Trump Promises More Weapons for Ukraine; Trump Again Accuses Dems of Fabricating Epstein Files
Trump continues Biden's policy of sending endless weapons to Ukraine, again blatantly breaking his campaign promise to end the war. Plus: Trump bizarrely insists that the Epstein documents were fabricated by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and James Comey. ----------------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, President Trump campaigned repeatedly on denouncing Joe Biden's policy of arming Ukraine in its war with Russia and vowing to end the war as soon as he got into office.
Like so many of his promises, none of this happened.
And now Trump, rather than ending Biden's war policy as he repeatedly promised, is doubling down on it.
With the NATO chief in the White House today, the Supreme Militarist Mark Rudy, Trump announced a new plan to arm Ukraine by sending the weapons through NATO, which he claims will pay for them.
We'll see.
A report in the Financial Times today also says Trump told Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to try to use missiles to strike the key Russian cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Imagine if Russia had told a proxy of theirs, we'll give you weapons and we want you to strike New York, Los Angeles, and Washington.
This came after Joe Biden in his transition out of the White House for the first time authorized Ukrainian strikes inside Russia.
Trump's policies are wrong and dangerous for the exact same reasons Biden's policy was in Ukraine, as we went over many times when he was president.
And it's crucial to examine why that is and what Trump is doing.
Then, when Trump first addressed the anger among his own supporters for having announced that he was closing the Epstein investigation with zero disclosures forthcoming, he did so by waving his hand and instructing everyone that this topic was far too trivial and insignificant to merit any attention.
And he thus directed everyone to move on and simply stop talking about it.
Forget about the Epstein issue.
Some obeyed Trump, of course, but many did not.
And he was thus compelled to return several times to address the obvious 180 his administration has done with regard to whether the various issues in this case would be investigated and whether the documents suitable for publication would be disclosed.
But each time Trump has tried to calm his angry base with additional statements, he has only made things worse.
Over the last 48 hours now, Trump has offered a conspiracy theory as bizarre and nonsensical as it is baseless and one might even say incriminating.
At least large parts of the Epstein file, Trump now claims, are fake, forgeries.
The Epstein files are forgeries, at least large parts of them, he claims.
Who fabricated these documents?
According to Trump, it's a Democratic Party cabal, what he calls the radical left of Obama, Hillary, Biden, Jim Comey, and John Brennan.
For that reason, Trump now insists the files shouldn't be released since they're filled with fake information.
Why does Trump suddenly have such a compelling interest in convincing the public that the Epstein documents are forged and fake by his political enemies?
What is in those documents that makes him suddenly want to convince the public that none of it is true, that it's all made up by Hillary and Obama?
And how long can this charade go on?
We'll examine the latest.
Before we get to that, a couple of programming notes, we, as system update, are also available in podcast form.
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One of the most significant policies of the Biden administration was the decision, unanimously supported by every single member of the Democratic Congress, but also a majority Of members of the establishment Republicans as well to arm and fund the war in Ukraine.
And the reason, there were a lot of reasons why people objected to that, especially people on the right-wing populist faction that were supporting Trump.
One of it was a cost issue, but another was just how dangerous it was.
Why was Russia our enemy?
Why are we making them our enemy?
Why are we claiming that the war in Ukraine, which is about who governs various provinces in the east of Ukraine, has anything to do with the lives of American citizens?
And also, Russia is a nuclear power, which has made clear that they regard this war as existential to their national security, something that the CIA has long said, all the way back to the Bush administration when Victoria Newland and Condoleezza Rice wanted to put Ukraine in NATO.
The head of the CIA under Obama, Bill Burns, who was in the Bush administration as well, wrote a memo that ended up being leaked by Wikileaks, which basically said Ukraine in NATO is a red line for Russia, not just for Putin and his supporters, but for even liberal anti-Putin critics.
Everyone in the entire political spectrum in Russia regards any NATO influence or presence in this country on the other side of its border that was twice used to invade Russia in the 20th century, killing tens of millions of Russians in two world wars, obviously a very sensitive part of their border, that they consider it existential, whereas the West does not.
And Putin was asking that the U.S. and NATO agree that Ukraine will never be a NATO, and the U.S. under Biden refused.
And that was at least part of the reason why Putin then went into Ukraine.
There were others, we've been over these many times, but Donald Trump had been steadfast in his opposition to Biden's policy of arming the war in Ukraine and promising repeatedly that as soon as he got into office, he would just tell each of them to cut it out, would threaten each of them or hold sanctions over their head or whatever he had to do, and the war would end very, very quickly.
None of that has happened.
And Trump has increasingly come to blame Vladimir Putin, principally for that, despite that flamboyant conflict he had in the White House with Zelensky.
And he's now done a 180 on this as well, on the question of Ukraine as well.
And he's now announcing a massive influx of weapons from the United States to Ukraine that he intends to put through NATO, claiming that NATO countries are going to buy it from the U.S. through some unknown mechanism.
And NATO countries are already saying, we're not even going to wait for these weapons to get here.
We're just going to send them to Ukraine, knowing that the U.S. is going to replenish our stockpile.
For all the talk about how Trump was splitting with Western Europe and questioning the value of NATO, here is the NATO chief, Mark Ruda, in the White House today.
He's one of those EU maniacs who just wants war in every way.
And when Trump went to the NATO summit a couple of weeks ago, Mark Ruda was so grateful that Trump had signaled that he was going to start funding and arming Ukraine again that he actually sat there and flattered Trump in the way that Trump loves the most.
He actually called him daddy.
He said, you're kind of like a daddy.
You know, sometimes if the two sides aren't doing what you want, the daddy has to come and impose discipline, calling Trump daddy in front of the cameras.
