Dave Smith dismantles President Trump's claims that the Iran war is over, contrasting it with Bush's Iraq victory where regime change occurred. He argues Trump's "great economy" narrative ignores youth debt and housing costs, while his NATO criticisms contradict his own aggressive foreign policies. Smith highlights how Trump's failure to arrest "deep state" figures or close Guantanamo Bay has eroded his working-class coalition, predicting Republican midterm losses as voters reject broken promises and contradictory war justifications. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Victory Through Nuclear Treaty00:14:53
What's up?
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith, riding solo for today's episode.
Let me just remind you before we get into the show this weekend's the big one, Chicago.
Me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein will be out doing stand up shows at Zanies.
Friday and Saturday night, we are at the Rosemont Zanies Club.
And then Sunday night, we will be at the Chicago Downtown Club.
Those tickets are moving very fast.
The shows are going to sell out.
So if you want to come out, Go grab tickets for it now.
This is probably going to be one of your last opportunities in the next couple of days.
So, comicdavesmith.com.
And I should mention, I mean, we got a bunch of stuff coming up on the road.
We got next after Chicago.
Sorry, Chicago is this weekend.
But then after that, we got, hold on, let's see here.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Arizona, oh, the Denver Comedy Works out in Colorado.
The Houston, Huntsville, Alabama, Nashville, Tennessee, Fort Lauderdale, Appleton, Wisconsin, Austin, Texas, at the Comedy Mothership.
Grab those tickets now, by the way, even though it's a few months out.
Those always sell out early.
And then Louisville, Kentucky, Fort Worth, and Dallas, San Diego, a bunch more stuff.
ComicDavidsmith.com for all of those ticket links.
Okay, so the President of the United States of America did an interview with Maria Bartiramo.
Which they recorded yesterday.
It aired this morning at 6 a.m.
And so I thought for today's show, we could respond to some of what was said there.
It's like, I don't know.
I don't know what to say.
I mean, we'll get into it and break it all down.
It is unbelievable.
I guess I'll add this before we get into it.
I'll poison the well a little bit that it's just unbelievable how clearly Donald Trump is just lying.
Now, obviously, Donald Trump has always had a unique relationship with the truth.
Especially when it comes to bragging about his own accomplishments.
But this, at this point, when you're talking about something as serious as an ongoing war, it's just amazing how brazen the lies are.
You know, so it got reported yesterday after the interview, and then it didn't air.
A couple clips came out last night, but then it didn't air till this morning.
But during the day yesterday, there was reporting that Donald Trump had announced that the war is over.
And so this sent off a big reaction.
And there's even just that look, obviously, everyone kind of infamously remembers that George W. Bush launched the mission accomplished banner and landed that fighter jet and gave that whole speech.
And that looked really ridiculous when the war ended up going on for 15 years and being an absolute catastrophic bloodbath for at least eight or nine of those years.
But Donald Trump, I mean, even when it was being reported yesterday that he announced the war's over.
Like, dude, this war has been going on, like, I think less than nine weeks.
He said it was over six weeks ago.
Like, he's said it's over so many times.
He's declared victory.
He's already had like 15 mission accomplished moments just in this short war so far.
And of course, as we have been talking about and will continue to talk about, not one of the war goals has been met.
The very clearly stated strategic reasons for the wars, not one of them has been accomplished.
And of course, we have this major problem now.
With the Strait of Hermos that we did not have before the war started.
So it is very hard to imagine how you can declare victory so many times.
I mean, at least, just to be clear, the point I'm making here is that George W. Bush did say mission accomplished and declare victory, and that looked very bad.
In fact, I think in many ways, that is probably the thing that has come to define George W. Bush's legacy more than anything else, it's probably that mission accomplished banner.
Even more so than Katrina, or even more so than the financial crash of 2008, even more so than Afghanistan.
Really, Iraq became George W. Bush's legacy and specific because, you know, look, the optics of it are really, really bad to declare victory and say mission accomplished and then be caught in a, you know, catastrophe that cost trillions of dollars and a million lives and all of that stuff.
So, but, but again, to be clear, like Donald Trump did, okay, George W. Bush, at least to some degree, made the war about Saddam Hussein.
Saddam Hussein was that regime in a sense.
You know, this was a guerrilla fighter who became the dictator of Iraq.
You know, Donald Trump doesn't even have a win like that.
You know, taking out the Ayatollah, like taking out Khomeini is just not the same thing as taking out George W. Bush when the mullahs are still in power and the IRGC is still controlling things and the Iranian army is still standing and it's the Ayatollah's son who is taking over.
Like, at least, you know, in Iraq, We had invaded the country.
Now, it is true that we had a fairly light footprint under the, I was going to say Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld strategy.
But we had taken the country.
It was clear that the next step was we were going to hold elections.
It was clear that Chalabi's group was, what was it, the Free Iraqi Congress?
I believe that's what they were calling them, the Free Iraqi Congress, if I remember correctly.
It was clear that that group was going to be given preferential treatment.
It was also clear that, you know, If you remember the dynamics in Iraq, right?
Saddam Hussein is a Sunni Baathist dictator sitting on like a 20% or so Sunni country.
There's like 60% of the country was Shiite.
So, super majorities of the country were opposed to Saddam Hussein.
So, my point is as soon as you had a military presence there, you were going to be holding elections at some date.
There was no question that Saddam Hussein's son wasn't going to be winning that election.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, we had effected a regime change there.
Now, obviously, the lesson of George W. Bush and why he goes down as one of the worst presidents in American history is because we, you know, there's the lesson of celebrating a regime change before you've figured out if you can put something else in there that's going to replace it, that's going to be better, because that is the real test of whether a regime change was successful or not, is what comes next.
