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Jan. 15, 2026 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
26:44
Back From The Abyss Trump Holds Off Iran Attack For Now

The world waited anxiously last night as all signs pointed to a US strike on Iran. The attack did not come and many wonder whether this is more trickery or if the president has wisely decided to resist neocon demands. Polls suggest Americans overwhelmingly oppose US strikes on Iran.

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Time Text
Executions Stopped 00:14:03
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well.
Thank you.
Very good.
Well, we have a few things to get caught up on.
News changed quickly, and all the source of this news that's available to us, that doesn't mean that it's all, you know, up and up.
Maybe it's just an opportunity to confuse us at times.
But anyway, a lot of people have at stake on exactly what Trump's plans are in Iran because, you know, he's talked about getting pretty violent with them.
And all of a sudden, you know, matter of fact, in my mind, I had some thoughts about talking about this today, but my assumptions were that maybe we were on the verge of or it already had happened.
But things changed.
It looks like attitudes are changing.
The interpretation in the marketplace was that things were getting calmer.
You know, gold goes down, oil goes down, and the stock market, you know, is settled.
But the truth is, is I don't think anybody knows.
I'm not even sure if the administration knows because they seem to have a mixed bag when it comes to information.
But this is the whole thing.
Even when you have an individual, I want to be fair, I want everybody's opinion.
And if they do that, they still then have to pick.
I've never quite understood why you have to have diametrically opposed views presented.
It sounds like it's awfully fair and all.
But then they say, well, now we can split the difference, and that's what our position should be.
So figuring out our position on the round was in, you know, up for grabs last night.
But I imagine there are some people who right now say it's up for grabs.
But it means, though, that the uncertainty leads to other problems.
And one thing that I thought about, Daniel, on this was, you know, if they were contemplating, you know, military action, which would be an act of war, even though they've never done it, just think of the difference would be if everybody honored the Constitution.
Well, yes, you know, a lot of people in this country think that we should take them on and deal with it.
So what we should be having is, you know, maybe polling, maybe discussions, maybe calling their congressmen, maybe discussions about the pros and cons of this.
But there's none of that.
That would have eliminated this uncertainty.
But maybe it's conceivable, very suspicious at times.
Maybe they like the uncertainty.
Somebody might benefit by this.
But it looks like there's an uncertainty that doesn't quell, it doesn't quite answer all our questions, trying to figure out why are they doing this.
And if you look at in the history of going to war since World War II, you know, where it's not required to really debate and be honest, it's a guessing game.
It's special interests.
You know, the lobbyists out there.
There's a partisan issue.
So there's lots of variables in there.
It's not like, okay, it's time that we're have to get serious.
We need to discuss this non-intervention foreign policy.
What is that anyway?
Maybe we should look into that so that we can at least enter into a debate.
Yeah, it was, as President Trump said, locked and loaded.
And I was pretty tense yesterday, late afternoon, because everything was moving into place.
You had a lot of activity with our super tankers, you know, the refueling tankers.
A lot of movement.
You had six of them in the air, I think, in the region at the time.
You had a lot of transport jets, a lot of transport planes taking American troops away from the bases around the Persian Gulf.
Everything seemed to be in motion.
Now, there weren't the naval assets in place, but they were heading in the direction, and they wouldn't have necessarily been critical to an airstrike.
So everything looked like it was about to happen.
And all of a sudden, President Trump decided not to do that.
Now, we've been very, very critical of him, especially lately on the show.
Now, if he took a hard look, if he talked to somebody with a brain, I think there's a lot of people in the Pentagon with good brains who know this sort of thing.
Maybe they convinced him to stop listening to Lindsey Graham, who right now I'm sure is having an anxiety attack, depressed but not disillusioned because they never give up.
But he listened to cooler heads and said, you know what?
There's a big danger of this blowing up in my face, making me look bad.
One thing we know about President Trump, he doesn't like to be made to look bad.
