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Aug. 20, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
27:02
What Happened To America First

President Trump's foreign policy is turning out to be just as militaristic and interventionist as his predecessors. Promising "America first," his saber-rattling from Venezuela to Ukraine and blind support for Israel are anything but.

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Time Text
Economist's Plan for Interest Rates 00:06:04
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you today.
Good to see you again, Dr. Paul.
It's been a while.
You've been busy holding the fort together.
Well, anyway, I want to start off with an update on the Federal Reserve.
It's in the news.
Of course, there's a meeting up there at Jackson Hole, and there's a fight going all the time.
I've been fascinated with the fight between two interventionists on what their interest rate should be.
But nobody is allowed to be represented by talking about, well, maybe they shouldn't think they're smart enough to even come up with the answer of what the interest rate should be.
But there's a new angle to it right now is because one of the members of the FOMC, the Federal Reserve Board, has said his retirement, and Trump is getting ready to appoint a new person that would be there for several months, and then that term would run out, and they would then have to have another vote.
But right now, it's a big deal because Trump is trying to line up his economic policy.
But he picked a person to take over, a person by the name of Stephen Moran, and he's the director of the Council of Economic Advisors.
And they never get a lot of play, but some of them get well known, and they have a lot of clout.
But most of the time, they're very, very conventional.
I don't think anybody talks about the difference between Keynesianism and Rothbardism.
Anyway, that's the one he's recommending.
But it's going to be a pretty good debate because I thought, I wonder what he believes in.
So I dug up a little bit, and I just want to mention those.
But there was one quote in one article that I want to read because it gives you a pretty good idea of where this guy's coming from.
I'm sure he's a very nice guy.
I've never met him, but I think he has a lousy idea here.
So his name is Moran, M-I-R-A-N-Mirana Moran.
And an article was written by him by the chief economist of AXA.
And he was sort of describing it.
So I was going to read his very brief description of this new person that's going to save us from inflation.
And I really get a little charge out of this because they write this seriously.
Here it goes.
The economist said, notes that his essay, Morana, said his essay on how he found his essay very interesting on how to distort the global monetary system better to serve the U.S. economic interests.
I bet we could do that, just get rid of them.
But anyway, his idea is highly insightful.
He's bragging about this genius at the Council of Economic Advisors.
Highly insightful for understanding his views.
In it, he outlines several ways to provoke a depreciation of the dollar.
Oh, why would we want to do that?
Without causing a drop in demand for U.S. assets.
Now, that's magic.
Depreciate the dollar, print the dollar, destroy the value of the dollar, and not change, you know, human.
He wants to alter human action.
We've been taught that human actions is something you can come around to, at least understanding the variabilities of what happened.
And without causing a drop in demand, and that gets more complex on how he does that.
It's an unbelievable, complex idea.
Rewards, tariffs, threats, innuendos, you do it our way, and you vote this way.
But he's on the side of obviously of Trump.
But I think he has more intellectual clout on this.
In it, he outlines several ways to do this, which would otherwise lead to rising interest rates.
See, he has to, without causing a drop in demand, that's the key here, which would otherwise lead to rising interest rates, which I think that's logical.
But he doesn't want that to happen.
And he says eventually an economic slowdown, further complicating the already complex budget.
And he sticks to this, but then he comes up with very, very complex ideas.
And it's available, but it's the use of what we've already witnessed.
You know, you do it our way, or we're going to put sanctions on you and blockade this, deny you, you know, have economic penalties all the time.
So they want to use this.
And then the big argument comes up about, you know, are they interfering with the independence of the Federal Reserve if they do that?
And, of course, Trump and this economist, they don't like, they don't like that, that you can't interfere with the independence because they want to be able to dictate it.
But of course, they want it.
They want it.
What Trump wants and this economist wants is control of it.
And it's just a matter of, and it would be secret too, and it would probably be, you know, a little more, actually, it could be more dangerous because there's going to be, because they literally admit, print the money, but we know how we can prevent anybody from knowing about it in order, because if they think they're going to have an economic policy or economically protect themselves, we'll prevent them from doing it.
