Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the latest speech Donald Trump gave that appears to moderate his stance on abortion, if you believe that. They then move to the war in Ukraine and what the possible end game is for both countries, before analyzing the situation in Israel as it gets more and more dire.
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Did you go outside and see the serpent swallowing the sun?
I did not.
I kind of forgot.
Oh, well.
What?
I just forgot.
What do you mean you forgot?
This isn't a bit.
We didn't practice this.
We didn't discuss this before the show started.
What do you mean you forgot?
I don't know.
I'm in L.A.
There's nothing really happened here.
What do you mean what are you what are you missing?
It's it's a it's a it's a once every like couple of decades like phenomenon.
What do you mean?
What are you missing?
I don't know.
I mean, if I was correct in my memory when I saw this the last time it happened, like, you can see the shadows of certain things have, like, a cutout of it, like, you know, because of the moon.
I saw that already 20 years ago, whatever.
I don't know.
You're done.
You're over it.
You're over solar eclipses.
I will say this, I was at the airport dropping somebody off and there was a pilot at the gate waiting to get on and this lady who, you know, listen, I don't want to make any judgments on appearances, but the lady basically was in an age range and I don't know.
A situation where she goes up to the pilot and says, um, what do we have to be worried about from 30,000 feet up when the eclipse happens?
Or is the plane safe?
Something like that.
Something like that.
She was very concerned that the plane was going to have a real problem with an eclipse happening at 30,000 feet.
Well, you don't know!
A phenomenon happens!
And, like, you don't even know what's happening with the sun.
I'm shocked, everyone.
I promise that we did not plan this as a bit.
I went out.
I watched the eclipse.
I was in wonder.
It was beautiful and magnificent.
It made me think about life and the universe and how we're all in this thing together.
You forgot about it like a show.
Like a show on television you weren't even that interested in.
Did you have proper eyewear this time?
Absolutely, this time I had proper eyewear.
All right, because I didn't have eyewear either, so I don't know.
I guess it just didn't seem like it was going to be that big of a deal.
Listen, I'm the guy who we literally flew to St.
Louis specifically to see the last one, so I did it, you know?
I don't know.
I don't know.
You just did it, not interested in it again.
All right, everybody, what a rollicking start to this episode of the Montclair podcast.
I can't believe you just forgot about it.
Wow.
Well, we are recording this for everybody listening.
It is Monday, April 8th.
That is right.
I was outside all morning and early afternoon watching the solar eclipse.
I had a great time.
I'll tell you what isn't having a great time.
The United States of America.
And that's why the Muckrake Podcast is here to do what we do.
Reminder, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast in order to support the show, gain access to the weekly weekender as well as live shows and exclusive analysis.
Today, everybody, man.
A lot of stuff is on the docket.
We have to start, unfortunately, with the Republican nominee Donald Trump.
And Nick, Donald Trump has had, how do I put this, an interesting relationship with the issue of reproductive rights.
As everyone knows, he is responsible for appointing three Supreme Court justices that changed the balance of the court Which led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and in an announcement today that he was going to make public his stance on abortion in the 2024 election, the first thing he wanted people to know is that he held responsibility for the overthrowing of Roe v. Wade.
Many people have asked me what my position is on abortion and abortion rights, especially since I was proudly the person responsible for the ending of something that all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and in fact demanded be ended.
Roe v. Wade.
They wanted it ended.
All legal scholars, Nick.
Oh yeah.
By the way, when you watch this video, it looks like it's in, it's like 10 frames per second.
He looks bad.
Yeah.
It's, it's very disarming to me.
It looks like as if that, that would be what AI is going to look like at some point.
So I don't know.
If you convinced me, by the way, that this statement, which is, was, was heralded by Trump and the people around him as like this massive, massive moment for his campaign and him as a politician.
If you told me this was AI, I would not be all that.
Shocked.
It looks terrible.
It sounds terrible.
But also, all legal scholars wanted to end Roe v. Wade?
That's incredible.
And Nick, do you think the speed with which Biden campaign social media people clipped that Donald Trump's saying, I'm proud to get rid of Roe v. Wade, do you think that they moved so quick it caused a sonic boom?
Do you think that they had to alert the airspace in Washington, D.C.? ?
We can only hope that that happened, but I don't know if it did.
Well, so he started off things, rollicking start once more, saying that he wanted to take credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Nick, according to my notes, over 70% of Americans believe that women deserve to have the right over their own bodies to choose what they do with it.
And the last I checked, most legal scholars believe that Roe v. Wade was settled law.
And that this court was not only stolen, but overstepped its bound.
But that's great, Donald Trump.
Let's see where it goes from here.
I have to imagine that this thing is going to clarify from here.
My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land.
In this case, the law of the state.
Many states will be different.
Many will have a different number of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that's what they will be.
At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people.
This really sounds like AI to me, but this doesn't sound like the will of people.
