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June 19, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:41
Will Trump Pull The Trigger

Amid extreme pressure from Israel for US President Donald Trump to enter its war with Iran, President Trump claims he has not decided. Will he pull the United States into what could be the most disastrous intervention of all time?

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Time Text
Targeted Airstrike Debate 00:15:22
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
Dr. Paul is not with us today, but I am joined by my good friend and colleague, Chris Rossini, to do today's Liberty Report.
Chris, are you there?
I am here.
Great to be with you, Daniel.
Good morning, Chris.
It's great to see you again.
Today, we're going to talk a little bit about the topic of the show, which is will Trump pull the trigger.
Yesterday was a pretty chaotic day, and Trump seems to be increasingly unhinged on his social media posts.
And many people, I think, correctly commenting that this is really not the behavior of the President of the United States to basically conduct one policy through his angry posts on Truth Social.
It certainly doesn't seem to rise to the level of the presidency, in my opinion.
But nevertheless, he has, in the past few days, had all CAPS unconditional surrender.
I guess that can be taken two ways, but I think he meant it toward Iran.
And of course, Iran is not going to do that because Iran, of course, was the victim.
They were attacked with a sneak attack just a week ago today, in fact, from Israel.
And Israel is finding itself, Chris, in a situation that, unlike, not unlike the U.S. has found itself in when it takes on these overseas commitments, these overseas regime change commitments, which is that it's never as easy as the neocons make it out to be on paper.
It's going to be a cakewalk.
It'll be easy.
It'll all be over in a couple of days.
And for Israel, they're finding out that it's not a good idea when you're a country of 8 million people, perhaps, and you take on a country of 90 million people with extremely sophisticated weapons, with also an extremely sophisticated weapon production system.
That's something that people don't really understand is that Iran does make its own weapons.
It's refused, and some would say unwisely, it's refused to enter into military alliances with places like Russia because it wants to maintain its autonomy and its independence.
Israel, on the other hand, has a very, very limited capacity to make weapons.
It's almost entirely reliant upon the United States to deliver weapons, and those weapons are running very, very low, particularly when you talk about air defense weapons.
The aero missiles in particular are running low.
And so when you take on, as Ukraine has found out, when you take on a country that's bigger, that's larger than you, not only in geography, not only in population, but in industrial capacity, you soon find yourself in a very bad situation.
And that's what's happening to Israel right now.
And that's not to say that Iran is not taking some hits.
That certainly is happening.
But we do know that Israel is clamoring for U.S. involvement, is desperate for U.S. involvement.
Israel is demanding U.S. involvement.
And President Trump appears to be going along, although he has not yet pulled the trigger.
So the question, Chris, that we have to try to answer today is: will Trump pull the trigger?
What do you think?
Well, I hope he doesn't.
And that's why we speak out every waking moment against it.
I do want to emphasize what you mentioned there about it's so simplistic, the propaganda, to try to get us into the war.
They use these words targeted airstrike as if it's, oh, we're just going to go in, do a targeted airstrike, and that's it.
It reminds me of 15 days to flatten the curve.
Just give us 15 days to flatten the curve.
This is how the state operates.
They use very innocent language.
Everything's going to be okay.
And then once you open the door for the state, it devours everything.
That 15 days to flatten the curve led to lockdowns, led to destruction of our society like it has never been has seen, and all based on lies.
Well, the wars are the same thing.
And even the words targeted airstrike are bogus themselves.
Our friend Anya Parimpil mentioned, well, Pearl Harbor was a targeted airstrike.
Was that not an act of war?
Yeah, it was a targeted airstrike.
They targeted Pearl Harbor.
That was an act of war.
And that's what happens when you give them an inch.
The United States government has already taken too far, but they should not be given an inch to put our soldiers' lives on the line that they could end up coming back in coffins with this targeted airstrike because the world is far too complex.
You cannot just map it out in an ivory tower, and this is how it's going to go, and that's what's going to happen next, and this is what will happen after that.
Absolutely not.
These people have proven that the world does not work that way.
Our country has suffered tremendously based on their lies.
And they just move on to the next war.
So it has to stop here.
And it's not looking good, Daniel, with President Trump.
Yeah, it's not interesting.
I'm glad you brought up the point of targeted airstrike because that reminds us of the dialectics.
And this is exactly what's happening.
And in fact, even Trump's most fervent supporters are playing into this game.
And Charlie Kirk posted yesterday on X.
He said, the proponents of regime change have pivoted in the last 24 hours.
They know they are losing and their position is indefensible and unpopular.
Keep the pressure on.
Now, the average person would look at that and say, wow, even Charlie Kirk has come to our position on not attacking Iran.
