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March 31, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
27:52
Three Months In, Trump Already a 'Wartime' President

That didn't take long. A candidate elected to end current wars and avoid new ones, Donald Trump as president has significantly escalated the war on Yemen and is now threatening to attack Iran. He is also threatening Russia (again) with punitive tariffs. What is it about the White House that turns every resident into a warmonger?

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Time Text
New Threats and Tariffs 00:13:58
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel Mick Adams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
It's funny again.
It is, I know.
We have to go back to work.
They keep popping up.
No more fun.
No more weekend fun.
Okay, but one of the things keep popping up is our foreign policy of peace and prosperity.
I don't know.
We might need some help in spreading the message because there's still a message out here.
And I mentioned that one of the things we're going to be talking about is the foreign policy of Trump.
And it's not exactly a message of peace and constitution, but it reminded me of all the promises of George H.W. Because I remember he was very promising that we were not to be the policemen of the world and all.
What did we end up with?
Humble foreign policy is what he promised.
But today, we have a president that uses threats and innuendos, but maybe he doesn't mean it.
Maybe he doesn't mean he's going to put on tariff unless he means it.
And he backs off.
Anyway, everybody knows how difficult it is to actually plan the future from what he's saying.
But what we want to talk a little bit about is targeting Iran, whether it's through Yemen or directly with Iran and this sort of thing.
But he's literally using a dangerous talk.
Yeah, it is.
And I guess scare them into innuendos and all, but a good way that wars start.
And it is disappointing.
Because he promised I want to stop wars and not start anything.
But here, well, I don't know.
He still has a chance to stop something, but nothing has been explicitly stopped yet.
But it looks like there's been escalation.
I think that there's been no de-escalation about the fight between Israel and the Palestinians.
And it looks like that's going to be around for a while longer.
And now there's certainly Iran is not going to fade into the future that nobody talked about.
Because Trump, one article here on anti-war, Trump threatens Iran with bombing if nuclear deal is not reached.
I wonder if it's on whose terms?
His turn.
You know, I was always told that the Soviets always was for, they were always for peace on their terms.
And that's generally the way it is.
I'm for peace, peace, peace.
Maybe that's what we're seeing here.
But anyway, it's it to me, and I think you were sort of in agreement with this, the rhetoric, especially of the last several days over the weekend, hasn't improved any.
It looks like it's, you know, being made worse and more threats.
So I hope that some of this stuff reverses itself, because even the vice president, I think he wants to sound like he's not endorsing all of this stuff too.
So we'll see what happens.
But this is an interesting thing, but to me, very, very dangerous.
And, you know, if Iran is telling the truth, our presidents are telling the truth and we can believe them.
I mean, actually, they have a decent policy, you know, when you compare it to the threats of ours because they don't have it.
And we just reported yesterday or last week that Even the investigators say they're not working on a nuclear weapon.
And yet here we are.
Saddam Hussein, I don't think we ever found his nuke who was going to blow up New York City, but sure scared a lot of people.
Yeah, we did report it on the national intelligence estimate.
Now, this didn't just come up when Tulsi got into office.
An NIE takes months and months to write.
It takes all of the different intelligence community agencies have to sign off on it.
Some disagree.
It's a very long, maybe a year-long process.
So this is an NIE that was initiated under the Biden administration.
Very, very hawkish administration.
They still came to the conclusion that they came to in 2006, which is they don't have one and they're not working to build one.
Nevertheless, as you say, Trump over the weekend makes this very bellicose statement.
And you use the right word.
Maybe he's bluffing.
Maybe he's bluffing.
The problem with bluffing all the time is that people never know when you're telling the truth.
Is he doing it?
Is he not doing it?
Is he going to bomb us?
Is he not going to bomb us?
And the danger, I mean, maybe you can do that in a real estate deal.
Oh, that bathroom is totally fine.
Trust me.
The toilet works fine.
But when you are dealing in world affairs, the Iranians, if they don't think he's bluffing, they may do something based on what they perceive rightly.
It sounds at least to me as a threat to be bombed.
They may react in a way that would take us down the road to war, which is unnecessary.
That's the problem with bluffing in foreign affairs, you know.
And I think, you know, President Trump ran as a peace candidate.
I will stop the wars.
