From Yemen To Iran To Gaza To Russia - Is Trump Losing The Plot?
President Trump hit the ground running - hard - after his inauguration in January. It seemed like at least half of the Federal Government was exposed as not only totally fake, but actually working against US interests. From USAID to the Department of Education, thousands of "employees" were let go. Then he fell into the siren song of all Presidents: he got sucked into the Imperial Presidency and began waving the sword. Can he get back on track?
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Dr. Paul is not in today.
He's out for the day.
So I will be conducting one of my little briefings on things that I think are important.
And the theme for today's show is, has Trump lost the plot?
And we all know how it started.
We were all very excited.
Trump took power, and it was like a freight train going through government.
All of a sudden, we were getting a look at the way the sausage was made.
We were getting a look behind the screen at what was going on in places like USAID that the propaganda had told the American people was just doing our bidding overseas, just helping poor people, earthquake victims and such.
The reality is it was an absolute octopus with its fingers in every country across the world, promoting agendas that most Americans didn't agree with, but were forced to pay for.
And we saw the firing of the massive majority of the people at USAID.
And most of us cheered because we had been, some of us who have been talking about it for years, understood not just USAID, but the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, all of the foreign intervention, regime change, regime destruction mechanisms that the U.S. government employed overseas had been exposed by the Trump administration.
And not only that, but within the administration itself, within the executive branch itself, we got to look at exactly what people were doing who were on the federal payroll.
And it wasn't much.
First of all, they didn't go to work.
They didn't show up to work.
They were moonlighting.
They were daylighting.
They were taking two or three jobs and what have you while on the government salary.
Didn't want to go back in.
And when they were gone, they weren't missed.
And so we saw many thousands of them fired.
We've reported on this show about what happened to the real estate market in Washington, D.C. area, the greater Washington, D.C. area.
A lot of houses on the market because the gravy train was slowing down a little bit.
And all of us were cheering because this is what Trump promised to do.
Now, he was getting his toes wet in the Ukraine-Russia crisis war, which in fact was a U.S. war against Russia using Ukraine as a proxy.
That's what President Biden's team intended because all of his experts, so-called experts, have been involved in trying to take down Russia since at least 2014 when they were all working for Obama.
We're talking about people like Blinken and Sullivan, Victoria Newland, they were all involved in it, and they just restarted their efforts when Biden came into power.
As we know, Biden can't even sign his name.
So they took over.
The cat was away, so the mice did play.
So we thought that maybe, perhaps, he had two choices in front of him.
Was he going to own Biden's idiotic war, or was he going to come in and say, this is not my war?
This is not my issue.
I campaigned on ending wars and peace.
I'm not going to get involved.
We are pulling out all of American support for this war in Ukraine, this proxy war, and it'll be over soon.
We thought he might do that.
He gave some indications.
And to be fair, there were some very positive developments.
Having a phone call with Putin is very important because under the Biden administration, there was no communication.
And with a lack of communication, with a lack of diplomatic activity, even with countries you don't get along with, there's always a risk, especially when they're superpowers.
There's always the risk of a misunderstanding having extremely dire consequences.
And so we don't want that.
So the fact that he picked up the phone is great.
And we hope there will be a phone call today, and we're waiting to see what happens with the phone call.
But unfortunately, he went much further than that, much further than just trying to be a broker and try to end the war.
He's getting involved.
He's making proposals.
He's telling Russia, you need to stop shooting for 30 days, to which President Putin said, Well, what's going to happen in those 30 days?
Is Ukraine going to rearm?
Are they going to pull their troops out where they're surrounded?
This is a complicated issue.
You can't just, you know, we're on the offensive.
We're moving ahead.
And you're telling us we got to stop.
So he got more involved in this.
He's made some proposals that, quite frankly, are bizarre and they won't go forward.
But in the meantime, as he does this, no, he lifted the hold on weapons and intel to Ukraine.
That just happened a few days ago.
So at that moment, that became his war.
That's when he fully jumped into that bathtub and put himself into it.
And it's a real problem.
And it's not what Americans wanted.
So unfortunately, we're seeing that continue.
I'm going to put up this first clip now.
This is anticipation of today's phone call.
And I have highlighted Bloomberg is reporting to indicate my lack of confidence in Bloomberg.
Nevertheless, this is what's on the plate.
So we have to try to digest it.
Putin demands halt to all Western arms for Ukraine ahead of Trump call.
I don't believe that President Putin called up Bloomberg before they called up Trump.