But that's not what he's saying here.
What he's saying is a dialectical synthesis of the positions, which is our position is do not get involved whatsoever.
The extremist interventionists are saying we need to get in there completely and have a regime change.
And the Kirk, and I'm not picking on him, but the Kirk synthesis position is simply that we will not go in.
We are going to win.
We are anti-war.
We're going to have a targeted airstrike.
And that's what they want.
And that's certainly what Netanyahu wants, because they all understand that a targeted airstrike is, as you point out, is a Pearl Harbor, is a declaration of war.
And a targeted airstrike will most likely, I would say, 90% result in the destruction of American forces in the region.
Upwards of 50,000 to 80,000 American soldiers who are sitting there as sitting ducks.
There's no AD.
There's no air defense over our military bases.
It's not designed to handle this.
What the extremists are planning on is for President Trump to have a targeted airstrike on the Florida reactor inside the mountain.
Iran will respond by hitting American troops.
And then you'll hear nothing about the fact that the U.S. started it.
Just like you've heard nothing about the fact that Israel started it.
All you will hear about is that Iran has killed American service members.
The yellow ribbons will go up everywhere.
Americans will start waving the flags and another country will be flattened.
But I don't know that it'll end as easily and simply as they think, because that's what Israel has found out as well when you attack a country that has the ability to defend itself.
So I think this is really important, Chris.
And I think it's probably the one thing to emphasize most.
The targeted airstrike is a declaration of war and it will result in American service members getting killed because that is by design.
That is what they want.
That shows how sick these people are.
Absolutely, Daniel.
You know, I wanted to move on to the constitutionality of all of this.
You know, President Trump yesterday on this targeted airstrikes or whatever, he said, quote, I may do it.
I may not do it.
Nobody knows what I'm going to do, end quote.
And I'm thinking how far America has fallen.
You know, the left, they're usually off the mark, but they have this no-kings, you know, rallies, whatever.
You know, he's acting like a king.
Anybody that I may do it, I may not do it.
Nobody knows.
And Congress sits back.
Congress is the one that has to declare war.
And not that we believe that Congress wouldn't.
They're all, you know, they're APAC influenced outside of just a handful.
So they probably would vote for the war, but make them do it.
Make them put their names on the line because they could hide behind failure.
When the failure ultimately occurs, which it always does, they could say, hey, you know, the president did it, not us.
You know, and all they care about is their seat, you know, their Congress seat.
So make them put their names on the line.
If you're going to take us to war, put your name out there.
That way we can blame you when it all goes south, as it always does.
So that's where we are constitutionally, which is totally ignored.
Ironically, every single one of these people swear an oath to the Constitution.
So they're all liars.
So Daniel, what do you think about our constitutional government that we should export to the world because it is such an enlightened system?
Exactly.
It's just been shown to be not even a piece of paper.
But, you know, Judge Napolitano in his column today makes a good point that even if Congress were to vote to declare war, it would be illegal because Iran has not attacked or threatened the United States.
Now, it may be technically an appropriate way to go if you want to have war, but it wouldn't be a justified declaration of war.
It would be completely illegal to do.
But you're absolutely right.
Congress is, I mean, I thought it was bad in 2002 when they run up to the Iraq war when Congress gave an authorization to go into Iraq, which is Luisa words.
And they did that to protect themselves so they could say, well, we didn't vote for war.
We just said you could do it if you want to.
They're not even bothering with that anymore.
And it just shows how degraded our society is, Chris.
And, you know, one other point, and I don't want to get too much into this because it's been, everyone has talked about it.
It's been kind of beaten over the head.
But I just want to emphasize for people to understand now it's easy to watch a Tucker Carlson interview with Ted Cruz and to, of course, cheer for Tucker Carlson.
I think he handled it incredibly well.
And it's also easy to look at Ted Cruz as a villain, but Ted Cruz is not necessarily the villain.
Ted Cruz is a symptom of everything that's wrong on Capitol Hill and in Congress.
Now, Ted Cruz is not a stupid person.
He came across as relatively dumb when he was grilled by Tucker Carlson, but he's actually considered one of the more intelligent members of Congress.
So that shows a lot about the others.
But the fact of the matter is, and I think what Tucker Carlson was so brilliant in pointing out, and it wasn't just a series of guts questions, is what a lot of people think it was.
What Tucker Carlson was pointing out is you have a bunch of people on Capitol Hill with the power, the power to take us to war, the power to, and not just directly with a declaration, though, the power of propaganda to talk us into a war, to pressure Americans into accepting war, who have no idea about the countries that they want to attack.
