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Jan. 10, 2026 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:11:19
Glenn Answers Your Questions On: Reactions to the Minneapolis ICE Shooting, Protests in Iran, and More

Glenn answers your questions about the Minneapolis ICE shooting, protests in Iran, "Trump Derangement Syndrome," the deep state, and more.  --------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook  

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As we do every Friday night, we are going to have a Q ⁇ A this evening where we gather questions that were submitted throughout the week by our locals members.
As always, it covers a fairly wide range of topics.
It asks about issues that we cover from a perspective different than the one that we analyzed it from.
Sometimes these questions raise topics that we haven't covered, and that's the case tonight.
And I always really look forward to this in part because I think that a dialogue with one's viewers and readers is of the utmost import for journalists, an important form of accountability for journalists, but also it is kind of an unpredictable evening.
I generally don't see the questions beforehand, or if I do, I see it a minute or two right before we air.
And so it tends to be a less kind of structured, less planned, more spontaneous, extemporaneous show.
And that often leads to thoughts and ideas and points that might not otherwise emerge if the show were more planned as it is on other nights.
So I really look forward to it.
So let's get right into that before we begin.
A couple of quick programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
All right, we have lots of questions.
I'm going to try and get through as many of them as I can.
In order to do that, one thing that I could do is dispense with any sort of lengthy pre-preface about what this segment is, how it functions, why we do it.
I already did a little bit of that.
So I'm just going to dive right into the questions.
The first one is from DAC 1990.
And the question submitted is this, quote, after what undeclared war breaks out should we say we have fascism here in the United States after we return to striking Iran?
How many people need to be shot in the face where the perpetrators go unpunished before we admit that truth to ourselves?
I was speaking with an Argentine friend of mine and I had to explain to him that cops here generally have the latitude to shoot people in the United States if they can make the argument that they feared for their safety.
Sorry for ranting, Glenn.
I feel as if the walls are closing in on us.
Now, that question deals with several different issues, including what seems to be a return to explicit imperialism.
The United States has been an imperial power for quite a long time.
The difference is that Trump has been far more honest about that than prior leaders.
He's dispensed with any kind of justice arguments or the acclaim that we're going around the world freeing people.
He admits we're just going to take their oil.
It's amazing because for so long, for decades, if you were somebody principally on the left, but sometimes even on the right, who said, I think the United States, the real reason we're going to fight wars is for oil.
You were told you were a fringe extremist and a conspiracy theorist.
That, of course, the United States doesn't fight war for oil.
It's just a gigantic coincidence that most of the countries that we invade where we have an interest in determining who the government is, where we impose governments, happen to have gigantic oil reserves.
It's just a massive coincidence, though.
And for Trump to just come right out and say, yes, we're going to Venezuela, we take their oil.
Today, the Trump administration announced that an oil tanker left Venezuela without the permission of the United States.
So the United States forced it to return.
We really are governing Venezuela, I think is refreshing.
But then you have this corresponding increase in violence.
And the question was by the incident in Minnesota two days ago, where a woman who was part of the protest, who had gone there specifically to participate in the protest against ICE to seemingly impede ICE officers as part of the protest, was shot and killed as she tried to drive away from the ICE agents who were demanding she get out of her car.
There's pretty much a consensus on the right that's very pro-ICE that the shooting was justified and that she got what she deserved because an ICE agent was in front of the car as it was pulling out.
And the claim is that he justifiably feared for his life and was therefore entitled not to try and get out of the way, but just to shoot her in the head, which he did.
And then there are huge amounts of people on more on the left.
I don't mean the real left.
I mean, just like kind of left of center who are pretty unanimous that this was an absolutely unjustified murder.
We've kind of covered some angles of that.
But I think what I want to talk about, and actually there's this suggestion within the question about it.
And actually, before I do, you probably have seen most of the videos.
To me, the key factor, as I've said before, is the fact that when she was pulling out, she was getting away.
The ICE agents had tried to pull her out of her car, open the door.
She pulled away and immediately turned her wheel, her steering wheel to the right, which is exactly what you do if you were trying to get out of the situation and flee, as opposed to running down an ICE agent.
But as I said, I understand how people see that differently.
There would be investigations.
I think it's disturbing that we have government officials like JD Vance and others who are pronouncing basically a verdict in this case.
I don't think that's the responsibility or even the right of political leaders to do.
But that is to me how it looked.
But again, there are a lot of people who see it differently.
So there was a newly released video today.
This is cell phone footage taken from the phone of the ICE agent who actually did the shooting.
And the minute it was released, it was released to something called Alpha News, a very pro-Trump MAGA right-wing news outlet.
It seems like ICE gave it to them.
That's almost certainly where it came from, the cell phone of the ICE agent.
And conservatives immediately began declaring that this is definitive proof that she did in fact try to run him over and he was therefore justified in shooting her.
Everybody who does not have that view of ICE does not see this video that way.
So I'm just going to show it to you since a new video.
Some of you may not have seen it.
Again, this is from the cell phone of the ICE agent who ended up drawing his gun and aiming at her and shooting her fatally.
That's fine.
I'm not mad at all.
Show your things.
I'm not.
It's okay.
We don't change our plates every morning.
Just so you know, it'll be the same fight when you come talk to us later.
That's fine.
You have said it's in former foot respect.
You want to come at us?
I said, go get yourself some lunch, big boy.
Go ahead.
Out of the car.
I've seen video of this that I think has been much more revealing than that.
Again, it was the person who did the shooting.
So it was from his perspective.
I already gave the interpretations, the competing interpretations.
Obviously, there was some, I guess you could call it, adversarial energy between the woman who was driving the car, who ended up killed, her wife, her partner, who was the woman with the short hair who was speaking in a fairly condescending way to ICE agents.
It's absolutely your right.
You're allowed to speak.
You don't have to speak deferentially and respectfully to agents of the state.
You have the right to speak critically, especially when you're at a protest.
The driver said, I'm not mad at you, dude.
And, you know, it was not like a very polite, earnest statement.
It had a tinge of sarcasm to it.
And then the life of the woman who was shot was, you know, being confrontational, saying, we change our plates.
