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Oct. 22, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
27:46
Will Neocons Weasel Their Way Into A Trump 2.0 White House?

Politico has published at least two speculatory articles on what the top personnel in a second Trump White House might look like. Several prominent neocons are on the list. Will the neocons move back in and run the show? Also today, tens of thousands of soldiers are deserting the Ukrainian army. What happens when there is no one left to fight?

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Who Will Be Chief? 00:14:45
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
I'm doing quite well.
Good, good.
Trying to figure out the future.
Nobody knows the future.
We just can guess at it once in a while.
We can guess.
But you know, the assumption right now on all the news stations, even the anti-Trump people, I think it's acknowledging there's no way Trump can lose.
But they never talk about, they talk about Trump winning and losing his supporter.
But what about the people?
Are they going to lose with this election?
I fear for that because I think that there's little guarantee, regardless of who's in office, that the spending will back off, the deficits will be less, and there will be no Federal Reserve to run things.
And our troops are coming home, all these things.
So that's why there's no magic to this.
But they're lining up, and the professionals, the people who really know how to run the government, they've had experience, and by golly, we can't leave it up to the people.
These votes don't mean that much.
It just means that we have to usher it, and now we have the edge, the Republicans are saying.
It looks like the Republicans are going to win.
But sometimes the policy doesn't change that much.
But there's a lot of talk, a lot of talk on the television and on the internet about who might make it.
And there was a pretty strong contention with, I wonder who will be chief of staff.
Now, the chief of staff, on the short run, does have a lot of power.
He's the doorman.
And yet Trump's experience with the chief of staff wasn't all that good.
It wasn't that good.
And actually, during his reign, four years, we were also not excited about all his appointees.
And there's been hint, and he's hinted that he will be studying these things more and picking and choosing.
But I guess we don't have, there's not a person to appoint to rein in or give us a hint as to monetary policy because both policy knows you've got to keep the printing presses going.
So that is going to continue.
But when it comes to foreign policy, on the surface, there's some changes between the two parties.
And yet, I'll believe it when it happens because generally speaking, there's somebody that's involved in the military-industrial complex that has a vote that nobody talks about.
So I'm not so sure what will happen.
But there are, maybe we found a couple names.
We say, well, I hope he makes it.
We could add a couple.
But unfortunately, from my viewpoint, some of the names mentioned both for the cabinet and the chief of staff doesn't get me excited.
Wow.
You know, we're having him.
He will stick to his guns and he will hold the president's feet to the fire.
And Trump will just smile and say, okay, I'll do that.
It's up for grabs and there's a lot of talking.
But I guess politically speaking, One thing that I noticed is the assumption.
Harris isn't sitting around talking about her.
I mean, they mention it, but everybody knows it or assumes they know that that's an impossibility.
But after all the cheating and lying settles down, who knows where the system will be.
Yeah, I was just going to say that with my opening, too, that I don't see an article.
I mean, this is an article.
We can actually put that first one up.
This is an article from Politico, which is an anti-Trump publication.
We look at it, tend to look at it because it has interesting stuff, but it definitely is not in favor of Trump.
And now it's possible that we missed the article, but I haven't seen one that says who might make up Kamala Harris' cabinet.
But they are speculating on Trump, so it makes you wonder if they've kind of resigned themselves to a Trump, second Trump term.
But I would just say, Dr. Paul, there's three things that we do know, especially from the first Trump term.
First of all, we know just in general, the personnel is the policy, especially when you have a president like Trump was, who was not very hands-on when it comes to his staff.
He's sort of a general person.
So he puts people in.
They basically do what they want.
That's the first one.
The second thing that we know, and he complained about it probably almost the entire four years, is that the people he has hired to do their jobs aren't doing what he wants them to do.
And in fact, in many cases, they're going behind his back and doing things he specifically does not want them to do.
So that's the second thing that we know.
And then now the third thing, you know, what does he do about it?
What is he going to do about the fact that the people he had in last time didn't do what he wanted?
Well, if there's any truth to what Politico is saying, there is some cause for alarm because it doesn't look like there are people here that are going to be controlled by him.
And so the methodology for this, if you put up the next clip, the methodology for this is far from scientific.
We should say that from the beginning.