And this was true with Iraq.
It's true with Iran.
And Ted Cruz, again, is one of the smarter members.
So you ask some of these knuckleheads some even more simple questions about Iran, like where is it?
You won't be able to answer.
A lot of people assume incorrectly.
Well, he's a member of Congress.
He's got to have information I don't have.
I'm sure he knows.
Well, I spent 12 years on Capitol Hill, Chris.
And I can tell you they don't.
Not only do they not have information, they are incurious.
They do not want to.
Don't bother me with the details.
I've got my talking points from either the Republican or Democratic leadership.
I know what to do.
I'm going to go down to the floor and say it.
And if they do bother to go to an intel briefing, as Congressman Jimmy Duncan said in our most recent conference, you go in there and you get a dog and pony show.
You get them telling you stuff that's absolutely not true because they want a particular outcome.
They're not there to inform you.
They're there to propagandize you into a decision that's already been made.
So I just want to dispel that idea that these people somehow have all this wonderful knowledge and intelligence because they just don't.
Yeah, absolutely.
And there's another aspect of that interview that I'd like to bring up, and that's the bad theology of it.
I mean, Tucker exposed it as, you know, an irrational, and they're both Christians.
So Tucker exposed it.
But, you know, I'm almost positive that if you went up to Americans, they said, well, we have a secular government.
We don't have a religious theocracy here.
Yeah, well, maybe in name only we do, but our government is motivated by these, you know, outlandish religious ideas.
And, you know, Tucker nailed a cruise on them.
He's even bad at explaining them.
Dispensationalism, Christian Zionism.
This is what animates our Congress.
Now, if we're supposed to have a secular republic and our policies of war are based on these religious beliefs, then that's another thing that has gone out the window along with the Constitution.
That's not what America was supposed to be.
We are a very diverse nation here with all different types of Christians, Catholics, Baptists, every mixture.
And we're supposed to have a constitution that our members of Congress, the president, are supposed to follow these laws.
Well, they don't follow the laws and they're off fighting wars, religious wars for another country.
I mean, we have fallen hard and far and our society reflects it.
We're on our last leg here.
We elected this guy to try to turn things around, not put the last nail in the coffin, but that's where we're heading.
And it's a shame.
That's very true, Chris, and it's an important point to make.
And some people have said after that, not only that interview, but also the long, lengthy text that U.S. Ambassador to Israel Huckabee sent to Donald Trump, that both of these things read literally read like something that Al-Qaeda would say.
This sort of strange extremist religious view, the idea that Allah or God will command you to do certain things.
And Huckabee himself just said it.
Just listen to God, President Trump.
He'll tell you what to do.
And that's what Bush said about Iraq.
I mean, the parallels are eerie, Chris, because Bush said, God told me to attack Iraq.
I'm not going to disparage anyone's religion.
We've got, as you said, a very diverse country, not just Christians, all sorts of religions, a lot of atheism around there as well.
But the idea that God is going to be knocking on your door, hey, hey, Bush, why don't you go ahead and hit Iraq?
Why don't you kill a million people?
Man, if that's the God they worship, then we are in big trouble.
But the point is, you make the point, which is right, is we, the Americans disparage theocracies.
That's one of the reasons we want to attack Iran.
It's a theocracy.
The Taliban are theocratic.
Al-Qaeda is theocratic.
The U.S. is behaving in the same way, and it's a very dangerous place to be.
Fantastic, Daniel.
AOC's Disappointment in Republican Move 00:05:00
I wanted to point out President Trump has been such a huge disappointment.
You know, the time is ticking.
He had four short years, and now we're halfway through a year, so what, three and a half years now, to really turn things around, focus on America.
And he went off across the world to focus on another war for Israel.
And he's handing this to the left because, you know, in three and a half years, they can run as the peace party.
And everybody will forget about Ukraine and the hypocrisy.
It doesn't matter in politics.
They will focus on the present war.
And AOC and Harris can be our next president.
And the guy just drops the ball because he couldn't focus on America.
What a disgrace.
You know, from what it started off with, when Elon was in there cleaning house, I mean, it really looked like things were changing.
And now Elon was kicked to the curb.
Tucker's kicked to the curb.
Pulsey doesn't know what she's talking about.
I mean, it's just every single day the guy disappoints.
And now he could really, if he triggers this war even further, bury us for good.
I mean, what a total disappointment, to put it lightly.
You make a great point, though, Chris.
I mean, this is, I mean, I keep seeing history repeating itself so much.
I'm starting to wonder if I'm going insane.
But this is exactly what happened at the end of the Bush era.
Obama emerged as a great anti-war candidate.