This sounds like a party that is petrified at how most of these elections have been going against them because of this issue.
Yeah, I mean, for the hard-lining Republicans to get behind this, and we'll talk in a minute about what the divides are within the Republican Party and what they look like and how they operate.
This, to me, sounds like a candidate who wants absolutely nothing to do with one of the cornerstone issues of the 2024 election.
By the way, he's echoing my take on it.
or your faith.
Do what's right for your family and do what's right for yourself.
Do what's right for your children.
Do what's right for our country and vote.
So important to vote.
By the way, he's echoing my take on it.
It's like, do what's right for your family, but don't tell anybody else what their doctors and their families can do in the privacy of their own home.
That That's what's so strange to me about all this.
I know he's doing all the catcalls to make sure the religious right comes out to vote for this, but do you hear that?
It's almost like he's saying both things at the same time.
It sounds like it is tested language that has been run through multiple focus groups, is what it sounds like.
And by a bunch of people and a bunch of think tanks who have gotten together to figure out how in the hell to avoid a major small d democratic reaction to an overstepping of bounds and honestly the carrying out of a drastically unpopular decision.
And we know that's not an opinion of yours, we know that it's fact because... That's actual fact!
Yes.
Well, and we can prove that because he's reading this.
Yeah, he didn't write this.
Just again, so people understand, Donald Trump did not stay up late at night with a pen, with a fountain pen, writing this thing.
This is not how this happens.
Should we keep going?
You want to hear more?
Unfortunately.
Let's go.
All right, here we go.
At the end of the day, it's all about will of the people.
That's where we are right now, and that's what we want, the will of the people.
I want to thank the six justices, Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch, incredible people, for having the courage to allow this long-term, hard-fought battle to finally end.
Yes, they had the courage to insist during their confirmation hearings that they would respect the previous law and sorry decises and you know all that bullshit that they would say under oath and then as soon as they can reverse precedent.
Do you know what this actually is?
I'm going to use this term, and I don't use this lightly.
I mean this sincerely.
This is gaslighting, is what it is.
It's Donald Trump trying to tell the American people who he has been abusing for years, oh, all that happened was that justice was carried out, and we're all very happy about this, and it's over.
We don't need to fight about this anymore.
We don't need to talk about how women are dying.
We don't need to talk about how women are fleeing states and basically being hunted down.
We don't need to talk about how clinics are being shut down or how battles are raging across the country.
It's all settled.
It's all done.
Now we can be a good happy family again.
This is not delusional on his end, but it is literally an abuse of the senses and the twisting of reality that we live in.
Wow, what a great lead-in to the next part of this.
Absolutely.
This 50-year battle over Roe v. Wade took it out of the federal hands and brought it into the hearts, minds, and vote of the people in each state was really something.
Now it's up to the states to do the right thing.
Like Ronald Reagan, I am strongly in favor of exceptions for rape Save our culture?
and life of the mother.
You must follow your heart of this issue, but remember, you must also win elections to restore our culture and, in fact, to save our country, which is currently and very sadly a nation in decline.
Save our culture.
What's he saying there, Jared?
There's a lot of white people who hear exactly what he's saying, and I want to say something else about this, Nick.
This is, and we're going to talk a lot about this today, this is like one of the main themes of this episode, which is how weird And how all over the place Donald Trump's supposed ideology is.
What he just said about how he feels about abortion, that he strongly supports exceptions of rape, incest, and the safety of the mother.
Nick, that makes him a moderate within the Republican Party.
On that issue.
That literally within the GOP makes him a moderate.
Because most of them openly support a nationwide ban on abortion.
If not all abortions, at least within a certain group.
He was thinking about a 15 to 16 week ban.
That's what was being kicked around the campaign for a while before they settled on this.
Which they didn't even settle on anything, right?
What this basically is, is a moderate Republican stance on this thing.
And we'll get into why he's doing it.
It's not out of the generosity of his heart, Nick.
It's because that this is a measured decision on his part.
Right.
They're trying to clean up on aisle six after having... Clean up on aisle six.
Now, let me just throw this out there, because I don't think I had brought this number up before, but in January an article had come out that had said that, do you want to hazard a guess as to how many Pregnancies from rape have occurred in the 18, it's actually been more than 18 months now since the Roe v. Wade was rescinded.
Oh god, even the thought of that makes me ill.
No, I don't know.
Just in the states that pretty much outlawed abortion, there were 64,000 pregnancies from rape. 64,000!
In those 18 months.
So it's like, they wanted to treat, I suppose they wanted to treat this as like, that never really happens, so we need to outlaw abortion.
In reality, it happens all the time, basically.
It would make, if I were a woman, I would probably be a little bit scared to be walking around seeing a number like that.
It's awful, and to be frank, going back to the, and I've been bringing up abuse a lot because I've been coming to an understanding of exactly how this works on like a deeper level.