Next Move Unknown 00:15:56
So that's what's going on there.
And it's a long way from some of the hints we've heard because we've heard hits from Trump and others.
Yeah, I think an audit of the Fed would be good and all.
But since he's mentioned that, he's mentioned mostly that what they're doing now and the independence of the Fed.
I remind people a lot that how I get around thinking about this.
Independence, to me, when they're yelling and screaming, independence, what they want is secrecy.
And now Trump's maybe against this independence, but he wants to be independent and secret next because they're not going to give up on that.
It's who has ready access to the maximum part of the deep state, you know, and that's that's what's going on.
But we're going to hear a lot more about this appointment.
Yeah, okay.
Well, as you know, Dr. Paul, I wasn't just playing hookie last week.
I was away getting ready for our DC conference.
This was our ninth conference in D.C. You were greatly missed at the event.
I can tell you that for sure.
It's our 19th overall that we've either produced on our own or with our colleagues at the Mises Institute and the Future of Freedom Foundation.
So 19 conferences we've done in 12 years, which is a pretty good track record, I have to say.
Well, I don't think I'm bragging when I say that this event, Dr. Paul, and I hesitate to tell you this because I don't want you to be disappointed, but more people came up to me after this conference and said it was the best of our conferences than ever have happened before.
So, and I felt the same way.
We got some media if you put that first clip on.
Our good friends from Zero Hedge, who we basically give an ad for every day, they wrote it up, how the Ukraine war could end tomorrow if the U.S. wanted.
Jeffrey Sachs addresses Ron Paul's D.C. conference.
You can find that on Hedge.
I'm going to bring a couple pictures to you, Dr. Paul, so you can get a sense of what it was like.
Hold on, we got some problems.
Can we bring that second picture up, please?
Thank you.
So here's Jeffrey Sachs addressing the event.
He gave a great speech.
Everyone loved it.
Go to the next one.
He talked a lot about JFK, by the way.
Here's the panel that we had.
This was a lot of fun, Dr. Paul.
Judge Napoleon Tano basically did an episode of Judging Freedom.
So here on the stage, you can see Anya Parrampil, her husband Max Blumenthal, Doug McGregor, and Jeffrey Sachs.
It was a very lively exchange.
Now go to the next one.
This was a delightful presentation as well on Natalie Morris of The Redacted.
We know her.
We know her husband Clayton.
She was just, she gave such a great talk and is such a wonderful person in person, a great, great personality.
And I'm skipping a few because I know we don't have a lot of time.
But the next speech was one of my all-time favorites.
And this is NNT Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
He gave a very, very interesting speech.
Hopefully when we get these up within the next day or two, you'll be looking at Taleb's speech.
It was really, really unique and interesting.
And then if you go to the next one, we had Doug McGregor brought down the house with a very powerful speech.
And then you closed it up, Dr. Paul, but you were here in Lake Jackson.
So I didn't get a photo of you speaking on the screen.
But I tell you what, I was in the crowd.
And when you came up, it was electrifying.
People were so thrilled.
Standing over.
I hope you saw the standing ovation because they were just absolutely thrilled.
And the other thing, now, the great little moments of the conference that happened backstage and behind the scenes.
Now, this was, put that next one on if you can.
Imagine being in this room.
This is our VIP cocktail party.
I'm sitting here talking to Max Blumenthal and Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
They're having a drink.
I'm not, but having a conversation.
There are many, many photos like this, Dr. Paul.
And there are innumerable photos of people in the audience talking, having a good time, getting to know each other.
The room was packed, packed like it hasn't been in a while.
So I just have to say overall, it was really a wonderful experience, except for one big problem that you were not there this time, but we'll get you there next time.
Very good.
I better be ready.
Get ready.
So anyway, on to the meat of what we're all about today, which is what the heck is going on with Trump's foreign policy.
It doesn't look America first.
Now, you have four examples, and I think there are four excellent examples.
The first one, if you put it up, is Ambassador Huckabee.
I don't know who he is ambassador from or to, because he certainly is not looking out for America's interests.
