Scott Horton and James Smith dissect Donald Trump's legacy, critiquing his administration's "anti-insurgency" airstrikes that killed tens of thousands while praising his rhetorical restraint on new wars. They expose how the military-industrial complex pushed a trillion-dollar nuclear arsenal expansion under Obama, compromising the New START treaty to appease corporate interests in New Mexico. The hosts argue that fabricated narratives like the Steele dossier framed Trump for treason to block détente with Russia, warning that the treaty's expiration threatens an omnicide event between the U.S. and Russia. Ultimately, they contend Trump's true legacy lies in shifting right-wing rhetoric against interventionism despite executing a foreign policy driven by strategic incoherence and corporate capture. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Why We Need to Roll Back the State00:14:31
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I have an early Christmas gift for all of you good people, and that, of course, is a Scott Horton episode.
Now I know what you're thinking.
Isn't this the same thing I got you last year for Christmas?
And also, didn't the government ban Christmas this year?
You're right on both counts.
Yes, it is.
And yes, they did.
But the government has not yet banned Scott Horton from speaking the truth.
Expect that in late 2021.
But for now, he is still legally allowed to tell you good people what's going on.
So what I wanted to do, as I'm sure some of you remember, I don't even know if Scott remembers because he's been writing so much and podcasting so much, but four years ago, we did an episode during Obama's lame duck session called The Legacy of Barack Obama.
And so what I wanted to do was an episode about Trump, the legacy of Donald Trump, and just talk kind of about the bigger picture of what the Trump presidency means, what we think it will mean going forward, what type of job he did.
And I thought no one better to do this with again than the great Scott Horton, who of course is the author of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can check out his work at anti-war.com, thelibertarianinstitute.org, the Scott Horton show, if you really want to know what's going on in foreign policy is the best thing I could advise.
And rumor has it, there is a new book coming out, which, of course, when that does come out, we will have you back on and we'll talk all about that.
Anything else that you want to mention before we get started?
I don't think so.
Did you say anti-war.com?
I did indeed.
Okay, there you go.
That's the most important project on the internet right there, everybody.
Yeah, I completely agree.
Okay, so when we did the Barack Obama legacy episode, I asked you at the beginning for a grade to give Obama a grade.
Now, I gave Obama an F as president, and you said, no, I'm going to give him a D minus.
I don't know if you remember this, but you said, you know, you said you have to grave on a presidential curve.
Otherwise, we would just give everyone an F and the grades would be meaningless.
And you said, well, George W. Bush is responsible for a million dead people in Iraq.
So Obama, at least he, you know, signed the Iran deal and normalized relations with Cuba.
So he gets a D minus for not having quite as many corpses on his conscience as George W. Bush.
Although, as the war in Yemen has continued on in the four years since Obama's been gone, he might be working.
He might be working to wrestle that F away from George W. Bush, or not away from him, but to share it with him.
So I'm curious, with that standard in mind, judging on a presidential curve.
So, you know, over the last 120 years, Fs have to go to like, you know, Woodrow Wilson, LBJ, Truman, George W. Bush.
Am I missing an F in there?
Who else gets a flat F as president?
Oh, Nixon.
Oh, yeah, Nixon.
Well, Nixon shook hands with Mao, but man, he killed so many Vietnamese and Laotians and Cambodians.
It's just, he's in the deepest pit of hell for that.
No question.
Yeah.
And he also, I mean, if you want to talk, because obviously the killing people has to come first, but like with Woodrow Wilson, I mean, you also got to say, like, created the Federal Reserve and created the income tax and these things that really just destroyed the future of the country.
And for Nixon, taking us off the gold standard, I know that's not as bad as killing somebody, but man, did that allow us to kill a whole lot more people afterwards?
So that's that's pretty bad too.
And of course, George W. Bush has got to, I mean, I don't know how much worse a president, well, let me not even go down that path.
I guess it could always be worse, but he's pretty damn bad.
So, in that, you know, in the through the lens of that presidential curve, I'm inclined to give Donald Trump.
I'm ranging between D plus, C minus.
What do you think?
What grade would you give Donald Trump?
Well, first of all, I don't remember this episode from four years ago.
I know you do.
I know you don't.
And if you ask me if I gave Obama a D minus, I'd deny it.
You're a liar, Smith.
No, I must have said that.
And, you know, the Iran nuclear deal, it was pretty important for what it was.
But then you see how tenuous it was and how easy it was for his successor to cancel it.
But it was a pretty big deal taking the issue of war between us and Iran off the table and truly establishing once and for all that there never was a secret parallel weapons program anywhere or anything like this.
We absolutely know everything there is to know about Iran's nuclear program.
IAEA has verified every inch of it.
So, eh.
But so on that same curve, it's got to be at least a D.
It can't be a D plus.
Maybe it's not a D minus because he only had four years and not eight.
I mean, you got to give him the Afghanistan deal.
We'll talk about that.
But, and look, people say his fans say, and I'm glad that this is the talking point.
It's very important that this is the point, that he did not start any new wars.
It'd be a lot worse if they were going around going, yeah, Donald Trump kicked ass for four years, man.
And they're not saying that.
You know, they're saying he finally had a little bit of restraint, which is not really true, but at least they like that narrative.
So I'm definitely for that.
Donald Trump, his rhetoric against the Middle East wars are the best thing that ever happened in the American right wing since World War II, probably, in terms of getting them to think right about these issues.
You know, in the 1990s, there were complaints about, well, we don't want to be the policeman of the world.
And, you know, we don't want to be overburdened with nation building, some stuff like that.
But Donald Trump has just ratcheted up those kind of sentiments on the right to such a degree that it's, you know, better than any magic wish come true that we could have ever come up with of how to get them to agree with us, Dave.
I mean, honestly, is having him run.
So that's pretty important.
But in terms of the number of human beings he killed and the rate at which he killed them and the rest of it, the guy's a monster.
He's absolutely a monster.
He belongs buried under the Supermax prison with George Bush and Barack Obama.
And, you know, I must, I don't know what I was thinking that day because I must have misunderestimated Barack Obama's death toll.
Because I think you probably could chalk up about half a million in Syria alone to him.
You know, almost, I mean, within 100,000 or 200,000 of W. Bush, right?
He's just almost equivalent.
You know, Bush started two major wars, really three, Somalia.
But then Obama came in and Obama started Libya and Syria and Iraq War III and Yemen and spread special operations forces down, you know, through Mali and Chad and Nigeria and Niger and Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone and the Cameroon.
I mean, this is out of control now.
This is all.
And then so Trump comes in.
I kind of think of Donald Trump as like the greatest practical joke on America, right?
Like somebody had to save us from the Clintons and the bushes.
Somebody had to stop them.
But this was the only guy that we had.
This was the best that we could do.
Well, this guy's famous enough and he's rich enough.
He's tall enough and he's brash enough, basically.
He's mean enough to go in there and just trash Jeb Bush.
This is your alpha male?
I don't think so.
Push him right over.
And then who are you left with?
Marco Rubio?
Now this is your guy, you know?
But then what do we get?
We all wanted Ron Paul, but we didn't get Ron Paul.
We didn't even get Rand Paul.
We got a Sean Hannity fan.
That's all we got.
Half the time, Sean Hannity fans want to use hydrogen bombs to kill every last Muslim in the world.
And half the time, they want to forget that that part of the world even exists at all.
And maybe they could be appealed to with a line about how it's too expensive to intervene over there.
Yeah, it's actually, it's the perfect description of Sean Hannity fan because really what Sean Hannity fans are is purely reactionary.
So it's like, well, what did Obama want to do?
Well, we want the opposite of that.
And it's like, oh, did Obama get us in a war in Syria?
Well, then we don't want to be in no stupid Syria war.
Did Obama sign a deal with Iran?
Well, then we don't want no stupid Iran deal.
But of course, you can flip it around.
You can flip it around on any one of those two, right?
Obama did something.
It wasn't enough.
He intervened in Syria, but he didn't kill Assad and overthrow the government, which is what he should have done.
So they can flip either way on that.
But you're right.
I mean, and that's exactly the level of thought that goes into it, too.
You know, this is the way Donald Trump approaches these things.
So essentially, no matter what he believed, and I think he always was kind of a Democrat.
So he wasn't really for George W. Bush and Bush's wars.
But whatever he believed, he knew that he had to use W. Bush against Jeb, you know.
And after all, who could deny that the Middle East wars have been an absolute disaster?
So it became a useful point for him to say, like, look, there's no point in pretending this anymore.
Mitt Romney lost because he wouldn't admit it.
You know, the next Republican's going to win has got to admit that Bush blew it, you know, and it did work for him.
But he never believed in peace.
He never read the Constitution and the anti-federalist papers and thought about like what it really means to have a limited constitutional republic, you know, centered on liberty.
And I'll tell you in the campaign of 2015 and 16, he never used the words freedom or liberty once.
You know, maybe if someone asked him a question, he repeated it back or something, but that wasn't his thing, you know?
No, he doesn't think like that.
You know, it's funny, even when he was when he was railing against the lockdowns over the last year, he'd always say things like, we got to open the economy.
People got to work.
We got to get the stock market up.
He always looks at things through the business perspective and never once, at least I've never heard him ever once make an appeal just to basic liberty.
The idea that you have a right to do this and no one has a right to tell you you can't.
He doesn't.
Well, that's an abstraction.
Yeah.
He doesn't deal in abstractions.