But of course, knowing that, although pretty embarrassing, that that's how you can flatter and ingratiate yourself and then start influencing Trump.
And today, the NATO chief was at the White House next to Trump.
And that's when Trump announced this new policy.
Here it is.
We've made a deal today, and I'm going to have Mark speak about it, but we've made a deal today where we are going to be sending them weapons and they're going to be paying for them.
The United States will not be having any payment made.
We are not buying it, but we will manufacture it and they're going to be paying for it.
Our last meeting of a month ago is very successful in that they agreed to 5%, which is more than a trillion dollars a year, so they have a lot of money.
Okay.
This claim that NATO agreed to 5% is through accounting smoke and mirrors.
All they did was expand the definition of what defense spending includes.
So it includes, in large part, the amount of money they've been pouring into the war in Russia that they've been sending to Ukraine.
But it also includes things like they can build infrastructure, and as long as they can demonstrate it has some connection to the military, that gets counted as military spending.
Of course, these European nations can't and won't and don't want to increase military spending to 5% of the GDP because they're social welfare states that are already becoming incredibly fractured because their native populations are dying out, not having even at the level of fertility to replace the populations.
They're having to import huge amounts of immigrants to do the work because they don't have the people to do the labor.
And that's a largely young population.
And so you have this tearing of the safety net where more and more people are going to start going on retirement, more and more people are going to start being eligible for benefits, and yet they're not really able to pay for them.
The last thing they want to do is start going further into debt by increasing defense spending to 5%.
But that's what Trump demanded.
So they all pretended they were doing it.
And Mark Rudy said, you won, Mr. President.
You got us all to get 5%.
And now Trump's boasting.
A very successful meeting.
I got them to 5%, right, Mark?
He loves to call world leaders by their first name to kind of show the hierarchy.
And this is what he's boasting about.
And then he's announcing the policy to ensure that the United States continues to funnel weapons to Ukraine.
Which is more than a trillion dollars a year, so they have a lot of money.
And these are wealthy nations.
They have a lot of money, and they want to do it.
They feel very strongly about it.
And we feel strongly about it, too.
But we're in for a lot of money, and we just, we don't want to do it anymore.
And we can.
But we make the best, and we're going to be sending the best to NATO, and in some cases, to maybe at Mark's suggestion, if we go to Germany, where they're going to send early-on missiles, and they'll be replaced, and NATO's going to take care of it.
It's going to be coordinated by NATO, and they're Going to work very much with Matt Whitaker, who's right here, is a great ambassador, and Matt's going to be coordinating.
You better do a good job, Matt.
I will.
But Matt's going to coordinate.
He's a very talented guy.
He's going to coordinate everything.
All right.
So, congratulations.
The war in Ukraine is absolutely going to continue.
We can put that picture back on the screen of the video.
The photo at the White House, there you see to Trump's left, J.D. Vance, Marko Ruby, and Pete Hekseth.
J.D. Vance was as vocal as it gets about how this war is none of our business.
We're prolonging it.
We're risking dangerous escalation, including nuclear war.
It's insane, he said, what Biden is doing.
Pete Hegseth and his Pentagon cut off arms to Ukraine just a couple weeks ago based on the argument that they presented that the U.S. stockpiles are too low to continue to furnish Ukraine with missiles and defense systems because we used so much in our bombing of Yemen.
We gave so much to Israel over the last year and a half, two years.
We used more of it to defend Israel every time Iran or someone else wanted to attack Israel.
And of course, we've been feeding Ukraine and our stockpiles are too low.
The Pentagon said we can't keep sending it there.
And then Trump just reversed it in order to keep sending it.
And then when they asked about it, they said the Pentagon stopped it.
He said, I didn't stop it.
I don't know who did it there.
It wasn't me.
Kind of distancing himself from what his own defense secretary did.
And now he's saying the weapons are going to flow.
Now, to say that I'm skeptical that NATO nations are going to flip the bill for all of this is to put it mildly.
But even if they do, let's say that Raytheon and Lockheed Barton, which produces all these weapons that NATO and Trump want to send to Ukraine now, get massive influx of contracts and payments from EU nations and NATO.
The military-industrial complex always wins, no matter what the outcome of elections are.
Then no matter what happens there, let's say it doesn't cost the United States money, which again, I seriously doubt for a lot of reasons.
Still, again, the objections to what we were doing in Ukraine wasn't about just the money.
It was about why are we involved in this war?
Why are we sending weapons?
Why are we continuing and prolonging this war as though it has anything to do with us?
Why are we making Russia our enemy?
Why are we risking escalation over who governs a few provinces in eastern Ukraine that are far more relevant to Ukraine and Russia than they are to the United States?
They're not relevant at all to the United States.
And yet here's Trump, after spending years bashing Biden for having done this, now doing exactly the same thing, just like Biden spent the whole Trump sped all 2024 bashing Biden for bombing Yemen, got into office and did the same, even escalated it.
He kept mocking Trump, Obama for being a terrible negotiator who likely was going to bomb Iran because he couldn't get a deal done, and then Trump gets into office, can't get a deal done, and bombs Iran.
You can, pretty much the safest bet in the world if you're a gambling person, I think it's even safer than taxes.
I wouldn't say it's safer than death, but on the same relative probability scale as death, is the continuation of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy in Washington, no matter who wins elections, no matter what they campaign on.
Here is more of Trump.
Is this the same video?
No, this is a different video.
Here he talks more about his policy in Ukraine.
Will these be Patriot missiles specifically or Patriot batteries that you're planning?
It's everything.
It's Patriots.
It's all of them.
It's a full compliment with the batteries.
And when do you expect them to arrive in Ukraine soon?