He says, hey, Israel, we have no problem with you taking over what's left of Palestine.
It's not a problem at all.
Go to the next one.
Here he is, waving his hand at the wall, I guess.
He says it's not a violation of international law, Dr. Paul, to build more settlements.
But it clearly is, if you go to the next one, it's the Fourth Geneva Convention, which the U.S. is signatory of, that you cannot transfer an occupying power civilian population into a military occupied territory.
It's a violation.
So he's running interference for them.
Dr. Paul, this does not look America first to me.
Yes, and you know, overhanging that whole debate over there, there's a lot of religious connotation about what you should do, even with just basic spiritual beliefs.
No, it's very discouraging.
You know, the first report you gave today was all very positive.
I said, well, we always try to say something positive, and that was.
And this time, we had to skip from there over to this.
And I wished I could find some things in some of our intervention and some of our foreign policy, because we've had some good foreign policy statements, but it doesn't look like I think if a reporter would just get to the right people when they're interviewing these people on foreign policy, explain to me how what you're doing is America first.
This looks like you're putting America last.
Look at what's happened to our taxpayers.
They pay all the money.
How about innocent people who died from our bombs?
And every place we go, we spend the money and we're bankrupt.
Have you noticed in the ordinary media, now they sort of casually mention, you know, we don't have any money.
But they still don't worry about the consequence.
But the consequence will come.
And that to me is such a shame.
And I was hoping for a little bit of non-intervention that America First, even though that wouldn't ever be my first choice because I want freedom first.
But America First implies that you don't take money from poor people here and go and fight and kill other people.
I mean, it's a moral tragedy of what we do with our foreign policy.
And it's been going on from the day I could remember anything.
And I remember things going on in World War II that I've always went, why are they doing that?
Why are they doing that?
And I think we've talked about it.
Well, there's some sinister reasons for that.
Sometimes it's money.
Sometimes it's power.
And sometimes it's just political shenanigans that go on.
But it sure lives on.
It's been around for a long time.
And it's sort of quiet now because we don't have our military being killed.
But that should not remove the moral responsibility of who's being killed and who's being injured, the way we finance it and what we do with our bombs when we drop them on innocent people.
I want to thank Georges for kicking me in 50 bucks.
He liked a piece that we put up on James Engleton from the Gray Zone on RPI.
We appreciate your support for that.
Dr. Paul, it's not even just there.
Go to the next one.
It's supporting the settlements in Israel with U.S. backing.
Go to the next one if you can.
It's not only that, Dr. Paul, it's backing escalation in Gaza.
Trump says Israeli captives will be released only if Hamas is confronted and destroyed.
Well, in the process of confronting and destroying Hamas, if that's the goal, you're also murdering 2 million people.
That's not how you're supposed to do things.
You can't starve kids to death because there might be some bad guys out there.
That's not how it works.
But that is how Trump is behaving.
And this is obviously under normal circumstances.
Dr. Paul wouldn't be any of our business.
But the problem is these children are starving.
People are getting shot with our bullets, our bombs, and our money.
And Trump is 1,000% behind it.
Go to the next one.
The next phase of Israel's offensive will focus on taking over Gaza City.
It involves forcibly displacing 1.2 million Palestinian civilians to the south as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign.
You know, Trump says credibly when he talks about Russia and Ukraine, I want the killing and dying to stop.
Why has he never uttered that phrase when it comes to Gaza?
Does he not believe that Palestinians are human beings?
You know, you cannot believe those statements are ever very serious unless they work very hard to veto all the proposals of the spending in a military budget.
And that's where the billions are.
And of course, that works into the economic crisis because that debt you have to pay for.
And that's why they're fighting, like on my opening statement, they're fighting on who gets to set the interest rate.
Oh, we can print money, but we don't have to worry about interest rate.
But it's the interest rates that's on automatic pilot.
And what about the part of the budget that's automatic?
Most of the budget is off limits for debate.
So that's why it's going to continue.
And this, you would think, and that was been my argument for years, is that if we were sincere and working and decided, well, we'll do our best.
And I thought maybe at the beginning of this year we were, it would, but nothing happened.