So this is just speculation.
We'll leave it at that.
But one of the things that they apparently are suggesting is that this will be one of the demands.
Now go to the next one.
Here's Bloomberg further speculating because these are according to Russian sources.
So take that with a very, very large grain of salt.
The first one is demanding suspension of weapons deliveries to Ukraine.
Ahead of his call with Trump, Putin has made a prerequisite for Russia signing up to a truce, said a senior European official.
There we go.
Senior European official and three people in Moscow familiar with Russia's position.
Classic Bloomberg, classic mainstream media.
Nevertheless, we'll take it on board.
While Russia wants to halt all arms delivery, its minimum is that the U.S. military aid should stop.
Two of the people said we don't know who they are.
So there you go.
Senior European officials said Europe was extremely reluctant to agree to the demand.
Well, I think that we can probably go ahead and say is pretty likely because Macron and the gentleman from the UK, Kier Starmer, they believe that they are going to march into Ukraine with or without Russia's permission.
That should be interesting to watch.
Unfortunately, the soldiers they're going to get killed will not be that interesting.
So what else do we have here?
The suspension of arms supplies sought by Putin would be lifted after a final peace accord.
So this is the whole, this is the whole sort of Ukraine argument that Trump has taken on board, which is that we need to ceasefire first and then we need to have talks.
Of course, that favors the side that is on the defensive, which clearly Ukraine is on the defensive.
Even the New York Times has reported that they're holding on to a very tiny sliver of Kursk.
So all this is to say that what started out very promising is now President Trump sinking into the mire, sinking into what happens to, it seems to me, all presidencies, which is the allure of somehow being the king of the world.
And what that entails is getting involved in wars and sucking the United States down into these wars.
So on the one hand, we have this going on with Russia.
President Trump doesn't need to have a ton of phone calls with Putin about Ukraine.
Now, there's a lot to talk about.
And if any of you have watched Tucker Carlson yesterday, had our good friend Rick Sanchez on talking about the Biden administration's 11th hour banning of Russian media in the U.S., which is against the First Amendment.
So there's a lot to talk about.
There's sanctions to talk about.
There is cooperation to talk about.
There's reducing tension to talk about.
There's plenty of stuff, but Ukraine, in my opinion, is not one of those things, in the opinion of many people.
So, but that's not all.
So, here he bites off a big piece of Ukraine.
And then, what does he do?
Well, to their credit, Steve Witkoff went over there and he told Netanyahu we need a deal.
He did it right off, very early: stop bombing Gaza.
Let's have a multi-part deal that will result in the resolution of the crisis in Gaza to a degree.
There's other aspects to it.
So, you had this deal in place.
Netanyahu began implementing phase one.
The fighting stopped.
The Houthi stopped attacking Israeli ships.
Everything seemed to be moving in the right direction.
But, of course, then Netanyahu, as he is want to do, said, Well, I don't want to go on to phase two.
Maybe we can extend phase one a little longer.
Phase two involved, you know, each side giving more concessions, release of more hostages held by Hamas and in exchange for an extended ceasefire and the removal of the removal of Israeli troops from Gaza.
He didn't want to move on to that phase.
And so he held it up.
And not only did he hold that up, but he held up humanitarian assistance for the people of Gaza who'd had their houses blown up, the water infrastructure blown up.
Everything's blown up there.
And they wouldn't even let any humanitarian aid through.
So that's when, of course, the Houthi said, hey, this is not good.
If you keep this blockade up, we're going to start hitting your ships again, Israel.
And to which Trump responded, again, as I said, with Russia taking on a war that Biden started, that's not our war.
And if you go to the next one, here was the response.
And it happened last night.
And it's absolutely disgusting.
Israel said, okay, it's obvious that the U.S. has our back.
The U.S. bombed the Houthis.
So we are going to go ahead and return to what we like best, which is killing women and children in Gaza.
This is Dave DeCamp at anti-war.com, who writes, Israel restarts large-scale bombing of Gaza.
Over 400 killed.
Many of the dead are children as Israel is hitting homes and tents sheltering displaced Palestinians.
First, they blew up the homes, then they set up tents and they blew up the tents.
And Dave writes, the Israeli military on Tuesday morning began launching large-scale airstrikes on the besieged Gaza Strip, making the full-scale resumption of Israel's genocidal war.
Around 1 p.m. Gaza time, Al Jazeera reported that 404 Palestinians had been killed, 562 wounded by Israeli strikes on homes and tents.