Nick, what they want to do is they literally want to paper over awful stuff like that.
They want to pretend like it's not a number like that.
They want to pretend like that that doesn't exist.
They want to pretend- all that unpleasant stuff.
And anybody who comes from a family like mine, they understand what I'm saying.
You know?
We just- why do you want to talk about upsetting things like that?
Meanwhile, people are suffering terribly.
They just want to pretend they want they want quote-unquote woke people to shut up and stop talking about these things and what it does to people.
Well, get along if you can just stop talking about this stuff and stop worrying about it and what it's doing.
is honestly so aggressively cruel and dehumanizing based on what you were saying and statistics like that.
Like the idea that we're going to put so many women in these terrible positions and act like it doesn't occur.
Like, the transphobia, uh, you know, homophobia, whatever you want to call it.
You pretend like those things don't exist, literally put millions of human beings, like not only erases their existence, like in totality, it also goes ahead and makes sure that their existences are full of all these indignities and sufferings.
Like it's, it's, it's, it's repellent.
There's another way to put it.
A poster was, I already wrote it as you were saying it, is the racism.
If they, if we stop talking about racism... It'll go away!
Right.
That's their take on it.
When, by the way, for a long time, as you know, and we'll get into some of this stuff later, too, is we thought that the country was progressing in some way.
I think there was a there was a couple of decades in there.
It felt like things were getting a little bit better.
we were inching along you know certain policies seem to be agreeable enough to people but it also meant that people knew that they had they couldn't say all the virulent racist stuff right they knew they had to they had to just shut up and be quiet and they can't say this stuff because they knew that society wouldn't accept it well guess what they're now able to they've been activated again and now they're saying okay what they want to say is that we not that they want to shut up and stop They just want to say all the racist stuff out loud.
Sure.
Sure.
And by the way, speaking of that exact idea, the way things had been changing and the way they'd been moving and progressing.
And a reminder for 70 percent of Americans want women to have reproductive rights.
Right.
Like a vast majority.
Donald Trump.
And this is another clip for those who who haven't heard this, who haven't heard what the media is How do I put this?
Charitably calling an evolving view on abortion.
If you haven't heard Donald Trump's evolving view on abortion, you probably need to listen to this for just a couple seconds.
I'm very pro-choice.
I hate the concept of abortion.
I hate it.
I hate everything it stands for.
I cringe when I listen to people debating the subject.
But you still, I just believe in choice.
I'm pro-life.
You're pro-life, but you do think that there should be exceptions for rape and incest?
Yes, and life, you know, the health of the mother, the death.
Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no, as a principle?
The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment.
For the woman?
Yeah, there has to be some form.
Yeah, if people don't remember that, Donald Trump in the lead up to the 2016 campaign was literally telling the media that he believed that women should be punished for reproductive care.
That was a story, Nick, I don't know if you remember this, it lasted for about two weeks and then like it just got caught up in the maelstrom of all of his other shit.
But if you'll notice, Donald Trump used to be a pro-choice liberal figure in the media.
All of a sudden, it behooves him politically to come out as a pro-life candidate or to even get so aggressive that he says that women and doctors should be punished for this type of care.
The point of it is, going back to what you said about how things have been changing, people like Donald Trump are weather vanes.
They show us exactly where things are moving and where things are.
And there's only one thing that we can really gather from this, Nick, and this is, I'm getting ready to say this, This is horrific, what I'm about to say, and I'm so sorry that I have to shed light on this, but it's important.
You want to know what Donald Trump actually thinks about abortion, Nick?
What?
He literally doesn't give a shit one way or another.
It really does not matter to him in any way, shape, or form.
First of all, because he's not a woman.
And second of all, because he's not capable of giving a shit about that.
He literally will say whatever matters To him getting power and him getting money.
And I know that that's really frightening because it betrays something, which is a sociopathic, psychopathic attitude.
And the idea of a person who could be in charge of the country and not really give a shit about something that's this big of an issue, it reveals something.
This is who Donald Trump is.
This is one of the reasons he's so dangerous, is because what he said today about abortion didn't mean anything, first of all.
It was given to him, like we talked about, by advisors and think tanks in order to mean nothing.
And what did it tell us?
It told us He doesn't care!
He'll say whatever he has to say to get elected and keep the money flowing.
This is a completely, you know, meticulously decided decision in order to try and manipulate people.
There's nothing underneath there.
There's only a sucking wound that needs more and more and more.
And quite frankly, the issues that matter to all of us, matter of fact, the matters that issue to all of us on all sides of the political spectrum, he doesn't Care.
Not even the beginnings of a care.
Well, there's one other clip here I'm going to throw in there that I think included that might speak to that as well, because it might not be exactly accurate what you're saying when you hear what he says here.
I believe this is the clip.
Roe v. Wade.
They wanted it ended.
It must be remembered that the Democrats are the radical ones on this position because they support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month.