But so this is how they basically put these together.
They get a bunch of people who write for Politico and said, let's spitball and see who might be in the second Trump administration.
And here's from the article.
He would be great at this or she would be great at that.
Trump has said on recent occasions while watching surrogates on television, according to a person with knowledge of his comments, who was granted anonymity to speak freely.
And like with his months-long search for running mate, the TV circuit has become an important venue for aggressive jockeying.
So anyway, they're saying basically we're kind of spitballing.
We talk to someone who's close to Trump, and it's the kind of people that he's looking at.
So that's kind of a general rundown of things.
Right.
And there'll be a lot of behind-the-scenes fighting and fuming.
And then there'll be a lot more writing because this was the first significant article, articles that actually went delving into and named a lot of names and trying to prejudge and guess who's going to be running the show.
But that will come up.
And of course, so many of those will have to have Senate approval.
So the way he said it comes out is a big deal, too.
You know, how easy they can get things through.
And some of those victories, you know, there's this assumption that it's going to be automatic almost that Trump will win.
But there was a couple Senate races that I thought, oh, it caught my attention.
A couple of Republican incumbents.
Are they going to end up with a tied vote again?
And who knows what?
Or one or two votes difference.
Yeah, this is definitely not a play-by-play.
But the first category is the Secretary of State.
And I think this is probably one of the most important, maybe after National Security Advisor.
But this is critically important because we've seen, Dr. Paul, we've talked about it on the show, how the State Department has been weaponized.
It was weaponized under Hillary.
It's been weaponized under Blinken.
It's to the point where when Biden needs to send someone to talk to someone overseas, he doesn't even send Blinken.
He sends a CIA director, which is weird.
So that's the dysfunctionality of the State Department right now.
So here are the people that Politico has come up with.
And they mentioned the frosty relationship he had with Crex Tillerson.
So here are the people that they've talked about.
And I'm only going to do a couple of them that we know.
If you go to the next one, now the first one is Rick Rinnell.
A lot of people may not know him.
He was Trump's ambassador to Germany.
He is an uber hawk.
I wouldn't say not exactly a neocon, but pretty much a neocon, super, super hawk.
As Politico points out, he submitted himself as one of the most influential advisors on foreign policy.
Trump refers to him as my envoy.
Many GOP experts consider him to be a top contender.
He is very, very hawkish on many of the issues.
So go to the next one.
Robert O'Brien's another named Dr. Paul that's not on everyone's tongue, but he was President Trump's, I believe, final national security advisor.
A very, very hawkish, I would say definitely open neocon.
Even Politico says O'Brien would be welcomed in Brussels and Kiev and is seen as a big supporter of NATO and Ukraine in the Republican Party.
So I don't know what you think about him, but the third one is the worst, and you can maybe comment on all three of them, is little Marco Rubio.
And we don't really even need to say much about Marco Rubio because he's the neocon's neocon.
He's never seen a war.
He doesn't want someone else to fight.
He was there in the Maidan in 2014, encouraging Ukraine to overthrow its elected government.
So all the problems in Ukraine are really on his shoulders and Lindsey Graham's shoulders.
So out of those three neocons, it's not very encouraging.
Not many, not much of a choice.
But I was waiting for you to say which one was closest to RPI.
I wonder which one that would be.
Every once in a while, they throw out one sentence.
You know, even Bush, when Bush ran on foreign policy, it was not, in words, it wasn't so bad.
Bad whole foreign policy, yeah.
Yeah, but what did he do?
Exactly the opposite.
That's why all this rhetoric isn't so meaningful.
And I think that there's so many people who are concerned about this.
But what will happen, though, is it'll be melded together and everything can get canceled, whether it's policy and economics, you know, interest rates, things like this.
Oh, we're going to do this, raise it, until a crisis hits, and they can pop up in a minute.
And what about on foreign policy?
I think sometimes things can happen overnight.
I bet there are plenty of people who are looking awarding for what event just happened during the night.
And, of course, I watch the financial markets, and I've been, the financial markets, I kept arguing the case, if I had only one thing, I look at the financial markets.
There are so many people involved in that that they'll give you a hint as to what happens.
But I tell you that the financial markets are not bidding well for what's coming.