We're going to have different plates the next time, kind of like mocking him in a light way.
Nothing of that, independent of the driving, remotely justifies shooting an American citizen in the head in broad daylight on an American street.
Obviously, and I don't think that's the claim, but the claim is this shows that they had kind of an antagonistic relationship with ICE, which is a huge leap from that to this woman who had basically no criminal record, was raising a six-year-old child, tried on that day to go run over ICE agents, kill them, be willing to go to jail, domestic terrorism, all of that.
So that's the video that was released today.
I think one of the things that we're seeing, and this is the point I actually want to emphasize, as opposed to just delving into the debate that is very tired by now, all the arguments are very well known about who was at fault, who wasn't.
I've already given my view on that, is that obviously, as we all know, when Charlie Kirk was murdered in this very brutal way on camera, and everybody watched that horrific image of a bullet entering his neck while he was just sitting there expressing his political views on a campus in a nonviolent way, there were a good number of people who celebrated Charlie Kirk's murder and said he deserved it because of his political views.
A lot of conservatives have wildly exaggerated who did that.
No members of Congress did that.
No leaders of the Democratic Party did that.
No very prominent liberals and media did that.
It's mostly confined to people on the internet, but there was a fair amount of sentiment that immediately emerged that was designed to say Charlie Kirk got what he deserved.
It was celebratory about the fact that he was killed, even though he's a husband, was a husband, a father of two young children who at the time was not engaged in any kind of provocative or violent behavior.
And that was very disturbing.
Just the fact that you could watch a life of a young man be extinguished in an instant by a bullet going through the neck.
I think a lot of people who were decent watched that video and had kind of a reaction that was kind of horrifying and sort of watched so many people instantly on the internet celebrate the death, say that he deserved it, start mocking it.
I do think that revealed the kind of crudeness and a vulgarity, kind of a dehumanization that maybe comes from just being online.
These are not, this is not necessarily reflective of who these people are.
Comes from being anonymous online, from group thing, from getting caught up in the sentiments of the moment.
But I think a lot of those people actually think that way, that if you are a Trump supporter, if you're on the right, if you have said things about race or gender that you find offensive, it's not enough to criticize a person, not enough to try and get them excluded from decent company.
They actually deserve to die.
They actually deserve to be killed.
And there was a lot of that sentiment, and I wasn't surprised.
I have seen that sentiment on large parts of the of American liberalism and the American left.
And it didn't surprise me, but it did, it is something that I find very concerning.
And the right went way too far with it.
There were people who were simply posting Charlie Kirk's words and critiquing him, which you have every right to do when a prominent, influential person dies.
There's a big difference between celebrating the death and expressing criticisms of them.
And they got a lot of people fired from their jobs simply for criticizing Charlie Kirk, which I thought was also quite destructive.
There was just a professor actually who got summarily fired because he posted nothing more than a Charlie Kirk quote that obviously he meant critically.
Didn't celebrate the college now has to pay him, I think something like close to a million dollars for violating his due process rights and free speech rights.
But I do think there was a coarseness and a dehumanization to the reaction that people rightly were kind of horrified by.
But what really bothered me also about that was this idea that that only happens on the left and not the right.
And you see now in the wake of the killing of this American citizen, that there's a lot of that sentiment on the right now, too, which is that first it was kind of justifying the fact that this woman, Nicole Good, was shot, which is a valid argument.
Not one I agree with, but obviously you have the right to debate.
Was the use of fatal deadly force by an ICE agent justified or not?
That's totally legitimate debate.
But then it became an attempt to dehumanize her and demonize her.
I think a lot of people on the right were disappointed that it wasn't an immigrant, that it was an illegal immigrant, that wasn't a person of color, it was a white woman.
But then they kind of felt like they hit the jackpot.
She turned out to be a lesbian.
And they're all, I mean, you can't find anyone on the right, barely, talking about her and this killing without constantly saying she was a lesbian.
Matt Walsh called her a lesbian agitator who had a humiliating and destructive death or humiliating and demeaning death because she was defending Somalians with an IQ of 68 who would never defend her.
And from there, there was a lot of sentiment over the last 48 hours.
A very viral treat saying, oh, good, I saved her six-year-old son from being trans by this gay couple.
Obviously, a celebratory tweet saying the ICE agent was heroic, saving her child from their degeneracy.
And from there, that led to a lot of celebratory tweets that, again, it's not that members of Congress are doing it, but JD Vance did call her or Kirsten Young called her a domestic terrorist.
JD Vance has been very aggressive in talking about her in a way that suggests she deserves this.
And then it crossed the line into, yeah, we want people like that killed.
And I, you know, I was always impatient with this idea that only people on the left celebrate the death of their political opponents, but people on the right would never do such a thing.
Such obvious deceit.
I've seen that come from the right.
I've seen it come from the left.
Oftentimes, as I said, it is coming from the sewer of the internet, the sewer where people are anonymous and so are able to say things that they otherwise wouldn't say.
important and i was on judge napolitano showing her napolitano show on wednesday and we talked about the shooting in minneapolis and and we were also talking about american imperialism And I made this connection and then Tuck Carlson in his newsletter this morning, I'm sure he didn't hear me, but he made a similar point, which is that, and I wrote about this before during the war on terror, which is that when you're a country like the United States that is constantly fighting wars in countless different countries,
I think it's very important to realize that the United States is very, very anomalous in this regard.
Only Israel fights as many wars in as many places, but the United States is the world champion, the undisputed world champion.
Just to give you a comparison, China, the last time it fought a war was 1979.
It's 47 years ago.
And that war was a one-month border dispute with Vietnam.
They haven't had a war in 47 years.
We've had dozens, depending on how you define war, but certainly bombing and changing governments and invading and droning.
So we are a country that is very war inclined.
We fight more wars by far than any other country.
And when that happens, in order to get the population to accept those wars, to believe they're just, to support them, you have to constantly dehumanize other people.
You have to constantly talk about them in a way that leads Americans to believe that their life has no value.
They deserve to die.
The world is a better place when their lives are extinguished.
