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June 13, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
01:00:06
20240613_robert-f-kennedy-jr-uncensored
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Polling, Criteria, and Votes 00:09:40
How do you like being called Junior?
You're not exactly a spring chick, you.
It's funny because he kind of kissed me and slapped me at the same time.
The Baby Boom Generation watched CNN, they watched MSNBC, and I'm not normally allowed on those networks.
You don't own a house in this country.
You can't participate in the American dream.
How did you feel about Donald Trump becoming a convicted felon?
This is the destruction of everything that we value in America.
I'm the first candidate in history whose request is Secret Service Protection and denied it.
You've been very supportive of Israel, but very unsupportive of Ukraine.
I'm anti-war.
It's a war of choice.
It's a war we should never have had.
To me, you're painting a very benevolent, trusting view of Vladimir Putin.
Ah, or else how can you have a peace?
I'm very, very happy to take cognitive tasks along with President Trump and President Biden.
Look at that she can get you on the debate stage and then put you all through a live cognitive test.
Peter Kennedy, a supposed conspiracist and the insurgent independent candidate for President of the United States, RFK Jr., has shaken up the race for the White House, powered by younger voters and a canny media plan that favors podcasts over press conferences.
Both the Biden and Trump campaigns are divided over who he may hurt the most.
But one thing's for certain, a strong independent candidate could change the course of history in a knife edge election.
And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he's going nowhere.
Returning to Uncensored, he joins me now.
Robert, great to see you.
Here, thanks for having me back.
It's been a few months since I last spoke to you.
How's it going?
What's your perspective on the way your campaign has been playing out?
Well, I mean, I suppose there's two ways of summarizing it.
One is our challenge to get on the ballot in all 50 states.
We're now on the, we have now enough sufficient signatures for 10 states, and we are already on the ballot in nine more, so that's 19 states.
That gives us about 278 electoral votes, access to 278 electoral votes, which is about half the total.
By mid-July, we will be on the ballot in every state and in the District of Columbia.
Our polling is doing well.
I'm over 15% in six of the major national polling firms now.
And in head-to-head races, I beat President Biden in a landslide, 39 states to 11 states, and the biggest poll taken, which is the Zogby poll.
I also beat President Trump in a head-to-head race.
President Biden can't do that.
I can.
I'm beating both President Biden and President Trump in terms of favorability.
I'm way ahead of them.
And I'm beating them among young people and among independent voters.
So my peers, my big challenge is the baby boom generation.
They're the people who watch CNN, they watch MSNBC, and I'm not normally allowed on those networks to do live interviews.
And so if you live in that information bubble, then you would have a very, very unfavorable view of me.
And my challenge is to get on those on CNN, MSNBC, and then the broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, and try to get live interviews on them so I can talk directly to the baby boomers.
And I've got five months to convince them, enough of them, to vote for me that I win the election.
What is fascinating is that right now you are polling better than any third party or independent candidates polled in an individual survey at this stage in the cycle since Ross Perot in 1996.
That's only 30 years ago.
So whatever you're doing is clearly resonating with a lot of Americans.
What nobody can really work out is who you're going to damage most.
Who do you want to damage most?
I don't really have a preference.
I mean, I can tell you what our polling is showing, which I think is the most accurate polling, that about 57% of the people who say they're going to vote for me, if I dropped out of the race, they would vote for Donald Trump.
The big Zogby poll, you know, typically Piers, a national poll by Harvard Harris or Gallup or Aquina Piak or Monmouth has about from 1,000 to 2,200 people.
Zogby did a poll more than 10 times that size, so 26,000 people, and it has a margin of error of almost zero.
And that poll showed that if in a three-way race, right, if the three-way race occurred today, President Trump wins.
And if I drop out of that race, President Trump wins even more.
He wins two extra states, which would be Maine and Virginia.
So I think my presence in the race helps President Biden at this point.
I'm hoping in the long run that I'll be very damaging to both of the candidates.