You know, that's, you know, a concept.
What's a concept?
You know, shine my shoes.
This guy's whole thing, you know?
And so, you know, so this is the best we could do.
He got in.
He said, I want out of Syria.
His military told him, no, we want to stay in Syria.
So he said, okay.
And then a year later, he goes, I want out of Syria.
And then his military said, no, we want to stay in Syria.
He goes, oh, okay.
And then, so that was the best that we could do, Dave.
Is what we had to throw our wrench in the war machine was that he did make significant progress in the minds of the American right.
And he did, I think, always disbelieve in the mission.
Because remember now, they didn't just say we got to defeat the bad guys in Afghanistan.
They said, We're going to turn Afghanistan into the Netherlands.
You know, we're going to make it a Westphalian Western European nation state with American values and an American Bill of Rights and a centralized government in Kabul and all these things.
And any Sean Hannity fan can tell you that that's stupid, dude.
That's not going to happen in Afghanistan.
A nation the size of Texas in the center of Asia on the far side of mountains from the sea.
I mean, just stop.
It ain't going to happen, right?
Any Donald Trump could tell you that.
So he never believed in it.
In fact, if you go back to 2012, when the generals were trying to continue the surge that they promised would be over by the summer of 2012, or actually by the summer of 2011, in 2012, Obama gave him a few more months, but in 2012, he was saying, nope, you promised it would be temporary.
Now we're drawing down the surge.
And Trump, who hated Obama clearly, took Obama's side on Twitter against the generals and said, you know, this is make America great again.
Why are we wasting our effort over there?
And so when he came into power, I'm not exactly sure what is, you know, the dynamic here.
I would love to interview this guy someday.
But he got Zame Khalilzad, this extremely important and powerful neoconservative from, you know, original friend of Richard Pearl and then from the University of Chicago when they studied under Leo Strauss in the late 60s and worked for Scoop Jackson, joined the Defense Department under Ronald Reagan.
And you'll notice in the new book that he just comes up over and over and over and over and over again from 1979 all the way through.
Not that he's the master planner of any of this stuff, but he's just involved constantly in all the worst decisions the American government has made in the last 40 years.
But anyway, Trump hired him to make peace with the Taliban.
And I'm totally making this up based on what I've read from stupid Bob Woodward books and other books like that, where you really hear from the principles about how these relationships work inside the White House, the National Security Council at that level.
And I'm thinking it must have been something like Khalilzad made Trump promise it.
I worked directly for you, not for the Secretary of State.
And you 1,000% got my back to see this through.
And if so, then I promise I'll see this thing through for you.
That must have been a hell of a handshake.
I mean, would you accept a handshake from Donald Trump that he's got your back?
Somehow this worked.
Somehow this happened.
And Zame Khalilzad went.
The Deal They Signed in Afghanistan00:03:24
See, Bush and Obama always said, of course, we'll deal with the Taliban as soon as they're done making peace with Kabul.
Yeah, okay.
In other words, never, right?
And of course, the government in Kabul that we've created there, they have no interest in making peace with the Taliban that's going to encourage the Americans to leave and stop.
They lose their security force.
Yeah, exactly.
They rather keep us by not making peace.
So Trump and Khalilzad said, those days are over, man.
No more of that BS pretext.
Taliban, here's the deal.
We will pull our troops out.
You guys swear to keep Al-Qaeda and ISIS down and out.
And you got to really mean it.
And then that's the deal they signed.
With the only other condition was you have to promise to talk to Kabul, not we need a deal with Kabul before we go or some kind of stupid poison pill like that.
It was as boiled down, as simple as could be.
They signed it last leap day, January the 29th, 2020.
But then the deal is, of course, though, there had to be a poison pill somewhere, Dave.
The deal is we don't have to fulfill our end of it until May 2021.
And President-elect Biden has already made it clear to leave Afghanistan.
In fact, he talks about it like it's 2009.
And he wants to be able to do that.
Which he might in his defense, he might believe it's 2009.
I'm not sure he knows the difference.
Yeah.
And he's saying, no, we want, you know, the minimal option, which is 10 or 20,000 so-called counterterrorism troops to stay indefinitely, which means if he sticks with that, that means the deal is off.
And that means the Taliban goes back to war.
And the Kabul government is screwed, man.
I mean, the Taliban is so powerful now.
If they go to full-scale war against the Kabul government, I don't know what's keeping them from marching right into downtown Kabul other than the airstrikes.
They could probably walk one fighter into the capital city one at a time and then take it over the day after tomorrow or something.
I mean, I don't know what they think they're doing over there, but they're in a pretty untenable position.
At the same time, though, the military's point of view is they got that Bagram air base there north of the Shamali plane and they're keeping it forever and they're never giving it up.
But what use do you and I and the American people get out of it?
Nothing.
Other than a possible tripwire for war with Iran or Russia or China.
But does it give us a strategic advantage in a war with Iran or Russia or China?
No.
In fact, I'll tell you what's the best thing about the American occupation of Afghanistan, Dave, is the fact that our guys are there, Bagram, where the Iranians can find them helps keep the peace between America and Iran because our government has basically handed them some American GIs as hostages so that if we start a war with them, we got too many guys within range.
Same as our bases in Qatar and Bahrain and Kuwait and are still 5,000 guys in Iraq.
But other than that, I mean, if something went wrong, they're right there adjacent in a place where, again, we're talking about the center of Asia, as far as you could get from North America as possible, where we have no real strategic interest whatsoever and where it could cause a problem with these neighboring states, at least at some point.
But what do you think?
Like they're going to keep long-range bombers and nukes there?
Hell no.
There's security for that in Afghanistan.
So what benefit is it even of the strategic air command?
Stress-Free Engagement Ring Shopping00:02:12
Nothing, right?
What does any part of the American nation or even national security state get out of it, really, other than a budget for one base commander and his people, you know?
Right.
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Giving Trump Credit for Afghanistan00:15:25
So, I mean, I suppose we have to give Trump some credit for at least wanting to do the right thing in Afghanistan, talking about doing the right thing in Afghanistan.
But it does seem like he at least wasn't wise enough or didn't care enough to set it up in the right way where he actually could have done it.
Because again, it's like, you know, he had time.
He had four years in there where he could have done this.
He could have gotten moving on it immediately.
And like you said, he waits till earlier this year to set it up for next year.
And now it's handed off to Biden.
So now it's all going to be for nothing.
And I don't know, you know, he has to at least get part of the blame for that.
I don't know how much you can blame him for Biden undoing his deal, but it's tough, you know, as me and you have talked about on the phone before, and I've talked about on my show, you've talked about on your show, just like, you know, putting McGregor in there as the highest level of advisor to the defense secretary after the election.
And you just sit there and you're like, so you're telling me you know the guy to put in there and you wait till now when you had four years when no one could have said anything if you had done it immediately.
I mean, if you had done this in February of 2016, it would have been like, yep, that's what I was elected to do.
And now I'm doing it.
So instead, we get too little too late.
And seriously, man, I mean, this can't be overstated that he ran on three major planks: trade protectionism, anti-immigration, and end the Middle East wars.
The one thing that he has total power over is ending wars.
And I mean, and not only that, but it's brilliant politics.
If you really, you know, he never said, I'm a true conservative like Ted Cruz.
He had this gimmick that he, at least for a while, that he was trying to be the president of all Americans.
Well, what better nuclear hand grenade to throw into the Democratic Party than to have the Republican president end all the wars?
Because the entire left half of the Democratic Party hates the wars.
No matter how many, you know, Obama started.
They suffer them at best.
You know, the liberals and the Democrats are pretty bad, but the progressives and the leftists, they hate this stuff.
And for Trump to do that would have been great sabotage in terms of, you know, his own politics.
But just think of how easy it would have been to say, especially for him to say, look, George Bush is a big dummy.
Barack Obama is a big weakling.
And so they screwed up everything and they started a bunch of wars that they didn't know how to finish.
And I'm telling you right now, I know how to finish them, but it's not worth the cost.
We can't afford the price to pay to tie up all these loose ends.
We're just going to call it off.
You got a problem with that?
Blame Bush and Obama.
And after all, Donald Trump's not even a governor, much less a senator.
None of this was his fault.
None of it was his fault.
And he could have just come in and said, look, you wanted a clean break.
Here's your clean break.
Admiral, sail home.
General, fly home.
Fill your boats and planes with sailors and with Marines and soldiers.
And that's it.
It's over.
And he could have done it.
He could have done it.
And they wouldn't have been able to withstand it.
And then, but the thing is, of course, back to the fact that we're talking about just some random Hannity fan here, not a guy with any knowledge or any real principle at all.
You know, there are places in our culture where he could have found good, qualified, conservative-leaning and libertarian-leaning anti-interventionists to serve in his government.
But he never heard of any of them.
And so what did he do?
He went and hired a bunch of Marine generals.
They were all Marine generals, except the one Army general, McMaster, right?
The rest of them were all Marine generals.
Well, what should we do?
And so all that happened was they gave him his marching orders that we have to keep everything going as it is.
And he begrudgingly went along with it.
Occasionally, he would yell at them and say, I disbelieve the things you say, but he would never stop them, never undo it, you know?
And so in 2017, he came in and the first thing they did, this is in the last book, Fool's Aaron.
The first thing they did was the general of the Afghan war went and testified before John McCain's Armed Services Committee and said, we need way more troops right now.
Well, and Trump got mad.