The concept of having an abortion in the later months and even execution after birth and that's exactly what it is.
The baby is born, the baby is executed after birth is unacceptable and almost everyone agrees with that.
If he's willing to go out and lie to that extent in that same speech that we've been talking about today, I don't know now if he's just a guy who doesn't give a shit about this.
The thing is just saying whatever they tell him to say.
So first of all, not only is it unacceptable, it doesn't happen.
That's the first thing that we need to say is that that is a fever dream of the right.
It's something they say in order to engage people emotionally.
Nick, the thing I wanted to talk about with all of this, and by the way, he treats this like his endorsements.
Somebody comes to him and says, hey, we got some steaks.
You want to put your name on it?
He's like, why are you asking me?
Just do it.
Well, just pay me.
Yeah, just pay me.
I don't care.
Is your vodka any good?
I don't care.
I don't need to drink it.
I don't need to eat your steak.
Just put my name on it and give me the money, right?
When it comes to this, The Republican Party, because everybody wants to pretend the Republican Party is one big happy family.
It's not.
Here are the major groups.
I was sitting around with this today.
Here are the major groups within the Republican Party.
Evangelicals, Libertarians, Capitalists, Opportunists, and the New Right or Authoritarians, right?
And then you have a smattering of populist people who are at the base, right?
Guess what?
When it comes to abortion, let's go through this list.
Evangelicals, pro-life.
They think it is an affront to God, correct?
Correct.
Okay.
Libertarians.
How do Libertarians feel about abortion?
Well, they better not want the government to be at all involved in this decision at all.
If they are true actual Libertarians, they do not want the government involved in this in any way.
Capitalists.
How do they care about it, Nick?
They probably don't care.
They probably don't care as long as they can make money from it one way or another and it doesn't affect their bottom line.
Opportunist?
Oh, there's plenty of room to make money and gain votes and also become the 45th president of the United States of America, if you want to use it.
How's the new right?
The authoritarians feel about it?
They don't want it around because they're worried about white demographics and white population.
That's what they're concerned about.
So when Donald Trump has to come out and make an official declaration of how he feels about abortion, you have to somehow or another hit as many of these as you possibly can.
Evangelicals don't want to hear from Donald Trump, who they believe to be a divine agent, that he is okay with abortion in cases of incest and rape and the health of the mother.
But guess what?
He's not going to put up with babies being executed after birth.
So what's he doing?
He's going ahead and throwing them some crumbs.
That's what's happening.
It's all just so perfectly put together in order to try and hit all these parts.
We need to talk about this because the question is, who is he trying to speak to in this moderation of his stance on abortion?
Although with that shit he just said about the Democrats, it's not so moderate, but this is obviously trying to speak to somebody and trying to cleave off a few votes here or there somewhere.
Is this the time we could talk about how the women vote in the Republican Party for this?
Okay, so what's your take on how this is talking to them?
Because I actually have a lot of thoughts on this.
Well, you know, I don't even know if I have, like, a take, but that's what hit me the most.
It's like, you know, this is a shrinking demographic for the Republican Party, and the only way they can kind of grow any kind of votes is to be as, you know, out there as they possibly can, as virulent against, you know, abortion as they can.
So, they risk losing some of that that they were trying to, and the only, you know, mind they can make right now is from that end, by trying to go more moderate on it.
So, I suppose they're trying to get some of these women back who are Republicans, who probably left the party even, rather than vote for this party that's so against women's rights.
Well, here in a second we're going to be talking about Trump's stances on Ukraine and Israel and how these things are coming about as well, continuing this theme.
One of the things, Nick, is that we currently have a lot of Americans right now who are trying to decide whether or not they're going to vote for Joe Biden for a second term.
And many of them don't want to because of what's happening in Israel, which I understand where that comes from.
I, and by the way, When we talk about Trump, a reminder to the people who are listening, we're not talking about calculations that Trump has made in his head.
Right?
Because it's not.
It's Steamboat Willie, you know, going down the river in that head.
Like, he's not thinking about this.
There are people out there who are doing the thinking for him, and they put the stuff on the teleprompter.
When he reads it, and it sounds like it's the first time he's ever read it, Nick, it's because it's the first time that he's ever read it.
Okay?
So we're not talking about Trump.
We're talking about the Trump campaign and the effort to get Trump elected.
I think that they are trying to do a quiet campaign to say to people, moderates, some disenchanted liberals who are upset with the woke left, some people who are thinking about not voting for Biden because of what's happened in Gaza.
It is a reassurance.
He's not going to push for a nationwide abortion ban, right?
If you live in certain enclaves in this country, you are not going to be affected by it, which is the continuing authoritarian promise.
Don't worry.
I know this over here is pretty gnarly.
It's not going to happen to you.
And I think part of this is to try to go ahead and push towards what I've been talking about, which is the trajectory of the conservative push within the United States political system, which is luring over centrists, so-called centrists.