And I've talked before about one of the things I really appreciate about the Catholic Church, and it's ironic that there are a lot of people who claim an allegiance to the Catholic Church or membership in the Catholic Church, and yet they sound as contrary to what the church says or what the Pope says about the sanctity of human life, people like Matt Walsh.
But what I've always said about the Catholic Church is that they, I think, have a genuine earnest belief in the sanctity of human life.
And it doesn't just manifest in their opposition to abortion, but also to things like their opposition to euthanasia and their opposition to the death penalty.
And then in general, just kind of an inclination to condemn war, to be concerned about the lives that are ending, because the central tenet of most religions is that life is created by God and life is the most sacred thing there is.
And it doesn't mean you have to be, you're a pacifist necessarily.
It doesn't mean that you never are justified in taking human life, certainly in self-defense, for example.
Although you can find places of the gospel about turning the other cheek, even when somebody strikes you.
There's other places in the Old Testament about an eye for an eye and the like.
But certainly the sanctity of human life, the fact that life is sacred is something that is central to it to most religions.
And if you're a country constantly at war, you have to deliver the opposite message.
You're constantly giving reasons why the lives we're extinguishing at all different places all over the world doesn't really have that kind of value.
In fact, the people are probably primitive or subhuman.
Their lives aren't really worth caring about.
In fact, they deserve to die.
The world is a better place when you extinguish that life.
And if you do that over and over year after year about so many different people in so many different parts of the world, you do make the society cruder and just generally coarser and more inclined to dismiss the inherent value of human life.
And it becomes much easier to be violent, to celebrate the death of people you dislike.
Martin Luther King talked about that in his one of the speeches that he gave that I like the most, which was in 1967 in Riverside Church in Harlem, when he apologized for not having opposed the Vietnam War earlier.
And he explained that he thought that he could just focus on domestic politics and violence in the inner cities and violence against the American people, but the government.
But then he realized you can't extricate those things.
If we're going around the world, killing people and justifying war and violence and the extinguish of human life in foreign countries, it's also going to affect how we see our fellow citizens as well.
And I absolutely believe that our foreign policy, the fact that we're constantly at war, we're constantly killing people, we're constantly bombing people.
Yeah, we got those people in those boats off Venezuela.
We wiped them out.
Who cares about due process?
They're narco-terrorists.
Yeah, we bombed Iran.
They totally deserved it.
The Israelis killed these scientists and these people in buildings and their families.
They all deserve it.
Yeah, we're going to celebrate it, not even lament it, even if you find it justifiable.
I'll just tell you this quick story.
And there's the last thing I'll say about this.
When the United States killed Osama bin Laden, finally found him in Pakistan under President Obama in 2010 or 11.
I forget which.
I think it was 2011.
And we found him as this old decrepit man who was sick and elderly, living with his wives in Pakistan.
President Obama went on television that night to announce it.
And I was in the United States that day, but I was flying back to Brazil that evening.
So I was on an airplane when President Obama made the announcement that we had found and killed Osama bin Laden.
And it was at the time there was very little Wi-Fi on airplanes.
And even if there is, I generally don't use Wi-Fi on planes.
I like to use planes as a kind of off-the-matrix, disconnected time.
So I didn't know when I landed in Brazil that the United States had found and killed Osama bin Laden.
And I got to the airport and I got a cab and the cab driver said, oh, where are you from?
I said, oh, I'm American, but I live here.
And he said, you know, Did you see the news about how the United States had killed Osama bin Laden?
And I said, what?
No, no, I didn't see that.
I was on the plane.
He said, yeah, the United States killed Osama bin Laden.
And that night, there were these protests, these celebrations in the streets of Washington and New York.
People were waving the American flag and with their fists in the air and were just raucous, like they had won the Super Bowl.
And this cab driver said, look, I understand why the United States would kill Osama bin Laden.
I can understand the arguments that it's justifiable.
But what kind of people go around celebrating the extinguishing of human life?
Like even if you, you know, most countries, a lot of countries, is a Catholic country Brazil is.
It doesn't have the death penalty.
And there's an idea of the sanctity of human life that probably comes from religion.
And when he said that, I probably wouldn't have thought about it this on my own, but I did realize like, yeah, there is something very odd and probably unhealthy about human beings going around celebrating the fact that we just pump bullets into some guy who is in his house, even if it's Osama bin Laden.
And I do think that comes from, as Martin Luther King said, as studies show, as other historians of empires have pointed out, this has happened with other empires when you're constantly killing people in faraway places, then it starts to infect the imperial capital, that a lot of our discourse has become extremely indifferent to the value of human life.
It's not surprising to see people celebrating the assassination of someone like Charlie Kirk or the killing of this woman.
This is not a criminal, doesn't have a criminal record, never set out to hurt anybody before.
She's definitely an activist.
She's a left-wing activist.
And if you don't share her politics, that should definitely not be enough for you, even if you think the ICE agent was justified to start talking about her like she got what she deserved and you're happy she's dead.
There's a lot of that sentiment and it's very similar to how people reacted who disliked Charlie Kirk.
And I think that is a sign of a pretty unhealthy and even I would go so far to say as a sick society.
And I think it's very inextricably linked with our very aggressive and violent foreign policy.
All right, next question.
You know, actually, there's another point I wanted to make here about this killing by ICE in Minneapolis.
The argument of those justifying it, principally on the right, is that if a law enforcement officer gives you an order, you should obey it and not ignore it or defy it.
So if an ICE agent tells you, get out of your car, you don't drive off, you get out of your car.
And if you drive off, you're probably going to suffer consequences.
I don't think in general, we consider it justified to put bullets into the heads of people who flee a scene.
In fact, that is not protocol for any police department.
You're not justified in just shooting somebody because they're fleeing.
And it's certainly not justified for ICE.
It is a law enforcement agency that's supposed to be about protecting the border and deporting illegal immigrants, not American citizens, although there are times when they can act against American citizens.
But the argument is that she defied an order of the police and therefore was to blame for starting this entire incident.
And then at the same time, even if she weren't intending to kill the police officer, the fact that he had some reasonable fear that he was in danger justified pumping bullets into her head.
And I understand that standard in theory.