But they had changed the regime, is my point.
He at least had one thing to point to to say mission accomplished.
Donald Trump has nada.
It's a big goose egg.
He's got nothing that he can even say is a victory.
And he's declared victory 15 times or something like that.
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All right, let's get back on the show.
Anyway, um.
All right, without further ado, let's get into some of the highlights from this interview with President Trump and Maria Bartiramo.
You keep saying was.
Is this war over?
I think it's close to over here.
I mean, I view it as very close to over.
You know what?
If I pulled up stakes right now, it would take them 20 years to rebuild their country.
And we're not finished.
We'll see what happens.
I think they want to make a deal very badly.
That's pretty unprecedented.
I mean, having direct talks like that.
I have talks with everybody, but it's very effective.
I think you're going to have a great deal.
I'm doing a great job for the country and for the world.
You know, we've had no help, zero from NATO.
We're there for them.
They're not there for us.
We spend, you saw the chart that came out a couple of days ago with a big monster red ball.
That was us.
And all these little satellite balls.
And it represented the money spent on military and NATO.
And it's ridiculous.
And they should have been better.
They should have said, we'll send somebody.
It's a small operation compared to a big operation.
But NATO was not there for us.
And what it means, if they're not there for us here, they're not going to be there for us.
So why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on NATO if they're not going to be with us?
If they're not going to be with us on Iran, they're not going to be with us on a much bigger subject than Iran.
All right.
So this is just, I don't know, on every level of this is wild.
I guess let's do the war stuff and then we'll do the NATO stuff second.
So here you have the president.
And this is what the quote ended up being, right?
It was reported that he said the war is over, but he's not even making that declarative of a statement here.
He's saying he thinks the war is close to being over.
He said this on the first day of the war, the first day of the war.
You know, the weeks, not months, is has already turned into months, not years.
Right?
That's just an objective fact.
We've already transitioned from weeks, not months, to months, not years.
The whole time, Donald Trump saying it's close to over.
Now, again, I hope he's right.
But he says, I think we're very close to over.
And this is a victory because we've set them back 20 years.
Of course, what exactly is a victory in that?
That they'll be rebuilding for 20 years.
That's what we get to come home with.
A lot of human suffering over there.
Okay.
Now he says, you know, he says we've decimated them.
I think we're very close to, you know, we've set him back 20 years and we're not done.
So we will be killing more people.
We will be destroying more of the country, is his announcement there.
But he says they really want to make a deal.
They really want to make a deal.
This is, there is absolutely at this point no evidence suggesting anything like other than Donald Trump is just making this up.
You know, they, if they're so desperate to make a deal, why did you walk away from that 21 hour meeting with no deal, with no deal in hand?
And everything that's been reported, and including what Donald Trump himself has said, is that the sticking point in the negotiations was the nuclear issue.
Now, it's not exactly clear.
It seems the most likely answer here is that JD Vance and Steve Witkoff and, and, um, Jared Kushner actually went back and made the same Israeli demand that you give up all enriched uranium and you can't even have a civilian legal nuclear program that you have the right under international law to have.
Which is, you know, as we've talked about quite a bit, it's quite an ask.
You know, it's quite an ask for, you know, if you just think about this for a second, right?
It is the there's a UN Security Council resolution.
A binding resolution.
It's never enforced, but this is international law.
Like, whatever, however you feel about international law, I'm not a big fan of it myself.
But there is a UN Security Council resolution that insists that countries join the nonproliferation treaty.
Israel refuses to.
They say, nope, we never agreed to that treaty.
We're not joining it.
America is a member of the treaty, Iran is a member of the treaty.
What the nonproliferation treaty says, well, it says a lot of things, but there's rules about What nuclear countries can do.
And then, if you're a not nuclear country, you agree to not develop nuclear weapons.
And there's a bunch of regulations around what you're allowed to do.
One of them is that you're not allowed to have normal relations, if you're a part of the nonproliferation treaty, with countries who have nuclear weapons and are not a part of the nonproliferation treaty.
So, Israel has nuclear weapons and is not a part of the nonproliferation treaty.
So, what they do is they don't admit they have nuclear weapons.
Because if they did, there'd be all types of legal implications about the countries that work with them and have normalized relations with them.
So, what they call strategic ambiguity, everyone knows they have them, but they just won't admit.
There's satellite photographs.
Like, we know they have them, but they won't admit it.
And so, this is like their end around, it's like not very clever, you know, way to usurp the international law.
But now, so now, just to be clear, Iran has signed the nonproliferation treaty.
They are abiding by it.
They're members in good standing and have been for years.
So now we're taking the demand of a country who has secret nuclear weapons.
And their demand is that you can't have a non weapon nuclear energy program.
War Agreements and Deterrents00:08:26
You can't even have a nuclear deterrent.
You can't have the energy program or a nuclear deterrent.
We can have secret nuclear weapons.
So that's the starting point of the demand.
Anyway, the point I'm getting to is if this was the starting point of the demand and the Iranians go, no, we're still not doing that.
It was a no before the war.
It's a no after the war.
Where is this sign that the Iranians are desperate to make a deal?
If they're desperate to make a deal, why wouldn't they have made the deal?
They have the same, like, in other words, the same thing that was a red line for them before is still a red line for them now.
That's what all the evidence points to.
And look, because it's not as if we've had the minutes of the meeting for 21 hours released and we know every single thing that's been said.
But look, it is also possible because this is another thing that people like me and people in my camp have been warning about for, you know, like about 20 years, some maybe a little bit more than that.