It is luring over supposed never-Trump liberals who are trying to figure out what they feel about Biden and what they want to do going forward.
And I think that that's what this is aimed towards.
Good luck, I guess is all I can say.
I think that some of those people are going to cross the lines.
I do.
I think that will happen.
Okay, because I think the other problem here is that women, you know, I think it's 38% of Republican women are in favor of Roe v. Wade, or were in favor of Roe v. Wade.
It's not a plurality.
It's not, you know, it's a chunk.
And it's, and by the way, because women vote more than men, it's a significant chunk for them.
But I think it's really 38% of women who are left in the party.
I honestly do feel like the party has shrunk because of this.
So that's probably another reason why these polls are going to be really hard to read.
It's unclear, you know, exactly what all this means until we get to the day of, you know, because We're going to have to deal with a lot of these weird factors.
And also, what's going on with Israel and Biden could change significantly between now and then.
And that could change the way people want to vote.
A lot of things could change.
And now, speaking of Trump's incoherent positions and things that could possibly change before November, we gotta check in on a couple of the major flashing points in the world.
First off, we have this story in the Washington Post about Trump's quote-unquote secret plan to end the Ukrainian war.
As we've heard for a while now, Nick, it would take him 24 hours.
He would end all the fighting in Ukraine.
And we have this thing that was obviously slipped to the Washington Post by a bunch of Trump insiders.
Also, Nick, do you notice how, like, these mediums, they keep publishing things that have been leaked to them by the Trump organization without even, like, pushing back on them whatsoever?
They just keep repeating them.
It's almost like they're all in on this thing.
But Trump's secret plan To end the war in Ukraine, it boils down to this, Nick.
It's really complicated.
It's so, so complicated, is what it is.
Basically, he would give Russia Donbass and Crimea, and give and cede a chunk of Ukraine to Russia, rewarding Vladimir Putin for his actions in invading them.
Trump has now come out and said, quote, many Ukrainians want to be in Russia.
Which it's wonderful that he thinks that, and that's how he looks at it.
This is quite the secret plan, don't you think?
Oh.
I mean, and the other part of the plan is he'll just stop giving all aid to Ukraine.
All aid.
All aid would be done.
Sure.
And that would end it pretty quick.
But, you know, how do we know that the people in the Donbass region, and even Crimea, want to be ruled by Russia?
How do we know this, Jared?
How did this information come out?
Do you remember?
Are you talking about, for real, or are you talking about within this secret plan?
Well, I'm just talking about, I guess, sort of, for real, when they're referencing this, because there was a poll done, and Putin likes to come out and say, we asked the people that are there.
You know, he has control over Crimea since 2015.
We asked them, they said, sure, we'd love to have the Russians in control of this area.
Like, that is, you know, what they're basing that little nugget he said on.
It's frightening to imagine, you know, as if, you know, they made up some bullshit poll that nobody actually had a say in, and that's going to be their predicate for being able to stay there.
You know, I don't understand how even the moderate conservatives, certainly the really conservative people in the Republican Party, Should have in the cockles of their brains uh some notion of Soviet Russia being evil and like they should we shouldn't allow this like I don't know where the hawks went from not that long ago in the 80s.
Well Lindsey Graham is super upset but he can't get him here and He's like, I don't know what Donald Trump's doing.
I mean, he's super, super upset about this because he... By the way, he is.
You don't have to make fun.
He is.
Lindsey, excuse me.
He is!
No, he's literally upset about this, but it doesn't matter because this hasn't... Like, he doesn't even understand what's happening within the Republican Party and that they have become not just authoritarian, but also aggressively isolationist, which is what Russia and China and everybody that Trump is sort of trafficking with now wants.
And by the way, Nick, that poll, even though it was doctored, Trump wouldn't even need that poll because instinctually he relates to Vladimir Putin.
He is instinctually an authoritarian dictatorial type, which means that whatever Putin would do, Xi Jinping would do, Kim Jong-un would do, like what any of them would do, he's totally fine with.
He loves it.
So obviously he thinks that that's the way to take care of this thing.
Meanwhile, what is he telling us already?
He's going to go ahead and give Russia a victory if he's elected president of the United States of America.
That's what's already on the board.
Nick, we do have to talk about this, though.
Speaking of Ukraine, Things are getting rough over there.
Things are really, really tough.
Let's look at the facts.
Here we are a couple years after this thing started.
Russia's economy, Nick, it was going to be destroyed.
Oh my God, you weren't going to be able to live in Russia by the time those sanctions took place.
Oh, it turns out, by the way, I'm just going to pat myself a little bit on the back, it didn't hurt their economy because it was just corruption throughout the West.
That continues to circulate and China took care of whatever hurt them there because it really wasn't ever actually sanctions in the first place.
Second of all, Ukraine's counteroffensive stalled, didn't work.