Well, we're going to have some come very soon, within days, actually, because a couple of the countries that have Patriots are going to swap over and will replace the Patriots with the ones they have, and Matt will coordinate with NATO.
But so it's going to be, they're going to start arriving very soon.
This afternoon, Boris Mr. Torgas, the German defense minister, is visiting Bit Hackset, the Secretary of Defense, and we'll discuss also, I think, this whole Patriot thing.
Norway is involved, so that's not the Patriots, but this whole deal is also about missiles or ammunition, so it's a broader benefit.
Anyway, there's your big breach with NATO that you see there with the head of NATO sitting right next to Trump, and they're both talking and agreeing about how they're going to continue to arm Ukraine.
A bit more here from Trump.
U.S. paying for some additional weapons through drawdown authority?
Should I try to translate?
Because basically what the President is saying that he's willing, of course, taking consideration what the U.S. needs itself.
So it's not that you can have a shopping list and you can order whatever you want, because the U.S. has to make sure that the U.S. keeps his hand on what the U.S. needs also to keep the whole world safe.
Oh, that's so generous.
He's saying, look, we understand you have to keep some weapons for yourself.
You're not going to ask you for just to give everything you have.
We know you have to keep a few for yourself, too.
And then he goes on to say this.
U.S. needs also to keep the whole world safe, because in the end, you are the police agent of the whole world.
You are the most powerful nation on earth, the most powerful military on earth.
You're the police agent for the whole world, he says, sitting next to Trump.
A proposition that Americans, for as long as I can remember, have vehemently rejected with polls.
Do you think the United States should be the policeman of the world?
Overwhelmingly, Americans say, no, that's not our role.
And here's the NATO chief sitting next to Trump agreeing basically to perform that function.
He's saying, look, that's your job, the United States.
You are the most powerful country on earth.
You have to keep the peace.
You have to side with the right country when there's wars.
And that's your role.
And I'm so happy to see you're fulfilling your duty of being the policeman of the world.
Trump isn't just feeding arms to Ukraine.
He seems to be encouraging Ukraine to become even more aggressive in escalating its war and therefore NATO's war with Russia in the most dangerous ways possible.
The Financial Times today reported this, Quote, Donald Trump asked Vladimir Zelensky if Ukraine could hit Moscow, say people briefed on the call.
Quote, Donald Trump has privately encouraged Ukraine to step up deep strikes on Russian territory, even asking Zelensky whether he could strike Moscow if the U.S. provided long-range weapons, according to people briefed on the discussions.
The conversation which took place during the July 4th call between the American and Ukrainian leaders marks a sharp departure from Trump's previous stance on Russia's war and his campaign promise to end U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts.
Remember all that?
While it remains unclear whether Washington will deliver such weapons, the discussion underscores Trump's deepening frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin's refusal to engage in ceasefire talks proposed by the U.S. president, who once vowed to resolve the war in a day, quote, Vladimir, can you hit Moscow?
Can you hit St. Petersburg too?
Trump asked on the call, according to the people.
They said Zelensky replied, absolutely, we can if you give us the weapons.
Trump signaled his backing for the idea, describing the strategy as intended to, quote, make the Russians feel the pain and force the Kremlin to the negotiating table.
According to the two people briefed on the call, a Western official who had been informed of the call said the conversation reflected a growing desire among Ukraine's Western partners to supply long-range weapons capable of bringing the war to Moscovites, a sentiment echoed privately by American officials in recent weeks.
Two other people briefed on the call between Trump and Zelensky and familiar with U.S.-Ukraine discussions on military strategy said that one weapon discussed was the Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATAC-MS.
Ukraine has used U.S.-supplied ATACOMs missiles with a range of up to 300 kilometers, 186 miles, to strike targets in Russian-occupied territory, and in some cases deeper inside Russia.
That was under the Biden administration, which we were told had a bad, terrible, destructive Ukraine policy.
That was very dangerous.
The ATACMs can be launched from Himar rocket systems that the Biden administration delivered to Ukraine, but they do not fly far enough to reach Moscow or St. Petersburg.
Following the ATACOM strikes last November, Russia also published an updated version of its nuclear doctrine that lowered the threshold for potential use.
The changes could envision a Russian nuclear first strike against the U.S., UK, and France, NATO's three nuclear powers, in response to Ukraine strikes on Russia with weapons such as the ATACMs and Storm Shadow missiles.
I suppose you can dismiss that as not a very likely outcome for the Russians' use of nuclear war.
But I wouldn't be too dismissive given that Russia has nuclear weapons precisely to prevent countries from bombing their cities.
You think the U.S. would allow Russia to send a bunch of missiles to Mexico or Venezuela with the explicit direction to use them to bomb New York and Washington with long-range missile strikes and the U.S. wouldn't consider that to be a Russian aggression against the United States with the threat of nuclear weapons very much on the table?
Of course they would.
Why would Russia see it any different?
Alexander Dugin is a influential Russian philosopher who is in Moscow, is known to be very influential in the kind of nationalistic faction that's a little bit to Putin's right, that pressures Putin to be more aggressive in Ukraine, that complains when he seems to be negotiating too much.
You may recall that I was in Moscow, I think, in May, and we sat down for an interview I did with Alexander Dugan in Moscow.
I was also just on a panel with him two weeks ago in Brazil about BRICS.
And I don't agree with him, et cetera, et cetera, but he's one of the most interesting thinkers I've interviewed.
We broke down that interview and why.
If you haven't seen it, I really recommend it.
But equivocally, one of the things he does is provides the Russian perspective.
Remember, the EU tried to block people from understanding the Russian perspective by making it criminal to platform RT and Sputnik to Russian state media outlets.