But obviously, if you wanted to incentivize Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, this would be the way to do it.
And so it's also quite possible.
That Iran is just simply not going to make the same type of nuclear agreement they would have made in the past.
I mean, if you're Iran, if you're a member of the Iranian government, if you will allow yourself for one second to just take it from their perspective, you want a nuclear weapon more than ever.
A nuclear weapon really is the one thing that would guarantee that no one's going to do this to you again.
And, you know, right now you have the Strait of Hermos as a deterrent, but nothing's quite like, you know, a nuclear umbrella.
And so, anyway, so there's just zero evidence that any of that is true.
And I will gladly admit I'm wrong if tomorrow the Iranians yell uncle and they just, you know, capitulate and do agree to this.
And it turns out he was right.
They really wanted to make a deal.
But I can't stress enough, there is literally zero evidence right now.
To indicate that that's even kind of directionally true, you know, everybody recognizes here, including the Iranians, how much this war is hurting the United States of America and how much it's hurting the world.
And they have every incentive in the world to not let Donald Trump off the hook right now and to make sure that they come out of this in as strong a place and that it took as much of a toll as possible and as much of a guarantee that this will never happen again.
To the second part here about NATO, because this is a truly insane standard that Donald Trump is applying to NATO.
Now, Donald Trump can sit there and say, though, we give hundreds of billions of dollars to NATO and we help them out so much and we do all of these things.
Okay.
Yes, I'm as anti NATO as anybody, substantially more anti NATO than Donald Trump is.
Donald Trump is entering his sixth year as being president of the United States of America.
I agree with you.
We shouldn't be giving hundreds of billions of dollars to NATO.
What have you done about that?
You know, like you've been talking about this issue since your first term.
If you don't want to be in NATO, make moves to get us out of NATO.
Now, let's hope you're not doing that just so that you can help the Israelis start a war against Turkey.
But getting out of NATO would be a great idea.
There's no reason why we should be subsidizing the defense of Europe.
Europe is rich, they're fine.
There's an agreement set up in the aftermath of World War II when Europe was war torn.
Well, they're not anymore, they've long rebuilt.
And we're in a lot of debt.
We shouldn't be subsidizing anyone else's defense.
However, that is a far different thing than saying because we subsidize your defense, because we have this stupid America last policy of subsidizing your defense, therefore, you have an obligation to join with us anytime we launch an aggressive war.
That is just crazy.
That is insane.
There are, there, like, there is nothing in the NATO agreement that says anything like that, right?
Like, the Article 5 says that we have to aid in the defense if anyone is attacked.
That's what NATO was always supposed to be, right?
This is why they will say it's a defensive alliance.
Now, it's not exactly a defensive alliance because they've also conducted offensive wars of aggression themselves, always with, you know, the US leading the way.
But they've, you know, they fought wars in Serbia and Afghanistan and Libya.
Like there were NATO forces involved in all of those wars, and those were wars of aggression.
However, the NATO agreement itself isn't we're on board anytime you want to drop bombs on anybody.
The NATO agreement is if any of us are attacked, we all pull together resources to help the common defense.
That's bad enough, by the way, because the implications of these war guarantees are always very dangerous.
Like that might sound nice.
Now, it might sound nice to say, oh, we have a defense agreement.
We have a war guarantee with some country.
We'll protect you, Estonia.
Okay, that sounds nice.
But if you want to really ask yourself, what does that tangibly mean?
That means what?
If Russia and Estonia go to war, we have to be in the war too?
When did we ever have a referendum on that in America?
That, like, oh, your American boys and American taxpayers are on the line for some conflict that might happen.
Halfway around the world in countries they couldn't find on a map, whose cultures they know nothing of, but their children should be risked for that conflict.
It's a terrible idea.
But the idea that Donald Trump is going to say so the standard here is Donald Trump launches a war.
Objectively speaking, the war is a war of aggression.
We were not attacked by Iran.
We're not responding to an attack.
This was a war of aggression.
It was a war of choice.
We did not have to launch this war.
We did it because we wanted to.
It was not a war of necessity.
Those are objective.
You know, observations about this conflict.
So, Donald Trump launches a war of choice, a war of aggression that is a disaster, is not working out, as evidenced by the fact that now he's bitching and blaming all of his friends for his policy.
It's their fault for not jumping in.
Well, why would we even need them to jump in if it's working out so tremendously well?
You know, like he doesn't even pay attention to the contradictions in what he's saying.
If it's so well and we're doing so good and we've already won, why do you care whether you didn't get more backup?
But instead, he's blaming them for not going along with this very unpopular war.
Look, man, why would anyone?
Look, if there was a vote, we don't do things this way in this country, but if there was a referendum on whether we should go to war with Iran, that referendum would have failed overwhelmingly.
In other words, the American people wouldn't decide to go along with this war.
Why do we expect the European nation states to be any different?
And, you know, I mean, there's something about this that is like, it is so profoundly Donald Trump, and it is the worst part about him.
It's why he's such a terrible person that Donald Trump launches, you know, say whatever you will, even if you want to defend this thing, and obviously I'm opposing with everything I have, but even if you want to defend it, at least have the slightest bit of honor, like be a man.
Defend it and then defend how well it works out or how well it fails.
But to sit here and make this unilateral decision to launch a war of aggression on behalf of a foreign country, and then everyone with common sense goes, This is a terrible idea.
Politicians Breaking Promises00:12:31
Please do not do this.
And then the thing turns into a disaster.
And then you blame all of those guys for being against launching it, for not launching it with you.