Now Russia's bringing up 115,000 more people, getting ready for another offensive on their own.
We've already thrown tens of billions of dollars.
We're going to throw all that towards them again.
Nick, I look at this thing.
I don't know how it gets better.
Emmanuel Macron is now talking about having troops in Ukraine, NATO troops.
Putin is talking constantly about nukes.
All of our economies have now been turned toward defense and weapons.
I look at this now, and I don't know how you feel about it.
I feel like the one turning point was the Wagner coup that got stopped.
That they just decided that they weren't going to go to Moscow and take over the government.
When that ended, I just see this whole thing now as a big, giant mess.
And I have to tell you, Trump's secret plan, it ain't so secret, it ain't a plan, and it really is not going to address any of this.
Right.
And I think without the help of the United States, if Trump were to win again and do this plan, then Russia probably just follows the same script that happened in Afghanistan.
Now the only thing that's different about it that is that Afghanistan was a lot farther away and so here because it's a neighboring country they it's probably a little bit easier supply lines whatever to to sustain this kind of a thing but like obviously this is not going to go on for 10 years like it did in Afghanistan I don't think um I don't think that they could sustain it anyway um and I obviously it seems like Zelensky's plan was to just simply wait this thing out and and stall it until
Until I guess what Putin gets bored and finally says I can't do this anymore because remember what happens after the Soviet Union pulls out of Afghanistan is they basically dissolve and lose their entire country.
I think he thought that they could repel the entire thing and then a counter offensive could change it.
I also think that with the way that the West treated Zelensky, I think he kind of thought that this thing was going to continue on the way that it was.
By the way, I want to go ahead and give blame where it deserves.
The idea, and you brought up Afghanistan, of course, the Soviet Afghanistan disaster, was in part funded because America wanted as many Afghani people to kill as many Russians as they possibly could and basically bury them, you know, in a quagmire.
That's a lot of what's happened in Ukraine.
Like even military specialists have said all along, like there's not a whole lot of ways that Ukraine wins this war outside of a possible coup within Russia or some sort of a situation that makes them pull out of it.
Now we've gotten to a point where nobody has any sort of off ramps towards this thing ending, particularly in a way in which Russia, you know, leaves and and respects its neighbor.
We also now have this escalation where we have Macron out there.
By the way, people say that Macron is doing this on his own.
If you think that the president of France is going out talking about NATO troops in Ukraine without talking to NATO allies, You're out of your mind.
That is not how any of this works.
He's what's called a mad dog.
And what they do with a mad dog is they say, hey, go out there and say a bunch of shit.
We're going to say, oh my God, we can't believe he's saying that.
While meanwhile, you're giving a message to Putin.
That was the entire point of why he did that.
There are no answers here outside of escalation, and Donald Trump certainly isn't going to fix it, but some other more serious people probably need to start figuring out how to fix this thing.
I agree, because it can't keep going on like this.
Now, you know, because by the way, you know, it's interesting, it'd be worth like studying a little bit more of Afghanistan.
The other thing is with the terrain, like it was easier for them to defend as well.
But it'd be interesting to see exactly how that went, because I don't think that there would have been that many more troops in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets than there are in Ukraine against Russians now.
And they held on.
And again, they held on because For the record, and I'm glad you brought that up, we don't know what in the hell is going to happen with Ukraine after this situation goes down.
The amount of money and weapons that have been circulated throughout there, there hasn't been a lot of foresight into that.
The amount of weapons trafficking that's going to come out of Ukraine after this, and not to mention radicalization, we have no idea.
This was another flashpoint that has just gotten completely out of control and nobody understands how to bring this thing to an end or how to make something better out of it.
And by the way, don't be surprised if they even get like some sort of ceasefire and then Putin violates it very quickly to check that too.
So that could be something that, you know, they would do.
I could see Putin actually doing it to make it seem like Biden gets a win just before the election.
And then like four days before the election, he goes back in again to show that Biden hasn't any strength and all that bullshit.
So it's like this this guy is just living to make the United States lives hell.
Well, speaking of authoritarian leaders that are making the United States lives hell, let's go to Israel and Gaza.
Let's find out what Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, thinks about Israel and Gaza, which of course is just an absolute bleeding, shameful wound.
Let's see if he takes this seriously, Nick.
This is from an article talking about his position.
When asked by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, we love Hugh Hewitt around here, on Thursday whether he was 100% with Israel, the former president did not give a direct answer but emphasized the optics of the ongoing conflict, saying the country is, quote, losing the PR war.
Quote, they're releasing the most heinous, most horrible tapes of buildings falling down, Trump said, and people are imagining there's a lot of people in those buildings and they don't like it.
And I don't know why they released, you know, wartime shots like that.
To me, it doesn't make them look tough.
Trump said his advice to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be to, quote, get it over with and, quote, get back to normalcy.