This is not our war.
And he was elected and he proceeded to light the Middle East on fire.
I mean, everything that we're seeing now, much of it, most of it happened under Obama.
Libya, the disaster there, the Syria disaster, where we now have Al-Qaeda in charge of Syria, all of the regime change wars.
They were under Obama.
But the left, you're absolutely right.
They are coming out as anti-war.
It's going to be their ticket.
It's going to be what they run on.
And it'll be a very tactical move on their part.
But you're right.
I think it'll be successful.
The American voter is so desperate, so desperate to have leaders who will stop taking us to war.
You know, they'll vote for this microphone in front of me, probably.
Yeah.
And, you know, this just crossed my mind as you're speaking.
Trump wants to create this master database, palantier surveillance state on top of it.
So here you go, AOC.
Here's a master database for you.
And don't you think that they would love to have all of the information at their fingertips of who the MAGA people are?
I mean, but this is the same people that gave us the Patriot Act, too.
It's the same story as in the 2000.
And then later, oh, Massey was right.
Ron Paul was right.
Boy, Ron Paul was right about everything.
Right now is when you have to do the right things.
But the right is just as dumb as they were back with Bush, you know, creating a surveillance state for the next Democrat to come in to use against them.
And, you know, we're warning you, don't do this.
But they're dead set on it.
So, you know, I guess they reap what they sow all the time.
The matter of the warnings, it's just we all get sucked into it.
You know, I'm not any, I'm not a MA person or a leftist, but we get sucked into it, you know, despite all of our warnings.
Well, let me serve up a little bit of a white pill there, Chris, because you're right.
But I'm trying, it's rare that I find myself in the position of being an optimist.
But in this case, I would say that there is a significant anti-war movement on the right that I have not seen in my lifetime.
And it's there, and the numbers are there.
You've talked about it with Dr. Paul on the show.
I've talked about it with Dr. Paul on the show.
If you look at the 18 to 25-year-olds, Republican voters, they are absolutely fed up with this garbage.
They're sick of the boomers sitting in front of their Fox News and demanding that other people go die in wars that they decide on.
So I think there is a great movement in the Republican Party.
I don't know what the future will be.
I don't know if they can take over the party.
I don't know if they'll start a new party.
The war party is extremely powerful.
It is the uniparty.
But nevertheless, when we start seeing rustlings of a serious conservative anti-war movement, that's why friends of ours like Clayton and Natalie Morris over at the Redacted are so important in my opinion.
And others on the conservative side, like Justin Paul Hano and his show, there are a lot of shows out there of people who are not leftists at all, who are vocally anti-war.
So we can be a little bit optimistic in that way.
We have to grow our ranks.
It's the only way to do it.
No, I agree.
And yesterday you showed the polling of that how Americans, even on the right, are against us.
In fact, Americans voted Trump because they're against war.
So it's not like Republicans are pro-war.
We had enough of it.
Israel's Reality Check 00:06:40
It's just you get scammed by the politicians.
Trump turned on a dime.
You know, no new wars.
It was the same thing that Woodrow Wilson kept us out of war.
FDR is not going to send any of your troops to die in Europe again.
Are you kidding me?
We won't repeat that.
And Mr. No New Wars is about to put us in another war.
So I have more faith in the American people.
It's the leadership and their megaphones.
They're influencers.
And they're no different on X than the television.
They have their scripts.
They, I'm sure, get paid to do it.
They have the exact wording that they say, just like on television.
So those are the people.
It's just, you know, the anti, the people that voted for Trump for No New Wars, you know, you do have to face reality that he lied.
This, oh, I trust Trump.
I trust them.
You know, that's, you know, what does he have to do to you?
So, yeah, I do have more faith in the American people than I do the politicians and all their megaphone influencers.
What's interesting is that there's a lot of interesting stuff coming out of Israel right now.
The Israelis are very unhappy because they were also told it was going to be a cakewalk.
And now they're spending days in shelters and they are mad.
They're not ready for this.
And there have been a lot of people who have said that, you know, and there's a lot of stuff coming out now that essentially, you know, in a way, it's Israel's fault, but it's also the U.S.'s fault.
The people in the U.S. who have demanded that we backstop Israel all this time, no matter what they do, has led them a false sense of that they're invincible, invincibility.
They have a false sense of invincibility given to them by their most loyal followers in the United States.
So they did them no favor.
If it wasn't for the backstop provided by the supposedly pro-Israel people in the United States, they would have realized that we need to find a way to accommodate our neighbors.
We can't just simply attack them all.
You know, I mean, it's just true in your own neighborhood, of course, if you started putting car bombs in your neighbors' yards, they're going to team up against you.