What's coming is economic chaos.
And, you know, Larry Kudlow is mentioned in here.
He's somebody that I knew.
He used to work with Dave Stockman.
But I peeked Dave Stockman over.
Larry Kudlow.
But Kudlow, you know, is I heard him the other day because if you took him, I can't verify this, but my guess is Kudlow and others, because they all were, they were all against tariffs.
But I heard him have a spiel the other day on justifying, well, under these conditions, Trump is on the right track.
And Trump's getting more aggressive with it.
Yeah, he is.
You know, tariffs on everybody and high.
Yeah.
Not the way to work.
Sounds like he's trying to get a job.
I wonder if Stockman would even do it if Trump gave him a tap on the shoulder.
Because, you know, Stockman was heavily behind RFK Jr. in the campaign.
And remember, RFK now was flipped and said you should vote for Trump.
I wonder if that, well, we could call David up and have him come on the show and talk about it, but it would be interesting to see.
But he would definitely be preferable to anyone that we've seen.
Oh, yeah.
And if that happened, that would verge on a minor bureaucracy.
Yeah, it would.
Just for the public information of them, even considering, who's this David Stockman?
I mean, he's so qualified for him.
Reagan didn't like him, but they made up after a little squabble.
Well, the other one that we want to talk about is Defense Secretary.
And again, this is just speculation.
This is kind of, you know, fooling around here.
But put that next one up.
This is what Politico says are the three top contenders.
I'm not going to go into this Waltz guy.
He's like a former military guy, whatever.
But the two other ones, Dr. Paul, I know that you looked at this and your eyes almost fell out of your head.
Is next, go to the next one.
Well, the other one says that, you know, Politico rightly pointed out that Trump was angry at Mattis.
He was angry at Mark Esper because they didn't follow his policy directives.
And that was the frustrating thing about Trump when he was president.
He said, my guys aren't doing what I want.
You're the guy who's famous for saying you're fired.
Why didn't he do it?
He never did seem to do that.
It was weird.
But so the first one is really, really bad.
And that's Tom Cotton.
If you put the next one up, he is supposedly on the list.
Uber hawk.
He, again, has never met a war that he didn't want to fight.
Unlike Little Marco, though he actually was in the military, there are pictures of him stealing Iraq's gold after the U.S. invaded.
So he has some experience with war.
He is going to be a supercharged, but he's not as bad as the next one, I think, Dr. Paul.
I don't know.
We should actually.
We'll give him a number.
Yeah, yeah.
Put the next one down.
Mike Pompeo is apparently another possibility.
CIA Secretary of State, member of the House.
He is a massively strong supporter for Israel.
And he is massively in favor of war.
Also, famously, when he was CIA director, he was trying to find a way to assassinate Julian Assange.
That's what he wanted to do.
I don't know, Dr. Paul.
Maybe our viewers can put in the comments who you think would be worse.
Who do you think would be worse?
Well, you know, Pompeo is being considered Secretary of State, but we're talking about the whole cabinet.
But when I came across Mike's name, he was actually, I think we spent a little bit of time in Congress together, but he got promoted faster than I did.
Massively In Favor Of War 00:07:07
Yeah, he was ambitious.
He moved by the law.
But what I wrote down here, and I usually don't pick on people.
I don't like to do it in personality.
But the thought that crossed my mind, that immediate thought, Mike Pompeo, the one I fear the most for Secretary of State.
Yeah.
And defense, yeah, too.
He'll be running the whole show.
Yeah.
He might pick the chief of staff, too.
Well, you said when we were talking offline that what worries you most about him is that he's really smart.
He is.
I think he was first in his class.
And if you were going to measure that, but I learned early on that the way you measure intelligence in our college class is not exactly the way you measure people in judgment.
You know, personalities and judgment and what your personal beliefs are.
Personal beliefs.
You know, right now he could be real smart, but he might conclude and say, well, you know, but we, we, he'll justify it intellectually, but we have a responsibility, you know, to police the world.
And this is acceptable, and we've been doing this for a long time.
And it hasn't always worked out all that well, but we'll keep doing it.
So I don't think that being first in class is an automatic that he's going to think more about liberty than authoritarianism.
