Feb. 11, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
26:46
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Is Trump Any Better Than Biden?
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, February 11th, 2025.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be here with us on just a moment.
Let's see, who has more respect for the human rights of the Palestinians, Joe Biden or Donald Trump?
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Professor Sachs, my dear friend, always a pleasure.
Thank you very much for joining us.
Do you think that the recent behavior of President Trump is an indication of his disdain for the human rights of the Palestinians, much along the line of Joe Biden as predecessor?
Well, if things go as they seem to be going right now, In which case the slaughter in Gaza will restart.
This is a continuation of U.S. policy.
U.S. policy is, frankly, genocidal.
It has been genocidal during the Biden period.
And if this ceasefire breaks down because of the steps that Donald Trump is taking, it will continue.
There has been hope that the new president would aim for a ceasefire and then for peace.
It seems, though nothing is firmly predictable in these days, but it seems that we are heading back towards war because, at least rhetorically,
Donald Trump has taken The Netanyahu line, as did Biden.
Netanyahu is the destroyer of American presidents and the destroyer of American foreign policy.
It seems that Trump is just falling into line.
President's outlandish idea that the United States could buy Gaza.
I mean, this isn't even Economics 101.
This is grade school level of economics.
You want to buy a piece of land requires a willing seller.
Who would sell it?
Well, this is not even within the realm of public discourse other than Trump saying these things.
And it has been said in the past that he says these things because he...
is softening up an opposition for a deal, that it's tactical, that it's blowing off steam.
The fact of the matter is that this has created a worldwide, very strong response against the United States.
And these are not idle words.
This is not blowing off steam.
The ultimate test, I want to say, will be next week.
If the ceasefire breaks down, this is Trump's massive failure.
And probably, although it sounds strange to say just three weeks into the administration, I think it would be devastating for his administration, actually.
You make early mistakes.
Biden made terrible early mistakes.
I said so when he made them right at the beginning of his term.
It turned out that they doomed his administration.
If Trump follows the same, and again, with Trump, you don't know, so I'm not saying it's firmly the case, but if he follows along, as he has been saying in recent days, the ceasefire breaks down,
the genocide resumes.
This will be devastating, not only for the Palestinians.
But for American foreign policy, and not only for American foreign policy, for everything about American politics, economics, foreign policy, because these events are all interconnected.
Trump, within a week, united the whole world against the United States by this rhetoric.
Again, Trump says lots of things.
Rhetoric changes.
But the test is, was this some kind of bizarre tactic that none of us gets?
Or is it a reflection of a continuation of American complicity and genocide?
If it is the latter, the consequences for the United States will be terrible for the Trump.
The administration will be devastating, is the point I'm making.
I'm going to play a clip of him coming home from the Super Bowl on Air Force One.
Tell me if you think this statement is well thought out.
Cut number one.
Steve Whitcoff said that process would take 10 to 15 years.
Does your commitment to rebuilding Gaza extend beyond your time in office?
We're committed to buying and owning Gaza.
As far as us rebuilding it, we may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it.
Other people may do it through our auspices.
But we're committed to owning it, taking it, and making sure that Hamas doesn't move back.
There's nothing to move back into.
The place is a demolition site.
Place is a demolition site because the American taxpayer paid for that.
But how well thought out do you think his statement was?
Buying and owning.
From whom would you buy it?
Once when he was asked that about two days before, he said Israel will sell it to us.
Well, Israel doesn't own it.
Yeah. These lands are Palestine's and the International Court of Justice made a ruling in 2024 that Israel is the illegal occupier of these lands.
The UN General Assembly voted with about 95% of the world population voting for the resolution.
Only the United States, Israel and a The statements that Trump has made,
they're empty.
They don't seem to be tactical.
They don't seem to be the art of the deal.
They don't seem to be some clever way to pull Netanyahu into a peace deal or anything like that.
What they have done is enraged the whole world because they're so starkly absurd and imperialistic and illegal that they make no sense to...
People who take these issues seriously because the lives of millions of people are at stake.
And Trump said that, well, and by the way, Netanyahu, who really has no even sliver of decency, Netanyahu said,
well, yes, there should be a Palestinian state in Saudi Arabia.
