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Nov. 12, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:47
Trump's Early Appointments: Are The Neocons Back?

Yesterday was a bad day for those who endorse "America first" in our foreign policy. With reported Trump appointments of neocons Elise Stefanik (UN Ambassador), Mike Waltz (National Security Advisor), and...Marco Rubio (Secretary of State), many who hoped that Trump 2.0 would be different than Trump 1.0 are feeling dejected and betrayed. Is there any hope left? Also today: Iran strongly denied any plan to assassinate Trump - who's lying?

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Time Text
Concerns About Trump's Influence 00:15:22
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
I'm doing well.
I got my fingers crossed because a couple days ago, it looked like we had every reason to believe we'll get some of our guys in, and we still might.
There are some definite improvements that we see.
But we got a little bit concerned about this announcement that at least somebody's quoting somebody like Trump and saying Trump said this and Trump's plans to do this.
And that has to do with Rubio.
You know, Rubio, he's one of those that's not on our favorite list.
No.
And that means that he could become Secretary of State.
And I don't think that would be good for the country.
No.
Or the world.
You know, he has not been watching our program, I don't think.
You should be forced to watch the program.
Before you're let in, we've got to watch the program.
Yeah, that'd be nice to say, well, yes, we took the oath over at the Liberty Report.
But anyway, the odds are pretty good that he will become Secretary of State, which I think will lead to problems because there's two different kinds of people in the world the way I see it.
When I want to simplify it, there are the authoritarians and there are the people who want to follow voluntarism and peaceful means.
And I would put him into the category of authoritarianism because he's expressed himself.
His authoritarianism doesn't mean that he beats up on people.
That's a personal thing.
But authoritarians in politics is much, much more deadly.
They have more power and they can do things.
They can change the world.
They can, especially in the Secretary of State, they can set the stage for a conflict that becomes very real and very dangerous.
So over the years, of course, I have become more certain that non-intervention is the right way to go.
I saw somebody, one of our friends, I think, wrote that there's never been a time that America has been absolutely non-intervention.
You know, I would say that's probably true.
There was one thing, although it was done with a great deal of caution.
I always think when we had a new country and we were just struggling to be, you know, recognized, and then Jefferson gets involved in the Mediterranean Sea.
But he had his purposes and it worked out all right.
And he covered himself pretty well with the Congress on that.
It wasn't like today that's done.
Nobody knows where our vessels are.
Why they are antagonizing and trying to precipitate problems around the world.
So I think the non-intervention is obviously the way to go.
But right now, I would say that Rubio as Secretary of State would be taking a step in a direction that we would not be pleased with.
Yeah, and I mean, as positive as we felt yesterday, we were talking about some rumors about Vivek Ramaswamy.
And although he's not exactly in our camp, he's more of a realistically minded person who we thought would look at the world pretty objectively and a very smart guy, objectively true, a very smart guy.
Well, it kind of went downhill, downhill.
And I went home, and not only Rubio is bad news, Dr. Paul.
I don't want to make it even sound worse, but Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor, an absolute disaster.
And Elaine Stefanik, although she won't necessarily be in a policy-making role, she'll be enormously high-profile as U.S. ambassador to the U.N.
And ironically, because we cheered when Trump said, I will not have Pompeo or Nikki Haley in my administration, she literally is Nikki Haley.
You know, she's a younger version of Nikki Haley, you know, in terms of policy.
So, very crestfallen on our part.
As you say, our fingers are right now so crossed, I think we need a splint on them, hoping that we'll at least get one.
But Hedge, as usual, covered it very well.
Put this first one up if you can.
It's an article titled, Trump Expected to Tap Rubio as Secretary of State.
Shortly after raising hopes that he would keep his administration free of some people, Donald Trump has started filling his national security team with neoconservatives.
First came word that he was assigned Representative Elise Stefanik as UN ambassador, then Florida rep Mike Waltz as national security rider.
And now, the New York Times reports that Senator Marco Rubio, Ala Little Marco, that's my edition, expected to be named as Secretary of State.