They didn't want their citizenry hearing the Russian side, only their government side.
And the reason Rumble is blocked in France is because they refused the French government's demands to de-platform RT and Sputnik.
They said, we're not going to take orders from France.
We're not going to de-platform Russian media outlets because you tell us to, and now they're not available in France.
Here's what Alexander Dugan said, and he's very pro-Trump.
When I interviewed him, he had a lot of optimism about what Trump and MAGA meant for Russian-U.S.
relations.
He was talking about how Russia needs doging.
He's very attentive to the MAGA movement, and yet he's become increasingly disenchanted with Trump for the same reason a lot of people have because everything he promised he was going to do and everything he said he was going to be is turning out to be the opposite.
And here's his reaction to this new policy announced by Trump.
And I can guarantee you this is opinion that huge numbers of people in the most influential sectors in Moscow share as well.
Quote, Israel and Ukraine are two American proxies, the EU as well.
Russia is not an American proxy.
That demands a different style of behavior.
China also isn't an American proxy.
Neither is Iran nor North Korea.
They're vassals and they are not, meaning we're not a vassal state to the U.S. We don't take orders from the U.S. He went on, insults and disrespect is the wrong way to deal with Russia.
The U.S. isn't neutral in this war.
It's fully engaged in Ukraine before and now.
Trump speaks with Putin as enemy with enemy.
He can be satisfied or enraged thanks to Biden and neocons like Lindsey Graham.
America already leads the war.
And they concluded with this, quote, Putin has chosen not to escalate war with the USA because of possible Trump's election and the consequent change of the role of the U.S. and the conflict under the new and more reasonable American president.
Trump is not alone in dealing with Russia.
There is another nuclear power involved, meaning Russia.
And I think this is a thing that Donald Trump fundamentally misunderstood.
Every time he talks about the world, he speaks as if he's the emperor of the world.
He says, Russia did this after I told him not to.
I'm very displeased.
Like I said, he calls everybody by their first name, like he does with everybody he works for.
Like, JD, Marco.
Like he talked to that aide, he said, Scott, you're going to do a good job, right?
And that's what he calls every world leader as well.
And this is a byproduct of Trump's view that the United States is the most powerful country on earth, and therefore to be the American president means you get to dictate to other countries what they can and can't do.
And that's why Trump really did think that once he got into office, he was going to pick up the phone and call Putin and Zelensky and say, you two need to stop now.
And they would be like, oh, okay.
But of course, that's not how the world works.
Maybe it did at some point.
But there's another massive country with at least as much power as the United States, which is China, which is obviously nuclear armed and highly militarized.
They're allies increasingly with Russia, Iran.
They have their BRICS alliance.
And again, Russia is a serious country.
They lost hundreds of thousands of Russian lives, young Russian men, on the front.
And it's cost them huge amounts of money and economic difficulty.
They had to revamp their whole economy to be on war footing, which helped their economy ultimately.
But Putin has been through a lot for this war.
You think they're going to just stop because Trump tells them to if they don't get satisfaction with the security needs they perceive, rightly or wrongly, that they perceive need to be fulfilled in order to stop?
Clearly, that Russians are telling you, telling Trump, we don't care what you threaten.
We don't care what you do.
If you can get a deal done that we feel serves our interests, we're willing to do that.
But we're not going to stop because you order us to.
Trump has made very clear that he's grown increasingly frustrated with Russia and Putin because Putin won't do what Trump tells him to, basically.
And as a result, Trump now talks about Russia and Putin the way neocons did, the way Jake Sullivan did, the way everybody in the Biden administration did, the way Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton do, the way the entire Democratic Party does.
Here he is talking about Putin.
This was yesterday in the White House.
I go home, I tell the first lady, and I spoke to Vladimir today.
We had a wonderful conversation.
She said, oh, really?
Another city was just hit.
So it's like, look.
So Melania says, oh, that's nice that you spoke to Putin.
He just bombed another Ukrainian city, which I guess Trump is disturbed by, supposedly, even though we're supplying all the weapons to Israel to destroy every living and breathing place in Gaza.
Here is Trump at the White House last week talking about Putin as well.
But that was a war that should have happened, and a lot of people are dying, and it should end.
And I don't know, we get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin for you want to know the truth.
He's very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.
Do you want to say that?
Lindsay Griff has a sanctions bill on which do you want them to put it?
I'm looking at it.
Yeah, no, I'm looking at it.
The Senate is passing and passed a very tough sanctions, but yeah, I'm looking at it.
Can you sign up?
It's an optional bill.
It's totally at my option.
They pass it totally at my option and to terminate totally at my option.
And I'm looking at it very strongly.
Now, I don't doubt that some of this is designed to put pressure on Russia because he perceives they're not negotiating as robustly as he wants them to.
He wants to end the war.
I believe that.
But at the same time, he's making very clear that if this war doesn't end, then we're going to do everything that the Biden administration was doing to Russia and more.
In fact, Trump today said that Putin has 50 days, 50 more days to prosecute this war.
And if he doesn't have a deal at the end of 50 days, they're going to start tariffing Russia.
They're going to start sanctioning Russia even more.
They're going to start flooding Ukraine with offensive weapons even more so.
And you can't go around making these statements repeatedly, have Putin call your bluff, and then not do any of them.
This is committing the United States to further conflict, to greater escalatory risk.
When Trump was at the White House the last time meeting with Benjamin Netyahoo, those two meet repeatedly and constantly, so it's hard to keep track of which one this was, but it was the latest two weeks ago.
This is what Trump said while speaking about Ukraine.
Are you planning to send more weapons to Ukraine?
We're going to send some more weapons.
We have to.
They have to be able to defend themselves.
They're getting hit very hard now.