This was a statement received with outrage by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
And what these two people think they're doing in enraging the world is really a strange, bizarre question.
Saudi Arabia is a very important country.
Completely, completely alienated the leadership and the public of that country is quite a stunning achievement.
You know, Saudi Arabia is widely courted, of course, by the BRICS countries, by China, by many others, and the United States and Israel are pushing them into direct opposition.
Comments that are not other than utterly vulgar.
So the point I'm making is that we expect lots of words from Trump.
We hear all sorts of things.
Sometimes they are tactical.
Even if these were meant to be tactical, which I don't think they are, the tactic itself is so costly to American interests.
And to global stability that it will profoundly undermine anything else that this administration aims to do.
President Trump came into office saying that he is a peacemaker.
We will see that tested within a few days.
If this ceasefire in Gaza breaks down, that will be the end of the illusion.
I'm sorry to say vis-a-vis the Palestinian people.
It is completely Without a shred of respect for the Arab world, which is hundreds of millions of people, very strategic,
very important, very much at the center of global war and peace, Biden was terrible.
I want to make clear to everybody I'm not making partisan remarks.
I'm not against this president or that president per se.
I have been saying for years that American foreign policy is deranged from the point of view of America's interest.
And if the ceasefire breaks down, it's just a vivid test of that.
If something wonderful happens between now and Saturday or Sunday that...
This ceasefire continues.
Well, then it's a rabbit out of the hat.
It's some tactics we can't figure out.
But the fact of the matter is it looks like the region's heading back towards war and that Trump's claims to be a peacemaker will be disproved within a matter of days.
Colonel Douglas McGregor agrees 100% with what you just said, Professor Sachs.
As far as I'm concerned, if all of the hostages aren't returned by Saturday at 12 o'clock, I think it's an appropriate time.
I would say cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out.
I'd say they ought to be returned by 12 o'clock on Saturday, and if they're not returned, all of them, not in drips and drabs, not two and one and three and four and two.
Saturday at 12 o'clock, and after that, I would say all hell is going to break out.
And I don't think they're going to do it.
I think a lot of them are dead.
I think a lot of the hostages are dead.
I think...
It's a great human tragedy what's happening.
This is an invitation to Netanyahu to violate the ceasefire.
There's no obligation to return all the hostages by noon on Saturday.
He just made that time and date up off the top of his head.
Well, it's even stranger than that because his own negotiator negotiated a specific arrangement for the timing of the release of the hostages.
So when President Trump says, well, these dribs and drabs, that's the agreement he reached.
His agreement.
Not somebody else's agreement.
His agreement.
The one that he took credit for a few days ago.
And if this ceasefire breaks down and there's war, it will show two things.
One, that U.S. foreign policy is owned and operated by Israel, which many of us fear to be the case.
It will show that the claim that President Trump has made that he's a peacemaker and that he's going to be in charge of U.S. foreign policy will be falsified within days, unfortunately, because if this happens as it could...
Well, happen.
This would mean that foreign policy is owned and operated by Israel and specifically by Netanyahu.
Nothing less than that.
So this is really strange and extraordinarily concerning because President Trump is repudiating the agreement that he himself negotiated just.
As he was coming into office, this is his agreement, not anybody else's.
He took credit for the agreement.
Now he's repudiating the agreement and inviting a return to war.
Again, you know, as events move and as weird statements are made, I don't bet on any continuity hour to hour, day to day.
But there is a bottom line.
The bottom line is whether the ceasefire holds or whether the ceasefire ends.
If it ends, this is a failure.
But I would say more than a failure, it is a disaster because it will not only undermine everything else of policy in the United States, our budget, our diplomacy, our relations with other countries,
our chance for peace.
It will also have alienated the rest of the world in terms of any kind of arrangements with the United States.
In the end, supposedly, there was to be the art of a deal.
What Trump is doing right now is putting the entire world against the United States.
Essentially, every country, whether it's on steel and aluminum tariffs, whether it's on peremptory across-the-board tariffs, whether it is claiming Gaza, whether it is claiming Canada as the 51st state,
or Panama, or whatever it is, within 22 days, three weeks and one day, almost all of the world.