But, you know, one of the big controversy over the last six years was January 6th.
And I was very much somebody who believed that the evils of January 6th were wildly exaggerated.
I never considered it to be anything close to an insurrection, and I still don't.
I consider it to be a protest that got a little bit out of hand and a lot out of hand and turned into a riot, but it was nothing that threatened the United States or its stability or the or the existence of the government.
I thought the shooting, the fatal shooting of Ashley Babbitt was horrific.
She didn't pull out any arms.
She wasn't engaged in violence.
They just shot her.
But if this is the standard, then it absolutely is the case if you apply that standard to January 6th that the Capitol police not only have the right to, but should have shot dozens of January 6th protesters.
The vast, vast, vast majority of January 6th protesters were nonviolent.
And that was one of the reasons I found their very excessive prosecution and imprisonment to be so outrageous.
We don't put people in prison for years for participating in a protest when they're not engaged in violence.
They just walked into the Capitol simply because other people who were there did engage in violence.
That is not a form of acceptable American justice.
But there was a minority, and not a couple of people, but dozens who did use violence on January 6th, and they used it against police officers.
And I don't mean they just punched the police officer.
I mean, they beat the shit out of police officers.
They used flagpoles and sticks and fists and stun guns and whatever they could get their hands on.
And these police officers were outnumbered and they absolutely had a reasonable basis to fear for their lives.
And several police officers that was exaggerated by the media done died on January 6th.
Several of them were seriously injured, seriously and permanently injured.
Many of them were hospitalized.
And there's no doubt they had a reasonable fear for their lives and for their physical safety.
And obviously, the people who were beating the shit out of them were defying orders, legal orders from a law enforcement agency that was telling them to stay out of the Capitol.
Most of this happened outside of the Capitol and they were trying to prevent people from coming in.
A lot of the protesters were allowed in and just waltzed in.
Again, those were the nonviolent ones, but the ones who beat the police officers with weapons, with things they picked up that severely injured them, whether it was outside or inside, why didn't the police have the right to just gun dozens of them down?
Just put bullets in them.
If that's justified whenever someone defies a legal order of the police and puts the police in reasonable fear of their physical well-being and safety and life.
And I have absolutely zero doubt, zero doubt that if there was some kind of Antifa protest or Black Lives Matter protest, and there was a police officer who was being beaten by, say, eight Antifa protesters with flagpoles and two by fours and metallic objects, and as a result,
pulled out his gun out of fear for his life and shot one or several.
Everybody on the right would defend that police officer and say he was absolutely within his right to do that.
There's no way to, if that's the standard you're upholding, to say that Capitol Hill police officers didn't have that same right that they should have gunned down multiple people on January 6th, the ones who were using violence.
But the reason these standards aren't being applied is the point.
It's that this is political violence.
It's politically motivated violence.
People are cheering when their political adversaries, Charlie Kirk or the woman in Minnesota, who has offline politics.
When the political enemies, people with different political views than you are killed, that's when you jump into action and start defending it and cheering it.
There are no consistent standards.
There are no coherent views about when this should happen.
I personally think, like, war, which should be a last resort, should be a last resort for law enforcement agencies to fatally shoot American citizens on the streets of the United States.
And I don't think that would have been the case on January 6th.
And I don't think that was the case in Minnesota.
But some people, when I made this point, said, Yeah, I think the ICE shooting was justified.
And I think the Capitol Police would have been in the rights to just gun down people on January 6th.
And at least that's consistent.
What bothers me a lot is not just the inconsistency, but the fact that there seems to be a politically motivated view of who should live and who should die.
And societies that abandon the universal sanctity of life and start cheering for the death of their political opponent almost always end up in very dark places.
And I also think, as the question suggested, that we very well may be headed there.
All right, next question is from KCM71, who says this: quote: There seems to be increasing speculation about TDS, Trump derangement syndrome.
Even people who are supporters say they have observed a change in his presentation in various ways in what appears to be a sudden flurry of aggressiveness and impulsive behavior, particularly regard to international relations.
Are you willing to weigh in with your observations of any changes seen?
I get the idea that we can't make medical assessments by watching videos, but the man has been in the spotlight for the past 10 years.
It's not as if we don't have considerable data on which to draw some conclusions, even if the conclusion is inconclusive.
I hope we learned a lesson from ignoring Biden's decline.
I just hope we don't do the same thing with Trump.
The man still has three years to go.
All right, first of all, let me just express a pet peeve of mine, which is this term Trump derangement syndrome.
This was a term, this derangement syndrome as applied to presidents that was first created by the longtime Washington pundit Charles Crawthomer, who was a columnist for the Washington Post, a regular on Fox News.
He was an old school neocon, fanatical Israel supporter, supporter of every American war, kind of a John McCain, Lindsey Graham sort of hawk, but the neocon version of it.
And Charles Krothamer, before he became a journalist, was a psychiatrist.
So he went to medical school and was a psychiatrist.
And in 2002, he decided to exploit his psychiatric degree and his expertise in psychiatry to try and turn critiques of George Bush, a president whom he supported into some sort of mental disorder.
And he dubbed it Bush derangement syndrome.
And he was very clear that he was purporting to diagnose a pathology, a psychological pathology on the part of liberals who are very critical of George Bush in a way that he found excessive.
And then ever since that entered the lexicon, every president who is criticized, I can't tell you how often liberals called it Obama derangement syndrome.
And now we're at Trump derangement syndrome.
American presidents should be heavily criticized by the citizenry.
They should be questioned.
There should be skepticism applied to their claims and statements and motives.
This is a healthy society and I hate this attempt to I.
You know i'll just I I, since i've been pretty critical of a lot of Bush policy, a lot of Trump policies throughout the year, deporting students for the crime of criticizing Israel or protesting against Israel, deporting people in the country with no due process to a hellhole in El Salvador even though they're not El Salvador and have nothing to do with El Salvador by invoking some very old law that had only been invoked in actual wars previously,
bombing Yemen, bombing Iran, arming Israel, imposing hate speech codes on college campuses, what we're doing now in Venezuela, lots of other things as well.