Quote, I'm not sure that I'm loving the way they're doing it.
You have to have a victory and it's taking a long time.
Once more, as part of the theme of the show, Nick, he doesn't give a shit about what's actually happening over there.
He cares about the PR of it.
He cares about how it looks.
That's who you're talking about having President of the United States of America.
Someone who doesn't care what happens and what's done to people, only cares about how it looks and how it comes across.
That's all he cares about.
You also need to have a um what's the scientific term yes a functioning brain to be able to god on what's happening there you need to be able to there's there's a lot of levels to this he doesn't have the uh focus or the ability to comprehend any of this stuff anyway even if he was quote-unquote interested in this so um you know but you're right it's a perfect encapsulation of him that he would sort of look at this for the PR lens uh of which he isn't lying Right?
The world is turning against Israel because of what they're doing and part of these videos that they're releasing are a huge part of that.
By the way, and they're having, you know, massive protests against Netanyahu as well.
I just, for the life of me, cannot understand.
Listen, I guess I can understand how he's ignoring this without any kind of backing from the actual country and maintaining power.
I'm astounded that he is still in power at this point and hasn't been pressured to step down and find someone else who could, you know, Come to a resolution.
Well, for those who maybe turn this off or aren't paying attention to it, Netanyahu, first of all, is an absolute crook who, much like Donald Trump, is absolutely desperate to stay in power because otherwise his ass might end up in jail.
Not just because of what he's done in Gaza, although, again, he deserves to be hauled off to the Hague, but because of what he did before.
He is corrupt.
His entire inner circle has been corrupt forever.
It's the most open secret within Israel.
And they've just absolutely schooled the system in order to keep themselves in power.
Now, Nick, I gotta tell you, one of the things that I'm starting to kind of wrap my head around, Because now Biden, every time Biden has to talk about him, and I think it is both one, the disrespect that Netanyahu has shown for the United States, like the complete lack of communication he's shown for the United States.
I think it's also the political ramifications of it.
Biden is now looking at multiple states and multiple like big chunks of the electorate that are kind of not just turned off by this, but like really, really considering not voting for him.
I think that you're starting to see from the Biden administration, they have to every time they talk about this, they have to say, this is awful and we don't have control over it.
And Netanyahu is completely out of control.
We need someone else to do this.
There's a lot of hints toward regime change in a way that I did not expect.
On top of that, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi of the Democratic Party have come out, started to talk about conditions for giving Israel weapons.
By the way, on this note, I'm going to write a big article about the AI that Israel is using.
It is nightmarish.
If people haven't already seen that, they should look up Lavender.
One of the conditions is the end of using artificial intelligence to target people.
It should be a war crime.
And the fact that Pelosi and Schumer have started to come out and say this stuff, that is a major sea change.
And you know that as well as I do.
This is not what Schumer and Pelosi do.
But Nick, one of the things I'm starting to understand, And, you know, we saw Israel strike the Iranian embassy in Syria, which we now have been looking around wondering, is Iran going to hit Israel?
Iran has had to have the cooler head in all of this.
They reportedly told the United States that they were not going to strike back as long as the United States would get a ceasefire in Israel, which is very non-Iranian for the record in this entire situation.
I think Netanyahu knows that he has to have war and conflict in order to keep power.
And I think he's more than willing to start a regional war that would threaten a world war, quite frankly.
I think he's more than okay to do that.
And I think in that way, Netanyahu is cut from the same sort of cloth as Donald Trump.
Doesn't give a shit, only cares about his own fate, and is willing to put everybody else's on the line in order to save his own skin.
Right, and to get back to the Biden administration and their thing, they're dipping their toe in being much more and more critical of Netanyahu and you'll see that continue to get stronger as the days go by because they're going to realize that the polling is better for them when they are stronger against what Netanyahu is doing.
So, it was shocking when you first started to hear that.
Schumer was already shocking enough when he was calling for Netanyahu to step down.
But now that Biden is getting into it, I don't think it's going to be that long until they get to the calls for, we are going to stop supplying weapons to you unless you have in earnest talks.
Now, there have been talks in Cairo about trying to get some sort of ceasefire and Hamas has come out and said they're not going to accept that because You know, they're going to want concessions that probably aren't going to be acceptable to anybody either.
So, I don't know how this is going to work.
It really is frustrating to me because I wish there was a clear path if someone could say this is exactly what Biden could do to put enough leverage on Israel to completely stop and come up with a ceasefire.
It feels like the only solution is they need to have somebody else in power who would be able to do that.
And Netanyahu is not that guy for all the reasons that you listed.
I feel like that's got to be the first thing, is maybe Biden ends up ultimately saying, Netanyahu, you have to step down.
I would not be surprised if three, four weeks, five weeks from now, it gets to that point, having dipped the toe, getting the whole foot in, and then the next thing you know, they're completely against the Israeli government.