But also, you know, all of our polling is showing that I'm bringing in a lot of people who had given up on the political process, people who weren't going to vote this cycle if I am not in the race.
Now, two questions about the upcoming debate.
One, I believe you've technically qualified to be on that stage with Biden and Trump.
But the question I have for you is, are they going to let you?
Well, clearly they don't want to let me.
You know, we know from the Washington Post reporting and from other journalists who have said, who've actually described what happened in the telephone call between President Biden and President Trump and the CNN.
And from their staff, it wasn't the candidates directly who participated in that call, but their lead staffers.
President Biden's staffer said, we will not be on the debating stage if Robert Kennedy is allowed on that stage.
And together they hatched criteria that they thought would be designed to keep me off the stage.
But unfortunately for them, I actually meet all those criteria.
I meet them.
Just briefly, the criteria is that I'm over 15% in at least four recent polls from four of 12 specific companies.
And I'm already in six polls from those 12 companies.
I'm already over 15%, including the CNN's own poll, which has me at 16% from May.
And then their other criteria is that the candidates have to be on the ballot in enough states to get 270 votes.
Well, I will have enough signatures to get 270 votes.
In fact, 343 electoral votes by the June 20th deadline.
The problem CNN has is that President Biden and President Trump aren't on any ballot.
They both have the expectation they'll be on the state ballots when they win the nomination of their respective parties.
Right now, that's just an expectation or a hope for them.
They're the presumptive nominees, but they, you know, the Democratic Party has a ballot line.
The Republican Party has a ballot line, but neither President Trump or President Biden do.
I'm the only one that ballast.
So I'm the only one that could conceivably meet that criteria.
Right.
And what's interesting is the Biden camp clearly don't want you anywhere near it, but Donald Trump has a rather different view.
Let's take a listen.
Crooked Joe Biden does not want RFK Jr. in the debates because Junior is far left of him, and they would be debating over the same territory.
He's also sharper and far more intelligent than Joe.
I don't care if Junior joins the debate, but right now his polling numbers are absolutely terrible.
He's not properly qualified in the states, and he seems to be on a downward path.
Junior needs more than his name to get on that stage.
But if he gets on there, I would love it.
First of all, how do you like to be called Junior?
I mean, you're not exactly a spring chick here.
Oh, I, you know, there's a lot worse stuff that he could call me.
I'm not, you know, I expect to be called something by President Trump.
And it was funny because he kind of kissed me and slapped me at the same time.
He did, yeah.
It was a kiss slap.
I've had a few of those from him.
I mean, I actually think it would be great for America and for American democracy if you were on that stage.
And if you were.
And I really think.
You know what?
You know.
Yeah, go on.
I would say this, Pierce, is that if you look at President Biden and President Trump, they're two very, very different candidates.
Inflation Erodes the American Dream 00:06:08
And that's what their followers eat.
And their dispositions are different.
Their personalities are very different.
Their ambitions for our country, their vision for our country, their ideology.
But on the issues that they differ on, it's a very narrow Overton window.
It's guns, it's the border, it's abortion, it's trans rights.
On the big issues that are really existential for our country, like the national debt, the $34 trillion debt, we're now paying more to service that debt than our military budget.
Within five years, it'll be 50 cents out of every dollar collected within 10 years, 100%.
President Trump and President Biden can't talk about it because President Trump ran up $8 trillion more money than every president in the United States history from George Washington, George Bush.
He came into office saying that he was going to balance the budget and that he spent more money than all presidents in history.
President Biden is on the way to catch him.
He will actually exceed that by the end of his term.
He's now running up a deficit of adding $1 trillion every 90 days to the deficit.
This is existential, and they can't talk about it.
They can't talk.
Both of them are behind the wars, the Ukraine war and the other wars that were this addiction to wars.
Both of them have brought that on.
Neither of them can deal with this terrible, poisonous polarization and division that we have in this country that is more threatening to our democracy than at any time since the American Civil War, since both of them feed on that anger and that vitriol and those accusations and the fear.