And now suddenly i'm hearing, oh, you have Trump derangement syndrome, which is so ironic because i've spent eight years being told i'm a Trump shill, i'm a Maga adherent.
I defended Trump in Rush Gate.
I defended Trump in his prosecutions.
I defended Trump against some of the more deranged rhetoric about who and what he is.
And this is the problem is that the minute you start criticizing your president, people tell you you have derangement syndrome, as though it's just binary, either you follow the leader blindly or the minute you start criticizing him, it means now you, you hate the president and therefore your your commentary should be discarded.
I think it's very important to criticize all American presidents in in very aggressive ways.
They have insane amounts of power concentrated in their hands, more so every year as the presidency gets more powerful and Congress disappears and the judiciary becomes more deferential.
Now, having said all that, i'm not.
I actually i'll tell you the truth.
I don't see changes in Donald Trump, behaviorally compartmentally uh, cognitively.
In fact, i'm amazed at how active Donald Trump is.
At the age of 79 or 80, he flies all over the world constantly, every single day.
He allows media into the Uh Oval Office.
Joe Biden, they hid him from press conferences and interviews.
They barely let him speak in public.
Trump is exactly the opposite.
Every second you look around, there's Trump giving interviews to journalists, speaking in countries all over the world, meeting with world leaders.
His energy level seems very high to me and I also think that he's a lot more knowledgeable now than he was during his first term, which makes sense because he had never been to Washington before, had never been in the government before, had no experience whatsoever in dealing with foreign policy, economic policy, dealing with the Vipers and the UH factions in Washington, and now he does.
He has a lot of experience and he speaks.
I'm not Donald Trump, is not an intellect, not a reader, But he has a decent mastery and a very good intuitive sense for how the world works.
And it's one of the reasons he's been successful in the things he's done.
Not universally successful, but he's a very high-risk businessman.
So he's had bankruptcies and failures.
But, you know, there's no denying he's a very successful person.
And I don't, if anything, I see Trump as being more cogent, more energetic, more focused than even in the previous term or during the campaign.
I'm amazed at the level of vitality energy has given his age.
I don't think there's any remote comparison between him and Biden.
Almost the polar opposite in this regard.
Obviously, there are inconsistencies in how Trump campaigned versus how he's governing.
I can't think of a politician in my lifetime for whom that wasn't true.
I mean, one of the defining events of my life was watching Barack Obama in 2007, 2008 rant and rail and rave against the policies I found most offensive, George Bush and Dick Cheney's war on terror policies, the erosion of civil liberties, the vow to reverse all that.
And then I watched him get into office and not only not reverse it all, but extend it, maintain it, even worsen it in many ways.
This is what politicians do.
And I think one of the things that's happening, and this is, this actually relates to a question that somebody asked that I think we have about whether I misjudged Trump by saying that he was some sort of anti-interventionist candidate or peace candidate.
And I'll look at him.
I'll get to that.
But one of the things I want to say is oftentimes we see, we talk about the issue in a very binary way.
Like either Trump is the peace president, deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, almost like a pacifist, doesn't believe in war, doesn't believe in interventions.
And so all you have to do is show bombing Iran, bombing Venezuela, arming Israel, threatening Colombia.
And now suddenly it's all the way on the other side.
And Trump is this like crazed imperialist and warmonger of the kind that he campaigned on the promise not to be.
And I am very opposed to Trump's foreign policy.
And I've been very clear about that.
Having said that, one of the first things Trump did when he, after he was inaugurated, was he restarted one of Joe Biden's bombing campaigns, the one against the Houthis in Yemen.
Trump was critical of Biden's bombing of Yemen in 2024, saying it was unnecessary, that all you had to do was pick up the phone and do a deal with them, that it was a failure of Joe Biden, that he's bombing the Houthis unnecessarily.
And then Trump's in office for about three weeks, and he starts doing exactly what Biden did, bombing the Houthis, but even more so.
And the idea was we were going to bomb the Houthis for six to nine months, finally incapacitate them, destroy all their arsenals, disperse them, scatter them.
And after a month, Trump saw that everything he was promised was not happening.
There was no progress being made.
We were spending enormous amounts of money.
We were exhausting and depleting our missile supply that we were also using to send to Ukraine and to protect Israel.
And after almost less than a month, about a month, Trump ordered the whole thing stop just abruptly.
He said, I'm not doing this anymore.
Because he didn't want to fall into this endless war in Yemen.
So I criticize him for having started it, but he also put a stop to it well before Israel and a lot of his senior advisors and people in the military wanted that stopped.
And then, yes, Trump bombed Iran, but he bombed Iran for one night, didn't get dragged into an extended quagmire, didn't try and engineer regime change in Iran.
Even now with these protests, it's always hard to see.
what is causing them or how serious they really are, what kind of a threat they are.
But even now, he's not saying, yeah, we want to put in the Shabaran son or the opposition.
He's being very cautious about getting involved.
So he bombed Iran, but then for one night and not longer, even though obviously there was a lot of pressure for him to do more, including regime change.
And then even in Venezuela, and I spent months condemning this, when we were bombing the ships and it was clear it was a regime change policy, then we abducted Maduro.
Everybody assumed, especially the people supportive of what Trump was doing, everybody assumed that we were now ready to clean out the Maduro regime and install Maria Machado or Edmundo Gonzalez or these opposition leaders that bipartisan Washington has long craved should run Brazil.
Remember Juan Guaido, who Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump are going around saying, Mr. President, and treating him as the president of Venezuela, this kind of insane fiction.
And Trump very quickly put a, threw cold water on that.
And they were like, so what about Maria Machado?
Is she ready to now run Venezuela?
Are you going to put her in?
And he was like, she's a nice lady and all, but I don't really think she commands any respect because I don't think Trump wants to dismantle the Venezuelan military and police and the institutions that keep civil order and that govern the oil industry or anything else.
He doesn't want to repeat what we did in Iraq, where we dismantled the Bathist army and military and left the country in anarchy that we then had to fight for and fight in to clean up or what we did in Libya where we just walked away.
Maybe we're going to do more in Venezuela.
Maybe we'll eventually do all that.