Homes and tents, guys.
So go to the next one from Dave's article, same article.
And I did not put any of these photos up because I don't want to do it.
You could easily find them yourself on X.
But pictures and videos from Gaza have surfaced online showing that there is a large number of child casualties.
Israeli bombardment has returned to Gaza, bringing massacres with it once again.
Al Jazeera reporter wrote on X: The bodies of children killed in their sleep lay scattered in the aftermath.
The massive attack came about two weeks after Israel imposed a total blockade on aid and other goods entering Gaza.
So you starve them for two weeks and then you kill them in their sleep.
Good move.
Go to the next one.
Hamas told Reuters that Israel had chosen to end the ceasefire unilaterally and that Israel's attacks exposed the remaining Israeli hostages to unknown fate.
But Netanyahu says something different.
If you go to the next one, he said, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said in a statement Tuesday morning that he instructed the Israeli military to escalate in Gaza in response to Hamas rejecting U.S. and Israeli terms for an extended temporary ceasefire.
That, of course, is not true.
As far as I understand it, what Netanyahu wanted was to extend phase one.
And the original deal said, no, we go to phase two at this point.
It was supposed to go to phase two, I believe, on the 1st of March.
So there you have it.
We're back into Biden's policy in Gaza and Israel.
We're back to Biden's policy when it comes to Yemen and bombing Yemen.
We're back to Biden's policy when it comes to Russia.
And now to add insult to injury, literally, this is kind of an understatement.
If you hit the next one, now Dave also wrote about this.
The U.S. and Israel are considering expelling Gaza Palestinians to Syria.
Now, we remember a couple of weeks ago when Trump came up with this amazing plan to get all the people out of Gaza and turn it into some sort of weird resort.
He was genuinely surprised that the rest of the world was appalled at such a suggestion.
I don't think anyone on his advisory team, maybe he didn't have the courage to say, Mr. President, this is an absolutely insane idea to ethnically cleanse an entire area.
Nevertheless, they've come up with a new plan.
They want to send them to Syria because why?
Because U.S.-backed Al-Qaeda are now in charge of Syria.
Now, this is another Obama disaster, the whole overthrow of Syria that the Biden administration had continued.
Now, Trump lobbed a few bombs over there while he was president, but he never became that awfully involved.
It looks like with these moves, he's doing so.
Now, if you go to the next one, this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that a source from the region told CBS that the HTS, now that's Al-Qaeda renamed with Suthsan-led government has been approached through a Syrian official.
They denied any knowledge of the proposal.
President Trump repeatedly called for the permanent removal of Palestinians from Gaza.
He did walk that back a few days ago, if you heard that, when someone asked him, Are you talking about getting not letting them back?
And he wavered on that, which he's want to do.
I mean, he does this all the time, unfortunately.
But no, it shouldn't be a shock.
Overnight, when you kill 400 people, go to the next one.
This is Israeli newspaper Haretz, which actually discusses the situation in Gaza much more objectively than any of the U.S. media.
There's more of a debate in Israel, of course, than there is in the United States.
Israel faces a wave of international condemnation following renewal of Gaza hostility.
Following Israeli airstrikes on Tuesday, countries, including Ireland, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, as well as UN bodies, shared their disdain to renewal of hostilities in Gaza as Israel faces calls to reinstate a ceasefire.
So there you have him returning to this policy with regard to Gaza.
And Israel shouldn't be surprised because his top advisors are fanatically pro-Israel, and there's no one that we can recognize on his team, certainly among the senior level, who would say, Mr. President, this is not a good idea.
But as if that is not enough, with the Houthi attack by the United States over the weekend, we discussed it with Dr. Paul yesterday.
Ramp-Up To War00:06:45
What that means is, in fact, Trump and his people ramping up for a war with Iran.
So yet another war.
Go to the next one.
This is actually up today on the Ron Paul Institute website.
MK Badrakumar, who is a retired Indian ambassador, who, if you read the Ron Paul Institute website, you will know that I publish him as often as I can.
I've been reading him probably for 15 years or longer.
I find his insights to be very, very refreshing and very, very sober and clear-headed.
So here's what Badrakumar writes about what's going on with Trump in Iran.
Now go to the next one.
He says, on Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to launch a decisive and powerful military operation against the Houthis of Yemen with overwhelming lethal force in the most significant military action of his second term to date.
Very, very, very big military operation.
I don't have the clip, but I was just looking at X and Scott Ritter, good friend of the Institute, spoke at one of our conferences.