I was like, what are you guys trying to roll me?
I just got here the other day.
And you're already going behind my back to John McCain, demanding more troops and all this.
And so they had, and I knew because I was talking with my buddy Mark Perry, the great Pentagon reporter, and I was writing my book about it.
So I was on his case constantly.
Like, where are we at on this?
What's going on?
And the generals were saying, oh, we're going to present Trump with the escalation plan any day now, any day now.
And then he kept putting them off.
And he kept telling them no.
And they kept saying, well, we're going to have it next month.
Well, we're going to have it next month.
We're going to have it before the NATO meeting.
Well, we're going to have it after the NATO meeting.
And he kept putting them off and putting them off until finally in August, once they got rid of Stephen Bannon and that was the last chance they had.
And then they took, I mean, this is one for the history books, man.
They essentially kidnapped the president, took him out to Camp David, and it's all generals and CIA.
And you can see in the picture, he's like, meh.
And they're all like, oh, I don't want to be here.
But uh-uh.
That's an illusion.
What happened was they just came and said, here are your choices, just like on the Simpsons movie, right?
Here's your choices, A, B, and C. Pick B. We're escalating, but only by 4,000, not 40,000, okay?
Sign here.
And he signed here and he escalated the war that just like Obama, he didn't believe in.
He knew the war was bullshit, man.
He wasn't for the, again, he had supported Obama trying to end the war back four years before that.
And five years before that.
And they rolled him right into it.
And then here's the part, and this goes for the rest of the terror wars too.
And this gets very little coverage.
But Trump, there's this mythology, Dave, left over from the Vietnam War.
Oh, it's true.
It's based on Lunan Johnson personally intervening on the rules of engagement, picking targets in the White House and this kind of thing.
And he may have been making up for military ineptitude and craziness, you know, in his own way.
But the way the narrative went down was LBJ micromanaging the war.
He tied the soldiers' arm, you know, one hand behind their back so they're not allowed to defend themselves.
We would have lost if he just unleashed the military to do their job.
In fact, in Iraq War I, Bush Sr. made explicit reference to this.
We're not going to have any micromanaging and behind the back hand-tying type action here, man.
Our military has got the thing.
So that was a real kind of narrative, something that Trump grew up with.
And as soon as he came into power, he made it absolutely clear that within the law, I want you to loosen the rules of engagement as loose as they go.
And within the law, I want you to devolve the authority over airstrikes as low on the chain of command as it can go.
So if Barack Obama has a bunch of bureaucratic rules about all the different hoops you have to jump through and check marks that you have to put in boxes before you can do a drone strike, I want the local captain to be able to call in whatever he wants and for nobody to second guess him within the law.
And so that was what they did.
The policy was essentially to loosen the rules of engagement and the command authority for the air war in Afghanistan and all over.
The only other, the only bright spot here is in Pakistan.
He only did, I think, three drone strikes, two in 2017 and one in 2018.
And they pretty much, you know, the Pakistanis, I think, told them back off and get out since then.
But in Afghanistan, and we'll get to the rest here in a few too, there was a massive increase in airstrikes.
And we're talking tens and tens and tens of thousands of people killed.
And in fact, Dave DeCamp just sent me, there's a brand new thing from the Cost of War Project that I haven't had a chance to look at yet about the, I don't know how many tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in this air war.
If you go back to the Obama years, General Flynn, he was the right-hand man of General McChrystal.
He was Colonel Flynn.
And he was right-hand man in McChrystal, the head of intelligence for JSOC in Iraq.
And then when they came to run the Afghan war together, and Flynn had written with some guest co-ghost authors and so forth, this thing criticizing intelligence efforts in Afghanistan and essentially saying we are pissing in the wind here in the way that we do these airstrikes.
And he, you know, in pushing for counterinsurgency, which meant a huge increase in infantry ground forces to blanket the land, he was arguing against what he derided as mere anti-insurgency.
And by that, he meant airstrikes against who you think are targets down there, but you don't really know.
You have no intelligence.
We're talking about the Afghan countryside here, okay?
There's no intelligence about who we're really killing down there.
And in doing so, it's not like Michael Flynn has a bleeding heart, right?
His point was this is all counterproductive for our mission.
We're blind.
Go ahead.
Well, McChrystal was the one who said that great thing about what was it, insurgency math or whatever, right?
So he basically said, I forget exactly how it went, but he was like, oh, one to 10.
Right, right.
What is 10 minus 2 equal?
Well, it equals 20.
You know, like, well, it equals, right.
So it's the more of them you take out, the more there are that want to come take us out.
Especially, especially when it's innocent men, women, and children that you're killing some farmer's son, right?
And not some Taliban fighter who might actually be from a different district and not from around there and who might even be unwelcome.
Instead, you wipe out the whole family and the Taliban guy escapes, right?
And now the whole neighborhood is in an uproar and form their own militia and join up the fight.
And it just goes on and on.
So, but I'm not arguing for counterinsurgency, blanket the land with infantry and good intelligence because they never got any good intelligence.
The whole thing was a bust.
But if you take Mike Flynn's point the other way, what was Trump-era policy in Afghanistan?
Anti-insurgency, counterproductive airstrikes against God knows who, a bunch of innocent civilians that just did nothing but, of course, grow the Taliban like pouring blood on their garden.
You know, as simple as that.
And same thing for everywhere.
He did the same thing in Somalia, the same thing in Iraq and Syria.
Remember, it was James Mattis's quote that Trump was like, I like that.
We're going to wage a war of annihilation against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, which, as we've covered on the show, Obama built them up and then Obama launched the war against them, Iraq War III, starting in August of 2014, after he had, oops, kind of created the Islamic State Caliphate there kind of thing.
But then, so the war wasn't over yet by the time Trump was inaugurated.
So he spent most of 2017 wrapping up the war against the Islamic State there.
And they murdered tens of thousands of civilians in the process of doing so.
Okay, so I want to get into that.
I want to get into the war in Syria and Mattis specifically.
Because one of the things that's so kind of interesting about breaking down Donald Trump is that he did.
And I think that what you started with, your point was spot on, that the best part of Donald Trump's legacy, the best thing that he did, which truly is a gift to the country, and it's what keeps him from having a lower grade, even though neither of us are giving him a good grade, is that he made it okay to be a right winger and say we shouldn't be fighting any of these wars.
And then right after that, I would also say that he, you know, hammered the press for being fake news and the enemy of the people.
And they are the ones who sell these wars.
And so I think there's value in that.
And the other thing is that he did shine a light, just rhetorically, on government corruption, referring to it as a swamp, even back in the debates when he would, you know, when Jeb would get applause and he'd point out the fact that there were campaign donors in the audience.
And he was right about that, by the way.
That was the truth.
That's who they were giving tickets to.
He had way more support than them and he couldn't get his people in.
And he's like Trump.
He's a billionaire from New York City.
So he like knew half of them.
It was just amazing.
You know, he'd be like, that's Frank.
Frank owns an oil company.
So the drain the swamp thing and the wars, this was really, you know, amazing to hear from a guy who ends up winning.
But then the guy who's supposed to drain the swamp, I mean, ends up putting in the swampiest of creatures.
I mean, his appointments, his inner circle, the people at the highest posts could have been appointed by George W. Bush.
I mean, you easily could have had John Bolton as a national security advisor.
You easily could have had Pompeo as the Secretary of State.
You easily could have had Mattis in there in a George W. Bush administration.
So getting into Syria, this is one of the things that just it's just the craziest thing about Trump that he puts Mattis in there and tinkers around a little bit in Syria.
Now, I will give him credit.
He did, I think he was the one who was responsible for ending the CIA's program to arm the anti-Assad rebels.
And that was done very quickly in 2017 when he got in there.
So he did do that.
And he did seem to not really want to fight the war.
And even when there were the fake gas attacks, I mean, he'd bomb them, but he did seem to have some restraint to not want to like really, I mean, I know there were people around him who would have been happy with him doing a lot more.
He was happy to say, oh, I dropped a big bomb.
It was the biggest bomb ever dropped.
And, you know, then kind of just continue with where we were at.
But when he finally goes to start talking about pulling out of the war, this guy, Mattis, wants to quit over it.
And you almost ask yourself, you're like, did they ever have a conversation about this?
I mean, how do you pick a guy to lead your policy?
And then when you're finally like, okay, I want to enact the policy I've been running on, the guy's like, what?
I'm not doing that.
I'll quit.
It's like, was there no conversation about this?
Like, what do you make of that?
That's the answer.
That's exactly right.
They never had the conversation that any of us might have imagined that like, look, the job is this, right?
I mean, and even if Trump said it in his own kind of Trumpian way that I can't quite imagine how he might have said it, the way I might have said it would be, we're going to end these Middle East wars and you're going to stand there and be my Marine Corps tough guy general who tells the American people that it's okay.
That's the job.
You protect my right flank so that it's a tough guy macho thing to end a bunch of wars.
That's the narrative.
You want the job or not?
But no, Trump never had a discussion like that.
Trump had a discussion like, wow, that sure's a bunch of shiny metals on your chest.
Betraying the Kurds Again00:13:36
I bet you're real tough and could do push-ups.
And what was that city that you killed in Iraq twice?
Fallujah, huh?
Neat.
Whatever.
You know, he likes tough guys.
He likes guys who sound like they know what they're talking about when they're guests on Fox News.
And I mean, why did John Bolton get the job?
Because when John Bolton's on Fox News, he thinks he's correct about everything and he sounds like it.