They didn't do it gradually.
I would start where they're most eager to talk about.
This is militarism.
And nothing even gets cut.
And you can't audit what they're doing.
And when you look at it, it's such a tragedy.
When I think of two evacuations of a country, Vietnam, everybody remembers the pictures there.
And then it was Afghanistan.
Yet we're all, you know, it's different now.
The American people got sick and tired of our troops coming home, but they ought to get sick and tired of the bigger picture.
Who benefits and who die from our policies of intervention overseas?
And it's a tragedy.
And it's not even in the Middle East, as you picked this article, and you're absolutely correct, Dr. Paul.
It's also in Latin America.
The policy of Trump is becoming very clear in places like Venezuela.
It's all about ramping up the drug war and ramping up interventionism and regime change.
Put this next one up.
This is what Trump is doing.
The Trump administration deploys three U.S. Navy destroyers and 4,000 troops near Venezuela.
What's Venezuela doing?
Why do we need to put 4,000 troops there?
Well, it's another regime change effort.
Go to the next one because they're very explicit about this.
This is the spokesman, Carolyn Levitt.
President Trump's been very clear and consistent.
He's prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible for just to justice.
The Maduro regime is not the legitimate government of Venezuela.
She said it's a narco-terrorist cartel.
And Maduro, it's the view of this administration, is not a legitimate president.
So we're going back to Juan Guaido, Dr. Paul.
We are literally going back to Juan Guado.
Now, I know Lil Michael Ruby is very happy about this, but the rest of America should be furious that we're going back to Juan Guaido.
Yeah, they seem to miss the point about America first.
But regime change is what we've talked about since 2014.
Just looking at history and the common practice of our government.
But we were very much involved in that.
And I think there's a really deep-seated belief in empires.
And they think that's a feeling of strength and wisdom, you know, that we're taking care of the world and we put it in a moral tone.
But that isn't the way it is.
We do that, and we always think it's good, you know, but it isn't.
Well, a libertarian uses a very simple direction.
Are you initiating the problem?
Are you initiating the violence?
Are you dropping the bombs?
And what have you, you already implied, what did the Venezuelans do to it?
Oh, they didn't elect the right person.
Well, there's a lot of people in the world that doesn't like the president we've elected, but we would hardly justify and say, well, why don't you come on in here and do something about it?
Yeah, exactly.
It makes no sense.
Yeah, it does.
It makes no sense at all.
And here's the thing: the whole thing in Venezuela is based on something that's absolutely untrue.
Even our own intelligence community says it's untrue.
Put this next now.
This is from Dave DeCamp over at anti-war.com.
We appreciate him writing this up.
So the whole thing that we got to overthrow Maduro, they've even talked about Dr. Paul kidnapping him, going in there and kidnapping Maduro.
So anyway, here's what Dave wrote.
The U.S. designated the so-called Cartel de los Solos over claims that it supports the Venezuelan gang, Trendi Aragua, and Mexico's Sinaloa cartel.
Now get this, Dr. Paul.
However, a recently declassified U.S. intelligence memo said it was unlikely that Maduro's government cooperates with or directs TDA, which is a Venezuelan gang.
And Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum has denied there's any evidence linking Maduro to Sinaloa.
So even the U.S. intelligence community doesn't believe this.
It doesn't matter what reality is.
Reality is what Marco Ruby and Trump says it is, I suppose.
Look how long the tragedy in Iran has continued.
And that happened when we participated with the British in going into Iran and overthrowing an elected leader.
Exactly.
And yet it's still, it's commonplace.
Well, right now, the one that annoys me the most because it's out there, it said 99 times out of 100 when Russia invaded Ukraine.
That was the beginning of all the trouble.
And they don't go back to saying, well, why do you get so worked up by that?
Because, you know, have you noticed they get more evidence how strong our opinion was when the Cold War ended that we would not, NATO would not put their weapons up, you know, in places like Ukraine and close to the borders of Russia.
But it's done, but it's still, it's still always the Russians that did it.
And they're no angels.
There's no doubt about that.
But why aggravate the situation?