The real problem, especially when you look at military policy, defense policy, and foreign policy, is someone like Trump.
And I think generally people that look at these, I want a tough person in that position.
I need someone tough.
Where what you actually need is someone who can articulate a pro-American approach to the world.
The world is changing.
You can't just have a dinosaur in there who's going to stamp his hand and stamp his fist and be tough.
Someone needs to be able to say, what do we need to do to progress in a world that's becoming very, very difficult?
And I don't think any of these people can articulate such a view.
Well, I've mentioned this to you in the past: that when I was under attack for a position that was not for more war and sending more troops, that it's interpreted as being very weak and unpatriotic.
And when you're there with few allies and you stand fast and you know you have to stay there, I, for some reason, didn't have a choice.
It's just that I thought that was the right thing to do.
But I didn't consider myself a weak person.
You know, if I did that, I couldn't have stayed.
I had to have some sense of balance about the morality of the system that we're trying to defend.
Yeah.
Well, the last kind of one we're going to talk about is the Attorney General, if you put that up.
And we're not going to talk about John Ratcliffe.
He was the director of National Intelligence.
He's the other guy.
I don't know who he is.
But the one we have, and on a little bit of a positive note, and this again, it's not Trump saying it, but it's a political looking at it.
And that's Mike Lee, the senator from Utah.
Now, he's not perfect on everything, but he certainly is libertarian-minded.
Probably the second most libertarian member of the U.S. Senate.
I think he would be great on civil liberties.
In a few conversations I've had with Rand, we don't get into these details, but he had nothing but good things to say about it.
Yeah.
Mike Lee's taken some tough votes, and he's so that's one little bit of a bright light and kind of a dark tunnel, but we'll see.
This is all speculation.
There'll probably be people that we haven't even thought about.
Hopefully there will be.
Hopefully he'll find a national security advisor who can have that vision.
How do we stop spending a trillion dollars a year and keep losing wars?
It seems like people with a high IQ could figure that out, but they don't seem to.
But the IQ is attached to something that we know how to do it.
We don't have to cut spending.
And the Republicans constantly do this.
They say, if we have the right regulatory code and a tax code, that they will, you know, the economy will be so healthy.
And there is a little bit of truth to this.
The country is healthy.
There'll be more revenue.
But I always thought, that's not my goal.
If we have more revenues, let the people keep them.
But it is true that they argue that, but they overly emphasize this.
So that gives them their excuse to not cut back on the militarism and not have to take on the military-industrial complex and so many welfare spending that we do here at home.
Yeah, it'd be nice if he said nobody connected with the military-industrial complex will get a job in my administration.
That would be a good start.
We'll see.
But so the last thing we want to talk about just briefly is kind of a follow-up, because yesterday we talked about The people in the Israeli army and how they're exhausted, they're depressed, they hate this war, it's a nightmare, they want it to be over.
Well, the same is happening in the other war that the U.S. is fighting as a proxy, and that's the one in Ukraine.
And thanks to Kyle Anzon at the Libertarian Institute, we have this article today: About 51,000 Ukrainians have deserted armed forces this year.
If you go to the next one, this is from the article.
The Ukrainian prosecutor's office has opened 51,000 cases of desertion through the first nine months of 2024.
The number of soldiers abandoning their posts is likely to double last year's total.
So, after two and a half years, almost three years of the media lying to us and saying Ukraine is on the verge of winning, we see that people are voting with their feet and they're voting to get the heck out of there.
Yes, and it's a lot of them, and it's building.
And I think that's a good sign: the exhaustion of war, exhaustion of boots on the ground, to wear the boots and do the fighting.
And the people who pay for it back at home, you know, they all have relatives, their family members die, they're gone, families are split up under these circumstances.
And one individual said, Well, I'm going to do it.
I just think it's a little bit safer in prison than it is in the military.
But then I got to thinking, you know what?
What a choice.
If you're in prison, unfairly, especially, that's involuntary servitude.
They're taking you and you, they own you, they put you in a cell and lock you up.
And at times, sometimes they haven't committed a lot of crime, a significant crime.
January 6th sort of points to that problem.
But the prison he thought was safer than the military.
But what about the military?
Especially if there's a draft or if you're conned into it.
And right now they're lining up.