And that's good enough, right?
John Bolton, that's the kind of confidence I want in a national security advisor.
Yeah, well, John Bolton's confidently bad on everything.
But to Trump, Dave, I mean, he can't, he doesn't know where to look further than Fox News for his people, man.
Where's he going to go?
He's never heard of the nationalinterest.com, where some somewhat non-interventionist conservatives write sometimes.
I mean, never mind anti-war.com or the American conservative or something really good.
But at the national interest, there's a nice mix of guys there.
At the Cato Institute, you know, the great Doug Bondo and Ted Carpenter and the crew at the Cato Institute.
Doug was a special advisor to Ronald Reagan.
There's your ticket.
There's your credential right there.
He could have been the deputy national security advisor.
You think Donald Trump's ever heard the name Doug Bondo in his life?
No.
Or if he did, he forgot it immediately and had no idea why it might be important.
So yeah, I mean, I think it really is right that he did not believe in these wars.
But what he did believe in is he has to look tough and macho by having a bunch of generals around him.
And frankly, no other faction of the American establishment supported him at all, right?
Wall Street didn't support him.
Arms manufacturers didn't support him.
Agribusiness, pharma, even the Israel lobby, he was kind of rude to them.
They knew they could bank on Hillary Clinton.
They were at least divided, you know?
But he got Mike Flynn and a couple other generals to stand next to him and essentially say, don't worry, everybody.
It's going to be fine.
We're with him and we're going to make sure he's okay.
And so that was dependent on them.
It seemed particularly in the case of Flynn to be very highly motivated by hating Hillary Clinton.
Like Flynn really hated Hillary Clinton.
And I don't know what all the details are there, but even on the campaign, he was like leading the lock her up chance and stuff like that.
Like he really didn't like them.
And I do think that there was, at least it seemed to me that Flynn, certainly Bannon, some of the other people that he brought in that were quickly, you know, routed out of there,
that they had this kind of different geopolitical strategy than the Bushes and the Obamas and the Clintons, where they did not think that fighting essentially proxy wars with Russia in Syria or even in Iran was a good idea.
They thought that China was the big geopolitical threat and that we needed, they kind of saw like, oh, we're draining our resources in the Middle East while China is investing in these areas and we need to get back to like a stronger ground where we can fight them geopolitically, whatever the merit of that point is.
They certainly were somewhat at odds with the strategy, the current strategy, the Obama strategy in the Middle East.
So they were open to this kind of change.
Well, and it's strange too, because it seemed like the people who were the worst on Iran were better on Syria and that people who were worse on Syria were better on Iran.
Which makes no sense.
Yeah, because the whole point of being bad on either of those is because you hate the Shiites because that's what Israel wants.
Otherwise, what are we even talking about?
Who the hell cares about Assad?
And, you know, as I show in my new book, and anybody can look it up, a thousand times over, everybody involved said, the reason we're doing this is because Iran supports Hezbollah by way of Syria, and that threatens Israel.
They said it a thousand times from 1996 through the day before yesterday, that that's the whole point of being in Syria is not to fight ISIS, to fight Iran and Iran's friends, the Assad regime in Damascus.
That's the whole reason Obama supported Al-Qaeda against him in the first place.
And now Trump, you know, he would say, in fact, this is what happened in early 2018.
Trump said, we are only in Syria to fight ISIS.
And now that the Caliphate is gone, we are getting ready to pull out of there.
And Rex Tillerson came out and said, that's not true.
We're there because of Iran.
And Iran's still there because Iran just helped defeat ISIS, right?
So we're there because of Iran and we're there to, we're going to stay embedded with the Kurds forever in order to help fight Iran.
And then that provoked Erdogan, the president of Turkey, to attack the, you know, kind of western portions of Syria and Kurdistan, where a couple of years before they had taken the town of Afrin.
The Turks then sent the Al-Qaeda guys to come and rouse the Kurds back out of there because Tillerson was essentially countermanning the president of the United States, belay that order.
Whatever you thought the commander-in-chief just muttered is not going on.
But he was implying that if we're staying there in Kurdistan, then we're guaranteeing this independent Kurdistan.
And to Erdogan, that was crossing a major line.
And so he started killing people over it.
Right.
So if you, the Tillerson thing, by the way, for people who might remember, this is the clip.
I was working for SE Cup at the time.
And this was the clip that I did that got like the most traction of any clip I might have ever done, but besides like Rogan stuff, but it was like this, it went like kind of viral.
But it was the clip when Tillerson came out and laid out his 10-point plan.
And one of them, like hidden in there, was regime change in Syria.
And SE Cup was like thrilled with this.
She was like, oh, you know, because that was her big issue at the time was, you know, the overthrowing Assad.
And she was like, oh, you know, like, thank God we've got the adults in the room around the president because the president says these dumb things like we're going to get out of Syria.
And, but then, you know, you got Tillerson, the serious guy there, who's like, no, no, no, we're going to stay and have regime change.
And I literally just flipped out on the set.
And I was like, I mean, like, it just fucking blew my mind.
Like, how the fuck after Iraq, Libya, and Yemen were still just contemplating maybe have a regime change.
How do you think that'll work out, guys?
And you're like, how will it work out?
And the thing that was so fucking crazy about it was like, this was the most obvious case of how it was going to work out.
It was the most obvious case.
It's like, well, you'll hand the country to ISIS.
That's what you're going to do.
It's just, and, but the crazy thing is.
This is late in the game.
This is not like, oh, the mythical moderates will take over 2012.
This is way better.
We've already seen, you know, live leak videos of ISIS cutting people's heads off and stuff.
No one is believing the fucking 2012, you know, 2013 rhetoric anymore.
But the thing that I didn't hit that I always, which I remember talking to Essie Cup about off camera, was that I would go, I was like, Essie, like, what's going on here?
Do you see something a little bit strange that the president of the United States comes out and says, this is my foreign policy?
And then the Secretary of State goes, no, that's not the foreign policy.
Not even the Secretary of Defense.
Just the State Department telling you, actually, ignore the commander in chief.
Here's what we're going to do.
And Trump did get rid of him shortly after that, but we didn't leave Syria.
Hey, replaced him with Pompeo, for God's sake.
Yeah.
The devil himself.
So, yes, I mean, you're better off with Tillerson than Pompeo, for God's sake, there.
And then, so, but then now remember the fake gas attacks.
The first big fake gas attack was under Obama in 2013, but there were two big ones under Trump in 2017 and 18, in Khan Shikun in 2017, in April 2017, and in Douma in 2018.
And in both cases, Donald Trump fell right for it and ordered tomahawk airstrikes.
And apparently, in this case, you know, it's funny the different lines, the way the military skates their different positions in here.
And they clearly are their own interest group with their own positions on all these things.
They didn't want regime change at that point.
You know, they don't want to go and they want to stay in order to be a pain for Assad and for Iran, but they didn't want to kill him.
And I think, you know, Tiller, I mean, not Tillerson, but James Mattis, I think, credibly told Bob Woodward that Trump said, kill Assad.
He did this gas attack, kill him, assassinate him, bomb him with a tomahawk, whatever.
And Mattis just told the Deputy Secretary of Defense on the way out the door, we're not doing that.
And so when it comes to insubordination, I'll take some of that, please.
Sure.
Sure.
Here's, you know, Trump, Trump is like, you know, why do I want, he used to say, because he was parroting Flynn a little bit.
Look, Iran and Hezbollah and Syria, they want to kill ISIS.
Why don't I just let them do it?
They can do what they want there.
It's their country.
And the bad guys that they're killing are the bad guys I want them to kill, right?
And then he flips right around.
Oh, a big fake Al-Qaeda false flag sarin attack where there's no sarin at all and we're all just pretending here.
Let's assassinate the leader and turn right around.
I mean, that's what, because the guy's got no policy.
He hadn't thought any of this stuff through.
You know, at least Obama was decidedly non-committal and knew that he wanted to support Al-Qaeda enough to keep the war going, but never enough to win.
And he had picked that position and he never would say it out loud, but that was what he meant.
Donald Trump's just blowing in the wind, man.
You know anything.
Al-Qaeda does some fake, stupid sarin attack that any idiot on Twitter can see through, but Donald Trump falls right for it, you know, and then, and that could have been much, much worse if, you know, Mattis had not essentially, you know, quashed that.
But then, as you say, Mattis resigns when a few months later he says, well, I want to go ahead and leave Syria.
And he goes, oh, my God, you want to betray the Kurds and all you're doing the thing.
Like, of course we're going to betray the Kurds.
America betrayed the Kurds by backing the Islamic State in the first place.
Well, helping Saudi and Qatar and Turkey.
Sorry for my, you know, slight, you know, plausible deniability, you know, little aside there.
America screwed them over backing the jihadists in the first place.
Then, yes, took the Kurds side and helped them and used them to help us defeat the Islamic State in eastern Syria.
But Turkey's been our NATO ally since the end of the Second World War.
And at the end of the day, America's going to go with that.
Now, it's true that, and we've run articles about this at antiwar.com.
did an interview with Ted Snyder where we talked about this in depth.
It's true that the way that Donald Trump withdrew from Syrian Kurdistan was essentially designed to screw them over as bad as he could.
When he had, there was no reason for him to do that.
He essentially told Erdogan, go ahead and hit him.
What do I care?
I'm leaving.
Well, he didn't have to do that.