I will get us out of wars.
And in fact, I think he appealed to a large portion of Libertarian Party people and libertarians in the party itself endorsed him for president on the basis of him being a pro-peace and pro-prosperity president.
Well, leaning into war like he's doing is, as you said, anti-peace and anti-prosperity.
You know, I think they should take a lesson from the wisdom of children because children know when their parents are bluffing.
You know, oh, yeah, don't do this.
And they learn, they know which parent does this.
Kids are very, very smart and they interpret this.
It seems like, you know, once you get really smart and you're in the government, you're dealing with nuclear weapons, that you lose this estimate that who are we going to believe?
And so the bluffing goes on.
And I think it happens to be a tool that Trump uses.
You know, he, you know, he can, what was it?
You know, he was going to raise the tariffs.
Well, he's still planning on doing that.
But it was a little too high in one place.
Oh, okay.
We won't make them that high.
And the markets shifted the attitude.
But the whole problem still exists.
The bigger problem of, say, tariffs or bombing or what's your foreign policy all about, the big problem of inaccuracy or inability to understand what we should expect.
People should know what their leaders are going to do.
And I think that's one of the biggest tragedy of government.
One of the reasons that government usually gets us into trouble.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Well, let's take a look at, we're buried in the lead a little bit here.
Let's take a look at what we're talking about.
And this is from Axios.
Anti-war did a good write-up about it.
I think Politico did a good job as well.
But here's the Axios piece.
Trump threatens Iran with bombs unless nuclear deal reached.
Go to the next one.
Here's this quote.
Over the weekend, apparently.
Apparently, he called an NBC news anchor and said he was mad about a few things.
He used the word P-I-blank blank E-D.
Maybe it happened.
He didn't deny it.
Here we go.
President Trump threatened to bomb Iran if the Islamic Republic doesn't reach a new deal with the U.S. on its nuclear program.
As you point out, Dr. Paul, they had a deal with the United States and Trump canceled it.
So what kind of a new deal would it be, A, and B, why would they trust Trump if he canceled the deal in the first place?
And they say, why it matters?
Trump wants to engage in diplomatic talks with Iran, has leveled threats against it before, but this is the strongest and most serious.
Here's what he said, quote, if they don't make a deal, there will be bombing.
It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before, Trump told NBC News Kristen Welker during a phone interview.
Bombing like they've never seen before.
And he gave him a two-month deadline.
Let's get a deal about two months or we're going to bomb you.
Yeah, I don't think he should get a very good grade on diplomacy.
It's just, I mean, this just looks like aggravation.
Even if there are problems, I don't think that's the way that you're going to solve them.
So that is something that we have to face up to.
And there's going to be very little dissension.
You know, even that weak dissent, or at least it was said, that the vice president mentioned, well, maybe we should, you know, jump in and do this bombing.
So maybe we should take it through.
But he wasn't in the room.
And that was only mentioned afterwards.
Say, oh, yeah, he suggested that maybe this is not the best thing to do.
And yet the bomb still dropped anyway.
The tough talk has consequences, you know, and go to the one that says state of play, because this is from the same Axis article.
And this is what happens when you talk tough and you do tough things.
In recent days, the U.S. military sent several B-2 stealth bombers to the Diego Garcia military base in the Indian Ocean.
In a deployment, a U.S. official said was not disconnected from Trump's two-month deadline.
The B-2 bombers can carry huge bunker buster bombs that would be a key element in any possible military action against Iran's underground nuclear facilities.
I actually wrote a piece on Saturday about this, Dr. Paul, and we talked about it, I think, on the show as well, that this movement of B-2s, of cargo ships, of refueling tankers, all points to one thing, which is either he's planning to attack Iran or he is planning an elaborate bluff to try to bully Iran into a deal.
Again, why would you deal with Trump who abrogated the previous deal?
You know, it's a big question.
So.
Well, he, in his mind, probably, this is the art of the deal.
Yeah, a new deal.
Yeah.
Well, there's a little more danger.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
It is.
And, you know, again, people are saying that this is Netanyahu's dream to get the U.S. to fight its war against Iran.
He did it against Iraq.
If you remember, he went into Congress in 02 and said, believe me, if you attack Iraq, there's going to be peace in the Middle East, right?