Well, we've already heard a testing of that from Schumer, who said that there needs to be elections in Israel.
Which is, you know, sort of hinting around and massaging at the idea of a new leader dealing with this.
I've talked about it a little bit on this podcast before.
Netanyahu and the Zionist project within Israel has incredible ties to Russia.
It doesn't make sense in our political spectrum because we have like, you know, this sort of, you know, sort of this back and forth idea that if you're getting money from America and you're such close allies with America and have so much sort of sway in America, you obviously aren't with the Russians.
He's been playing both sides of the equation for forever.
And that Zionist project, particularly under Netanyahu, has incredibly strong roots to the exact same ideology that led to the invasion of Ukraine.
So one of the things is...
We can't simply say, oh, Biden's doing this or they're doing that and it all works like old politics.
It is supremely complicated.
And this isn't, and I hate to call it a game board because nothing is game-ish about it as people are dying, but just to use the analogy of it, this game board doesn't work the way that it used to work.
Things are changing constantly.
And what is actually taking place in this geopolitical spectrum is so, so complicated.
And I say all of this, Nick, for this purpose.
I'm not sitting here telling you what you have to do in November.
I'm not telling you that you have to go vote for Joe Biden.
I've told everybody who's asked me.
I'm going to vote for Joe Biden, and I'm not going to feel good about it.
And I'm going to do it with an understanding that I'm voting against Donald Trump.
I am voting to tap the brake on authoritarianism, and I'm going to work my ass off outside of the voting booth to make things better.
To make not Biden better, but maybe the Democratic Party or at least American politics better.
Whatever I have to do, I will do that.
But Nick, based on everything that we've talked about today, everything that we've seen for the past eight years, That complicated game board that we're talking about, for all of the reasons we've documented today, and so many more, Donald Trump is not the fucking person to handle this.
He is not the person to be involved in any of these complex maneuvers, and if anything, it has shown that his instincts and his loyalties do not lie on the right side of any of these issues.
Absolutely.
I mean, especially with the Russia stuff, because you don't like to always say this, I feel like there's a lot more, much more of a collusion going on anyway there.
And at the very least, he's beholden to them probably for money.
Oh, I don't disagree on that front.
I don't, I don't disagree with that.
No.
No, no.
Yeah.
Either way.
But, and we have to, we can't forget like from an Israeli standpoint, there are over a hundred hostages still being held as far as we know.
And if that was any part of a priority to get them back, Israel would not be doing what they're doing right now.
And they're also hiding behind the notion of, you know, tragedies happen in a war, in wartime.
And you know, the people who were working for the, to bring food to the Palestinians got killed in their car on a targeted strike.
But this keeps happening.
These mishaps keep happening.
Put heavy quotes on mishaps because you don't accidentally kill aid workers when you track their car and shoot three separate missile strikes in order to kill people and then the people helping the people that you've killed.
Well, here's the problem.
I'm still trying to picture that scenario where they did do it on purpose to do something, which I can't quite follow.
There's simply probably a lot of incompetence as well.
They were shooting people waving white flags who were hostages who were coming back as Israelis, and they shot them dead.
I think incompetence is part of it, but I don't think that's all of it.
Yeah I mean listen okay so is all right it's the scene uh sir these aid workers are in the car leaving should we destroy them or should we let them go and the guy goes destroy them like all right I don't know if that's really I think that's too simplistic I think that's a that's a movie scene I don't think that's what's happening I think that they've created, I mean we know they've created kill zones where they literally don't ask who it is or what it is, they just murder them in cold blood and call them a terrorist.
In all these situations they've created a kill zone basically in Gaza where anything that moves is fair game whether it's a man, woman, or a child.
And I think that's where that comes from.
I think it's just sort of a lack of restraint and an overabundance of cruelty.
I don't think it's somebody like trying to be an evil mastermind, although we have seen a fair amount of cruelty in this thing.
Yeah, and it's those kind of tragedies that happen that would instantly trigger, okay, we need a ceasefire for two weeks to kind of get this sorted out, figure out a chance.
I'm sorry to say this.
These systems are in place.
And that is absolutely not happening either.
And that's what's so frightening about all of this.
And it's like, there's just, it's a mix of a bunch of things that need to stop.
But if your answer on what's happening in Gaza is all of it, I mean, I'm sorry to say this.
I know this is brutal.
There are so many people who are having like forced amputations because they've been in handcuffs and zip ties too long.
That's how they're treating people over there.
If your answer isn't something needs to be done about this and it needs to be better and your answer is, ah, the PR is bad, you know, like they, they need to stop letting videos out of what's happening.
You're an authoritarian.
You're a dictator in waiting.
And like, that's what we need to understand is that Donald Trump is not the guy to be handed the keys in these situations.
All right, everybody, that's going to bring us to the end of this episode of the MuttGregg Podcast.
We're going to be back on Friday with The Weekender.
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