In fact, he very easily could have said to Erdogan, I'll tell you what I'm going to do.
I'm going to get the Syrian Arab army back in there to occupy that border.
It's their country.
And then the Kurds will have, you know, whatever their arrangement is with Damascus for their degree of autonomy.
But we're going to have the Damascus military is going to stand on that border.
And that will alleviate your concerns that the Syrian Kurds are going to harbor the PKK on this side of the border.
So he didn't do any of that.
He was like, yeah, go ahead and say, what the hell do I care?
Like just to give withdrawal a bad name almost, you know, when he could have taken care of it easily.
Yeah.
And that could have been.
And then they stayed anyway.
They stayed anyway.
Task and purpose.
The headline is operation turn the fuck around.
He pulled them out.
He sent them to Iraq.
And then before they even got to the border, they got their orders, go back.
And they're occupying the oil and the wheat fields there to this day.
Not to fight ISIS, to keep the revenue and the food out of the hands and the bellies of the people of Syria and the Syrian government.
Yeah, it was unbelievable to see how the media, the entire corporate press responded about the Kurds being betrayed.
It was all the sudden like the only thing anyone wanted to talk about was how you could not betray the Kurds.
Like the entire corporate press snapped into lockstep march.
The Kurds are being betrayed.
The Kurds are being betrayed.
Meanwhile, the Kurds haven't come up again since that time.
No one gives a shit about the Kurds.
Yeah, a few hundred were killed was what happened.
But like no one, but no one's mentioned since, but I just mean even like there's no story of like, oh, how are the Kurds doing?
You know, because we care about the Kurds so much.
Like no one cares about the Kurds afterward.
But for that week, man, it was interesting to see some of the most revealing moments about the corporate press in the Trump presidency were things related to Syria.
It was after the first bullshit gas attack in 2017 when he bombed them.
No One Gives a Shit About the Kurds00:12:22
And you remember Brian Williams talking about the beautiful lights that light up the sky and CNN, who was it, Fareed Zaqara, I think, saying he was presidential for the first time and all of this.
And so the media, it was almost like you could see that if Donald Trump had decided to be a Cheneyite, you could see it already that it really would have let a lot of the air out of the hatred for him in the corporate press, that he could have had, you know, that he was always going to be cast as the bad guy, the same way Bush Cheney were, but it would have been with much more respect had he just pursued, had he just like had his heart in it.
Even when he was fighting the wars, you could tell Trump never had his heart in it.
And so they hated that.
But the second he talked about leaving, I mean, man, they started bashing him like they never have before.
Well, and it was personal too, right?
Because the FBI counterintelligence division and the CIA set him up and framed him for treason.
So then after he won the election, he said something like, God, this is like the kind of thing they did in Nazi Germany, which I'm not exactly sure what the reference was there.
I think he was just trying to call the CIA the Gestapo, which is accurate.
And the FBI counterintelligence division, you know, if the shoe fits and all of that.
Well, they got pissed off.
And then what happened the day after, okay, remember right before he was inaugurated, three days before inauguration, they released the ridiculous intelligence assessment that says that Putin rigged the election for him.
And then the day after inauguration, he goes to CIA headquarters, but he's Donald Trump, dude.
So he gets up there.
He's still wearing his overcoat.
So he looks like some New Jersey kind of mid-level gangster or something.
And he gets up there and he just starts going, I had the biggest inauguration crowd ever.
Suck it.
And he's got this crowd.
Oh, and he's in front of the wall of stars of all of the heroic CIA officers whoever, you know, got rolled up and killed in a foreign nation.
So he's got the hallowed heroes behind him.
And he's up there going, me, me, me.
Did you see the length of my limousine?
Blah, Right.
That's a rough paraphrase.
And the CIA guys, all of them are just pulling out their knives like this guy's got to go, dude.
And then, you know, from then on, you know, it was just personal.
I had always said that, you know, they took his, you know, I mean, he, he's on both sides of every issue, right?
He's, he's the greatest champion of gun rights.
Also, he's for taking the guns and then due process later, right?
He's going to save Medicare.
Also, we got to reform Medicare because it's so expensive.
And he hates all the wars.
Also, he's going to escalate them all and whatever.
Well, they heard his, you know, anti-NATO stuff and they panicked as though what he said was real.
As though, you know, they fell for it the same way his fans fell for it.
They're like, wow, I agree with exactly 50% of the things this guy says.
You know, that's amazing.
And yeah, but I think some of it is also that, and I think people like me and you may not appreciate this sometimes, but from their perspective, how dangerous some of the things he was saying was.
Because the truth is that even if he's on the other side of the issue, that still came out of his mouth.
And people still heard that.
And when you look at the absolute hatred that John Brennan has for Donald Trump, which is apparent, I mean, listen to any interview with John Brennan talking about Trump.
I mean, it is very personal.
But you also, it's hard, I think, for guys like us to realize that nobody except us, you know, the people listening and stuff like that.
But for all of us, no one else knows that Obama armed al-Qaeda.
No one else knows that he created ISIS.
That's not known by people.
That's like me, you, the people at the Libertarian Institute, you know, Jimmy Doerr and 12 other people know this.
This isn't something.
But then Trump's out there in 2016 just saying it.
It's like the biggest, this guy with like fucking, you know, you know, 70 million supporters and a billion dollars and the biggest microphone in the world is out there saying these things.
And sure, he might later on in that day say, we're going to bomb the shit out of them.
And then later on in the day, say, we're going to pull the troops out.
We'll bomb the shit out of them, whatever.
But from Brennan's perspective, he's still like, what the fuck did you just say?
Did you just tell everybody about the treason that I committed?
He even accurately explained it sometimes.
Yeah.
You know, he would say, parroting Flynn, he would say, look, Obama backed them in Libya, then he backed them in Syria.
And then that's what helped them come in and take over Iraq.
And we didn't have our troops left in Iraq to keep them out of Mosul and all that.
So they took over.
You know what?
That's the narrative.
All right.
That's exactly what happened.
You know, they went to Libya and they took the fighters and guns from Libya, moved it on to Syria, and then it blew up in their face in the worst catastrophe you could have possibly imagined with the creation of the so-called caliphate of Baghdadi, you know, Ibrahim and all that.
You know, this was in 2004 and five, this was the most ridiculous lie of the war party, right?
Oh, well, see, we're fighting against the Islamo-fascist caliphate.
Oh, really?
Where is it?
It doesn't exist because there's a bunch of nation states in the way.
It's only in your imagination.
It's like the lost city of Atlantis or something, the Islamo fact.
Where is it in the sky?
I can't find the thing.
And then, oh, and at the same time, Obama, I mean, Osama bin Laden is hiding in the attic, you know, from his wife, even or whatever, out there in Abbottabad.
And he's like, Yeah, man, one day, wouldn't it be great if we had an Islamo-fascist caliphate?
You know, Obama makes this come true.
Obama hands it to him on a silver platter.
And so, yeah, not only was Trump saying outrageous things, he was right.
And he was explaining how it worked and everything in a way that, like, oh, it's kind of hard to ignore.
They did take the side of the jihadists in Libya and in Syria.
And now that I think about it, let's see.
The Islamic State declared itself in 2014.
So, yeah, that would be a solid three years after Obama started back in Al-Qaeda and Syria.
So, yeah, the timeline seems to work out there.
You know, like you don't have to know that much about it.
You could be SE Cup and go, wait, one, two, three, huh?
And so, yeah, you're right.
It was a problem.
And just overall, he casts doubt on the sacred mission of America's global leadership, you know, and power over the world.
You know, the United Nations order created by the United States after World War II depends on the U.S. Army to be the world army to enforce it.
Otherwise, it's just an agreement.
Let's not invade each other.
Okay.
But it's not enforceable without somebody to enforce it.
And so it's been the U.S. Army.
And if you read, you know, Joe Biden's foreign affairs article from last January, it's a, you know, part of what he says is he attacks Trump for disgracing this relationship.
And he promises to reestablish our sacred obligation to NATO.
Right.
And he means that when he says that.
Yes.
But one of the things that's interesting that's that's really revealed when Donald Trump would bring up some of these points is that they actually have no argument for it.
Right.
And so they go into this religious talk, you know, the sacredness of it.
I mean, I remember this when Ron Paul was inserting the Federal Reserve into the conversation, which really nobody else ever did.
And I remember when Ron Paul really pushed and started getting a little bit of traction, not too much, but a little bit of traction for the audit the Fed bill.
And the response from the Fed was that auditing the Fed would interfere with the independence of this basically sacred institution.
And you just look at that on its face and you'd be like, that makes no sense.
It makes absolutely no sense that you're no less independent if we just know what you're doing.
I mean, like, that doesn't transparency and independence have nothing to do with each other.
But you'd almost realize, you'd go, oh, they've never had to justify their own existence before.
It's always just been taken as a given.
Yeah, they're afraid we're going to take their independence away if we see the results of that.
That's right.
So there's something revealing about that.
But one of the things that's interesting about Trump talking about NATO is that, you know, they haven't had to justify their existence in 30 years.
And so then people go like, wait a minute, what?
This, this whole thing was supposed to be a hedge against the Soviet Union, which, oh, by the way, doesn't exist.
So why do we still have you see this?
Did you see this, Dave?
This is just last week.
Forgive me if this is where you're going with this, but just last week in the New York Times, there's a story about how they did a big study to try to come up with a reason for their existence.
Is that what you were going to say?