They're getting hit very hard.
We're going to have to send more weapons.
You're defensive weapons primarily, but they're getting hit very, very hard.
So many people are dying in that mess.
Once Biden lost the election to Trump, or rather Kamala Harris lost the election to Trump in November, Biden was still president for the next two months in the transition before Trump was inaugurated.
Biden basically did the same exact policy that Trump is doing.
And I remember MAGA people and Trump supporters being enraged that Biden on the way out, after already losing the election, was seemingly trying to start a new corporate war with Russia or a direct war with Russia by doing things like this.
Here from the New York Times, I think we have a prior one, actually.
Yeah, this one from NBC.
This was actually May 30th, 2024.
So this was before this transition.
Biden lets Ukraine strike inside Russia with U.S. weapons.
Giving Ukraine weapons and telling them, yeah, you're free to strike Russian cities.
We did multiple shows on the reckless dangers of that.
And then here from the New York Times, November 17th, because this was like 10 days after Kamala lost the election, Trump was coming in, and this is what Biden did.
Biden allows Ukraine to strike Russia with long-range U.S. missiles.
Basically, the policy that Trump is now embracing and announcing.
Quote, President Biden, not President Trump, President Biden, has authorized the first use of U.S.-supplied long-range missiles by Ukraine for strikes inside Russia, U.S. officials said.
The weapons are likely to be initially employed against Russian and North Korean troops and defense of Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region of western Russia, the officials said.
Mr. Biden's decision is a major change in U.S. policy.
The choice has divided his advisors, and his shift comes two months before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, having vowed to limit further support for Ukraine.
Say that again about Trump, having vowed to limit further support for Ukraine.
Allowing Ukrainians to use long-range missiles, known as the Army Tactical Missile Systems or attack them, came in response to Russia's surprise decision to bring North Korean troops into the fight, officials said.
MAGA World went ballistic, excuse the pun, when Biden did this.
Here's Charlie Kirk on November 17th when that report came out, who said this, Biden is trying to start World War III.
This is pathological and totally insane.
U.S. weaponry should not be used to fire into the interior of Russia.
Imagine if Russia supplied missiles to fire into America.
Totally agree, just made that point.
But I find it just as dangerous when Trump is not just providing the missiles and authorizing their use, but encouraging Zelensky to strike St. Petersburg and Moscow.
And again, even if that's posturing from Trump, speaking that way is very dangerous.
Wars escalate because of misperception, because of perceptions of threats, whether they exist or not.
It's a very dangerous game when you're talking about two nuclear-armed powers, and then you throw North Korea in there, which is also nuclear-armed power, that have been fighting right on the Russian border and actually now inside Russia with the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk and these strikes inside Russia.
Ukraine has been carrying out terrorist attacks in Moscow against nationalistic bloggers.
It's killed one of his daughter, Dugin's daughter.
They have blown up the cars of generals on streets of Moscow.
Just think about how the United States would be perceiving the security threat if that were happening.
We launched a 20-year war on terror because of a one-day attack on our cities.
Here is Senator Mike Lee, the Republican from Utah, same day.
Liberals love war.
War facilitates bigger government.
That was in response to Biden's announcement.
Here's Mike Waltz, who ultimately became Trump's national security advisor, where he lasted about 90 days before he was fired, speaking on Fox to Brian Kilmade.
This is also the same day that Biden announced that he's going to permit Ukraine to strike within Russia.
Walt is a hardcore warmonger and militarist.
He was, before Trump tapped him to be National Security Advisor, spent years in Congress demanding even more support for Ukraine, more aggression toward Russia.
But here's what he said.
So with two months left in office, Joe Biden has done something he's been called on to do for the last, since this war started, allow Ukraine to strike Russia with everything that we give them, the ATACMs, which are long-range missiles.
Hit Russia where they're trying to hit them from.
Your reaction to that, and were you briefed ahead of time?
I was not, Brian, and it's, you know, it's another step up the escalation ladder, and nobody knows where this is going.
Totally, exactly, Mike Waltz.
It's another step up the escalation ladder, obviously, when you give weapons to Ukraine and tell them that they are free to strike inside Russia and even encourage them to strike Russian cities.
Here from the Hill, November 19th, the day after this was announced, Representative Corey Mills, Republican of Florida, who does not support more security funding for Ukraine, said the Atakums move by Biden was a, quote, continual escalation in the wrong direction.
Biden is going to do what Biden's done for the last four years, which is destroy the country, destroy our position on the world stage, try and weaken us in every way when it comes to negotiations to make it more difficult for President Trump to go ahead and focus on the America First agenda.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said he supported Biden's decision to lift the attack on his restriction because it, quote, could lead to a diplomatic breakthrough.
But he also accused Biden of being shallow and trying to stymie Trump.
He's trying to put Trump in a box, Graham said.
Congresswoman Nancy Mays, Republican of South Carolina, said she was worried, quote, about the last-minute shift in policy before Trump comes in to defuse the situation.
So those were the reactions from conservatives when Biden did exactly what Donald Trump is now doing.
And just to give you a little reminder of how much Trump emphasized his opposition to doing exactly what he's now doing when Biden was doing it and how dangerous it was, here is what he said, part of his stump speech in campaigning.
This was in September of 2024, speaking in Savannah, Georgia.
Biden and Kamala got us into this war in Ukraine, and now they can't get us out.
They can't get us out.
I watched him.
We will, win, we will.
He's been saying that for three years.
Every time Zelensky comes to the United States, he walks away with $100 million.
I think he's the greatest salesman on earth.
But we're stuck in that war unless I'm president.
I'll get it done.
I'll get it negotiated.
I'll get out.
We've got to get out.