Now, here is sort of the rundown.
If you haven't followed these people, if you go to the next one, I'll just do this real quick with Dr. Paul.
And they did a good job of characterizing this.
The positive vibes of yesterday, which we shared, were quickly shattered by reports that Trump will place three quintessential neocons in key national security and diplomacy positions.
All three are anti-Iran hawks, zealous backers of the state of Israel, and major beneficiaries of pro-Israel lobbyists.
According to Track APAC, pro-Israel groups have given more than a million dollars to Rubio, $900,000 to Stefanik, and $230,000 to Waltz.
Doesn't look good.
You know, the announcement on Pompeo and Haley can't be just coincidental.
There has to be a strategy of sort of disarming the people who are going to be unhappy today.
So we'll make them happy yesterday, and maybe they'll forget about it and end up with a balance.
I don't know what would happen if that crowd gets up and they're all in the administration at one point or another.
There could be some real battles going on on foreign policy.
Yeah, there could be.
And hopefully that would be, you know, for beneficial reasons.
Well, I went on Twitter when he made the announcement on Pompeo and Nikki Haley, and I said, that's great, but listen, guys, this is only part of the battle.
You get rid of the ones that are the highest profile, and then you can bring in some that people don't know as well.
And I think that's exactly what happened.
But here's another: despite the fact that Rubio is bad on literally every single foreign policy issue.
Literally bad.
He makes John Bolton look like a peacenick.
I mean, he's really bad.
Despite that fact, and despite the fact that, as we've known from the first Trump administration, the personnel is the policy.
Despite those two things, they genuinely seem to hate each other, which is weird if you have a foreign policy, if you have your Secretary of State.
Now, let's just revisit a couple of things.
This was during campaigns.
Fair enough.
People say things during campaigns that can be nasty.
However, let's look at a couple of things that Trump said about Rubio.
Go to that next clip.
Lightweight Marco Rubio was working hard last night.
The problem is he's a choker.
And once a choker, always a choker.
Mr. Meltdown, he called him.
Go to the next one.
Rubio is totally owned by the lobbyists and special interests.
A lightweight senator with the worst voting record in the Senate.
Lazy.
And one more, this is pretty devastating.
Marco Rubio is a total lightweight who I wouldn't hire to run one of my smaller companies, a highly overrated politician.
So he thinks very little of Rubio, but somehow announced that this would be, that he would be taking one of the most important positions in the administration.
And before we move on, Rubio seems to feel the same way.
Cue that first video.
Let's listen in.
Let's just do about 30 seconds.
I'll just say when to stop.
This is, you want to put your ear piece in, Dr. Paul.
Here's Rubio describing Donald Trump.
Full screen that if we can, and let's just listen in for a couple minutes, a couple seconds here.
There is no way we are going to allow a con artist to take over the conservative movement, and Donald Trump is a con artist.
Donald Trump is a con artist.
He's a con man.
I think it's time to unmask him for what he is.
A con man who's taking advantage of people's fears and anxieties about the future, portraying himself as some sort of strong guy.
He's not a strong guy.
He got out of the sweat.
He got out of the sweat because there's a poor clock and there's a brain.
And he wants president.
Should anybody be surprised why people with a half a brain don't get disgusted with the political system?
Because these are the good guys who supposedly counteracting some of the mob activities where people take over the Justice Department and all that stuff.
But that is so sad.
You've ruined my day.
Sorry about that.
And here's a little bit of irony, Dr. Paul.
So back then, when they were running against each other for president back in the previous two cycles ago, here's how Trump very accurately criticized Marco Rubio.
Put this next clip up.
It's not going to be audio.
It'll just be, put the next regular clip up if you can.
So this is what he said accurately back in 2015.
Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet.
I agree.
Now here's the irony.
Click to the next one.
Because in this cycle, the pro-Israel donor with the $100 million plan to elect Trump, it wasn't Sheldon, but it was his wife, Miriam Adelson, the exact same thing Trump was complaining about Rubio for taking money for them and being a puppet.
