost a decent number of its most prized or of its most important nuclear-capable warplanes.
Russia's nuclear triad is being subject to extreme, severe attacks.
And it wasn't just in Siberia.
It was simultaneously in a bunch of different parts of the country.
And even Russia, which is kind of rare, acknowledged through its Ministry of Defense that what it calls the Kiev regime carried out what Russia calls a terrorist attack against these airfields.
And it probably...
But everybody seems to agree, including even Russia, who was the recipient of this attack, that there was an extremely unusual and damaging attack yesterday.
So here's what Politico said this morning.
I don't know if you all are old enough or young enough or crazy enough or goofy enough to subscribe or be familiar with this thing called the Politico Playbook.
This was like one of the innovators of a daily political newsletter where the savviest Pundits at Politico would aggregate everything going on in the DC insider world and have a little daily sort of cheat sheet that you would wake up at five in the morning and read first thing.
Everybody would read it as like this communal exercise to know that you are inducted into the DC insider circles and you're aware of what's on the day's agenda.
But anyway, I'm over explaining the Politico playbook.
I just want to point out that Their title today was Russia's Pearl Harbor.
This was the title of the Politico playbook newsletter today.
Now, it almost seems like they're trying to be cheeky, or they're trying to be kind of funny, or they're trying to be lighthearted.
Let's say it's just like 10% or 20% as severe as what Pearl Harbor was to the United States in 1941.
I think the nature of the analogy is kind of confused.
But if we're talking about just a sneak attack on an unsuspecting target that drastically altered the trajectory of a war, then if the Pearl Harbor analogy holds, what we should expect is for World War III to be coming soon.
Obviously, when Japan...
The European War had been underway for two years, over two years.
The United States was not yet a full-fledged, official, declared combatant in the war, although it was playing a supplementary role with The Allied powers through land and lease and through naval convoys and through intelligence sharing and various other things.
But then Pearl Harbor comes along and the United States, of course, as we all know, declares war on both Japan and Germany.
The analogy can't quite hold in terms of the context of Russia being attacked by Ukraine, even in a dramatic, spectacular, unexpected fashion, and have that be likened neatly to Pearl Harbor.
But if it's just kind of like a vague expression of the gravity of the incident, then what's with all the celebrating?
What's with all the frenzied anticipation?
Why is this like a big joke?
To people.
Like, am I crazy?
If you're saying this is Pearl Harbor and Russia's going to react in such a way that it would be comparable to have the United States reacted after it was attacked, then we're all in for some dark times, aren't we?
And Russia's the world's leading nuclear superpower.
Some of its strategic...
So there's a weird phenomenon that I'm detecting that people are sort of a nerd or numb to this chronic nuclear risk.
Associated with the Ukraine conflict?
Like if I had told you, I don't know, three, four, five years ago, that it would come to pass that a client state, armed, funded, subsidized, operationally enabled by the United States, meaning Ukraine, would have the ability to attack a strategic nuclear bomber base.
In Siberia, you might think to yourself, gee, that seems pretty startling.
That seems like maybe a bit worrisome.
Does that mean that we are on the precipice of some kind of nuclear conflagration?
We should probably check it out.
And if so, take whatever steps are within our capacity to mitigate But that's just not a thought that seems to occur to very many people anymore, especially if you are going by the conventional mainline coverage.
So take a look if you haven't seen it.
Here was just a clip of the drone attacks, one of many that got circulated on Telegram yesterday.
Okay.
It's, uh...
Sigh.
Right, so is that Pearl Harbor?
Might be a little bit of an exaggeration, but it seems like people are chomping at the bit for it to be Pearl Harbor, so then we could all get involved in some kind of global cataclysm.
It is kind of a sick impulse that I think goes too underexamined.
So then what's happening on the diplomatic front?
Another geopolitical hotspot that the U.S. is playing a central diplomatic role in, ostensibly.
And we are all left to hope that there is some resolution potentially coming down the pike.
Today, there was a second round of meetings between a Ukrainian delegation and a Russian delegation in Turkey.