And they are both the product of it.
So they're not going to be able to solve it.
And, you know, and then the chronic disease epidemic that now is debilitating 60% of our kids, they can't do anything about it because they presided over it.
inflation that is destroying our economy, the destruction of the American middle class.
They're the ones who ordered the COVID lockdowns, which were the nail in the coffin of the American middle class.
In 500 days, we created 500 new billionaires, this new oligarchy of billionaires, and we shifted 4.3 trillion dollars from American working poor and the middle class to this new class of super rich.
And they did it.
You know, they have, they've mounted this assault on the American middle class.
And the only thing they can say is it's not happening.
But, you know, I spent a lot of time talking to regular everyday people.
And 60% of the people in our country today are making less than the cost of basic human needs.
And, you know, there's desperation in our country that has never been experienced before in American history.
And neither of them has a plan.
Neither of them even talks about it.
President Biden says we're all doing great.
So I think, you know, I'm talking to Americans who want these issues debated, who want to know, well, you know, what we're going to do about housing costs in this country.
There's an entire generation now that is never going to own a home, which is the basic fundamental fulcrum of the American dream.
The promise that if you work hard, you play by the rules, you can buy a home, you can take a summer vacation, you can raise a family, you can put something aside for your retirement on one job.
There's nobody in my kids' generation who believes that that promise applies to them.
And, you know, the housing prices are out of sight because of inflation, number one, but even more importantly, these giant corporations like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard that own 88% of the SP 500 and now are buying up all of our housing stock and taking that opportunity.
If you don't own a house in this country, you can't participate in the American dream because you can't get access to capital.
If you own a house, you own equity.
You can borrow money.
You can pursue your entrepreneurial impulses.
You can build a bowling alley or a yoga studio or a saloon or a sporting goods store without that.
And that's what created the American middle class as the greatest economic engine in the history of mankind.
And now we're going from a ownership society to a rental society.
And when we do that, we go from being citizens to being subjects.
And, you know, this is the destruction of everything that we value in America.
If you were on that debate stage, what would be the killer question for you for both Trump and for Biden?
I think the things that I just talked about, what are we going to do about inflation?
How do you justify?
How do you justify running up these huge deficits?
What's the end of it?
Where is it going to end?
You know, that's what is eating up the American dream.
These deficits feed inflation.
Inflation is a way of taxing the poor, of taxing the working poor, people on fixed incomes, people on salaries.
And, you know, it's destroying everything in our country.
And neither of them has a plan for dealing with it.
And that's what I'm going to hit on them.
Where is your plan for making our country affordable again, for rebuilding the American middle class, or rebuilding our industrial base, helping small business in this country, which is under attack?
There are a million benefits and subsidies for big business and none for small business in this country.
And during COVID, they closed the two of them, closed 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation, no scientific citation.
And now they're going to those businesses and asking for the money back that we gave them during COVID.
Protecting a Kennedy Family Legacy 00:09:33
And it's just insane.
And 41% of black-owned businesses will never reopen.
We're seeing the devastation of that in our cities today.
Many of these businesses had three generations of equity in them and of hard work, of sweat equity, of financial equity, and it's all gone now.
And the American middle class, which is, you know, we're turning into this very stratified society, which with this extraordinary wealth above and widespread poverty below and that kind of configuration, peers, cannot support democracy over the long term.
It's too unstable.
And talking of preserving democracy, how did you feel about Donald Trump becoming a convicted felon?
Do you agree with the Republicans and a lot of independents actually that it was a ridiculous weaponization of the justice system over what should have been just a state misdemeanor, massively overreached, and now will unleash a series of tit-for-tat attempts to imprison political leaders in America, making it almost a banana republic?
Yeah, I agree with you.
And, you know, the framers of the United States Constitution were very, very conscious of the history in England where the king would often jail his opponents in parliament on their way to parliament on contrived charges.