He's now done it himself.
It's universal.
That's the thing.
That's the real message here.
Once we get to thinking, oh, the bad people have been in charge and they just got whipped and everything is going to change.
And I guess why it bothers me the most is I like the idea of consistency because I really believe people like that.
They lose confidence in people if they're flip-floppers or they're daydreamers.
They say, yeah, that was two years ago.
You have to be practical in politics.
How can he get some of our stuff passed if we don't do that?
What is amazing, it doesn't bother them.
You know, it seems like they have no sense of guilt for saying flip-flopping all over the place.
There's no shame on how they do that.
Yeah.
And Rubio had been initially extremely enthusiastic about the Ukraine war.
He actually wanted to send troops in it.
He wanted to, you know, no fly zones and everything.
Now, very, very much of a hawk on Iran.
In fact, he wants to go to war with Iran.
If we can play that second video clip of Rubio's views, I mean, this is our top diplomat.
Diplomats, their job is to avoid war.
You might want to put your earpiece in and listen to the second one of Rubio.
This is only a 30-second.
No, no, let's just listen to like 30 seconds of this.
I'll tell you when to stop it.
Here's Rubio on Iran.
So if you don't get a deal, what's the alternative?
Do we have to go to war?
Is it necessary to be absolutely certain they don't have a nuclear weapon or capability?
Absolutely.
And I think that the best way to have achieved that is to leave in place both the unilateral sanctions and the international sanctions.
You combine that with a very clear demarcation to the Iranian regime, and that is this.
If you cross this threshold, you will face military action on the part of the United States.
We don't want that to happen.
But the risk of a nuclear Iran is so great that that option must be on the table.
So if it came to that.
So now he could say I've changed, but like you say, you value consistency, you know, and if you flip-flop back and forth, you know.
Well, I think most people do.
You know, if you have a social relationship, you want consistency on the people you're doing.
A business association.
You want a consistency.
If, yeah, I have a good business partner, and 85% of the time we are upfront and above board, and everybody knows each other, knows what's going on.
Except for 15% of the time, we might do something else.
Oh, that's okay.
Those are the rules.
As long as nobody sees us what we're doing.
Yeah, I mean, in a way, I guess if we're looking for some sort of silver lining, because Rubio will have such a public role, he will be open to more criticism and investigation.
I think that is probably a scrutiny, is the word I was looking for.
Sorry, scrutiny.
But I think another, probably equally, if not worse, appointment, and I hate to be the bad news guy today, is Mike Waltz at National Security Advisor.
National Security Advisor has a lot of advantages to this role.
It's a relatively new role in the United States, made famous, of course, by when Kissinger was National Security Advisor, and then also Brzezinski made a huge role as National Security Advisor.
But that is not a role that requires advice and consent of the Senate.
So you can get people in there as your personal advisor in national security who may have different views to counterbalance.
Unfortunately, with Mike Waltz out of Florida, there isn't that kind of counterbalance to a Rubio because Waltz is just as enthusiastic and just as much of a neocon as Rubio.
And just put this next clip up.
Now, this is Michael Tracy, who is a great investigator.
He's very anti-Trump, fair enough, but he always backs it up with some facts.
And if you put on that, there you go.
So Michael Tracy wrote, Mike Waltz, the incoming National Security Advisor, worked for Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
Remember like a week ago when everybody was absolutely convinced there was some giant ideological chasm between Trump and the Cheneys?
So yes, he did work as very senior advisor to both Rumsfeld and Cheney, people who were supposed to think we're not that conservative.
Yeah, the way they rationalize and say, well, people like you and a little bit of being, and that is, we're overly rigid.
You know, we're not there.
You don't deserve to be in politics.
Politics is a sense of bringing people together.
Each one of you have to sell out half of what you believe in.
You know, that's the whole thing.
So they reward people who give up on their beliefs.
And I think that's part of the problem.
A lot of people would ask me over the years, how did you go through that?
Why didn't you just join them and do this and become chairman and all that?