That is just some bitch made behavior, if ever I've seen some.
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All right, here, let's go to the next clip.
Do you expect the Republicans to lose seats in the House?
And what does that mean for your agenda?
Well, I just left with Mike Johnson and some great people, some great congressmen and women in the Oval Office.
I think we're going to do good.
Now, with that being said, when somebody gets elected president, that party always loses the midterms.
I don't know why.
I don't know why.
Nobody can explain it.
I asked people that are deep into the psychological world, I said, why is it that a voter votes for the opposite party?
Even when you have a good president, I think I had the greatest year, the greatest opening year.
I've read the greatest.
Look, I ended eight wars.
A ninth is coming.
But I ended eight wars.
Nobody's ever ended one war.
Who's ended one?
Nobody.
I ended eight.
We have the biggest tax cuts ever.
We have the biggest regulation cuts ever.
The greatest economy ever, pretty much including the fact that I took a detour into Iran in order to stop something that could have destroyed the world, right?
But even when you have a great president, they tend to lose the midterms.
It doesn't make sense to me.
So we're going to try turning it around.
You know, in 50 years, I guess the president, the person, the party with the president, has won twice.
Why that happens, I don't know.
We are really working hard to turn that around.
We've had the greatest year in the history of the presidency, first year, and we should be giving credit.
Look at the border.
So we had a border that was an open sieve.
You covered it better than I did.
Pause it for a second here.
Um, because uh, here we'll get into the border stuff in his next comments in a second.
But the um, oh, the levels of cope.
I mean, yeah, he's he's kind of he can't even say with a straight face, we're going to do well in the midterms.
He's got to go, well, yeah, it looks like it's bad, but it usually goes that way.
And nobody understands why, nobody can figure out why, you know, the the incumbent uh party.
Always seems to lose the midterms.
And it's not true that they always lose the midterms, but they do more than they don't.
Well, a huge part of that is because.
Politicians campaign on one thing and then don't keep any of their good promises and do a whole lot of bad stuff, and they end up getting the voters kind of disgusted at them.
And that's the same path that's continuing here.
Like, why is it that Barack Obama, who comes in with like these crazy high approval numbers and is like really beloved by the country, and why is it that two years later, the country is voting in the Republicans?
Well, like, okay, in that case, it was because Barack Obama.
Ran on ending the wars and closing Guantanamo Bay and reinstating habeas corpus and tearing up the Patriot Act.
And, you know, he even ran on cutting the budget.
He said, I'm going to go through the budget line by line until we deal with the national debt and all this stuff.
And then he didn't do any of that, did none of it.
He expanded the wars, surged them, expanded the theaters.
I mean, I'm talking even just two years in, he was already had really put the Obama doctrine of drone warfare in Pakistan and all types of other bombing campaigns.
Guantanamo was still open.
The Patriot Act still stood.
The budget had only exploded.
And he had given us, he went all in on Obamacare, which was a complete flop and disaster.
And like the website didn't work when they first launched it.
You know, everybody at this point kind of just hates Obamacare.
No one goes, Oh, what a great system this state insurance marketplace is.
But even already at the time, people had really seen that it was bad.
And then, of course, there was the stimulus and the banker bailouts.
And it was people were furious about this.
Both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements were like out in the streets, furious over the idea you bailed out the big banks who tanked the economy with the government.
And then the government takes the taxpayer money to bail them out.
It's such an outrage.
That's why the Tea Party rode into success.
That's why they won.
And, you know, for the guy who said, oh, you know, like, come on, dude, Donald Trump talks mad shit.
And so you got to hold him a little bit accountable at times.
I mean, the guy who said, we're in a new golden age, a new golden age has been ushered in, and there'll be so much winning that you just get tired of winning.
Well, okay, when you came in the second term, the Democrats had like a 23% approval rating.
They were totally defeated.
You had the greatest political comeback in history.
And now, a year later, you're sitting around going, Well, you know, they always lose.
That's what happens.
No, you had every opportunity in the world.
And let me tell you something if Donald Trump had delivered for the American people, I think the Republicans would be in a great position to keep control of the Congress.
But they just haven't.
And look, even by his own admission here, and he can get back into bragging about the border, that's probably the strongest argument that he has.
But, and we'll hear him out on that.
But even if he wants to say this little like, well, we took a little bit of a dip.
I mean, well, the economy was white hot, but we took a little bit of a dip because we had to go fight this war.
Like already right there, that's a complete betrayal of America first.
The whole point of being for an America first administration was no, we don't want to sacrifice over here for doing some unnecessary shit over there.
And if Donald Trump's way of selling it now, you know, you got to go.
You have to, your starting point is you're campaigning on let's not fight these stupid wars, specifically the one in Iran, too.
Let's not fight these stupid wars.
Let's stop wasting money.
They're unnecessary wars.
And let's focus on our country because we got so many problems here.
And then you go, all right, actually, we got to sacrifice and tighten the belt a little bit here because we got to do something over there.
It really, in order to pull off that much of a 180, it really relies on your ability to sell people that this was necessary.
And Donald Trump just has the laziest thing of, oh, they would have destroyed the world.
I mean, is there even one Fox News watching father in law who really believes that the world would have been over if we hadn't fought this war?
Because is anybody that lost?
I suppose there's some people who just whatever Trump says, they'll believe.
But it's just like you, in order to pull off a 180 like that, you would need, you know, you would need something big.
Look, FDR may have ran on keeping us out of World War II, but we got hit on Pearl Harbor.
How much he knew about that, leave that aside for now.
But I'm just saying the optics politically of it.