We will not leave until we win.
What happens if they win?
That's what they do is they fight wars.
As somebody told me the other day, they beat Hitler, they beat Napoleon.
That's what they do.
They fight.
And it's not pleasant, but we've given them close to $300 billion.
And you know what?
Europe has given them, which is approximately our size when you add up the countries together, their economy.
It's very close to our size.
They've given them like a small fraction of that number, just a small, very small fraction.
Now, it's very rare, by the way, to hear an American president say that it was Russia that defeated the Nazis.
Usually, the Soviet Union's absolutely vital role in World War II is ignored to attribute all the credit to the United States and the West.
But Trump did say that, but he was also saying Biden can't get out of the war.
It's an extremely dangerous war.
He just keeps sending weapons.
He doesn't know how to negotiate.
I'll negotiate an end to this.
And here Trump is now doing exactly the same thing as Biden, like he did on so many other issues, just five months into the presidency.
Wasn't just Trump.
Here was J.D. Vance in April of 2024.
He wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about the Biden policy in Ukraine.
J.D. Vance, the math on Ukraine doesn't add up.
Quote, the Biden administration has applied increasing pressure on Republicans to pass a supplemental aid package to more than $60 billion to Ukraine.
I voted against this package in the Senate and remain opposed to virtually any proposal for the United States to continue funding this war.
Mr. Biden has failed to articulate even basic facts about what Ukraine needs and how this aid will change the reality on the ground.
Again, Trump's position is we're not going to pay for any of this.
That remains to be seen, to put it mildly.
But the other critique of J.D. Vance is, what's the plan here?
You think just pouring more weapons into Ukraine is going to help them vanquish the Russians when they've been fighting for three and a half years with hundreds of billions of dollars of the most sophisticated weapons pouring into Ukraine from the United States and NATO?
And Russia just keeps occupying and gobbling up more Ukrainian territory?
What's the plan now?
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a model of consistency, no matter what you think of her, and I will give her credit, a lot of credit for that.
In July 2024, just like Trump and Vance, she was saying things like this, quote, no more America tax dollars for Ukraine.
And she came on my show, talked to a lot of other places about this, and her view was, this isn't our war.
It has nothing to do with us.
Why should we be continuing to get involved?
Here's, I thought we had a clip of Marjorie Taylor Green from today saying the same thing.
I believe there's a tweet of hers.
Oh, that tweet that we just showed you, even though it was from a year ago, she reposted it today, obviously, a response to Trump's announcement of getting further involved in the war in Ukraine.
And then she also reposted this video, which is her speaking at a Trump rally in South Carolina in February of 2024.
Here's what she said about Ukraine.
I'm proud to announce that I've introduced amendments to the NDAA to block funding for the war in Ukraine.
The only thing our country should be doing is pushing for peace like we had under President Trump.
We had world peace for four years and we desperately need it again.
We must stop the warmongers and we must stop funding a deadly and bloody war in Ukraine.
That's right.
The American people don't support a war in yet another foreign country.
Do you?
The American people support defending our own border with our own strong military against the savage Mexican cartels.
Some people in Washington think the best way to spend your hard-earned dollars is killing other people in foreign wars.
I don't agree with that.
Marjorie Taylor Green, when Trump announced that he was restarting Biden's bombing campaign in Yemen, which both Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene criticized last year, vocally objected and said, what do Houthis have to do with the lives of American citizens?
Why are we killing Houthis?
This is the kind of foreign war that we were supposed to get out of, not re-enter, when Trump won.
She said the same thing when Trump joined the war with Israel to bomb Iran and provided Israel with weapons.
She said, how is this our business?
I'm sick of us fighting wars for foreign countries.
And now she's saying the same thing about Ukraine, one of the very few people in the MAGA movement.
I'm not saying there are none, but they're few and far between, who refuse to just turn on a dime the minute Trump does a 180.
And even though her entire political brand, political career is founded by, founded in her loyalty to MAGA, her loyalty to Donald Trump, she's somebody who believes in our principles and she's not going to change them for the sake of convenience.
And people like that deserve respect.
And I'm glad they're out there because with the Epstein situation as well, which we're going to show you in just a minute, Trump's amazing, bizarre, alarming comments today, which he only keeps having to go back to because his own supporters, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others, are demanding it, objecting to what he's doing.
This is the kind of thing that actually puts pressure on political leaders when their own base stays true to their values and says, wait, this isn't what you ran on.
This isn't why people in my district voted for you.
In fact, they voted for you because you promised to do the opposite of everything you're doing.
And it seems like we're in even a more dangerous posture now with Ukraine, given these reports that obviously the White House wanted out that Trump not just authorized but encouraged Zelensky to use our long-range missiles, which we're now providing, not just to bomb deep inside Russia, but to bomb their most important cities, including their capital.
To say that's dangerous is to put it mildly, and it's still my view, which used to be Trump's and his supporters, that this war is not in America's interest.
It has nothing to do with American interest.
And yet here we are getting further and further and further involved after having elected a president who promised to end the war or at least get out with the United States' involvement.
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We've been covering on essentially nightly basis the evolution of the Trump administration's extremely controversial treatment of the Epstein files, which was central to the discourse of right-wing and MAGA politics over the last four years.
And the Trump administration shocked and angered, especially their own followers, when out of the blue, they sent a memo to Axios of all places announcing that the DOJ and FBI had concluded their investigation.
There was nothing here to see at all.
They were closing the investigation and they would release no further documents, meaning they wouldn't have released a single document, not even one token one, that wasn't previously available.
And we reported on and showed you the video where Trump at the White House, when asked about the one issue they've never addressed, which is Epstein working for with a foreign intelligence agency.