And I think that the biggest reason it was very, very personal and never expressed in a way is I had zero desire to have power over other people.
I didn't want it, but I wanted to have influence about a better monetary system and a better policy and all.
But if you're looking for power and think that you could do more good by being in politics, I think that's what they do.
And that's why most people are there.
And if they don't go there with that attitude, they seem to catch on.
Like a week later, you say, what committee do you want to be on?
Oh, yeah.
Here's what it takes.
You make a great point about rigidity because you're right.
Ukraine-Russia Consensus 00:05:09
Our critics would say, why are you so rigid about this?
Why won't you compromise?
But you know who the most rigid people in the entire political sphere in the U.S. are?
Are neoconservatives.
They never back down.
They never back up.
They never compromise.
The war machine cranks ahead over and over.
So, I mean, if we're going to battle the neoconservative ideology, it shouldn't be a one-sided compromise, and it always is.
You know, they have a hard time saying, well, we're pragmatists because we bring about peace.
We bring people together.
And that's how you do that.
Yeah, okay, let's just look at the foreign policy of interventionism and neoconism over the last, well, even just in this century.
You know, just think of how many wars have gone on and how many times have we improved the situation.
How many people have we killed?
And how many countries have become more libertarian by our efforts?
You know, it just doesn't happen.
A lot of people die from this.
And who suffers?
Probably the people who didn't make a whole lot of money.
And there's a group of people who are going to make money.
So power and money is so, you know, so toxic.
There's so many of them that it becomes pragmatism.
And they can describe, and they come to believe that if you're overly rigid and say, I'm not going to do this, you're a terrible person.
Well, one of the other things about Waltz, I mean, one of the things, okay, there's divided in the Republican and among conservatives, there's some division on the Middle East.
You know, some would rather us not get more involved.
The more traditional, i.e., you know, post-Cold War conservatives, the old generation, they're more neocon and they're more aggressive.
But there's a younger generation, we talk about it on the show all the time, who do not want us to get as involved.
But the one thing there was kind of consensus on was the Ukraine-Russia thing.
Even the China hawks, Ukraine-Russia is a dumb war.
We want war with China.
Okay, that's a dumb idea.
But nevertheless, they were kind of agreed on Ukraine is a bad war.
We shouldn't escalate there.
Everyone except Mike Waltz.
Skip that one clip and go to the next one, the one with two different yellowed in sections.
This is from an interview he did not long ago about Russia.
And I'll just read a couple of segments.
He said, first and foremost, just ask him a question about Russia and Ukraine.
First and foremost, you would enforce the actual energy sanctions on Russia.
So actually enforce that implies an embargo.
Russia is essentially a gas station with nukes.
Putin is selling more oil and gas now than he did pre-war through China and Russia.
So I think that will get Putin to the table, which is enforcing the sanctions.
We have leverage.
Now, listen to this, Dr. Paul, like taking the handcuffs off of the long-range weapons we provided Ukraine as well.
So his solution to the problem with Ukraine and Russia is to allow Ukraine to fire American weapons deep into Russian territory, which clearly would start World War III.
I don't want someone like that being a national security advisor.
It's pretty scary.
It's sad they get so far along with policy.
And it may seem like it was only yesterday, and in fact, maybe it was, but put on the next clip, you know, Dave Smith, our friend, the libertarian commentator and comedian, if you go to the next one now, he said, right after Trump made the great announcement, hey, no Pompeo, no Nikki Haley, Dave Smith said, the stop Pompeo movement is great, but it's not enough.
Good point.
Right now we need maximum pressure to keep all neocons and war hawks out of the administration.
They've had their time at the table and brought nothing but disaster to the world and this country.
Donald Trump Jr., to his credit, retweeted that and said, agreed 100%.
I'm on it.
So he's in agreement.
Sadly, his dad, someone told his dad, no, sorry, can't do it.
I don't know.
It's very sad.
How sad.
Yeah.
Anyway, do we want to move on?
By the way, just one more clip.
Elise Stefanik, our ambassador to the UN, just a little quicker, and I won't go too deep into her because it's not as important.