Okay, that's enough where you could say, hey, I was against this thing, but we just got attacked.
And so now we got to go.
Into it, Donald Trump just simply doesn't have anything like that.
He's sitting here and going, He's going in the 80s.
A group of Shiites in Lebanon who were affiliated with Iran killed some of our Marines.
It's like, okay, but you're saying we were attacked way back then?
But if that's the case, why wouldn't you have been running on we got to go back?
We've been attacked.
Why would why the switch up?
So there's just no, there's nothing politically feasible about this propaganda working.
I guess that's the best I could say.
All right, let's let's keep playing.
I should get credit.
The border.
I should get credit.
That's what we need them for.
Yeah, I think we should.
Well, I think we have to bring it back to talk.
We don't need help on the border.
But, you know, I built over 1,000 miles of wall.
We have to talk about it because we should be given credit for having taken this disaster where people were criminals were coming in from all over the world and pouring into our country.
The worst thing, it's the worst thing that's ever happened.
It was like an invasion.
And we should be given, Maria.
Credit for it, so I'm going to be talking about it, but I'm also going to be talking about we gave the voters the biggest tax cut in history, the biggest regulation cuts in history, the best economy in history.
And now, what we're doing is we went, we took this path, we knocked the hell out of Iran, we stopped them from having a nuclear weapon.
Regardless, by the way, I could leave tomorrow, they would never be able to have a nuclear weapon for years, they would because their country is all right.
Let's pause it here, let's pause it for a second.
So now, Donald Trump, his new talking point is I could leave now and they would never have a nuclear weapon.
There's some major problems with that.
Major, major problems.
I mean, the obvious is just that Donald Trump, but this is what you said last time.
This is what you said.
You obliterated their nuclear program.
This was your words.
You went out of your way to say the fake news is pretending that we didn't obliterate their nuclear program, but it's 100% obliterated, totally destroyed.
If that means we have to be back there in seven months, With your number one justification still being Iran can never have a nuclear weapon, and all the frantic Trump supporters going, No, this isn't a betrayal because he always said Iran can't have a nuclear weapon or whatever, which is a lot different than saying we ought to launch a war against Iran if they enrich up to 60% or something.
But if this is the whole justification for the war, and you're saying you've already ensured that they don't have them, then there is no more justification for the war.
But you're yourself saying we're not done with it.
If that's the goal and that's been achieved, then come home and say that.
But you know, you can't come home and say that because you already just said that seven months ago.
Again, this is pathetic.
Like, this is, he just can't come up with anything better because there's no other way to sell this thing.
You know, can't come out and just say, I fought a war for the Israelis.
Justification for Continuing War00:02:17
They told me it'd be really easy.
And it turns out it wasn't.
Now I'm having trouble getting out of it.
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Stock Markets and Midterms00:12:02
And look, I will say, in terms of his midterm pitch, and this is where I think a lot of the, you know, well, maybe I'll just mention there was, I had a little bit of a ridiculous kind of controversy on Twitter earlier today.
Some people may have seen, I don't know, the Libertarian Party tweeted something at me about how, oh, you're out of your mind, Dave.
And then they deleted the post.
And I mean, what's going on with the Libertarian Party right now is just a mess.
And it's like, it's just so embarrassing and unprofessional.
Just have this public dynamic where, like, clearly someone who controls the Twitter or someone who's got the, you know, has the password to the Twitter is like, post something talking shit about me.
Then you can clearly see after it, like, three or four people get together and go, What are you doing?
No, take it down, delete it.
Now it's like, Oh, it just looks even worse now.
But anyway, I so I had made this comment.
I was on with Sneeko and I'm sorry, I can't remember.
I'm blanking on the guy's name, Professor Yang or something like that, the Chinese professor.
You know, I had a conversation with both of them.
I really enjoyed it.
I thought it was a great conversation.
And then today people are flooded with, oh, this guy has all these bad takes on this issue.
Like, oh, okay, whatever.
Well, I guess I don't agree with that.
But we were having a conversation.
But what I said was, and I think this is like pretty conventional political wisdom, but I just went, I said, hey, look, there's an argument right now that the best case scenario is the Democrats winning the midterms.
Like, there kind of has to be some punishment for the Republicans here.
I also said I'm not going to vote for Democrats because I just can't get the stench of Democrat all over me.
I already got the stench of Donald Trump on me, and I'm trying my best to wash that off.
So I'm not trying to pick up any new stench right now.
So I'm not voting for them, and they're going to win the midterms anyway.
But I was basically saying the best thing probably is that the Democrats come back in the midterms.
Then this administration is totally discredited.
No one from this administration can run successfully, and some other primary challenger comes along for 28.
Anyway, I guess this upset people or something like that.
But, you know, For the people who took issue with this, I saw Steven Crowder's producer was like, no, you know, whatever.
Of course, that's never the right idea.
It's always got to be the Republicans and never the Democrats because they give us so much success.
But, you know, the real thing here is that even as people are freaking out, hey, what do you want?
Listen, man, I said I'm not going to vote for them.
So, Your beef isn't with me.
The Democrats are going to win the midterm elections, and it's not because of me.
I'm not voting for them.
That's not why.
It's because of what your guy is delivering.
And this pitch, look, I'll admit this the border thing, he's got a good pitch on.
That is a fair enough pitch.
It is the best thing that Donald Trump has to go with.
It's the best accomplishment of the administration.
It is not a small one.
I'll give him credit for that.
I'll call balls and strikes as harsh as I've been on them.
Hey, man, there was a.
A genuine crisis under Joe Biden at the border and a very severe crisis, like a crisis, like you know, um, the term gets so abused by our corrupt, uh, fraudulent, you know, national security apparatus.