And what happened at this meeting was that Russia presented An outline for conditions for a ceasefire.
So this is significant developments.
A significant development.
Ukraine, in conjunction with the U.S., had long since March approximately, had its own declared stipulations for what would be acceptable for a ceasefire.
But Russia had yet to formalize its conditions, should they exist, into a new direction.
And the conditions that Russia specifies are rather maximalist, I would have to say.
So what Russia gave Ukraine was two options.
Like it was like, like they were, like,
Option one includes commencement of a complete withdrawal of the Ukrainian military and any other Ukrainian paramilitary formation from the territory of the Russian Federation, which of course Russia believes to be Not just the internationally recognized boundaries, obviously, but the four Ukrainian oblasts that Putin annexed in 2022, as well as Crimea.
And in order to obtain a ceasefire, Russia says the first thing that Ukraine would have to do is withdraw entirely from those territories which Russia has yet to fully conquer.
So Ukraine would have to essentially retreat.
From its own territory.
And there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of appetite in Ukraine, as far as I can gather, to do that.
And so that's step one.
But then there's another option provided whereby, among other things, all The package proposal, it's called, so this is option B, would basically immobilize or stall the Ukrainian military deployments.
But on top of that, there would have to be a cessation of all foreign military aid to Ukraine.
So all foreign supplies of military products and foreign military assistance to Ukraine would have to cease.
And so would satellite communication services and intelligence data.
So this is a demand being imposed, not really on Ukraine, because Ukraine is not the one that's in any position to determine ultimately whether it's going to continue to receive those foreign military supplies or intelligence.
That really, first and foremost, is a demand directed at the U.S. And so, as much as Trump recently tried to suggest that he was going to take a more hands-off approach to these negotiations, that he wants to continue, but...
But that's a very clear Russian stipulation that could only be resolved by dint of the U.S. The U.S. would have to be the one agreeing to that demand.
And as of now, June 2nd, based on what's in the public record, U.S. arms provisions to Ukraine continue to flow uninhibited.
So does U.S. intelligence support continue to be supplied to Ukraine so that it can carry on its various military operations?
Are we to believe, really, that this long-range attack yesterday?
Was conducted totally autonomously by Ukraine.
Never once in the year and a half that Zelensky said this attack yesterday was planned.
Did word of it, did the existence of it cross the radar of these sprawling intelligence assets that the U.S. has invested in Ukraine?
I guess it's possible, but...
It might strain the bounds of credulity.
So if this is what Russia is—if these are the options that Russia is presenting for Ukraine to accept in terms of achieving a ceasefire, how does that relate to the current U.S. policy?
Well, helpfully, Marco Rubio— He explicated the policy very clearly on May 22nd.
So let's hear that on behalf of the Trump administration.
I would also make this point, and it's important, every single sanction.
Not one sanction has been lifted on the Russians.
Every single sanction that was in place under the previous administration remains in place.
So this idea we've given up leverage, we have the same leverage today we had under the previous administration.
Well, Mr. Secretary, I would argue that the leverage that we've given up is taking NATO membership off the table, taking away a commitment to continue to...
That continues.
There was a pause for one week.
All of that was restarted.
That was intelligence sharing, though, but it doesn't cover the equipment and arms.
Oh, absolutely.
That program has not been rescinded.
they continue to receive armaments from the United States.
And we continue to fund what the Ukraine Ukrainians need as the president and are you prepared to pass another supplemental bill to support the That's a different question.
That's not up for me to decide.
The White House would have to make a determination about whether to come to Congress for a supplemental.
But everything that's been approved and congressionally appropriated is ongoing.
In fact, to the extent that the Ukrainians have asked for anything additional, what they've asked for is air defenses, Patriot units, which, frankly, we don't have.
But we are working closely with our NATO allies.
There are NATO allies that do have some batteries of Patriot missiles that they could provide or transfer over to the Ukrainians to defend, for example, the airspace of Kiev.
We've been encouraging in that front and working alongside our partners there to get deliveries of some of these systems.
As you can imagine, none of these countries want to give up their patriot systems either.
But we can't make them fast enough.