They asked it to Pambandi, and before she could answer, he wouldn't let her answer, he interjected and said, how dare you talk about something so trivial?
Move on.
We have way more important things to talk about than some weird creep who died five years ago.
Oh yeah, this is totally irrelevant.
But his most prominent supporters and huge millions of them were feeding for the last four years on the claim that this was not just relevant and important, but essential to understanding the rot at the heart of the globalist order and that the Biden administration had in its possession enormous amounts of documents extremely incriminating about many of the world's most powerful people that they were concealing to protect the world's most
powerful predators.
And Trump officials who now run the FBI and DOJ and other agencies came into office campaigning on a promise, as did J.D. Vance and even Donald Trump, to finally bring transparency to this.
And so to just tell them all of a sudden, oh, this thing that you've been talking about for four years that your most trusted pundits and journalists have been telling you is so vital, that we've been saying is so vital.
J.D. Vance made a huge deal out of it.
Donald Trump Jr. did.
Dan Bagino, Cash Patel, Pam Bondi, long list.
Everything they've been telling you about how crucial this is, the documents are so incriminating, the Biden administration is disgracefully hiding it.
Never mind.
Forget all that.
This is not even relevant.
Who cares about Jeffrey Epstein?
People other than the most drooling, subservient, partisan supporters of Trump are not going to accept that, and they haven't.
And as a result, Trump keeps having to go back to it, even though he said, I'm not talking about this anymore.
Don't ask me about it.
It's too insignificant.
His base is riled up over this.
It's become a very significant controversy, arguably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, of the Trump administration thus far.
It's kind of a Frankenstein that they created by spending so many years banging the table saying only corrupt protectors of pedophiles like the Biden officials would hide these documents.
And now they're hiding them, even denying in some senses that they exist.
And so Trump has repeatedly gone back.
He keeps making it worse.
And now he has spun this incredibly nonsensical conspiracy theory that it's the Democrats who created the Epstein files, who forged them, who fabricated them.
And that as a result, he says, anybody demanding release of the Epstein files, something that he promised to do, that J.D. Bance promised to do, that all these people promised to do, that anyone demanding that is a selfish person playing into the hands of the radical left by demanding the disclosure of documents that he says were faked, like the Russiagate investigation was, by all these Democrats.
Clearly eager to convince the public, you don't need to see these documents.
And even if you did, the things in them, don't believe them, they're fake.
Why would Trump be so incentivized to convince the public that the information contained in the Epstein files, which first the Trump administration summarily announced they were going to conceal, why would he be so interested in convincing them that they're fake?
What's in those documents that he wants the public to disbelieve?
HERE HE IS SPEAKING OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE, STANDING NEXT TO HIS PRESS SECRETARY, CAROLYN LEVITT, EARLIER TODAY.
THE FILE, THE FINDINGS OF THAT REVIEW, THE FINDINGS OF THAT REVIEW, THE FILE, THE FINDINGS OF THAT REVIEW.
So the question was, in case you didn't hear the robot of noise going on, it's outside the White House.
Did Pam Bondi give you a briefing on what's in these documents?
And did she happen to mention whether your name appears in any of the documents?
And here's what Trump said.
Just a very quick briefing.
And in terms of the credibility of the different things that they've seen, and I would say that, you know, these files were made up by Comey.
They were made up by Obama.
They were made up by the Biden.
You know, we went through years of that with the Russia, Russia, Russia hooks.
With all of the different things that we had to go through, we've gone through years of it.
But she's handled it very well, and it's going to be up to her.
Whatever she thinks is credible, she should release.
Now, that is a little bit of a shift rhetorically because the FBI and DOJ's announcement originally was, we're closing the investigation.
There's no further disclosures.
And when Trump was asked about it at the White House, he said, this is just leave me alone.
I don't want to hear about this.
This is too irrelevant.
Pam Bondi answered the question about whether Trump, about whether Epstein worked for a foreign intelligence agency by saying, I don't know.
I have no knowledge of that.
I never thought about that before.
We'll get back to you.
Now he's saying she's going to release credible information, which means that there's some documents that Trump regards as non-credible, faked by Obama.
And when did, by the way, Obama fake these documents?
Jeffrey Epstein was arrested during the Trump administration, the first Trump administration.
And that's when he supposedly killed himself in 2018.
So the origin of this investigation would have been under Donald Trump, how did Obama fabricate documents in the Epstein file?
And to what end?
If Jim Comey and John Brennan and Obama and Hillary had fabricated documents, altered these documents, inserted stuff about, I don't know, about Trump or his associates, why would they do that if they didn't release it?
It only makes sense to do that if you're then going to release it and say, oh, look, here's the Epstein files.
Here's Trump's name.
Or here's Mitch McConnell's name or whatever.
And then Trump would say, no, no, those are forged.
Why would the Democrats forge documents and leave them there, not release them?
How does that make any sense?
When could they have forged them?
When did Hillary and Jim Comey and Brennan have the ability to access the Epstein files?
And what's the basis for this?
Why is this only being claimed now?
Why is Trump so eager to convince his base and the public, look, there's documents in there that you don't need to see?
Not the ones about Epstein having sex with kids on video or the child pornography they say he downloaded.
Nobody wants to see that.
Nobody cares about that.
Nobody's asking for that.
And this isn't something that Trump just came up with today.
This is clearly a conspiracy theory he's decided to disseminate.
Here on True Social, after he told everybody to move on, not talk about it anymore, and his supporters continued to do it anyway for the reasons I said, he went on True Social and said this, quote, what's going on with my boys and in some cases, gals?
They're all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who's doing a fantastic job.
We're all on one team, MAGA, and I don't like what's happening.