How did that work out?
And they're doing the same thing with Iran.
But it's not just Iran.
You know, he is ramping up against Yemen as well.
Now, going to that next clip, this is Dave DeCamp on anti-war.com.
U.S. launches dozens more airstrikes on Yemen, killing at least one civilian.
I think there's probably plenty more than one that have been killed.
Dozens and dozens of strikes, probably a couple billion dollars.
How much do you think these bombs cost?
They're not cheap, in my opinion, plus moving all of the military equipment around Yemen.
This is an extremely expensive effort to destroy Yemen.
You know, and I mentioned to you, and it was sort of a hint at how serious I think is.
I said, don't you think it's like a declaration of war?
You know, can you imagine how Trump would react if somebody came to our doorstep and started talking that way?
You know, so it's not diplomacy.
It's not exactly part of the philosophy that we have for seeking peace and prosperity.
Because if you get into the prosperity thing, we don't happen to think the road to prosperity are tariffs and more economic regulations and more inflation.
And quite frankly, I don't think you're going to do very much with the debt.
Yeah.
And, you know, Adam, you know, on our team, RPI's team, he did a piece over the weekend and he was looking at a new poll that shows Trump's numbers are going down.
People are more concerned with the economy, with inflation, with their financial future.
They don't want to bomb Iran.
They don't want to bomb Yemen.
They don't want to go to war for Israel or anyone else.
They don't want us to be involved in Ukraine anymore.
And he's getting lower and lower numbers.
He needs to wake up, I think, and understand what's happening.
You know, and the one thing, even during the election, I said they're not concentrating on a thing.
They're not concentrating on the economy or the bankruptcy or, you know, the monetary system that brings this stuff on.
So the bankruptcy is here.
And you'd think there would be some major changes.
Yes, we got a major change, but there used to be, I would say, 80% of the economists, right and left, thought tariffs were terrible.
But with the influence of the president and the vote, you know, everybody just rolled over and say, we can't say very much to it.
He might punish us.
You know, he might take away.
I keep, I call them bribes.
They give these countries money.
You do exactly as we tell you.
I used to say we'd bomb them.
No, we don't need to bomb them.
We just take their money away from them.
And then they're totally dependent on us.
But that's all part of a financial system that they don't really deal with it, you know, because it has to do with the military-industrial complex.
They're very much involved in this thing, you know, building that new, talking about building that new airplane.
It looks like it'll be worse than the 135.
Billions and billions of dollars.
You know, the new plane they're planning on, they want to, the big fight was make sure that it's can't be pilotless.
Successful Mission: World Safer 00:08:08
We can't have a drone or anything like that.
We have to have pilots in there.
And somebody suggested, like I did for 30 years, why are we building stuff that they used in World War II?
I can remember I was in the military in the 60s, but they had built the B-52 at the end of World War II.
And so I flew just in a meager way in a B-52 back in the early 60s.
They still have these things.
Now they want to build a bigger bomber and fighter and make sure that we have the personnel in there.
And nobody says, well, maybe they're old-fashioned.
I always think surface vessels of the Navy are part of old World War II.
How hard do you think it would be to shoot in a real war?
How hard would it be to knock out our aircraft carriers?
Maybe that's by design.
You know, the Carl Vinson's over there in the Red Sea.
What happens if the Houthis hit it?
That'll be causing Spell Eye to attack Iran.
That's too conspiratorial.
Well, yeah.
Well, I mean, Trump is just having a bad few days.
I mean, let's go to the next one.
Trump says he will continue bombing Yemen for a long time.
For a long time.
He says it's very successful.
Now, go to the next clip if you can, because I don't know, Dr. Paul.
I sort of like the way Trump talks in some ways.
It can be entertaining, but when he talks like this when it comes to war, I don't know.
So here's what he said.
The Houthis are looking to do something.
They want to know how do we stop?
How do we stop?
How can we have peace?
The Houthis want peace because they're getting the hell knocked out of them, he told reporters.
They want us to stop so badly.
They've got to say no mas.
But I can only say that attacks every day, every night have been very successful beyond our wildest expectations.
We're going to do it for a long time.
We can keep it going for a long time, the president said.
Keep it going.
They're begging for peace.
In fact, everything I see coming out of Yemen is the opposite.