But right now, Trump's not doing that.
And you see a lot of hawkish people in both parties who are now starting to be critical of him.
Like, why are we leaving the Maduro regime in place?
Why aren't we putting these Democrats into office and demanding elections?
And Trump's saying very clearly, I don't really care that much about that.
That's not what we're interested in in Venezuela.
We don't need to change the government.
We just need the government to cooperate with us in what we care about, which is their oil, not their freedom, not them holding elections.
And there is restraint in all of that, despite the fact that it's a form of incredibly aggressive imperialism that I do believe will blow up in the face of the United States for all kinds of reasons.
It isn't that Trump has just suddenly become this like deranged, violent warmonger that is reveling in seeing death.
He could do a lot more.
He could kill a lot more people.
And he still likes to think of himself as somebody who, as he said in a press conference or an interview yesterday, when the New York Times asked him, like, hey, what restrains you?
Like the Congress doesn't.
You don't think the courts do.
And he said, my own moral compass.
I'm not out to hurt people.
I don't want to see people killed.
I don't like violence.
I'm using the violence that's minimal and that I feel like is necessary to protect American interests.
And I'm not whitewashing Trump.
I have spent all year very aggressively criticizing him, especially on foreign policy.
But I think we need to make sure that we don't then jump to this other very simplified, exaggerated caricature or binary formula that he's now suddenly doing what Dick Cheney and George Bush did or what President Obama did in Libya or Syria, because he does seem to want to start conflict, but then also do what he can to keep them constrained.
Sometimes you want to keep it constrained and you can't.
But, and so he's playing a very dangerous game, but I don't think that he's like losing his marbles or suffering from dementia or suddenly a radically different person.
I'm not saying he's easy to protect, but there's nothing he's doing that is shocking to me.
Like, wait, that's so out of character for Donald Trump.
I don't think any of this is out of character for him.
All right.
Danny Brio Biero asks, and this is a question I kind of just addressed, but I do want to address part of it.
I am a loyal follower of your show, sharing most of your political and societal views.
I also admire your courage and integrity over the different stages of your journalistic career.
On the topic of Donald Trump, during the last election campaign, you repeatedly scolded and even ridiculed Democrats for their fear-mongering regarding Trump's authoritarian tendencies.
Do you feel any regret in light of his second presidency?
The same applies to your belief to his aversion of wars.
America first claims, did he succeed in fooling you along with his voters?
Thanks and keep up your fantastic work.
You know, it's so interesting.
I'm getting this a lot, especially with Venezuela, but even before with Iran, tons of Democrats and liberals constantly tweeting and putting on social media and writing articles that I was telling everybody that Donald Trump is the peace president, that he's the anti-intervention president, that he's not going to start wars.
And one thing you'll find is there are no quotes accompanying those assertions about what I said.
And the reason you won't find any is because I obviously was extremely aware of the people that Donald Trump was influenced by and who surrounded him in the first term.
We did shows about the fact that Mary Middleson was his biggest donor, one of his biggest donors.
And she was obviously expecting getting things in return for that massive support.
I think one of the things that is very overlooked about Donald Trump and the 2024 election is that from the time Donald Trump first got elected in 2016 and took the office in 2017 until he left office in 2021.
And then until he ran for president and won in November of 2024, so you're talking about 2016 to 2024, a period of eight years, Democrats and their allies in the broader establishment had one overarching goal, and that was to put Donald Trump in prison.
And once he got out of office, they brought four separate criminal felony cases in four separate jurisdictions and managed to secure a conviction on 34 felony counts in front of a Manhattan jury on a utterly trivial case involving Stormy Daniel and payments made to her and how that was characterized inside the Trump administration.
But the bigger cases were the ones from Jack Smith and the classified document case.
They wanted to put Donald Trump in prison for life.
And they were fantasizing about taking his kids and putting them in prison, going back to Russia Gate.
And Trump knew, and I think this is absolutely true, that either he would win the 2024 election and those cases would disappear because now he would be president, or he would spend the rest of his life in prison, which I absolutely believe would have happened had he lost that election.
And I think that obviously generates in any human being a kind of desperation.
And there are a lot of very powerful, wealthy people who in that desperation were able to exploit it by saying, we will give you all the money you need to maximize your chance of winning as long as you are willing to do this.
And so he was willing to say yes to anything.
Donald Trump doesn't want to go to prison.
He's not, there are people who are willing to go to prison.
Donald Trump is not one of those people.
Donald Trump has lived his whole life in extreme luxury.
He likes gold and skyscrapers and private jets.
He doesn't want to be in a prison cell.
He's not a person who could endure that.
And so I think he made massive compromises in order to do that, to give people what they wanted.
Unlimited support for Israel, promises of military intervention, a kind of authoritarianism at home, expelling student people, deporting them if they were critical of Israel, if they participated in the protest, greater hate speech laws.
But also Donald Trump has always been a kind of almost campy level worshiper of law enforcement.
One of the very first political things he did was when the Central Park Five were falsely accused, five black men, of raping a white woman.
Donald Trump looked at a full page ad in the New York Times demanding that they get the death penalty and they ended up convicted, but then exonerated.
That's one of the through lines in Donald Trump's political life.
And I also think that a major part of his first term was that he won the election, but never really got to do what he wanted because there were so many ways the establishment imposed roadblocks and obstacles, even subversive ones, to override the election by preventing Trump from carrying out the policies that he ran on.
And so I know when I interviewed on the show, people close to the Trump circle, but I also spoke a lot privately to them.
And they were all saying the same thing in 2024, which is that the one thing they're all determined to do is to prevent that from happening, to make sure that the executive branch is staffed with people whose only goal is to carry out Donald Trump's decisions.
And that is an unhealthy way to have any institution, especially very powerful one, a dissent-free institution where nobody can ever dissent to the leader unless he gives them direct permission, or they'll be fired or otherwise marginalized because you need diversity of opinion.
Authoritarianism produces really bad decisions.
But I think a lot of this comes from, it's a reaction to what was done by the establishment.
It was something I was talking about all the time about the dangers of what was being done in the name of stopping Trump, sacrificing every value, journalistic value, putting all institutions behind the Democratic Party, media outlets, just nonstop against Trump.