And that's a fact.
So I would just say that the people who call themselves Israel's greatest friends, the Ted Cruises of the world, have actually put Israel in a position now where it's cowering in bomb shelters.
So, and those of us who are critical of Israel's behavior and more importantly, critical of U.S. complicity in their behavior, I would put forth that we are much better friends of a peaceful Israel that can survive into the future.
And now we're seeing in Israel that it's literally facing an existential crisis, a crisis of its own existence now.
So, you know, it's easy to call people like us names, but the fact is, if they listen to people like Ron Paul and the rest of us, Israel would be in a better position right now.
America's backstopping of Israel is not only a harm to America, which is, you know, we're American citizens, so we have to speak out against that, but it's a harm to the Israeli people.
It's obvious today, you know, as we see what is happening in Israel.
But what this is, is moral hazard.
It's the same thing with the banks and with our unsound money system.
The banks know that if they take crazy risks, the Fed and the U.S. taxpayer will bail them out.
So they take risks that they would never take without that backstop.
And, you know, just like TARP and back in 2008, oh, look at this mess we made.
Come fix it for us.
And the government says, okay, here's $700 billion or whatever the heck it was back then.
We'll make you whole.
So this is the mentality that Israel's government lives under.
We will take these crazy risks knowing or assuming that America will come and bail us out and go die for us and go fight our wars for us.
This is the mentality that they live under.
And they've been right for a long time.
Now, how much longer will they be right that America will backstop and go die for them?
Maybe again they're right.
I don't know until President Trump actually makes that decision.
So, but that's the moral hazard.
And the Israelis suffer as a result of it, just like we suffer as a result of our, you know, unimmoral banking system.
That's a great point, Chris.
It's really great to make those parallels because it's exactly what it is.
And they have consequences.
But reality bites hard.
And the reality in Israel right now is that we don't have the missiles to give them.
You know, the arrow missiles that they need for their David Sling or what have you, they need hundreds and hundreds of them.
They've already dispensed with hundreds and hundreds of these.
The fact is that Raytheon only makes 110 per year for the entire world.
And we need a couple of those ourselves.
So reality bites hard.
Yes, the Fed printed a lot of money out of thin air when it wanted to bail out the banks.
But you can't print a missile.
You can't print these things.
They are real, tangible things.
And that's the reality that's going to sink in.
Yeah, very good.
I have one more point, one more point.
Try to be optimistic about it because we have to think of the future.
And we don't know Elon Musk, but we could just go by what we see publicly.
And I wonder he has been silent about this war.
And he has obvious reasons that we even understand of why.
But we don't know what he's thinking.
And I hope, my hope is that he's against it, another war for Israel, simply because of who he is and what he does as a person.
He's a builder.
He's a creator.
And war is a destroyer.
War destroys it.
You know, resources are shuffled to the merchants of death to create weapons and bombs to kill people that add no value to society.
And they get rich.
Go to Washington, D.C. You want to see where they live.
See all the huge mansions where all the lobbyists are.
That's, you know, they get rich, adding nothing to society.
Elon Musk is the opposite of that.
He's a builder.
He's a creator.
I was down in Florida last month, saw a SpaceX launch.
Adding Value to Society 00:01:37
It was amazing.
Everywhere I go on the roads, everywhere in my town, outside, there's Teslas everywhere.
This guy is adding value to our lives.
So I don't know what he thinks.
He's silent right now.
But I hope because we have to start thinking past Trump.
I hope that he's against all this crap and hates what he sees.
That's very well said, Chris.
And he has the ability to make a lot of difference because he's extremely powerful and wealthy.
And let's hope he uses those resources for good.
He's already done that, you're right, in our lives.
But if he's interested in politics and sees things that way, I think it would be fantastic as well.
I'm going to close out if you're ready, Chris, or if you want to have some final words.
No, that's it.
Well, I'll just close out by reminding everyone: the reason that the Ron Paul Institute exists is to struggle and educate against the wars that we're facing right now.
And I mentioned it yesterday.
What can you do?
Vote with your feet.
Come to the Ron Paul Institute Conference on August 16th.
There's going to be great speakers.
We're going to talk about this and other aspects of conflict.
Blueprint for Peace is a name.
I'll put a link in the description to get your tickets while they're still discounted.
But what we can do is show our numbers, show that we are not just an inconsequential appendage in society.
We are the core of society and we love our country and we want to not go down this path.
So get those tickets.
Come see us and show our strength.
And I do want to thank all of our viewers.
I want to thank you, Chris, as well for joining us.
But I want to thank all our viewers as well for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
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