Yeah, yeah.
No, It's fine.
It's just the point that I just thought it was a coincidence that you were making that same point that they brought up.
No, no, no.
This is what I'm talking about.
And so it's just like you go, oh, you actually realize you have no, they have to find a reason.
And of course, with the history of these things, right, like to buy into the United Nations, which actually, right, they wanted, Woodrow Wilson wanted the League of Nations after World War I, couldn't convince the American people to do it.
But after World War II, it was kind of easy to convince people.
It's like, okay, well, you just saw those Nazis.
You want to like make sure we don't have Nazis again?
Let's let's do this United Nation thing and make and and even with the Soviet Union to have to have NATO that that was kind of an easy sell.
But it's it's fucking 2020 now.
And you're sitting there and going like, wait, so what is the and as you were just alluding to, now they almost themselves have to figure out, yeah, what do we tell people when they ask about that?
Because we don't actually have an answer to this.
Yeah.
And everybody go look at the New York Times article because they say that what was the study group did their study.
I want to read this thing.
I'm sorry, I'm so far behind working on the book, but their answer was China.
Yeah.
That's a new one.
Yeah.
Has anybody ever seen a map of the earth before?
Everybody stop and go look at a map of the earth.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's sacred need and reason for existence is China.
That's right.
Why?
That's the Pacific Ocean.
That's an entirely different ocean on the other side of the planet from the North Atlantic.
The only thing that stands in between us and China is Luxembourg.
Yeah, exactly.
They're coming this way.
The big yellow horde.
Who's going to stop them with that belt and road thing?
And of course, now, here's why I want to really take the time to study this thing: is what do they say about Russia then?
Because if their answer is China, then I guess the dog that didn't bark is they must have admitted that, you know, the Russians are not coming.
And all that stuff where we were pretending that they were.
Nobody believes that anymore.
We can't get the Germans to even raise up an infantry because they know the Russians aren't coming.
Right.
And so, you know, I know, you know, who does have some money to spend on hardware and stuff?
China.
So let's pretend that that's an aggressive threat.
You know, speaking of Tillerson, one more.
Tillerson says it's in the new Woodward book, Rage, that he says, China, listen, this is serious here, okay?
China threatens U.S. domination of the Pacific.
And that's it.
No irony, no punchline.
That's just the story.
See, America dominates the entire Pacific Ocean.
All of it, 100% is an American lake.
And if the Chinese want to say that the South China Sea is in their sphere of influence, well, then we'll show them what the Monroe Doctrine really means: that the entire earth is our hemisphere.
Both hemispheres are ours.
And no other country has any near abroad or foreign interest or anything like that that we are bound to respect whatsoever.
So, which by the way, the Monroe Doctrine actually doesn't just say Europe stay out of the West, out of the Americas.
It says, and we promise to stay out of Europe too.
Yeah, that part has been dropped.
We really just focus on the first part.
Dropping the Monroe Doctrine Promise00:04:30
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So, all right.
So, Donald Trump, the Donald Trump's Russia policy here?
Well, sure.
I mean, let's get into that because that's Pretty important to the overall picture.
So, Donald Trump runs in 2016 on, and one of the things that I love about Donald Trump is just the most hilarious things about him, is that he'll say the most obvious thing ever and he'll be fully convinced he's a genius for figuring it out.
But then he doesn't realize that it's everyone knows this.
It's just a racket.
And so they don't, but he's like, hey, I just figured it out because of my big brain.
I'm so smart.
What if we worked with Russia to defeat ISIS and then we got the hell out of the Middle East and we just save all this money.
He's like, can you believe it?
I'm so much smarter than everybody else.
I figured it out.
It's a treason.
Right.
But so he is immediately by the Hillary Clinton campaign called out for being a Russian asset in the campaign, which, you know, one of the things that's really tricky about like the last five years in American politics is that there's so much happening that it's almost easy to get lost in the day-to-day stuff because every day it seems like there's some crazy new thing happening that every now and then you have to kind of notice when something happens and you go, wait, no, that was a really big deal.
That's like a really, really big deal that that just happened.
And that, to me, was one of them.
It was lost in this huge Trump moment.
But Hillary Clinton stood on a debate stage and called Donald Trump a Russian puppet.
And then if you remember, Trump goes, you're the puppet, you know, in classic Trump fashion.
But this was like when it first got inserted into the public narrative that so Donald Trump is saying he wants to work with Russia.
He's not secretly doing this.
He's campaigning on, I want to work with Russia.
I want to accept that Assad is going to be the president of Syria or the dictator of Syria or whatever.
And we are going to work with Russia, have a good relationship with Russia.
We're going to stop fighting all of these stupid wars.
That's what Donald Trump is running on immediately by Hillary Clinton.
He's called a Russian puppet.
But it didn't really get too much traction in the media and stuff like that.
It was just kind of like, oh, this is one of these things Hillary Clinton said.
Little did we know at the time that this would become the story of the first three years of Donald Trump's presidency.
So what do you, I don't know, anywhere in there you want to jump in?
Go ahead.
Yeah, man.
I mean, the whole thing was an absolute fraud from the very beginning.
It was just nothing but Democrats spend to protect themselves from.
I think she was afraid when Assange said, we got some Hillary Clinton emails.
She was afraid it was the emails they had deleted, the 30,000 real bad ones that still no one has seen, the ones that Trump joked about in the speech.
That, by the way, Russia, there's still 30,000 missing emails, which wasn't even a joke about Russia.
It was a joke about the 30,000 missing emails.
And when Assange said, yeah, we got some Hillary emails.
I think that was the worry was that they had the real goods.
Instead, it was just the DNC and Podesta stuff, all of which was bad.
And it proved that they had rigged the contest against Bernie Sanders for her, but none of them were emails by her telling anyone to do anything wrong in those.
The worst emails from her were released by the State Department after Jason Leopold sued them under the Freedom of Information Act.
There's where she's conspiring to start the war in Libya and Syria and all these kinds of things with the official releases.
But I think I have to go back and check the timeline.
I'm pretty sure this is after Trump had made that joke at the speech and they thought these emails were coming out.
So they just decided we're just going to say that Trump is in on it with these guys and they're rigging the game for him.
Leftover Accusations from That Era00:15:59
Like you're saying, it didn't stick that much because even though the Russians are not the Soviet communists anymore, still, like it's kind of red baiting.
Like you're saying somebody's loyal to the Kremlin.
You're sort of calling him a commie.
It's like leftover accusations from that era.
But look at who we're talking about.
Donald Trump doesn't just wrap himself in the flag.
He wraps himself around the flag.
Right.
And he thinks he's a super patriot.
Anyway, you could say when you had the Soviet Union, right?
You had there was, even though it was the scourge of humanity, there was this ideology of communism that a lot of people really believed in.
And there were, you know, like self-described communists in America.
There was a communist party in America.
There were like these people who had secret allegiances to the ideology of communism.
And of course, even if you're a good communist, you know that the Soviets like bastardized communism, you know, completely.
But so, so the idea that you would, you would red bait, you know, about someone kind of made sense, like maybe someone.
But now we're talking about Putin.
Like we're talking about what state capitalism or whatever the fuck they have in Russia.
Like, who the fuck would have allegiance to Putin?
It just makes ideology of pragmatism.
Yeah, right.
Like what?
It just makes no sense.
And look, I mean, and this guy, you know, this is the most puzzling part of this era to me is like people forgot that they already knew who Donald Trump was.
Who was introduced to Donald Trump in the year 2015?
I've known everything there is to know about Donald Trump my entire life since like 1983.
And he's the kind of guy who's just about as transparent as can be.
And you watch his cameo in Home Alone 2.
You know everything you need to know about who he is.
Oh, I get it.
He's a golfer who watches the Sean Hannity show and thinks he's smart, but he's not.
You know this, by the way, it's funny you brought that up.
I've talked about this on the show before.
So they were running Home Alone 2 in Canada on like Canadian public television, and they cut that cameo out because it's almost like they need to not remind people of the point that you're making.
That we all knew who Donald Trump was forever.
And also that Donald Trump was so accepted by the establishment that he could just be a cameo in a little silly children's holiday movie.
He was the DC's man.
Yeah, that's right.
It's part.
Look, let's go ahead and state this right.
This guy is Americana, right?
He's like Frank Sinatra or Mark Twain or Michael Jackson.
He's a mega star.
Yeah.
Right.
He is a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one of the bigger, better ones.
He's one of the most recognizable silhouettes in all of mankind, right?
If you put him up there, the guy is, and so I didn't mean to interrupt, but like, there's no point in, you couldn't be too hyperbolic about this.
He's probably right now the most famous man who ever lived.
And as of 2015 and 16, he was right up there.
He was more famous probably than Michael Jackson.
If you, you know, put Donald Trump's face in front of some guy in Central African Republic and asked him who he was, he knows who he is.
He was the, like, he was almost like a saying.
Like, if you, if someone was like, you're paying for dinner for everybody tonight, you'd be like, what am I, Donald Trump?
Like, that, like, as a kid, that was just a rap lyric.
Yes, yes, literally.
He was, you know, and, and so, the most fascinating and bizarre thing or one of about the Trump presidency is how much is projected onto him by all sides that just doesn't make any sense.
He might have been a secret spy working for the Russians for the last 10 years, maybe.
So it's, it's, this guy is, there are like very, there are, there are camps of people who, with all sincerity, are telling you he's literally Hitler.