It destroyed faith and trust in institutions, but it created a climate where the rules of the game changed, where now you put your political enemies in prison.
And I think Trump has reacted in a lot of ways to that.
But I also think my view of Trump was this.
My view of Trump was, and I was on the British independent media outlet Nirvana Media today, Naraba Media, Navarra Media.
Sorry.
And this is one of the things I talked about, which was that what was I about to say?
I lost my train of thought because I mispronounced the media outlet.
I was talking about Trump and how this idea of him being authoritarian.
Anyway, maybe that'll come to me.
Ken, oh, I know what it is.
My view of Trump was this.
It wasn't Trump is clearly the superior candidate that he's going to bring in, restore free speech and end censorship and end wars.
What I talked about today was when I first started writing about politics and doing journalism, it was 2005.
And I was primarily motivated by my serious concerns about the erosion of the war on terror in the name of the erosion of civil liberties in the name of the war on terror under George Bush and Dick Cheney.
And maybe I was a little naive.
It was really the first time in my adult life I was paying very, not just paying attention to close attention to politics day to day, but really delving into primary documents.
And I had the luxury of spending full time and could think about my assumption to kind of rebuild them.
But even then, when the Democrats were so vocal about opposing these policies that I found so dangerous, there was a part of me that I guess believed them.
And I felt like maybe the solution to uprooting this is to have Obama win.
And then I watched Obama get in and obviously do what I talked about earlier.
And then the idea became, oh, no, the solution is you just have to elect better Democrats.
And then I watched, you know, supposedly better Democrats like Bernie Sanders, who was prevented from winning or AOC, who started off basically promising to go to war with the Democratic Party, but ended up just melding into it and becoming a partisan hack and a Democratic Party tool.
And there's no point in doing this work if you're not invested in having changes happen.
And you could just go into this line of work and try and make money, could plant your flag as a partisan, feed people partisan drag every day.
Lots of people do that.
They make a good living.
But if you're in any way interested in it, if you're interested in doing it for any kind of commendable reasons, you're interested in doing it because you want to have some influence to whatever extent you can on changing things for the better as you perceive them.
And I became convinced that just sitting and cheering the Democratic Party or associating with the left and nothing else was a dead end, would change nothing.
And I began to see this transformation, the emergence of a opportunity on the populist right.
There was already a foundation laid by people like Ron Paul that has been forgotten.
I was writing about the Ron Paul presidential campaign in 2008, 2012, watching him go into South Carolina and Red Districts in Iowa and New Hampshire and rant and rave against the war on terror and neocons and even the racist drug war, as he called it.
And it resonated with a lot of voters.
So there was already this foundational laid that Trump then came and expanded.
But Trump ran against Bush Chaining, neoconservatism, even corporatism.
And I saw a lot of people on the right start to realize that the deep state was evil, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, these were untrustworthy institutions, that these wars we were fighting were serving the interests of a tiny number of people and were based on lives.
And being somebody who wanted to mix things up because the status quo was just a bipartisan sewer to preserve prevailing dogma in Washington, I wanted to explore ways that that could be joined with the people on the left who I also agreed with into a kind of new coalition to at least change the discourse.
So I did think that there was a possibility that Donald Trump's empowerment could subvert and undermine a lot of this dogma, not even necessarily for good reasons.
But what I always said about Trump was I thought the ceiling was higher than it would be for, say, electing someone like Joe Biden or Kamal Harris, where you know exactly what you're going to get.
But also the floor was lower, meaning I thought there were more dangers with electing Trump as well.
Never was this kind of cheerleader of saying, elect Trump, he's the peace president.
None of that ever happened.
That was never my analysis.
I never engage in that sort of simplistic thinking or binary analysis.
That said, I am disappointed in the first year of the Trump, second Trump term.
I do think that he has ended up siding with and listening to people who have an ideology that was very anathema to what MAGA and America First, Donald Trump said that they were about.
But it's not like it's shocking to me.
I always knew these influences were there.
I always knew Trump was susceptible to him and susceptible to them.
And so do I think that there were better scenarios that could have happened with Trump's election?
Yes, I do.
But I still don't have the regret of, oh, I wish I had just locked myself into and become captive to the Democratic Party and told everybody that salvation lies only with voting for Democrats and being completely closed off to what are the obvious changes in large parts of the populist right that are very real.
You see it on Israel by itself.
I think that's significant.
But even on the excesses of crony capitalism and hedge fund globalism, there are a lot of changes on the populist right that I think will have net benefits.
All right.
One more question, I think, or maybe a couple more questions.
This one is from Kay Cotwass, who says this, hey, Glenn, it's been pretty obvious for a while that the public's preferences and values have no influence on political power, with Trump's regime change in Venezuela being another example.
Who is really at the top of the power hierarchy?
Who actually runs the world?
I've always wondered this.
You know, I've always thought this idea that the president of the United States is the most powerful person on earth was the kind of thing you earn in like seventh grade civics.
And it makes sense in theory.
But it's really not true.
And you see this in many democracies.
I mean, the idea of a deep state is that democracy can't be trusted.
And so you can elect a president and you let him do some changes as long as within the kind of acceptable bounds of status quo dogma that serve the most powerful interests.
But if that president really starts taking seriously his own PR or thinking that he can be radical or confront institutions, they'll destroy him.
That's what the deep state is.
It's a backstop that prevents democratic changes from actually crossing any kind of line of extremism or radicalism.
It's a guarantor of the status quo.
And it's composed of many different power sectors.
You can't just say, oh, this is what runs the world.
Obviously, Wall Street, big finance, international banks, global institutions, the military-industrial complex, billionaires, oligarchs, basically the people with the greatest investment in maintaining the status quo because they have amassed the greatest amount of financial and political power within it.
They're always going to be people who wield immense power and will have the ability to place limits on a president.
If you get a president who's sufficiently charismatic, who leads the people, who can inspire people and has the will to overcome that, that can happen.
Certainly happened previously.
That's why you get radical changes and revolutions and the like.
But I mean, I saw this with Obama very quickly.