Fair enough, fine enough.
Whatever the case, he decided not to launch the attack.
Now, is it a ruse?
Might he launch it tonight or Saturday night?
Who knows?
You never know with President Trump.
But we do know that he didn't do it last night when everyone expected, which is a good thing.
We can take a deep breath and probably celebrate that fact.
Maybe that debate and following the rules on how you go to war, that doesn't come about, but maybe something, maybe it's a little bit late to start talking about it, but maybe they've been forced into it.
Just the reality of all this, that we better settle down or they better settle down who's in charge.
But I don't think, and you did a good job in summarizing that, but coming down on the side, say, yeah, yeah, but I'm an investor.
I want to know what's going to happen, you know.
And I want to know what I should do with my kids.
And what should I do with my dollars?
And what's gold going to do?
And on and on.
It just raises more questions.
So anyway, if you have to lean one way or the other, we're sort of favorable toward them not dropping bombs while we slept last night.
That wouldn't have been very good because evidently they may have discovered that Iran is not an easy target and it's going to last longer than 24 hours.
Yeah, well, they discovered that in June as well, which is why Israel was begging for us to get a ceasefire.
But now here's how Moon of Alabama, which I've read for many years, here's how they put it.
Now, I don't like their headline.
This is a play on what they always, they say that Trump always chickens out.
I don't mind someone chickening out if they're about to do something stupid, right?
You're about to draw, if you're about to jump off a building and you chicken out, that's a good thing to do.
But nevertheless, it's as usual, the content is good.
And they wrote, Bernard over at Moon of Alabama wrote, yesterday, U.S. President Donald Trump was ready and willing to bomb Iran.
The most important target would have been the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
But Iran was ready and Khamenei safe.
U.S. military, in contrast, was not ready to defend itself against the inevitable retaliation that would have come out of Iran.
There are only three destroyers with air defenses in the area that could offer protection against a ballistic missile onslaught.
A few minutes after the first strikes, their arsenals would have been empty.
They're very limited, of course.
Now, go to the next clip.
This is from the same article.
Now, they talked about how last time what happened, he said, well, this time is very different.
The military was unable to give any good options for strikes.
It had to ask Trump to stand down.
True, very important.
There's links there.
The Gulf countries were anxious and did not want to be part of the campaign.
Here's a quote from Assistant History Professor at Kuwait University saying: Bombing Iran goes against the calculus and interests of the Arab Gulf states.
Neutralizing the current regime, whether through regime change or internal leadership reconfiguration, can potentially translate into the unparalleled hegemony of Israel, which won't serve the Gulf states.
That was a quote.
Munavan Alema says, even Israel suggested to wait until the regime breaks down, and that is not going to happen.
Now, I did, I want to, we should visualize this because the Iranian retaliation they promised would be serious and severe.
We know now the capability of their ballistic missiles, which has only gotten more powerful since June.
So, with that in mind, let's do that bonus clip that I forgot to send in the first round, just to give a visualization of what U.S. assets are in the region and what the danger might be.
Each one of these dots, Dr. Paul, is a major U.S. military facility in the Middle East.
And you can see that Iran is right there, particularly with Iran's proven hypersonic missiles.
These bases could have been eliminated within seconds of a U.S. attack.
You're talking thousands of American service members instantly killed, which President Trump, I'm sure, would not have been happy seeing.
So, whatever the case, he wisely stood down for now.
And we can only hope that he will stop, you know, hang up the phone when Lindsay calls.
Don't listen to these people.
Start listening to people that are actually sane.
You know, I noticed on there there are a few bases still left in Iraq.
Yeah, sure.
And they're very active.
And we go in there, we fight these wars, and we're told all sorts of things.
And here we are.
It's just part of the empire.
And I think that's why it's going to last for a while because people don't really bring it up.
You know, they can't say that because it would challenge our patriotism.
Oh, no, we're for the United States.