They're telling you he's a Russian agent.
Then on the other side of the spectrum, you've got people telling you that he's playing 4D chess and that when he says X, Y, and Z, he really means something else and that he's the great savior and actually that he just cares about working class, you know, white people more than anybody else does.
And everyone's projecting their thing onto him.
And the reality is just what you see is what you get.
He's what we always knew he was.
He's that narcissistic.
He's that shallow.
He's that Donald Trump.
And he just is his entire identity is I'm a winner.
And everyone who supports me is tremendous.
And everybody who doesn't support me is very stupid.
And it's pretty much that that's pretty much it.
And always has been.
Yeah.
And so.
To your point, in the summer 2016, it was kind of hard to make it stick that this guy's a secret agent of the Kremlin.
And you're talking about Donald Trump, the real estate tycoon from New York, right?
The guy, you know, and this is how I knew he was going to win when I read he did The Apprentice for 14 seasons.
So you think you and I knew everything that we needed to know about him just by looking at one episode of, you know, him going bankrupt, losing a casino in 1992 or whatever.
The American people, the great broad middle class, loud majority out there, they watched him for 14 years in a row on that show.
You know, they had a level of familiarity that it just made this Russia stuff just seem crazy.
Like, how could it possibly be true?
Of course, it wasn't true.
And what was true was that the FBI counterintelligence division and the CIA, essentially America's secret police, framed him for treason.
You know, the Democrats started it, but then what happened?
Immediately, leaks in the New York Times and the Washington Post saying, yeah, it's true.
It's all true.
Yeah, the Russians did the hack and leaked all the emails and they did it to help Trump.
And, you know, Carter Page this and Papadopoulos that.
And they had all this prior knowledge and Roger Stone and the WikiLeaks and Mike Flynn on the phone with Kislyak and Jeff Sessions meeting at the Senate and the Trump Tower meeting with intelligence officials.
All of this was a lie.
All of it was just lies upon lies upon lies upon lies.
And those are just the major accusations against the people.
Maria Butina, again, another fake.
Well, listen, I just want to make clear because, and I've covered this a lot on the show.
I mean, I've probably dove into this more extensively than just about any other topic because, you know, it was an accusation that the sitting president is guilty of treason.
And so it was pretty important too.
But it's not just, just to back up, put an exclamation point on what you're saying.
It's not, they are lies.
It's not just like, oh, they got this wrong.
We have learned conclusively that they knew they were wrong about all of this.
Like the CIA told the FBI that they knew Carter Page was not a Russian asset because when the Russians approached Carter Page, he brought it right back to the CIA and told them that the Russians had approached him.
And they told the FBI that and the FBI failed to inform the FISA courts about this.
So one thing after another, every one of these examples, it's not like they got it wrong.
They knowingly lied.
And especially they said, they said, you know, like on the Flynn thing, they were ready to close it.
They knew there was nothing there.
And then it was two months after, you know, all the big flurry of memos where they all are essentially telling each other there's nothing here.
Peter Strzok is saying there is no connection.
The New York Times article came out and made all these extensive claims that numerous Trump officials had contacts with high-level Russian intelligence officials.
And the FBI agent wrote all over the margins, this is not true.
None of this is right.
Who's putting this stuff in the paper?
Blah, blah.
That was two months before they appointed the special counsel to pretend to investigate this for two more years.
And they said, to get off of the details and to the point, they said to the CNN, the reason we're doing this is because if we can't get him thrown out of power through the 25th Amendment, then at least we want to rein him in and prevent him from changing America's Russia policy.
And it was as simple as that.
That was, they were afraid that he was going to take away the biggest cash cow of, you know, our next generation.
They're done for the most part, Dave, patrolling and killing poshtoons in their poppy fields.
And now they're ready to build some more aircraft carriers and long-range bombers in the name of the threat of Russia and China and go back to the battle days of the Cold War.
And if Trump wants to work with Russia against China, no, we would rather have them be allies against us if we can have a Cold War with both, please.
So let's deliberately heal the Sino-Soviet split that Nixon did so much to exploit back in 74.
And let's go ahead and push them together so we have a big fake enemy that we can pretend threatens us so that we can justify all this arms buildup.
Yeah, I don't know if you ever, if you ever watched fucking, what was the, I can't remember, Oliver Stone had a like a history series, like a documentary series.
Oh, yeah, the untold history of the United States.
The untold history of the United States.
And one of the things he goes through, and listen, obviously you have to go into it knowing that he's a he's a lefty with some socialist sympathies and all of that.
But there's really interesting stuff in the documentary.
And one of the things he goes through in the history is that throughout the entire history of the Cold War, any politician who ever wanted détente with Russia was always demonized by the deep state, by the corporate press.
They get completely demonized and they're always kind of like cast with this like, you know, they might be kind of an agent.
Who knows?
You know, and so this was an old trick.
This was like right out of the playbook for the last, you know, 50 years in America that this is what you do.
So it's almost like they went back in the internet age.
Yeah.
Like just the same trick.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They did COINTELPRO against the president of the United States of America.
Yeah, that's what's different is that usually it wasn't the sitting president.
It was, it was usually like, you know, some senator or something like that.
And Donald Trump, back to how dumb he is, it almost makes him innocent where Jim Comey comes to him with this completely fake lie that, you know, we have this dossier that says that you had this P-tape with these hookers.
The Russians compromise you with these hookers in the hotel.
And Trump's like, that's completely fake.
You're the head of the FBI.
Investigate that and tell everybody how not true it is.
Instead of saying, let me tell you something, J. Edgar Comey, you're not even allowed back in the Hoover building, dude.
You're going to have your staff is going to meet you with cardboard boxes out front because you are as fired as an FBI director has ever been fired.
The hell out of my sight, you know, and, you know, your days are done here and you and your top 10 goons with you.
And instead, what does he do?
He goes, Jim, I'm going to need your loyalty.
I'm going to, I'm going to bring you onto my team here.
You're going to be a loyal Trump guy because I'm so charismatic to the guy who just came to, you know, claim to falsely claim that he was compromised.
He had evidence that he was compromised by the Russians, whether it's a whole lie.
It kind of reminds me of what Gary Johnson went on Morning Joe and had the Aleppo moment, you know, and it's kind of like this thing where it's like there, you don't even realize because you're too dull to even pick up on the fact that they're here to ruin you.
And you're like walking in like, hey, guys, we're all friends, right?
So let's talk about this.
And they're like, oh, no, no, no.
We're here to destroy your life.
And it's almost like Donald Trump just didn't even realize.
Like, he goes, oh, man, well, this isn't true.
So I'm going to need your loyalty.
And we're going to, and then Comey goes right out to the president.
He goes, he made me promise to give him my loyalty.
And I had to tell him that my only loyalty is to the stripes.
And, you know, like, and you're just like, oh, dude, you don't even realize what you're, it's funny because he had this like, I'm going to drain the swamp thing.
And you're like, dude, you don't even understand how deep this swamp goes and what they will do to you.
And he was completely unprepared.
And the thing is, though, too, right?
Like, you know, I complained earlier that he'd never heard of the damn Cato Institute and all these great foreign policy guys or whatever.
You know what?
He could have still have just gone and recruited a bunch of Republican freshmen or second termers from the House of Representatives who would all be 100% loyal Trump guys.
from spread out around the country who are qualified enough to get elected to the House.
They're qualified enough to help him run his departments, but they don't come.
They're not all members of whatever elite groups and whatever.
They're from out there in the country.
And he knew he was the new guy.
He knew he hadn't just finished doing 18 years as a senator, right?
He comes in and, oh, yeah, no, I'm going to bring the leaders of the FBI who are clearly out to get me.
I'm going to bring them onto my team.
Anyway, but then, so more with his stupidity, all this worked, right?
Instead of inviting Putin, like my advice on Twitter, instead of inviting Putin to D.C., letting him sleep in the Lincoln bedroom, taking him and whining him and dining him at the nicest steakhouse and taking him out to a nice Washington, D.C. play at the big, whatever the thing is that the cultural people do, and then sign a big fat nuke treaty and then beat the Democrats and the FBI and the CIA over the head with it and tell them, how do you like that?
You know, this is the business that we're doing here.
You want Russia gate?
I'll give you Russia gate.
Here's, you know, and could have said, that's it.
We're getting along with Russia.
I'm the president, not you.
And, you know, he's the guy.
Can you imagine you're sitting in that chair, but you don't realize what it really means that you're sitting in that chair and the ability at his command.
And because he doesn't know anything about the issues, you know, I think he said probably truthfully that he had talked to Henry Kissinger and said, I think we should make friends with Russia to beat up on China.
And that Kissinger told him, yeah, that's smart.
That's what I think too.
Kissinger was the guy who exploited the Sino-Soviet split at that time back then on behalf of China.
Now the other way, right?
But then, and Trump said that.
I remember at one point he goes, yeah, Dr. Kissinger told me he thought my Russia policy made sense because China's the real problem.
And then everybody attacked him.
Yeah, right.
You're a liar.
Boo, treason.
And it's like, what's really more likely that Vladimir Putin compromised him with a P-tape or that he talked to Henry Kissinger and Henry Kissinger affirmed what are, you know, basically foreign policy 101 lessons about how you deal with Russia and China.
Try to keep them from being best friends if you can.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, that's really brilliant calculus, as they call it.
You might think of it as more like arithmetic and simple math, you know, but they just treated this like this is absolute madness.
And then so what did Trump do?