We're responsible for how our money is spent and what we mislead.
So we've been misleading foreign policy since 1953.
Yeah.
And the answer is what you always say.
Could Rewrite Ukraine's Future 00:02:01
Let's just go home.
We don't need to do it.
It doesn't do any good.
It just makes things worse.
Well, the last one we'll mention, we probably could do a few more if you put that one up.
The last one is Ukraine.
So here he has this supposedly great meeting in Alaska with Putin.
And then he meets with the Europeans in Zelensky in his office.
And he does a 180 and says something completely boneheaded.
The U.S. is prepared to use air power to support a planned European force in Ukraine.
You could really rewrite this headlist from Wall Street Journal.
You could rewrite this headline shorter, which is, Trump planning World War III, because that's what it would be.
The reason Russia went to war with Ukraine, as you just pointed out, Dr. Paul, is that NATO was expanding to Russia's borders.
NATO membership, the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine.
So who in their right mind would think that actually physically putting troops in Ukraine would somehow placate the Russians?
On the contrary, and if the U.S. wants to use its fighter jets in support of European troops in Ukraine, they will be shot down and will be at war.
There was one article I read today that was making the point.
Zelensky and the Ukrainians are in a real fix because they're being pushed by outsiders to bring the two factions together and settle their dispute.
But they were pointing out, but, you know, even if you give Zelensky the benefit of the doubt, who's he going to trust?
Can he trust everything Trump tells him?
Can he trust everything that Putin tells him?
So they're in a dilemma because both sides have said things that they contribute, but didn't follow through and contribute to the problem.
So that goes with the argument that outsiders and NATOs and UNs, they're never going to solve the problem.
They're going to make it worse or delay it, and a lot of people are going to make a lot of money.
How about the Middle East?
How long is that in 1948?
The United Nations got involved there.
Ron Paul Scholars Seminar 00:02:52
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul.
And I just want to mention one other thing.
And I didn't bring any photos, but before the conference, as you know, every year we have the Ron Paul Scholars Seminar.
And that's a one-day event.
Actually, we've expanded it.
We have a dinner the night before, get to know your dinner, and a one-day event with lectures throughout the day for upper division undergrads and grad students.
And obviously, the point is to carry on the Ron Paul revolution to newer generations.
And every year, we're extremely impressed by the quality of scholars that we have.
And this year was no exception.
The scholars were great.
The speakers were great.
I've been wanting to have James Cardin come speak for a long time.
He gave a really amazing presentation.
We had Brian McClinchy, who we featured on our show a lot.
He did a great talk about U.S. interventionism overseas.
We had Dave DeCamp from anti-war.com was there, and that was terrific.
TJ Roberts, who was in our first class of scholars, and now is in the House, State House in Kentucky.
And we also had Kelly Vlajos, who you remember Kelly from the Burn Pitts story she did way back when we started our Thursday lunches.
She's still there.
She's doing responsible statecraft.
So imagine sitting for a day and listening to all these practitioners of foreign policy telling you what it really is like.
And I was just really happy with the program this year.
So I hope we'll have the support to keep it going and to expand it.
So I'm going to thank everyone for watching.
And I'll turn it over to you, Dr. Paul.
You know, I mentioned earlier on that we start off with something negative and we're supposed to have something positive.
You kind of get up with one now.
I can't believe it.
I can't feel better because I'm convinced counting the good guys and the bad guys is a lot easier to count the bad guys.
There's some special reason why they're doing that, some advantage that they think they have.
But I think it has been a good week for us.
And I think that the problems are going to be there.
We don't think they're that complicated.
We think non-interventionism and the promotion of individual liberty and free markets and sound money, it has such benefits.
And what we're doing, it has such horrors associated with it.
And it's been going on for could be a thousand years or more, all this nonsense.
But this represents the age-old problem of good and evil, and that's going to be around.
But I think anybody that recognizes and comes around to the point where, you know, natural law is pretty clear-cut.
It was pretty natural.
You're not allowed to cheat, steal, and kill people.
And a few people more would practice that.
I think we could improve the situation throughout the world.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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