We're not for building something so universal as an empire.
And that we were going to wield that.
That's not part of the American tradition.
But tell you what, to me, it's an empire.
And there's a lot of people involved, and everybody wants to share in it.
And maybe they just cast their vote on what's going on.
It's more than just one person.
See, the military-industrial complex never had anybody like Trump to deal with.
And maybe they were a little slower.
And then that was when they started maybe speaking out.
But that wouldn't be Trump's nature either.
But one for sure, I think the foreign policy, which is what we've talked about for so long, is a falsely motivated foreign policy of interventionism that we go in and arrest leaders of other countries.
Well, what if they catch Kamani?
Kamani?
Are they going to ruin them with Maduro?
Yeah, exactly.
Strategize.
It's very absurd.
Well, a couple of clips of video clips I have, Dr. Paul, from yesterday.
And that was some earlier indications that President Trump was looking for a way out, which was, I think, a good sign.
And it was a counter to a lot of the other very worrying signs.
You may want to grab your earpiece because I want to play these two.
The first one now is Trump midday, I think, talking about, well, it looks like the Iranians have stopped shooting their people.
And that was the first reasonably good sign.
Let's listen to this clip, video clip here.
We have been notified and pretty strongly, but we'll find out what that all means.
But we've been told that the killing in Iran is stopping.
It's stopped.
It's stopping.
And there's no plan for executions or an execution or executions.
So I've been told that a good authority will find out about it.
I'm sure if it happens, we'll all be very upset, including you will be very upset, but that's just gotten to me from information that the killing has stopped, that the executions have stopped and not going to have an execution, which a lot of people were talking about for the last couple of days.
Today was going to be the day of execution.
Let's go to that second one now.
This is the same event that he's talking to, and he mentions how something interesting that shows that he understands more of the nuance of what was happening there.
That second video, let's listen to this one here.
Mr. President, LeBron, you said that the killing has stopped.
Who told you that the killings have stopped?
We have been informed by very important sources on the other side, and they've said the killing has stopped and the executions won't take place.
It was supposed to be a lot of executions today and that the executions won't take place.
And we're going to find out.
I mean, I'll find out after this.
You'll find out.
But we've been told on good authority, and I hope it's true.
Who knows, right?
Who knows?
We've seen the money back.
So how do you trust?
No, you've seen that over the last few days.
And they said people were shooting at them with guns and they were shooting back.
And, you know, it's one of those things.
But they told me that there'll be no executions.
And so I hope that's true.
Does this mean a military action is now off the table against Iran?
No, we're going to watch and see what the process is.
But we were given a very good, very good statement by people that are aware of what's going on.
Yeah, okay.
So interesting.
Interesting.
I have to take this opportunity to comment on that advertisement or what he was signing.
Polls and Milk 00:09:32
He was signing to legalize, you know, milk in school.
Whole milk, yeah, whole milk.
You know, and when I think about it, I must have been a criminal because when I was a kid, I delivered the milk, you know, to the schools.
We sold milk in little bottles.
We could sell chocolate milk, white milk, skim milk, or whatever.
And we didn't even have a permit.
You know, we just did it.
And, boy, now, and that's been 80 years ago.
We had more freedom on milk.
But now we're catching up with 80 years ago, which we did automatically as a family event.
And I don't remember one person ever getting sick from any of our products.
Yeah, and I bet there weren't a lot of fat kids back then either, like there are nowadays.
I mean, it is an aside, but that probably is one of the brightest spots of the administration is the work that RFK Jr. is doing.
I don't know if you noticed the new food pyramid that they just flipped it upside down and now the healthy food is at the top, you know, and it was the opposite of what it should be.
So we're very critical of a lot of things, but I think RFK has done a lot of great work in the administration.
Most people think that way.
Most right-thinking people do.
But a couple more on this, Dr. Paul.
If you go to the next one, Trump assures that no strikes are imminent.