You know, Obama ran on this whole hope and change branding, but nothing in Obama's life suggested that he was going to go and confront institutional power.
He went to Harvard.
He melded into elite culture very well.
He's very comfortable within it, had no interest in going to war with it.
Certainly not if it meant sacrificing his own interest.
And he didn't.
He served it very, very, very loyally.
And I actually do think Trump is a more naturally disruptive figure, has a lot of resentment toward the elite class, kind of like Nixon did, in a way that Obama is completely devoid of.
But Trump saw in his first term, and I think sees now that, you know, I mean, this is why I never thought Trump was going to meaning they confront Israel.
Because one of the things that you have to know, if you know anything, is that if you were to try to do something like that, the amount of hellfire that would rain down on you from every power faction and oligarch class is inconceivable.
You have to be the bravest person to be willing to confront that.
And presidents aren't immune.
John F. Kennedy has his head blown off.
Ronald Reagan was shot.
Gerald Ford was the subject of a couple of assassination attempts.
And then, of course, Trump himself was shot in the ear, came about a millimeter away from having his head blown off.
In Brazil, Lula de Silva, the giant of indisputable, undisputed giant of Brazilian democracy, some massive figure in Brazilian politics.
He ended up in prison.
They imprisoned him for 18 months, and they could have kept him in there for a lot longer.
And then they've now imprisoned his successor, Jaire Bolsonaro, who is also now in prison.
There aren't any uprisings.
There aren't any life has gone on in both cases.
There are no people immune from having serious repercussions fall on their head, even if they're the most powerful man on the planet, the president of the United States.
And presidents are very well aware of that.
It's made clear to them.
That's what a deep state is.
And the United States absolutely has one.
All right.
Last question, which is from B.R. Duffy.
Hi, Glenn.
I'm hoping to hear briefly your thoughts on what's happening in Iran, likelihood of an actual revolution, potential negative consequences, and success.
Thanks.
It's very difficult to know what's happening in Iran for multiple reasons.
One thing, Western media is utterly unreliable.
They're overtly rooting for the Iranian government, the Iranian regime, to fall.
Obviously, many powerful factions in the West, in Israel, in the United States, are rooting for that.
Several key officials have just admitted that the Mossad is embedded in Iran as though that was something that would evade anybody's understanding of what's happening there.
So a lot of this is not organic.
Sure, there's Iranian citizens angry at their government enough to go out and protest in the street.
what country doesn't have that to the player.
Iran is a very geostrategically important country for obvious reasons.
It's Israel's greatest enemy in the Middle East.
So it's very difficult to know.
There's a lot of people wanting to propagandize that these protests are threatening the regime.
I've seen this many times before.
How many times have we seen it in Cuba?
Like protests in Havana.
Oh, wow, the regime is falling and it doesn't.
So many times, protests in Iran.
Oh, the regime is falling.
The people are rising up and nothing happens.
So I do think one of the things we saw in the Israeli attack on Iran was that the Israelis clearly had a lot of traders, Iranian traders working with the Mossad inside Iran.
Several of the most successful attacks were carried out by agents of the Mossad who are Iranian, who passed information.
A lot of times they're captive.
The Israelis will just say, we know where you live.
We'll kill your whole family unless you do what we tell you.
But some of them are, you know, susceptible to payments.
But the Iranian regime has been around for a long time.
It's not a new government.
They've been in power now for 47 years.
And from the start, major Western powers led by the United States and also Israel have been trying to destabilize that government and remove it from power.
Because we had for decades prior to that, prior to 1979, a U.S. and Israeli puppet who basically did what we want Venezuela to do, which is give us access to their oil, let our American oil companies go in and export their oil, serve Israel the way the Egyptian dictator that we prop up and the Jordanian dictator that we prop up do.
And the Iranians have been quite cunning about resisting this massive external power.
And the Cubans are that what they've done is a miracle.
I mean, they're very close to the United States.
They're a small island, and yet it's been a top priority of this gigantic superpower to overthrow their government for literally 65 years, tried an invasion and it failed.
So if a small island like Cuba can do that, Iran is a serious country.
These are sophisticated people, much, much larger.
They have 90 million people there.
A lot of advanced understanding.
They have allies in Russia, to some extent China, a serious military.
I'm not going to say that I don't think it's possible that the regime will fall.
We watched it happen very quickly in Syria.
The government, U.S. government had tried.
Other governments had tried for more than a decade and it didn't work.
And then suddenly it did.
But it's not going to be easy.
And if it does happen, the country is going to fall into a kind of instability, which I think is what Israel wants, like what happened in Syria, just a very dysfunctional rump of a country, little like factions controlling different regions so that they're not a unified country against Israel posing a counterweight to Israel in the Middle East.
I think that's the goal.
And I wouldn't put anything past the United States and Israel, either in terms of motive or capability.
But I also think the Iranians have been planning for this for decades and are extremely well entrenched.
It's not going to be something that's just going to happen easily, I don't think, but we've seen way too many things to write out that possibility as well.
All right.
So lots of great questions.
We had a few more as well.
We're going to save those for next week.
I think this new studio is working really well.
I mean, I don't want to call it a new studio because it's not like it's the permanent place.
Basically, I'm spending time in a farm that a small, very small farm outside of Rio.
So, we had to have a studio here, and my colleagues came and set up.
I think it's beautiful.
I'm still debating whether anything needs to go on these walls back here, like a small shelf.
But I don't know.
I'm starting to think not.
A lot of people think not.
Feel free to weigh in if you think, like, the wood and the green is good, or if there needs to be something else.
We're going to have a second studio in my home as well.
Um, so we're figuring out exactly where we're going to be, but this is definitely going to be a place we're going to do a lot of shows from.
So, I think it's working very well.
Um, each time we use it, it works better and better.
And we are very happy to be back more on a regular schedule.
We really appreciate the people who have submitted questions.
It really makes these QA shows not just easy to do, but very, very enjoyable.
And I think quite nutritious as well for us and hopefully for you as well.
Um, and that'll conclude our show for this evening.
Uh, as one quick reminder, system update is also available in podcast form.
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