Keep bombing us.
We're going to keep hitting you back.
And they've done that.
We reported on this from 18 on when the Saudis, with our help, were attacking Yemen.
And they lost.
And they've shown their resilience.
They've continued to show the resilience.
And ultimately, to what end are we bombing Yemen?
What's the goal?
You know, I guess we have to put it in a column.
Another item is going to cause escalation.
Escalation.
It's not going to quiet things down.
Well, let's move to the next one because we wanted to just do a little talk, a little thing on Pam Bondi, who's the Attorney General.
Now, she had a quote that irritated you over the weekend.
I hadn't seen it until this morning, and I felt myself a little irritated as well.
Well, I found that quote.
I dug it up.
Let's listen to what Pam said.
You want to put your earpiece in?
We'll listen to what Pam Bondi said over the weekend.
She is a big wartime attorney general.
Let's listen to Pam.
In terms of the signals chat controversy that's going on, is DLJ involved at this point?
If so, why?
If not, why not?
Well, first, it was sensitive information, not classified, and inadvertently released.
And what we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission.
Our world is now safer because of that mission.
We're not going to comment any further on that.
If you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was at Hillary Clinton's home that she was trying to bleach bit.
Talk about the classified documents in Joe Biden's garage that Hunter Biden had access to.
This was not classified information.
And we are very pleased with the results of that operation and that the entire world is safer because of it.
She's happy about that bombing.
Changing the subject, really.
There's a big difference between the two.
It's all packaged together.
But one is getting into the militarism.
You know, and I don't like the word safety.
I like safety, but I think our foreign policy makes us unsafe.
Sure.
And that's why I don't like that.
But I guess the other reason why this struck me is I never paid a whole lot of attention to her.
I sort of thought, well, you know, she's successful.
She looks like she'll be tough on crime and some of this is necessary.
And so she fit in very well.
So I think when I saw how strong she was on that, that really impressed me because I was listening to her because I think she made that statement more than once.
But she said, but the military mission was successful and it made us safe and it was a great deal of benefit.
And that is just not true.
So I was disappointed with that.
And so I guess it's one notch lower for my esteem for her, I'll tell you.
Her assertion that the world is a safer place because of the bombing that the signal chat revealed.
What the signal chat revealed is the way they go about it, which is very cavalier.
You know, I forget which one it was, but they said, no, Americans don't even know anything about Yemen.
It doesn't matter.
It's all about sending a message.
That's all that matters.
And then she's trying to tell us that the world is a safer place because of the bombing.
Now, the whole story, in my opinion, is bogus.
They claim that they got the top missile guy from Yemen, which they didn't.
They didn't get him.
But if you go to that next clip, what they did do, and I think this is what no one is talking about, everyone is talking about the salacious details of the fact that it was leaked.
And no one's talking about what actually happened.
And this is AF Post.
The White House leveled an entire residential apartment in Yemen because the Houthi's top missile guy was visiting his girlfriend there, according to National Security Advisor Waltz's signal messages.
The move resulted in the deaths of dozens of civilians.
Now, the story itself is bogus.
First of all, the idea, we're watching this guy, we're following this guy, we're ready to attack, but wait, let's wait until he goes into a residential building and visit his girlfriend, which itself is a weird story.
Yemen is hardly Southern California, where you pop in and visit your girlfriend at any time of day or night.
So why, if they were following this guy, didn't they kill him before he went into the building?
Why did they have to blow up the entire building?
Well, the Wall Street Journal reported, Dr. Paul, that all this intel on the targeting and who was killed came from Israel.
Now, you don't think that Israel has a hand in this or that Israel has an interest in blowing smoke on this deal?
I think it's absolutely true.
So the real scandal here is that you blew up apartment buildings to get the missile guy.
Yes, and this whole thing, and you played that clip from her interview, and it's very clear, but she didn't say it just once.
It wasn't, it was, it was a, the purpose was to distract, to distort, and make sure.
I have no idea why they did that dumb thing on the security thing.
I mean, who knows why that happened?
I mean, was there a good reason to do it on purpose?
I don't know, but maybe you know the answer to that.
But once again, she finished with the words on another interview.
I said, what we should be talking about is it was a very, very successful mission.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What does that mean?