He assures Tehran.
Now, that could be a good news or bad news because the last time we were about ready to meet Iran in Israel did a sneak attack.
But Trump says he told his national security team he wants any U.S. military action in Iran to deliver a swift and decisive blow to the regime and not spark a sustained war that dragged on for weeks or months.
It's a wise thing that President Trump says if that's the case, because that's exactly what would happen.
And as a reminder, here's Michael Tracy, because we're talking about who's shooting who and what are the reports about the deaths there.
I mean, we talked about this yesterday.
He pointed out the huge death tolls in Iran being splashed all over the media are all sourced to an outfit in Fairfax, Virginia called Human Rights Activists in Iran that is overwhelmingly funded by the U.S. government.
What is their methodology?
Is it credible?
Who cares?
Just pump the big numbers out.
So again, there's the corruption in how those numbers are being reported.
Boy, and you've brought that subject up before the idea of how they fudge the figures.
But that is a key process, you know, preparing the people to accept things.
It's the propaganda.
And it happens all the time, but it gets really filthy and wrong and filled with lies, especially having worked through trying to prevent a war in the Middle East.
And how many lies did we have to deal with there?
And yet it gets on and on.
And then also, also the justification of Afghanistan.
They had to create these things.
So creating these justifications, they are very, very important.
You have to be creative.
You don't have to be a truth seeker.
You have to be creative.
And that's a big difference than being somebody that's trying to reveal to the people what's really going on.
Yeah.
Well, the other thing that may have been, may have influenced the president, it should influence the president.
And it's something I know I like.
I think you may like it a little bit too.
We like polls when they go our way.
And this is one that definitely is going our way.
And this is a Quinnipiac poll that just came out yesterday, January 14th.
This is big, Dr. Paul.
Seven out of 10 voters do not want the U.S. to take military action against Iran for the killing of protesters.
Now, go to the next one.
In the wake of U.S. military threats against Iran, if protesters are killed, while demonstrating, 70% of voters think the U.S. should not get involved, with only 18% thinking the U.S. should take military action.
That's big.
But here's another thing, Dr. Paul.
If you go to the next one that I think is critical among independents, it's 80% versus 11%.
80% of independents do not want the president to attack Iran.
And you say, well, who cares?
They're not Republicans.
Those independents, as people who follow it very well know, were the margin of victory for President Trump in the elections, and they will be the margin of victory in the midterms that we have coming up in a few months.
So anyone looking at those numbers, looking at the independents at 80% say no attack, they better pay attention.
Yes, and the message has to get to them somehow.
But, you know, there were a couple people who had, you know, shifted a position toward our position.
And I was good, good, good.
But when they needed a vote to cancel out this principle of this poll, you know, that people don't really want this, then they went back on their vote and supported this whole thing that they can do this, that we don't have to stop them by just yelling and screaming.
But the people, the members of Congress, it's their responsibility.
It's all our responsibility.
But if we as individuals stand up and we let a member and not do anything, the Congress says, but here the Congress, and we at least understand how their thinking works because everything is power in the Congress, except for a very few exceptions.
And they're always wheeling and dealing.
But I think there was a record broken on how long they kept a vote open.
I think it was like what?
19 hours.
I think one time we sat around during the night and it was about eight hours or something.
It's ridiculous.
That was a prescription drug, wasn't it?
Yeah.
You know how I'm going to vote.
Why do you want me to stay?
There were a bunch of members in your office drinking wine all night.
Not you, not you, but some members who will remain nameless.
That was a fun evening.
And Norman was there.
So, well, the thing is, is transferring this type of an attitude to reality instead of just alerting the congressman, I better watch myself.
This is getting to be a tough job.
Well, here's another good thing from the Quinnipiac poll, which should be reassuring.
And Congress should be listening to this because they're falling down on the job.
They asked about military action in Congress.