He commented on this.
this powerful and decisive military operation.
He said most of the targets are probably guesswork.
And he's an Intel officer, so I'm sure he knows.
The attacks began on Saturday and continued into Sunday at the Yemeni capital of Sana'a and in other areas, reportedly killing 31 people and wounding 101 so far, most of them children and women.
And we've seen the photos.
We won't show them here.
You can find them.
I think that 31 number, I think it's at least double that now, if I'm not mistaken.
Now, Bad Rakumar, who actually is a diplomat, unlike most American diplomats, made a value judgment.
And I think it's absolutely correct if you are a human being with a soul.
Go to the next one.
This is what Bad Rakumar said.
Ambassador Badrakumar said, such wanton killing of defenseless women and children can only be seen as an act of cowardice.
Trump has blood on his hand.
Trump wrote on Truth's Social addressing the Houthis, your time is up and your attacks must stop starting today.
If they don't, hell will ray down on you, upon you like nothing you've ever seen before.
Well, as we've discussed on this program, there weren't any attacks.
They had not started up their attacks, and their attacks were only aimed at Israeli ships in response to Israel's slaughter of Gaza.
It was only the U.S. started bombing them that they said, okay, well, you know, we'll take out your ships too, if you want to play that game.
But that wasn't where it ended.
If you go to the next one, thereupon Trump abruptly digressed.
This is Ambassador Bad Rakumar and addressed Iran, that it needed to immediately stop supporting the Houthis, which, of course, there's little evidence that it does in a very substantial way.
Nevertheless, he threatened, America will hold you fully accountable, and we won't be nice about it.
So that's a clear warning to Iran.
We talked about it yesterday that the National Security Advisor Mike Waltz also threatened Iran, threatened Iranian ships.
So what is going on here?
This is kind of what happened in President Trump's first term.
He put a bunch of warmongers around him who are obsessed with fixing the Middle East and they have their own preferences there.
They're very, very strong devotion to the state of Israel.
And that sort of seems to guide all of their policies.
It may guide their policies, but from Iraq to Libya, et cetera, when they listen to the admonitions of people like Benjamin Netanyahu, all they do is they suck us into wars that we don't need to be in.
And again, that seems to be the case.
Netanyahu wants nothing more than having Donald Trump fight his war against Iran.
You guys go fight and help us out.
And that seems to be what they're doing now.
Now, there's a lot of speculation as to why, all of a sudden in the Middle East, there seems to be a conflagration of serious threats of war.
Some people, Thomas Massey included, and I think there's probably a lot of truth to it, are speculating that's because the war in Ukraine is winding down.
Russia is winning the war.
They've closed the Kursk adventure off, and they're moving into northern Ukraine in the middle part there to take more territory as a buffer.
As that winds down, the military industrial complex is looking around for a new enemy.
They need to keep the dollars flowing.
And so they think a war with Iran might be just what the doctor ordered.
I think that's a good point.
Now, a good friend of ours, Patrick Henningsen, had a tweet out today where he really took it to Secretary of State Rubio, who I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised at some of the first things he was saying.
I think that's when he was Secretary of State.
And Henningsen, and we'll go ahead and put that up because I will say I think I agree with what he says.
I don't know if he can make that text any bigger.
My eyes are failing this morning.
I'm going to try to read it on the screen.
But anyway, here's what Patrick wrote.
He said, it's now abundantly clear that Marco Rubio has fumbled the so-called ceasefire deals in Ukraine and Gaza.
A complete failure on both counts.
I think we lost the picture.
If we can get it back up there.
A complete failure on both counts.
The Rubio picture, if we can get it up there, Henningsen, thank you.
A complete failure on both counts.
Now he's fronting an additional war with Yemen and singling attack on Iran.
Rather than do his job, he's more preoccupied with attacking student protesters on U.S. college campuses and attacking the First Amendment, presumably on behalf of the Israeli lobby, than actually doing his job as our top diplomat overseas.
He's been trying to pretend to be Secretary of State for the last month, but the act wore thin already.
And now he's back to little Senator Rubio, a petty partisan operative under the thumb of a clueless Trump and whose top priority is carrying water for APAC, Miriam Adelson, and his mentor, Paul Singer.
A catastrophic failure.
Very, very cutting from Patrick, who actually was an intern at RPI a few years ago.
But I think, unfortunately, I think he's got a good point here.