And part of the challenge we have in Ukraine is that munitions are being expended substantially faster than the ability of the broader West, not just us, but the West, to produce them.
Now, that said, on the issue of Ukraine, here's what we can all agree on.
There is no military solution to this crisis.
It will have to end in a negotiated settlement.
So, that's Rubio clarifying something that I think a lot of people would probably find surprising, whether Trump supporters or Trump opponents.
If I had asked you last, I don't know, October, that if by May of the following year, several months into the second Trump administration, that the Trump administration's policy in terms of Providing arms to Ukraine and sanctioning Russia would be,
as Rubio confirmed, identical essentially to the policy of the prior Biden administration.
Would that have been surprising to you?
Would you have found that intuitive?
I really do think that a lot of Trump supporters and Trump opponents would find that less than intuitive.
And yet, that's the policy status quo.
That's the crux of what Russia is saying needs to be ceased in order for Ukraine to receive the ceasefire that it's demanding.
So are Trump and Rubio and the rest of the crew Going to adjust the policy?
Are they going to signal that they're willing to accede to what it is that Russia's demanding?
Because Russia probably has the cards here in the sense that they don't have an obvious reason to halt their war effort now.
Making incremental gains, seemingly ramping up for a summer offensive, massing around the northern border, according to many reports, for another incursion, potentially, from another angle.
And although U.S. and European weapons continue to flow to Ukraine, It's not clear for how long that's going to be sustainable, notwithstanding Ukraine's demonstrable ability to launch these rather impressive, I guess you could say from a tactical standpoint, strikes deep inside of Russia.
That doesn't change really the calculus in terms of the front line or what's going on where the real warfare is being waged.
Will it be willing to be seen as giving in to Russia?
Because we know the political uproar that could engender.
Maybe Trump is more immune to it now than he was in his first term, meaning you're a pawn of Russia.
You're selling out liberal democracy.
You have betrayed the rules-based international order.
You probably colluded all along in 2016 with Putin, etc.
Maybe that stuff just kind of rolls off Trump's back now.
But at the same time, is he willing to just allow Putin to trample over what had been a longstanding U.S. hegemonic project, which is subsidizing Ukraine?
Like if it just collapses, if they just retreat in humiliation because Russia demands it, will that make Trump look, quote, good?
I don't know.
I think maybe let's end here.
Trump pledged over and over again, you probably recall, to end the war in 24 hours.
He actually pledged to end the war as...
Now, again, art of the deal, I get it.
Yes, I've read it.
I read it every night before bed before I say my prayers.
And maybe it was truthful hyperbole or aspirational.
But I think a lot of people got the impression that Trump actually was such a And yet, two months ago now, over two months ago now, Trump had to revise his off-stated pledge.
Here's what he said.
I'm not understating the complexity of all this, but as a candidate, you said you would have this war settled in 24 hours.
Well, I was being a little bit sarcastic when I said that.
What I really mean is I'd like to get it settled, and I think I'll be successful.
What's the plan if Putin doesn't agree to a ceasefire?
Bad news for this world because so many people are dying, but I think he's going to agree.
I really do.
I think I know him pretty well, and I think he's going to agree.
Narrator, he hasn't agreed.
In fact, Trump has resorted to blurting out all caps truth social posts about how Putin has gone absolutely crazy.
And we all maybe should have been aware that he was being sarcastic this entire time.
I don't know how sarcastic Putin is now.
It seems like he's massing for a summer offensive.
It seems like those rather hardline conditions that were contained in that Russian negotiating document are not meant to be tongue-in-cheek or sarcastic.
And it doesn't seem like the U.S. Senate is sarcastic, as they've now gathered 82, at last count, co-sponsors for a Lindsey Graham-Richard Blumenthal bill to radically
That could be passed very soon.
And Trump seems to at least implicitly support it, although he's kind of So maybe he was sarcastic all along, but I don't know.
Nothing about this I find particularly humorous.
All right, everybody.
All right, everybody, thank you for tuning in for another episode of System Update.
Glenn will probably be back tomorrow.
I would think.
We will surely let you know.
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