Voters, 70% to 24%, think that in general, if a president decides to take military action against another country, they should first receive approval from Congress.
Now, there are, yeah, exactly.
What a thought.
There are big differences along party lines, but even with Republicans, you've got 54% to 35% that think a president should not be able to initiate military action without Congress.
That's pretty good news.
But, you know, it is good news, and we delight to hear it, but still, it's really sad.
I know that's true.
Only 54% of the Republicans think, well, we ought to read the pamphlet that's called that we take our oath to follow.
Maybe we ought to pay a little more attention.
I'll tell you one thing.
If this principle were understood and followed there, just think of how many less people would have died since World War II.
How much money would have been spent?
How much liberty wouldn't have been lost?
And just think of the problems that we're facing today.
We're still facing the problem.
We're not going to, we're not even close to dealing with a death.
That's just piling up.
The more the time goes on, the more the interest rates go up.
It's absurd.
So it's a shame.
And then does it suggest people say, oh, you're a fanatic.
You want to make sure that we follow the Constitution all the time.
Then the organization, the party people, they want to punish you.
It's disgusting.
Exactly.
Well, there's another poll, by the way, that just came out.
It's an A.P. Nork poll.
It was conducted between the 8th and the 11th of January.
So still a very fresh poll.
And this is another thing that should be a definitely yellow, I would say red flag for President Trump.
Now, it asks questions along many new lines.
But the Trump approval on foreign policy is minus 24, which is a new low.
So Americans are very unhappy with President Trump's foreign policy.
He's got a slight approval increase, plus four.
That's probably after the Venezuela, which was generally viewed positively because there weren't any Americans killed.
But nevertheless, people are not happy with this foreign policy.
My guess is a lot of his base wants him to make America great again, not Venezuela or Israel or Iran or Greenland or Timbuktu.
You know, I don't know.
Who knows?
Yes, no easy problem to deal with.
Celebrate with a Cause 00:02:06
But that's obviously the thing that we want to participate in to suggest that there are answers to this.
There's explanations why this happened.
And they're not very pleasant to think about because sometimes they're self-serving.
But what my argument always is, is that the benefits that come from a policy of non-intervention and staying out of people's lives, you know, if you want more peace and prosperity, there is no way they could argue the case, oh, what we need is we need more maduros and we need more dictators, we need more communism.
We elect communists to be mayors of cities because we're looking to do that.
So we have a long way to go.
And it's a job and a half because a lot of the nonsense has come out of our has come out of our universities.
And that takes a long time to change those attitudes.
Yeah, no kidding.
Well, I'm going to close out and I'm going to do a hold on.
I'm going to do a shout out to our live viewers on X because this is our first week of doing it and we're look like we're right around 4,000 live viewers.
That's great.
We really appreciate it.
We hope you'll continue watching us live on X if that's what you enjoy doing.
And I'm going to ask you to go to that very last clip and just remind you that we have a few days left and we're a few dollars short of our $125,000 matching funds.
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Great way to start a new year, giving some money to an anti-war organization that I believe at least is having some effect on the national debate.
I would like to believe that, Dr. Paul.
So if you can do that, we definitely appreciate it.
Keep the show going, keep our reach increasing.
Keep The Show Going 00:01:00
I think that's good for everyone.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Wonderful.
And I too want to celebrate in the best way we can about what we have read about in this polling.
And that, of course, is that most Americans, like 70%, say that, you know, you guys ought to be old-fashioned.
Americans, you be old-fashioned.
Why don't you just go along with what the oath of office is?
That you're supposed to get permission from the people through a vote in the U.S. Congress.
And I know they'll manipulate, and there's a lot of special interests, and it's hard.
It's a hard fight.
But I tell you what, I think it should be very encouraging in spite of all the propaganda and the stuff we've heard about why we're obligated to maintain an empire to keep the world safe.
It doesn't work and the people are waking up.
And I'm delighted to hear about this positive news.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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