We have a perfect administration, the talk of the world, and selfish people are trying to hurt it all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.
For years, it's Epstein over and over again.
So he called the people who are asking for disclosure of the Epstein files selfish.
And then this is what he said.
You see the part in blue right here.
This is amazing.
This is that same conspiracy theory that he enunciated today.
Why are we giving publicity to files written by Obama, crooked Hillary, Comey Brennan, and the losers and criminals of the Biden administration who conned the world with the Russia-Russia Russia hoax, 51 intelligence agents, the laptop from hell, and more?
They created the Epstein files, just like they created the fake Hillary Clinton, Christopher Steeldosier that they used on me, and now my so-called friends are playing right into their hands.
Now, is anyone who's a Trump supporter going to believe this?
That after spending four years saying the Epstein files hold the key to everything, accusing the Biden administration of protecting pedophiles by refusing to release it, they're now going to believe that, oh, these documents were written by Trump?
Does anyone believe this?
Trump seems very eager to me to say, we're not going to release certain files because some of it contains information that's false.
What information is that that he's so eager to convince Americans were fabricated by Obama and Hillary and Biden?
That didn't come from nowhere.
He's very interested in making sure that people believe that.
I don't think he's going to get very far.
Here is the first polling data on what Trump is doing with Epstein.
It's from Morning Consult.
And it came out today, and the headline is, few Americans trust the DOJ's conclusions on Jeffrey Epstein.
And then here you see the two questions they asked.
The percentage of voters who believe the Justice Department is being honest and transparent by saying, first, there's no evidence of a client list or blackmail scheme involving Epstein and prominent people.
And here you see in blue: this is the percentage of Americans who believe the Justice Department's claim on that.
Only 25% of voters overall.
And amazingly, the group that most believes what the Justice Department says, there's no client list, there's no evidence of blackmail, are Republicans.
If you had taken this poll a year earlier, six months earlier, Republicans were the ones saying no, there's huge amounts of incriminating evidence there that the Biden administration is hiding.
Now suddenly, it's Republicans who believe the Justice Department's claim.
But note, this is the no, the pink here.
More Republicans disbelieve the Justice Department than believe it.
It's the Trump Justice Department.
And 41% of Republicans say they don't believe the Justice Department when they say there's no evidence of a client list or blackmail scheme involving Epstein and prominent people.
Only 35% believe it.
But look at independents.
54% of independents say they do not believe the Justice Department is being honest.
Only 18% say they believe the Trump Justice Department.
And Democrats, 60% say they don't believe the Trump Justice Department.
Only 20% say they believe the Trump Justice Department.
And overall, the breakdown is 51% of all Americans say no, they don't believe the Trump administration's claims about this.
And only 25% believe it.
They ask the same question.
Do you trust the Justice Department when they say that Epstein committed suicide in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges?
Again, it's Republicans who know, amazingly, it's Republicans who most believe that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide.
40% of them believe the Justice Department is being honest about that.
Only 37% believe they're not.
But overall, 35% of voters believe when the Justice Department says Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.
42% believe they're not.
Being honest.
So you see, already a lot of Republicans have shifted to the point where Republicans are now the ones who are most dismissive of the Epstein files.
Nothing can see he killed himself.
Move on.
But still, huge numbers of people do not believe the Justice Department on this.
And why would they?
They've heard for years and years and years.
The opposite of this.
Here's data for progress polling on Trump's handling of the Epstein files.
Republicans who have heard a lot about the Epstein files disapprove of the Trump administration's handling of them.
So of the Republicans who've heard a lot about what Trump administration is saying, huge numbers don't believe it.
So here's the top list, people who say they've heard a lot about the Epstein files.
And the question is, do you approve or disapprove of how the Trump administration has handled the release of these files?
Only 20% of Republicans say they approve.
20% said they somewhat approve.
36% say they strongly disagree.
And 19% say they somewhat disapprove.
So even just among Republicans who have heard a lot about the Epstein files, 55% disapprove of how the Trump administration has handled this, compared to only 40% who approve.
That's Republicans.
Now, that's really bad news.
Not just for this specific issue, but for the broader promise of the Trump administration that they were going to cleanse the government of what was, in fact, these frauds that the Biden administration perpetrated on RussiaGate,
which was really Obama, but his CIA, and lying about the Hunter Biden laptop files being Russian disinformation, about the steel dossier, about COVID.
People have come to distrust the government, and it's a major reason why they turned to Trump, who vowed to provide all this transparency, to be honest with the public about what's happening, regardless of where the chips might fall.
And when the public says, including Republicans, we don't believe Trump and the Justice Department and what they're saying about Jeffrey Epstein, it's not just about Jeffrey Epstein, it's about the loss of trust that the Trump administration had about whether they would be any different or whether they would just be the same old, same old as the entire D.C. political class constantly lies and deceives and covers up.
And once people think that about you, and this is an issue that they heard a lot about, not from the New York Times and NBC News, but from Trump world over the last 40 years, once that trust is gone, it is extremely difficult to get back.
It's like if someone in your life who you trust, you catch them lying about something really important.
That trust is fractured, if not broken.
It's very difficult, if not impossible, for that person to earn it back because you've proven you're willing to lie about something important.
Why wouldn't you again?
That's what's happening with the Trump administration.
And the fact that Donald Trump is now resorting to this utterly insane, deranged conspiracy theory that I don't think anyone's going to believe, that it was the Democrats that created the Epstein files, as he said verbatim, and that a lot of the information there is fake and they fabricated it,
leaves a lot of people wondering why Trump is suddenly so interested in convincing the public not to believe the Epstein files, even if they do one day get disclosed through whatever mechanism the public comes to learn about them.
All right, that concludes our show for this evening.
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