And so we pass, and many of our states actually have laws that no matter what kind of crime a legislature, the state legislatures commit, you cannot arrest them on his way to the Capitol.
And it's a crazy law, but we actually have that in many states.
You can commit murder and they're not allowed to arrest you because they were conscious of that.
So, you know, we also, as you know, we have a counterbalancing value in our country, which is we want to make sure that no politician is above the law.
But so that if a politician breaks the law, yeah, they have to pay for it too.
But prosecutors are supposed to be very, very sensitized to the fact that we don't want America to look like a banana republic or to look at the ancient British model where political opponents, the law enforcement agencies were weaponized against political opponents.
And unfortunately, that's what it looks to many people.
What happened in our country?
And I want to say this.
I have condemned President Biden and the DNC's use of law enforcement agency, including the Secret Service.
They won't give me Secret Service protection.
I do not understand that.
Honestly, it is incredible to me that you have this current polling and you're a Kennedy.
I mean, and no one is thinking that a popular Kennedy in American political life at the moment should not be properly protected.
It's to me insane.
Yeah, I mean, President Biden has a statue of my dad, a boss, my dad, behind him at the Oval Office, and he must know what happened to my father.
You know, in fact, prior to 1968, prior to my father's assassination, only the nominees of the political party after the convention were entitled to secret service protection.
So my dad didn't have secret service protection.
He was relying on football players from the Oakland Raiders and the Dallas Cowboy, the Fearsome Forest.
Those were his guards.
And when he was up in Northern California, the Black Panther Party provided him protection, but he did not have any official federal protection.
And after he was killed, Congress changed the law and all of the candidates who ran that year, George Wallace, George McGovern, or George Wallace, Gene McCarthy, Hubert Humphrey, were all given protection.
Since then, the law has been that 120 days out from the November election, you're entitled to it.
I should be entitled to it.
I don't know if they'll still try to deny it to me.
But the president has discretion to give it to other people.
And nobody has ever been denied it who's requested.
I'm the first candidate in history who's requested Secret Service protection to been denied it.
I've had several credible threats on my life.
I've had three break-ins in my house, including a mentally ill person making it to the second story when my family was home.
I've had a guy show up at one of my events demanding to see me with concealed shoulder holsters loaded with magazines and a laser, a sighted pistol in his backpack.
And before he left his home, he created a TikTok account and left a goodbye message saying, if I don't return from this mission alive, you know, contact your commander-in-chief.
So he was, it was, you know, it was a very, very, let's say, suspicious incident.
And he was, luckily, my security detail, Kevin DeBecker associate, spotted that, looked at, he was wearing fake federal IDs.
So he had a fake U.S. Marshal badge, and he had fake picture ID, federal picture ID on his belt.
And my security detail noticed that that badge was a little too shiny.
And so they surrounded him and they, and, you know, the police came and arrested him.
But the Secret Service itself, we provided them 68 pages of detailed death threats and other threats against me.
And they examined my case and they said that I was at an accelerated risk.
So that was a Secret Service finding.
But the White House still has refused to give me protection.
Now, I do want to say this, that I believe the DNC is weaponizing all these agencies right now, including, you know, we saw from my case, Biden versus Kennedy, from the Murphy versus Biden case, from the Twitter files, that the law enforcement agencies have been now dragooned into censoring American, including the CIA, the FBI, CISA,
the DHS, the NIH, CDC, and FTA.
But President Trump also, when he ran, was saying, and this is the point that you made, he was the one who introduced this concept by saying, oh, we're going to lock Hillary up.
We're going to appoint a special prosecutor to jail her.
So now we've got this kind of tit for tactic going.
And it is really, really dangerous for American democracy.
And we've got to end it.
We can't turn our country into a banana republic.
No, and you need to be properly protected.
Have you tried to contact President Biden personally?
Yeah, I have.
And my family has talked to him.