But the crisis at the border, excuse me, the crisis at the border under Joe Biden was actually a national security threat.
Like that's a term that gets used a lot, but there are things that are national security threats.
The United States of America hasn't actually had to deal with too many of them because we have the most powerful military in the history of the world and two giant oceans and a global empire and all these things.
You know, we've had terrorist threats, but like there was something about the border crisis with Biden that was more of an existential national security threat.
You have people pouring into your countries by the millions or perhaps tens of millions, and you don't know who they are.
That is a real problem.
And that type of rapid demographic change against the will.
Of the domestic population and the social upheaval that follows from it.
That was a major problem.
Donald Trump got that border secure.
That's good midterm messaging.
That one thing is not going to be enough to win, though.
And, you know, when Donald Trump wants to, if this stuff about bragging about the economy is just, this is the touch of death.
And so, for all you guys, I guess my point is for all you guys out there who are so offended that I made some comments about how there's an argument that it's the best thing for Democrats to win in the midterms, which I think pretty undeniably there's an argument for.
I'm not even saying with certainty it's correct, who knows?
But, If your real concern is the Democrats coming back to power because they're such a threat, then just don't do yourself the favor of not lying to yourself.
If you're telling me, if this was every person like that, like Steven Crowder's producer, every like Trump supporting conservative, if Joe Biden was delivering this message, you would immediately see what the problem is in it.
What are you bragging about here?
The stock market going up, the Dow was over 50,000, which Which, by the way, every time you brag about that, all anyone can remember is how you covered up the Epstein file because it became such a meme that that was Pam Bondi's defense.
But okay, the issue which any Republican would have agreed with me during Biden, because, you know, by the way, Joe Biden also bragged about record high stock markets because he also had record high stock markets.
And Barack Obama also had record high stock markets.
And Donald Trump, the first time, had record high stock markets.
And George W. Bush had record high stock markets because we live in an inflationary economy where the price of everything goes up.
Almost every president is going to have a record high stock market.
But what does that mean?
That really just means the price of things is going up.
Now, that is good in some ways for the ownership class.
This might be nice for your baby boomer, you know, your BoomerCon audience or something like that.
But the major fundamental problem we have in the American economy is that the average first time house buyer is 40.
You cannot have a stable, functioning society of families if people can't afford to start them.
And that problem under Donald Trump, objectively speaking, has gotten worse.
Now, you can sit here and do your CPI math about how the rate of it getting worse was worse under Joe Biden.
By the way, I hate to burst your bubble for all the Trump supporters out there.
While that is true, it was largely Donald Trump's fault.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden really share the blame for the Biden inflation.
Now, what'd you think was in the year 2020, you locked down the country and injected $6 trillion into the economy.
Is it a shock that in 2021 and 2022, the price of things increased a lot?
Does Donald Trump bear no responsibility as he crammed the biggest spending bills in world history through in the year 2020 and demonized Thomas Massey for just requesting a vote before we commit fiscal suicide?
So, anyway, maybe that's neither here nor there to the political point, but that is a point that Trump supporters should grapple with a bit.
But this message of telling people.
That everything is okay.
Listen, Donald Trump did very well with the youth in the 2024 election.
The best by far he's ever done.
A lot of people credit the late Charlie Kirk for that.
He certainly did a lot of work on that front.
Imagine telling anybody, like anybody who's 30 and under, about how great the economy is.
You know, when you, these guys, and this isn't like, I don't just say this like it's an, um, An anecdotal example or something like this.
I use this example because it's like this is actually like the prototype of the 29 year old in the workforce today.
Nor it's like you're literally, you've got maybe 130 grand in student loan debt.
You work at DoorDash, and the average house in your neighborhood goes for $750,000.
Someone's going to come along and tell you what a great economy this is.
And now, you know, like you're at a place where, like, for you and your girlfriend to get Chinese takeout, it's $55.
You know, like there's just this is the touch of death.
This is such a losing message.
And meanwhile, what does it open the door for?
It opens the door for the Democrats to say, we're going to run on, and what are they all running and winning on?
Unaffordability.
We're going to run on how the price of everything is so expensive.
And the reason the price of everything is so expensive is because our nation is bankrupt.
We cannot afford the size of government we have.
And so all we can do is keep printing the money.
And if Donald Trump's committed to more foreign wars, then he's committed to more money printing.
And that's it.
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So, anyway, he will not solve the problem.
And this message is just going to be a disaster, an absolute disaster for the midterms.
The economy is so great.
And you know why?
Because the stock market's up.
Again, just focusing on that one demographic, and there's lots of other demographics to focus on.
Do you know any young people?
Forget 30 and under, say 40 and under.
Go to anyone who you know who's 40 and under, and I want you to go up to them and be like, dude, great news.
The stock market's at an all time high.
Deep State Polls Explained00:16:18
And you know what they're going to tell you?
Great, I don't have any money in the stock market.
How the hell could I afford to?
Where's this extra money that I'm putting into the stock market coming from?
I'm literally living at home.
You know what I mean?
Like, this is what they're going to say to you.
And I mean this, like, go talk to real people and see if I'm wrong about that.
And maybe you will find the exception to the rule.
There's some kid who got a trust fund or something like that.
But, like, that is heavily the exception to the rule.
And, you know, it's like people are not participating in the ownership class anymore.
And that is the central problem.
That any Trump supporter should be aware of.
And if Donald Trump was not the current president right now, you would absolutely agree with me and admit I'm right.
And I know this because you all did when I made the same point way back last year.