Policymaking, but just look who she is considered an expert by.
If you go to the next clip, our very favorite quasi-governmental organization, the National Endowment for Democracy, she's listed as an expert.
That is the neocon regime change organization that does all the color revolutions.
She's one of them.
So he's batting 043.
I think, before we move on, I would just say that he's got one chance really to redeem himself.
He needs a heck of a defense secretary to counterbalance all this neocon.
And I don't know what it is.
I want to hope for the best.
But if he gets another neocon in there, you know, it's bad news.
Yeah, the guard will be let down by some of those that, you know, help Trump get in office.
You know, their guard would be done.
Oh, he's going to make these changes.
He's got rid of these people.
But it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
Well, someone criticized me for criticizing the Rubio decision by saying, well, he'll just fire him within a year.
The Iran Threat Narrative 00:06:21
I don't know why you're complaining.
Well, that's not really what we want.
I mean, he's good at firing people.
Why not just hire the good people in the first place?
Anyway.
So let's move on to the next one.
Dave DeCamp wrote about this.
If you put that next clip up, Iran strongly denies U.S. claims it was involved in the plot to kill Trump.
I think the timing on this was very suspicious, Dr. Paul.
Right around the time of the elections, this story pops up that Iran is trying to kill Donald Trump.
It has a deep state smell to it.
I don't know how you feel about it.
Well, you know, the whole thing is, is the one thing that there seems to be more unity than usual between the parties and between the philosophies and is to hate Iran.
I mean, it is almost universal.
And I know, once again, if you come out and say that you don't go along with that stuff, then you're unpatriotic.
But this whole thing about plot to kill, I remember I think I wrote something on the day they shot him, the day he was hit, you know.
And then I expressed some suspicion, and people say, oh, no, no, this is a different story.
But all of a sudden, they say, the person who was supposed to do the autopsy on the person that did the shooting, oh, they went to do the autopsy and the body had been removed.
It burned, yeah, they burned it.
So they left all the evidence there to make sure that nobody would ever know all the details.
It reminds you of another presidential assassination.
But Iran keeps denying it, all that.
But I think we don't have enough people looking at this objectively, you know, and say, what's their beef?
Nobody asked that.
It's that we know.
And, you know, the one thing is, I don't think they have political and legal proof that they're the greatest, they're the country that caused the greatest amount of terrorism, the terrorist act around the country.
And then you get into, how do you define terrorism?
When did it happen?
And what if you become defending some of your own interests?
When you look at how Iran is surrounded by their goodness, you think, you know, that would be, you know, should be an eye-opener, but not so.
But see, they would say to you, but Iran has launched missiles at U.S. troops.
And then you might say, well, where are those troops?
Well, they're illegally in Syria.
It's not to say they deserve missiles, but it's like that famous story in the same thing.
They're shooting at our planes while we're bombing them.
How dare they?
When I didn't want them to go to war in Iraq, and he said, When I brought up the subject of declaring war, they said, What have they declared?
How have they attacked us?
How have they threatened us or bombed us?
They said, They were shooting at our airplanes all the time.
We were over there, just wanted to bomb and kill them.
And they would shoot at the airplanes.
Try to bomb them in peace.
And they were probably shooting with rifles because they never hit.
It was just a principle.
Well, you know, neither of us believe that Iran is a saint.
We don't know anything about it.
I probably wouldn't want to live there.
That's not my lifestyle.
It's more of a religious country, and it's not my religion, so I'm sure it's a beautiful place.
But I think a good question to always ask when something like this comes up is who benefits?
Now, how would Iran benefit at this exact point in history?
While everything is really in motion, why right now would all of a sudden they wake up and say, this might be a good time to try to take out Trump?
You know, it's just, it doesn't make any sense right now when there is a slight chance that things will improve.
They couldn't get any better or any worse after Biden.
They might improve.
So why would they take it?
Now, maybe they're just dumb.
Who knows?
Well, one thing is, I believe long term, it's going to backfire on the people who want to punish Iran all the time.