What does it even mean?
You know, as long as the military is successful, yeah, for whom?
Who was it successful for?
How about the people who were killed?
Yeah.
And now the threats are they're going to increase all this stuff.
And they're going to use this as an example.
Well, we have a little flaws in releasing the information and the security.
But when we bomb, we bomb well.
So what we need to do is just bomb more.
Releasing Information Messedly 00:05:36
Yeah.
That's so disgusting.
No, she may have been telling the truth, Dr. Paul.
It was very successful if you happen to be in the military industrial complex because all those bombs are not going to replenish themselves.
They're going to be sucked out.
And so on the one hand, we were treated and we were very, we were clapping the Doge is saving billions of dollars, cutting all this nonsense out of government.
Boom.
A couple of missile strikes later, it's all up in smoke.
I've mentioned this to you, but it's not funny.
It's just really bad.
That I keep saying, where are the progressive Democrats when we need them?
But if they attack on, it isn't on the bombing.
It's on the fact that they didn't run the operation right.
Too much of it was releasing information before they let them know that bombs were coming.
So which is important, of course.
But she wasn't, they weren't interested in really improving the situation.
This whole idea that we're safer, our country is not safer for that.
We were never made safer ever since Korea.
How were we made safer back then?
The Russians weren't about to invade us.
How about Vietnam?
There's 68,000 American soldiers that died.
How did that make us safer?
It made us more broke.
It made us addicted to spending and printing money.
And we morphed into an empire and an empire that the reserve currency of the world was dumped in our lap, which meant we could create counterfeit money for a long, long time, which I think is coming to an end.
So the policies cannot happen.
These bad policies, whether they're economics or military, they wouldn't happen if you didn't have a reserve currency and you have people that do not understand that this is a terrible crime of counterfeiting the money.
The founders didn't like counterfeiting because in 1792, when they had the first law dealing with currencies and all, they believed in the death penalty for people who were fraudulent with government paperwork.
And like we're talking about paper money.
Yeah.
Watch out, Jerome Powell.
That's what somebody said.
Does that mean that you're out for the Federal Reserve Chairman?
Well, you know, we're going to criticize Trump when he's off base and he's really off base now.
He needs to take a deep breath.
Stop talking so much.
Don't call reporters when you're PO'd or what have you.
Just take a chill pill, focus again on what they were doing that was good, which is cutting government.
Congress should be involved, as we've said many times in Massey.
Senator Paul said it.
Codify these things into law.
Cut government.
That's what Americans want.
They don't want another war.
So hopefully, maybe he's listening to us right now.
You know, earlier on, you quoted somebody talking about the numbers are being shifted and the Republicans are getting to be in danger.
I think there are several elections coming up real soon.
There might be some big changes.
If the Republicans lost those seats, then they'd question this whole thing, which I think was real, but it was mixed up, you know, because the people were disgusted with it.
But maybe they were disgusted with inflation for all that we know.
Maybe that might have been the biggest issue.
Well, as you say, people vote with their stomach.
Anyway, I want to thank everyone for watching the show.
Please hit the like button and share the show with your friends and your enemies and your relatives and everyone you can.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in.
Once again, it's very important for us to have supporters spreading the message.
Without spreading the message, it's not going to be worth very much.
That it's one thing for sure.
You can spread a message any way you can find out other than lying about.
Just tell the truth because the truth is on our side.
And the prosperity and the peace, the issues of those two things come more from a government of non-interventionist.
Stay out of the business of running our lives, running our wallets, running our families, running our churches, running our First Amendment.
The whole works.
Just as simple as let the people take care of their own problem.
It will not be done perfectly.
But when you put people in charge in Washington and they mess up, it's so much worse because it affects everybody.
If we have a free society and you mess up, yes, you have responsibility.
You might have to resort to going to work or getting help from the family or looking to charity or something.
But this way, the whole thing, the principle of liberty demands that there be responsibility at all.
And that's what so often frightens people away.
You mean I wouldn't have my checks coming in?
What's going to happen?
But I'll tell you what, the founders understood the difference.
It's too sad that we didn't continue to improve upon that because it wasn't long after the Constitution was written that it started to melt away.
And we've been left with a long time ago without the basic principles of the Constitution, and that is the protection of liberty.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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