Yeah, telling people the economy is great when it's not is one of the worst political strategies that you can employ.
All right, let's keep playing the rest of this clip.
They don't have an Air Force.
They don't have an airplane.
They're all gone.
And the press doesn't write about it.
The New York Times, you'd think, if you read the New York Times, this fake, horrible newspaper, you would think they're doing well in the war.
They have nothing left.
They're going to make a deal.
We'll see what happens.
We have to explain to the voters, so importantly, the great job that we've done, because there's no reason why the Republicans should be losing.
These people, they'll open up the borders again.
They'll have transgender for everybody.
They'll have men and women's sports.
They'll end no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security for our seniors.
They'll end it all.
And if people hear that, I don't see how we lose the election.
Um, you know, look, I'll say maybe that's not the best.
That's not the worst.
You know, keep hammering how crazy these Democrats were.
You know, the Democrats were so crazy and so, um, you know, it's not just crazy, it's like so, uh, almost suicidal nationally with the policies and then, and then just sick and weird.
And they, they were so bad for so long that, look, I'm not saying there's not still some mileage to get out of that line.
That's not the worst thing for Donald Trump, you know.
Like, just talk about the border and just talk about how crazy the Democrats are, probably politically speaking, about as good as you can do right now.
But again, there is, and this is where I think, you know, a lot of us who were talking about, like, if you, a lot of people are like myself have been talking about since last summer how Donald Trump is destroying his presidency.
And at least last summer, there was still a little bit of a debate about it.
And a debate about how much this would actually affect people.
The one two punch of launching the 12 day war and burying the Epstein scandal really bothered a lot of people, really fractured his coalition, which was already volatile, let's say.
It was already, and over the issue of Israel.
I mean, this is what the whole thing is over.
And it was already very volatile about that and Trump continuing to fund the destruction of Gaza.
But then he hits this one two punch.
You know, it wasn't obviously now there's a lot more evidence of how unpopular Donald Trump is.
I mean, it really is amazing all those people who like to cite the MAGA Republican polls.
But if you actually go look at the polls, like I just thought there were CNN, of all places, ran a story about this, but it is true that there were three national polls, three major national polls that all had Donald Trump underwater with working class, non college educated white people.
Like Donald Trump has lost the working class, the white working class vote.
That is his base.
That was his entire base from the very beginning.
He's underwater in the polls.
This is the most unpopular war in American history.
Like he's in a lot of trouble now.
But I remember saying last year that I thought the Epstein thing really, really hurt Donald Trump more than polls could even measure.
And because there is something about the Epstein issue where, look, it is a lot of people try to downplay it and they go, Look, man, what people really care about is their healthcare costs, their mortgage payments, their property taxes, their daycare costs.
And there is truth to that.
People will try to say the same thing about Iran.
You talk about this Iran all day, but what people really care about is how this country is doing.
And it's like, yeah, but the point is that no one's trying to solve those problems because we're focused on this other nonsense.
And that's why we have to oppose it.
We can't begin to solve these problems until we get out of these stupid wars.
And So anyway, I guess my point with the Epstein thing, it's like.
Midterm elections always come down to who is more energized.
Their midterm elections get a much lower turnout than presidential elections.
And so you got to have your base energized.
And the energy factor for Donald Trump was always drain the swamp.
Like, I don't think I'm, you know, I'm not going out on too much of a limb here.
Like, this is what everyone would have said.
This was the whole thing.
Donald Trump's whole pitch was like, there are these.
These corrupt criminals in Washington, D.C., who wield government power, who are destroying the country, they're selling you out for their own benefit.
I'm going to get in there and win for you, and I'm going to get all of those guys.
And get all of those guys was always front and center.
None of this means anything to Donald Trump because he just makes campaign pledges.
You know, we're going to build a wall.
Okay, we never built a wall.
I'm never going to take one dollar from anybody.
Okay, he took more money than anybody else from all the most powerful people.
But like, But he also said, I'm going to throw Hillary Clinton in jail.
It's not, look, they chanted lock her up at every single Trump rally through all of 2016.
This shit resonated with the crowd.
And likewise, all the, you know, do you remember when MSNBC used to try to damage Donald Trump by claiming that his second presidency was going to be all about vengeance?
And every single normal person in the country heard that and said, that would be cool.
Yeah, that would be nice if he really went in there and wanted to get like, hey, dude, what are we talking about here?
The deep state framed Donald Trump for treason.
The deep state stole the 2020 election.
And I mean, listen, when I say this and try to like think badly, I am not making any of the Dominion voting machine claims or anything like that.
I'm just saying straight up with the Hunter Biden laptop, which we have proven now from the Twitter files where they were really, I mean, Not only directing people to squash that story, but then suppressing the people who were covering the story, like all types of government deep state pressure to kill a story.
And then they came out and had that list with all these intelligence analysts or agents signing on saying this is Russian misinformation.
When it wasn't, we now know, confirmed it was Hunter Biden's laptop.
So, Russian misinformation campaign, nothing to do with anything like that.
But, and this issue.
Undeniably, it would have been at least a few points for Donald Trump in a razor tight election.
That was the difference.
Like they stole that election from him.
Okay.
And then the COVID lies and the COVID.
And look, Donald Trump's whole promise, many of his men made the promise very explicitly was that we're going to go after all the deep state criminals.
This was what Dan Bongino and Kash Patel rode that wave of popular support.
Pam Bondi as well.
Donald Trump as well.
And so, When you're now in a reality where everybody knows on some level, on some very fundamental level, everybody knows that Donald Trump will not be draining the swamp.
That will not be happening.