That's why we have to keep after the people.
Don't accept the draft.
That means things have gone haywire and they're down to the wire.
And we shouldn't fill the vacant spots, whether they're in the Middle East or whether they're in Ukraine.
And that's what they're looking for.
Missile Strike: 20 Years Of War 00:04:42
And the people who make money will be behind the scenes propagandizing to get us involved and send more troops.
But what did we talk about the other day?
Sending the missiles over?
Oh, well, they don't auto-shoot them.
Oh, we'll send the troops on the ground.
And with everybody recognizing that they were vulnerable to being, you know, be targeted as the enemy.
And that same thing will happen in Ukraine if, you know, they've already been a lot of foreign, a lot of foreign people have been hit there.
A lot of Americans have hit Frenchmen have gotten killed there.
So that will happen as well.
So anyway, I was going to close out with a video which really struck me this morning.
And that is a video of downtown Beirut, an 11-story apartment building in a neighborhood.
If we full screen this, this is what happened.
I think it was earlier today in Beirut.
Watch this, even rewind that and play it one more time actually, just to see this missile coming in and hitting a, look at that.
People are living in that building.
Now, there may be a bad guy somewhere in the neighborhood.
I don't know.
But people are living in that building.
This was a U.S.
It's a U.S. missile and a U.S. supplied missile fired by the Israeli military into a civilian area, knocking down an 11-story residential building.
Even if there was a bad guy somewhere, it's hard to justify this.
And, you know, we can criticize Israel as much as we want.
The fact of the matter is it was our government that provided those weapons.
Our government is accountable to us.
Americans should be doing something about this.
You know, back to the old story that we've been talking about for, it's getting on like 20 years, trying to head some of that stuff off in the Middle East.
And it continues.
Even the places where we go in and stay for 20 years, okay, we've made them good Democrats and we can leave now.
Well, we know that we're still there.
You know, Syria and Iraq and we'd like to be in Iran.
The whole thing is just a horrendous mess.
But I think the number one failure on the part of the American people is to know and understand and be willing to stand up for the fact that nobody should be put in harm's way, no matter what the excuse is, unless the people give permission.
This is an act of war to do this.
And if it gets vague, it's up to the Congress and the people to designate it.
And Jefferson even had to do this.
He says, I want the authority to do such and such, and it was very limited.
But now it's all-out war.
And I think you can blame Truman for some of it.
Oh, Korea.
Well, this is not a war.
This is just a little police action.
And we've had a lot of police actions around since that time.
And it's up and down.
They thought for sure that failure in Vietnam would end.
And it did.
And it was not until Bush went into the Middle East, ah, we finally got that bad image off our chest about Vietnam.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, we always like to say if the shoe is on the other foot, say that Russia gave Cuba a missile and Cuba fired it into some American neighborhoods.
Yeah, we would retaliate against Cuba, but we would also say to Russia, why'd you give them that missile?
You know, we're pretty mad at you, too.
You know, and that's the case with us.
We are getting the, the anger is coming onto us from the whole region, and it's not our battle.
And everything is a political decision, tit for tat.
You know, if one person puts one weapon in, we have to hit them.
We can't let them get away with this.
And that would be a good idea.
Maybe you ought to talk to them.
That was my suggestion.
Sometimes when people talk to each other, surprising things can happen.
But it's utterly amazing that even pausing, when you look at the tragedies of what's going on in the Gaza area, they don't even want to pause for 20 minutes.
Oh, 20 minutes.
Oh, boy, we're going to get ahead on this.
World Imperfect 00:00:55
So there's no strong desire.
And I mentioned this yesterday and have that wars end with exhaustion.
Exhaustion of funds, people, and the people back home that have lost so much.
Exactly.
Well, I'm done.
Take us home, Dr. Paul.
Hey, and I want to thank all our viewers for tuning in today.
And I can assure you, there will be events that we will want to make comments on in the near future and continuously because the world is imperfect.
And certainly the politics of the world, it's very imperfect.
And it's time we have people more interested in trying to root out the nihilists who say you can't know truth.
Well, tell you what, they've been looking for it for thousands of years, and that does not mean it doesn't exist.
It just means that you have to keep searching for truth because that's part of what life is all about.
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