Is against the United States.
Now, how do you make deals that way?
Well, maybe Trump's view, and I think it is his view, is that the U.S. holds all the cards.
This has been the mistake of American foreign policy for a long time.
This was fundamentally Biden, Blinken, and Sullivan's mistake.
They thought they held all the cards.
They held all the cards vis-a-vis Russia.
They held all the cards vis-a-vis China.
They held all the cards vis-a-vis the Middle East.
The United States holds few cards right now.
People don't understand that.
It's a little sad.
If we want to actually have things happen, you can't just do it by unilateral demands and threats.
You actually need to cooperate.
Is maybe not the American way for these leaders, but the way that they're trying, and again, I'm not differentiating across these two administrations, but if things go the way that they're going right now, it will be more failure by not understanding what we really hold in our hands and what we don't hold in our hands.
No. This is regarded universally as either bizarre Well,
it would be a war crime if they forced the Palestinian people out of their homeland.
Well, it would be a continuation of genocide, and this has been happening for the last two years.
It is, as you said, a demolition site because we made it so.
This is the U.S. and Israel demolishing this place.
That's been going on every day.
This is what a genocide is before our eyes.
Trump said he would stop this, and this is his test.
This is the test.
It's very straightforward.
Does this crazy offer help Netanyahu?
All of this is, if this continues, again, I have to keep using the conditional because it's so bizarre.
Absurd, so unacceptable, so tragic that it's a little hard to take on its face.
But if things continue in this way, if the genocide continues, nothing will put Israel's long-term survival at greater risk than what is happening right now.
The sense of disgust.
The sense that maybe Israel is forfeiting its right to be a country if it will not obey even the most basic of all international laws,
which is the law against genocide.
This is so damaging, it's amazing.
Now, again...
Trump came in with a basic promise.
He wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
He wants to make peace.
We're going to find out in a week.
It's not even a close call.
If this breaks down, if the statements he's making in recent days turn out to be statements one takes at face value, boy, are we in for a spiral of disaster.
The recently deposed chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Mike Turner of Ohio.
I think this will turn your stomach, but turns mine.
I'm loathe to give him any airtime, but I'm anxious to hear your response.
Professor Sachs, did you know that the Palestinian people pose a national security threat to the United States?
Cut number nine.
Do President Trump's comments help?
I think it does pose the challenge of focusing on the fact that Hamas and the Palestinians and the terrorist structure that's there needs to be dismantled, that Israel does deserve and need a...
God, is this what the Republican Party now stands for, or is he an outlier?
As for the two-state solution, it has about 180 countries on side.
The Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the G20, the BRICS, and the UN General Assembly have all restated their support for peace based on the two-state solution,
based on a state of Palestine alongside Israel, with both countries secure.
This is universally...
Accepted, except for Israel, the United States, Nauru, Micronesia, Polau, Papua Guinea.
I won't go on with these partners, so-called, of the U.S. The overwhelming, overwhelming near unanimity of the world has been working on the two-state solution, contrary to what the good congressman I don't know whether he knows any of that or pays attention.
If America just talks to itself in a bubble, we will be in a continuing downward spiral.
If people would get out and speak to other leaders in the world, they would understand perhaps something that they don't understand now.
I have maybe the added benefit that I'm speaking to world leaders every day.
In different parts of the world, in Asia, in Africa, Latin America, in the Middle East, in Europe.
Maybe people in Washington are in such an extraordinary bubble.
Maybe US foreign policy is so much owned and operated by Israel that nobody even wants to hear the most minimum truth and facts.
But what the congressman said is completely, totally incorrect.
Professor Sachs, it's a pleasure.
I have so many things I want to talk to you about involving BRICS and Russia, but we'll save that for when you can take a break next week.
Thank you so much for joining us.
I know it's the wee hours where you are.
Please continue what you do with foreign leaders because the American government is not doing it.
And we'll talk to you again next week.
Excellent. We'll see you then.
Thank you.
Great. A great human being with extraordinary reach around the world.
It's a gift that I get to pick his brain once a week.