There have at this point been zero deep state arrests and they bury the Epstein thing.
Like this is not an administration who's interested in getting the truth out to the people and holding the criminals and government responsible.
Once you take that away, where is your energy base?
That was the thing that motivated people to go vote for you.
And it's evaporated.
It's gone.
And that is why you're not going to win the midterm elections, not because, you know, well, presidents always do.
And even though we've had the greatest year ever, we're still going to lose.
Here, let's go to the other clip, Natalie, the third clip.
Let's play that and then we'll wrap up in a few.
The economy.
We have a great economy.
Remember, if I didn't want to make that little journey to Iran, it was a journey.
I said, we're going to have to do this for the good of the world.
So you still expect growth in the economy this year, number six?
I do.
I mean, I do.
Look, we had a couple of months where I had to go to a war.
I had to go and fight either a military operation.
Some people would call it a war, some people call it a military operation.
Just pause it already.
Just pause it already.
I mean, guys, again.
If any of you guys are concerned about the Democrats coming back to take power in this country, your issue ain't with me.
Your issue's with the guy you just saw on the screen.
Think about that.
He literally just said, though we have a great economy, we had to take a little journey into Iran for the good of the world.
Now, is that America first or is that some globalist bullshit?
So we have to sacrifice our economy for the good of the world.
Good luck.
I can't.
Now, why would white working class people not be surprised?
Supporting that message anymore.
Is that the same message that he had that got them to support him?
Or is that something a little bit different?
It's 180 degrees.
Like, what do you, you know?
And, you know, just this is, I don't know, man.
This is death.
This is death.
There's no way this is going to work.
And so, again, if you want to try to pretend this is something other than what we're seeing, then fine, go for it.
But this ain't going to work.
Here, let's keep playing.
Greatest military in the world.
But I had to divert because if I didn't do that, right now you would have Iran with a nuclear weapon.
And if they had a nuclear weapon, you would be calling everybody over there, sir.
And you don't want to do that.
Well, you keep saying was.
Is this war?
Okay, pause it.
John.
Pause it.
Okay, so this is where we're getting back into the part from before.
But, you know, I guess there's two major points there.
They're just the two easy ones.
Number one, you're lying.
You're lying.
It's just not true.
It's just not true that Iran would have a nuclear weapon already.
There's no truth.
He's just lying.
No evidence of this whatsoever.
And then, of course, as we've talked about for months and months, all of the intelligence says that it's not true.
It's just not true.
And in fact, if Donald Trump hadn't gone in on the 12 day war, there'd be IAEA inspectors in Iran right now.
They were still under an inspections regime.
So, it's just not true that they could have developed a nuclear weapon by now.
There's absolutely no reason to think that they would have.
And of course, then point B is like, yeah, but okay, well, then that totally destroys your whole claim from the last war.
What do you mean they'd have a nuclear weapon right now?
You said you obliterated their program seven months ago.
If what you meant was we set them back seven months, okay, well, that wouldn't even make sense, right?
Because there had to be some time to develop the bomb.
Right.
So if you're saying they would have a weapon right now, you're saying that what you set them back three months and then they were able in four months to break out, enrich their uranium up to 90 plus weapons grade percent, make a bomb, find a delivery mechanism to the bomb.
Like all of that would have happened in a few months.
Okay.
Well, then you were totally wrong when you said you obliterated it.
What you meant was you barely set it back.
Now, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to stop beating this drum because all those people who defended the 12 day war got to admit that they got that one wrong.
If you're going to support this one, then you got that one wrong.
Now, of course, just to be clear, the truth is that Iran hadn't made the political decision to get a bomb.
They weren't intending on getting a bomb.
They were actually trying to avoid getting a bomb.
They were quite happy to get back into a JCPOA like deal.
And that if they had at some point made the political decision to start developing a weapon, it would have taken them years in order to do it.
And we would have known that they were doing it.
At least we would have known that they kicked the inspectors out of the country because you can't do it unless you do that.
So none of this is true.
Just a big fat lie.
But if it was true, it totally contradicts the last thing you said.
All right.
You know what?
We'll wrap on that because I think that was looping right back into the part we had covered before.
But I will still, there's one other one I should add that was just noticeable throughout the interview is that, and again, this is just, it's almost too easy.
And the problem is that, you know, Trump supporters just, the ones who are still supporting them particularly, they just don't really care.
They'll make an excuse.
It doesn't matter if what He's saying contradicts what he just said.
It doesn't matter if one sentence contradicts the last sentence.
It doesn't matter if he sits there and says, you know, I had to take this detour into this war for the world.
So we had to, our economy had to suffer for the world.
Now, now they're pretending that that's what MAGA is.
That's what Trumpism is.
It doesn't matter if he says, I had to take us into this war, then pauses, then notices that he's not allowed to say it's a war out loud because it's totally fucking illegal if he calls it a war and then goes, I call it a military action.
Some call it a war.
So, like, but.
Here's one more for you.
Donald Trump, you literally, I know some people may have seen there's these old tweets of his that'll resurface now.
People will pull up tweets from, you know, 2014, 2016, 2012, whatever he was saying back then.
And what he was saying back then was that Obama was going to launch a war against Iran to distract from his failing presidency.
That's what he says.
He was warning.
That Obama was going to get us into a war and a round that would have been a disaster.
And now he goes, None of the presidents before me had the courage to do it.
And they really should have had the courage to do it.
That's how much he's moved the goalposts over the years.
From being the guy warning, Don't you dare pursue this policy, it's going to be a nightmare, to being the guy going, What a chump.
He didn't have the balls to pursue this policy because it's so awesome.