Not really knowing anything beyond kind of having these vague illusions, he just rolled right over.
You guys want to sell a bunch of weapons to Ukraine, to the Nazi-infested army that Barack Obama made, that Barack Obama was too afraid to arm after he made it?
Go ahead.
And then later he got himself impeached for temporarily holding up one of those arms deals of weapons.
He should have never been selling them in the first place.
When look, this is after Minsk too.
This is in the middle of a ceasefire.
And he wants to send more arms to one of the belligerents in this tenuous semi-peace in the east of the country in a crisis that is all Barack Obama's fault, not his.
Racing to War with Russia00:03:29
And he wants to come and make that worse.
Why?
Because he doesn't know the first thing about it, doesn't care.
And so they go, here's what we want you to do.
And he goes, oh, I don't know.
Okay.
And he added Montenegro and Macedonia to NATO.
And Tucker Carlson interviewed him and said, man, it seems like it's a really bad idea to be passing out all these war guarantees.
And now we just brought Macedonia and Montenegro into NATO.
What's up with that?
And Trump goes, I know, right?
What are we doing?
It's crazy.
And Tucker's like, but you're the president, though.
Like, did you not know that this was a thing that you were doing?
You know, okay, next subject.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I mean, and Tucker would say it like point blank.
Tucker's like, you know, I got like a 20-year-old son.
Are you telling me if there's a conflict over there, I got to send him off to go die?
And, you know, Trump's like, I know.
It's nuts.
Right.
So it's like he almost talked to him like as if he just was another show host on Fox News.
Right.
Like they're both just like, yeah, we both think this is stupid.
And it's like, yeah, but you're the fucking president, dude.
Like, what are you doing?
Yep.
And then, you know, he wanted to get, you know, Fort Trump built in Poland, which, you know, I guess that never happened, but he did send more troops to Poland and he sent more troops to the Baltic states right on Russia's border.
And I forget if it was in Latvia or Lithuania.
They did this massive military exercise just a few hundred yards from the Russian border, which, you know, I don't know when was the last time you looked at a map, but Moscow is just like 200 miles from the Russian border.
And they have, it's just wide open fields.
It's not like they have mountains and rivers you have to cross to get there or anything.
It's just wide open space, essentially, the capital city, a couple hundred miles away.
And this is just absolutely picking a bite.
It's, you know, Daniel Ellsberg, I think, was the one who coined the term omnicide for what would happen if there was a thermonuclear war between the United States and Russia.
And it would essentially be a setback as though we got hit by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs kind of a thing.
It would be setting human civilization back, you know, 4,000 years to the Stone Age or, you know, whatever.
The few survivors would have some modern technologies, I guess.
But out of the, what, seven and a half billion of us, about seven billion of us would starve to death.
So it's, it's, it's funny as all this is going on.
And this is really the way, this is always the way it works, which is really, it is, it's simple, but it's fucking brilliant because it works so well to control a population.
But at the same time, right, it's like with Obama, right?
So Obama inherits the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and talks about how, you know, we should, we should end the war in Iraq and we never should have fought this war.
That's kind of like his rhetoric.
And so what you have is, and then in action, Obama is now expanding the war.
He surges the war in Afghanistan, starts a war in Libya, then in Syria and Yemen, expands the war theater all over the place basically to wherever he wants to.
And the whole time he's doing it, the Republicans are hitting him for being soft on foreign policy.
Because remember that time he talked about not what, remember when he went to Egypt and apologized?
He's a big softy.
He just won't fight enough wars.
And so the reality is the complete opposite of what the criticism is.
Obviously, if you had a good, like honest, trustworthy press, they'd be criticizing him for all of the wars that he's starting.
But instead, he's getting criticized for not starting wars.
And same with Trump.
And it works.
It always is.
It was incredible.
It's incredibly effective.
Yeah, there's a quote from Trump Jr. when they pass new sanctions against Russia.
Selling H-Bombs to Get Re-Elected00:05:03
And he goes, now let them say that we're Russian puppets.
Right.
Exactly.
So as Donald Trump has this belligerent, aggressive, provocative foreign policy towards the Russians, what's the corporate press saying all day?
They're not sitting there saying like, oh, you know what?
This might be a little bit dangerous.
This is a nuclear-armed country.
We don't really want to do this.
They're calling him a traitor.
They're still saying he's colluding with the Russians.
And then it just becomes this like race to the bottom of how can he prove how much he's not colluding with the Russians by inching us closer toward a war with them.
To her credit, Tulsi Gabbard was one of the few people who inserted this into the conversation.
She said one of her big issues was the threat of nuclear war and that Donald Trump was way too hostile to Russia.
And it was funny when she, and she was not good enough at explaining it.
But when she would say this to like Democratic audiences, you could literally see them being like, what the fuck?
Like, what are you talking about?
He's working with the Russians.
That's what we all believe.
Yeah.
And, you know, the thing is, too, like, you would see along those same lines in the Senate, I think it was two years ago, you had Dianne Feinstein and a couple of other of these more powerful Democratic senators saying, you know, actually, we kind of like some of these treaties and want to keep them, you know, as they're expiring.
And it's like, oh, really?
You do, huh?
Senator Feinstein, the what, third most powerful Democrat?
How about you grab your whip and crack it and let the rest of your party know that at the end of the day, there are real matters at stake here that aren't all make-believe false accusations of complete ridiculous truth or conspiracy crap.
And we have actual nuclear treaties with Russia at stake here.
And we have to at least have the political space in our capital city to be able to re-ratify these treaties without being guilty of treason for appeasing the Russians.
We have to dial this crap back.
Some, right?
No, too late.
Too late.
And then who's she got?
She got Donald Trump sitting in the chair and he's got no interest in reaffirming these treaties.
And, you know, of course, it was Barack Obama in order to get the new START treaty passed, which is the last major strategic arms limitation treaty that is standing between us and Russia right now that limits the total number of long-range H-bombs.
And that means, you know, land, sea, and air delivered.
And in order to get that passed, Obama had to make a deal with the Republican senators from, get this, the nuclear caucus, where they're not embarrassed at all that they, you know, like the Black Caucus or whatever.
This is the people who are from the states who have the most at stake in representing the nuclear weapons industry.
And so they're not embarrassed at all to say, forget what's good for America's strategic posture in the world.
What's good is selling H-bombs to the USA and getting re-elected.
And so this is a real thing.
You couldn't make it up.
So the nuclear caucus said, listen, if we're going to do the START treaty, Obama, you're going to have to give us a trillion dollars.
We want to revamp the entire American nuclear arsenal.
And for that matter, the entire industry.
We want an all-new lab set up at Sandia and Lawrence Livermore and all of the laboratories.
Always forget the third one.
We want all new factories and assembly lines for all of our A-bombs and H-bombs, all brand new missiles.
We want to redo everything we've got.
And Obama said, oh, okay, fine.
And that was the compromise he had to make to even get the treaty passed at all.
Now, Trump's ready to let the treaty's about to expire.
Biden has a week and a half to save it after Inauguration Day, which Putin has said he's open to just extending it and we can negotiate details later.
So thank God for that.
But, you know, of course, when you heard that word $1 trillion, you're like, yeah, right.
Oh, you're going to spend $1 trillion revamping the entire American nuclear weapons arsenal and industry, huh?
Yeah.
Well, it's already, they call it 1.7.
You could call it three, and it'll probably be four by the time they're done.
And all this is good for what other than special interests in New Mexico?
None, right?
This is good for no American.
It's good for no earthling other than the people who are on the receiving end of the dividend checks directly connected to this enterprise.
All of the other 7 billion of us are being held hostage by these people and to all be exterminated at the same time.
Like if it was any one of us, that would be pretty bad.
But like they want to kill all of humanity or at least take a major risk of getting all of humanity killed just for their own narrow interests.
That's the way the game is played.
Yeah, it sure is.
But don't worry when there's a real crisis, you know, nine months later, you'll get a $600 check in the mail, maybe.
Part Two Coming Later This Week00:01:37
If we can get that deal together, you might be getting 600 bucks.
So hey, we got to do Yemen.
Okay.
You know what, dude?
We're going to have to do a part two.
Of this.
We get into uh, part one and part two, because I gotta, I gotta wrap and get this over so that uh to my producer so it can stream on time tonight.
So why don't we stop?
Stop there, and then later in the week, at some point, we'll do a part two, because I still want to talk Yemen, I want to talk uh, more about Iran and the conflict that brew there.
North Korea, I want to talk about Venezuela and then, of course, I want to talk about the election of 2020.
So we got more than enough for another hour and a half episode to do later in the week.
So we'll call that the Trump legacy part one.
So, thank you very much, Scott Horton.
We'll, we'll set a time later this week to do part two.
Um, that was uh yeah there's it's, if nothing else that you got to say man, the Trump presidency was.
It was more fascinating on a lot of different levels than uh, than than your typical uh president.
Uh, gotta say that and i'm gonna say that in them all.
Right so uh, of course, don't forget, by the way if, if you guys enjoy these episodes with Scott Horton, you gotta go listen to his show, where he's just interviewing uh, the experts on all of these different issues, and there's thousands and thousands of them Up on his website.
The show is at scotthorton.com, right?
I'm sorry, scotthorton.org, anti-war.com, the libertarian institute.org.
And of course, if you haven't already, you got to read Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Also, The Great Ron Paul, phenomenal book, and a new one coming out for you guys real soon.