I don't think Rubio, the Rubio that we saw when he first went into the seat, is not the Rubio we're seeing right now.
And he may well be gone soon.
Who knows?
Now, who is President Trump listening to?
Obviously, people like Rubio, definitely people like Waltz and others who are very, very hawkish.
Hegseth is very, very hawkish.
He wants more war on Yemen.
Who should President Trump be listening to?
It's easy, Mr. President.
You don't have to go, you can take that down.
Don't Go To War00:03:13
You don't have to go down this path.
You don't have to go down to the, you don't have to be a wartime president.
You know, there's this allure.
There's this siren song sucking you into it.
It's not necessary.
It's not necessary.
You need to stop.
Americans were happy with what you're doing.
Every poll shows that Americans do not want another war.
They do not want us to get more involved overseas, both Republicans and Democrats.
They want less U.S. involvement overseas.
So who should you be listening to?
Even very pro-Israel people like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene understands that we have to put our interests first.
Put that next tweet up.
Now, she just put her ex-post up.
Now, this is great.
MTG.
She gets it.
She says, I have not heard a single American say they want another war in the Middle East or anywhere else.
No one.
All I've heard is a loud cry demanding our government leaders, our government and its leaders put America first.
I don't support going to war on behalf of other countries.
I support feet peace and fixing our own massive problems for our own people.
It's literally my job title, U.S. Representative.
And I don't have it here, but Thomas Massey reposted this with 100% over it.
Very, very good sentiment by someone who, as I said otherwise, very much supports Israel, but she understands it's not going to do anyone any favors.
Now go to the next one, speaking of Thomas Massey.
He also has some great advice for the president.
He starts out saying, who wouldn't be for blasting some nasty pirate to smithereens?
Here's the problem.
It's not about pirates or protecting China's shipping lanes to Europe.
We're being conditioned to forget everything we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan.
These are not our wars.
Bingo, you said it.
And one more, someone who definitely deserves to be listened to, and that is someone I mentioned earlier in the show, Tucker Carlson.
He posts late yesterday.
It's worth pointing out. that a strike on the Iranian nuclear sites will almost certainly result in thousands of American deaths at bases throughout the Middle East and cost the United States tens of billions of dollars.
The cost of future acts of terrorism on American soil may be even higher.
These aren't guesses.
These are the Pentagon's own estimates.
A bombing campaign against Iran will set off a war and it will be America's war.
Don't let the propagandists lie to you.
Very, very important.
We're saving some money by shutting down these superfluous agencies and sending home people who do nothing but lay around and take our money.
That's going to be a drop in the bucket compared to what it's going to cost for a new war.
What we're already spending propping up Israel's war in the Middle East, billions of dollars.
If we go after Iran, as Tucker Carlson very rightly said, hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives in a war that in no way is ours.
Good, Bad, Ugly00:01:59
So, President Trump, pull yourself back from the abyss.
Sober up.
Stop writing these crazy posts.
Stop being so rabid in your responses.
Take a deep breath.
Fire some people.
Bring in some better people.
Bring Danny Davis back in to help out with Tulsi Gabbard.
Bring some others in.
You don't have to go down this path.
Your presidency right now is at risk.
There are people who want you to succeed, but who will criticize you when they can see clearly that you're going down the wrong path.
I don't presume that you're watching this, but if you are, and anyway, this may be the last time I do say this, but go on to that last clip because we're going to talk about all of these things this weekend at the Ron Paul Institute Conference down here in Lake Jackson, America in the age of Trump 2.0.
I could have put a subtitle of the good, bad, and the ugly, but we'll leave it at that because there is good, there is bad, and there is ugly.
And we've talked about most all of it today.
Great speakers, Tom Woods, our good friend, David Stockman on the board of the Institute, Jeff Dice, great friend of ours, my former colleague in Ron Paul's legislative office, former U.S. Representative John Duncan, who has the distinction of being one of the famous six Republicans who voted against the Iraq war back in 2002.
And of course, Ron Paul, all speaking and taking an assessment of the early part of the Trump presidency.
You're going to want to be there.
I'll put a clip there.
We are getting close to capacity, guys, but there are a few tickets left, especially you folks in Texas.
Come on down, check us out in Lake Jackson.
And I want to finally thank all of you.
I can take that down.
Thank you very much for tuning into the Liberty Report.
I hope I've enlightened you a little bit on some of these things, and I hope you will take them and share them with others.
I hope you'll give us a thumbs up and spread the show around and subscribe to the show.