It's sort of like the people who knew and they had to destroy Trump, and they worked very hard.
And the harder they worked, the bigger joke it became.
Because if they'd have done one or two things, maybe they'd have been believable.
But they never stopped.
So the credibility was gone.
So long term, you know, it was a benefit.
They were turned back on them, and they look like the jerks.
And I think that eventually it might happen, but it's a weird situation when all those countries, but they do have some friends out there that are going to help them when push comes to shove.
And if you look into what they claim, at least in the mainstream media, what the plot was all about, it doesn't make sense.
It looks like a Kakame story because apparently one of the hired guns never made it over here.
He was sitting in Tehran and he was interviewed by the FBI in Tehran and he was an assassin coming to take out the U.S. president.
You know, like who in their right mind, in fact, if you have that next clip, I think it's the next one, the foreign minister himself of Iran said, this is insane.
He says, who in their right mind believes that a supposed assassin sits in Iran and talks online to the FBI?
He'd be signing his death warrant.
It's crazy.
This plot is weird.
My guess is it's some deep state people in the U.S., the CIA, maybe in coordination with the Mossad.
They don't want any relation to get improved with Iran.
They want war with Iran, and they almost got it under Biden.
They may still, but they're going to hedge their bets and make sure they get it withdrawn.
It may be available and we could use it when we're talking in this instance about how many people we how often we participate in these shenanigans and coups.
How many times in the last, maybe since World War II, how many times have we been involved in a coup and to take over of a government?
More than 100, yeah.
I saw a list once.
It's more than 100.
Guatemala, you know, go down to Nicaragua.
Now Venezuela.
Rubio, by the way, was the one behind the Venezuelan men who tried to overthrow the Venezuelan government.
Deep State Conspiracy 00:03:37
They would say, yes, but we've become sophisticated.
We can do it by them dying.
And we don't send our troops over there in our ground troops.
But if it gets out of hand, they would send troops.
Matter of fact, they have sent troops.
It's small numbers.
Yeah, 100 troops in Israel right now.
Well, we will try to be optimistic.
I think we're out of time, though.
Should we skip that third story?
Yeah, we'll go ahead and skip.
And we'll get people to come back tomorrow and find out what was that third story we were going to talk about.
And it has to do, just give them a little hint, it has to do with who's behind annexing the West Bank.
Where's the money coming from?
And will that bring peace?
I'll bet you a lot of our listeners know already about what's going on.
Yeah, they do.
Well, there's a lot of you out there, and we really appreciate a lot of you coming back to watch the show and a lot of good comments.
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Dr. Paul, over to you.
Very good.
And we are experiencing a shift in listeners to our program.
There's more, and it's been very beneficial.
More people have expressed themselves.
Our message is getting out.
And thank you for all the people who help on that because I still believe the one-on-one is tremendous.
And today, the one-on-one is usually somebody who wouldn't have less than 100 people on their list.
And it's amazing to me how you can spread information.
The best thing of it all, I get the most fun out of, is when the left hears about this, when they were dissecting what happened in the campaign this time, they said, yeah, they knew how to use the internet.
We'll have to do something about that.
They think the answer is canceling them for using the internet and getting our message out.
And our message has shortcomings, as we talked about today, and there's political shortcomings.
But I still think the distribution of information today is so much better than before, because I guess when three major networks had control of it, there was no resistance to it.
Everybody accepted it, the three stations.
They all said the same thing.
So it must be true.
So I think that's hope that the internet's around for a while.
I hope it has people involved that will use common sense and integrity because if they're consistent and seeking truth, the people will respond in a positive way.
If it's used in illicit ways, and they're to just pump out lies and innuendos, people will recognize that.
And that's why the people finally gave up on the regular media.
So I think we're moving into an era that will help us who's trying to get information out and help all of you help us spread this message of liberty.
Because that, to me, is the answer to the terrible things that go on in the world.
That if we look for truth in what liberty is all about and how important the monetary system is and how important the traditions of America are.
Thanking Listeners 00:00:04
So I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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