I've reached out to Senator Chuck Schumer because, you know, what the White House says is, well, there's this little committee in Congress led by Chuck Schumer.
It's three people.
And they say that you shouldn't get protection.
So they're pointing to Chuck Schumer and saying it's his fault.
But, you know, it's Biden's choice.
President Biden has the discretion and he ought to, he doesn't even need, as you point out.
He shouldn't even need to look at the Secret Service report.
He knows what happened to my dad.
He knows what happened to my uncle.
Of course.
He knows, you know, my uncle Teddy, when he ran, he was given Secret Service protection by Carter, who hated his guts.
But he still had the decency to give him Secret Service protection 551 days out before he even declared.
When people knew that he was thinking of declaring President Biden or President Carter wrapped him in Secret Service protection.
You know, and I'm not worried about my own safety.
I don't think like that.
But I'm worried about my family.
I'm worried about their safety.
I'm worried about bystanders.
When my father was killed, six bystanders were shot, including one of his best friends, Paul Schrade, who was shot in the head.
When my uncle was shot, there were numerous bystanders, including Governor Conley, who were shot.
When President Reagan was shot, other people were badly, badly wounded, permanently disabled from that.
And almost every assassination we've had, attempt we've had, there's been bystanders shot.
So I am worried about their safety.
I've made that clear to Chuck Schumer in a series of letters and communications to him.
It's ridiculous.
And to the White House and, you know, and no response.
Utterly ridiculous.
Shameful, actually.
Shameful that a Kennedy running for president is not being given proper protection after what happened to your family.
Putin's War and NATO Provocation 00:15:18
I'm going to keep on that, actually.
I'm going to write a column about that.
I want to talk to you just.
Well, thank you, Pierce.
I appreciate it.
Well, no, because I remember you telling me late last year, and I just couldn't believe it hasn't been fixed.
Just hearing you talk about it the way you just did and the precedent it sets and what happened to other members of your family who did get it.
It just makes no sense to me that anyone would want to take the risk.
Just no sense whatsoever.
It's actually disgraceful.
You know, like I say, I'm not worried about my own safety, but I'm not sure.
No, I think it's good for our country, for people to think that the federal agencies are now weaponized for political processes and not just doing what they obviously should be doing.
Completely.
I want to talk to you just separately about Israel and Ukraine, because you've been very supportive of Israel in the war with Hamas, but very unsupportive of America helping Ukraine against Russia.
And I'm just curious how you see the ideological difference, because from where I sit currently in London, from where I sit, you have a Russian dictator illegally invading a sovereign democratic European country and that country struggling to repel the Russian invader and desperately needing our help.
And America remains the number one help it could possibly have.
And we all know that.
And so America's assistance to Ukraine may or may not determine whether they can stop a Russian victory.
And in Israel, they are attacked by Hamas, October the 7th, horrendous attack.
And they're responding and they're trying to get their hostages.
And there's a lot of controversy about how they are executing that war.
But you're fully supportive of them responding to that invasion on October the 7th.
How do you differentiate?
I mean, obviously they're different situations, but ultimately it's about the same kind of principle of a people being attacked and then having the right to defend themselves.
And America very supportive at the moment of both.
Why do you object to one, not the other?
Yeah, it's contextual, Piers.
And here's the reason.
I'm anti-war.
I think most of the wars that we fought over the past 100 years were immoral wars.
I think the only war that we fought that was actually a moral war was World War II because it wasn't a war of choice.
It was a war where we were attacked.
It was a defensive war.
We were attacked by an implacable enemy.
And it had declared its intention to destroy Western democracies, Western values, and to conquer the world, to establish essentially a German caliphate that they called the Third Right.
But most of our wars, including World War I, were wars of choice.
My grandfather protested World War I, lost a lot of his friendships, but it was a war to benefit anchors and arms dealers.
And I think the Ukraine war is the same.
It's a war of choice.
It's a war we should never have had.
It's a war that President Putin, you know, we provided the provocation, which was our insistence, irrational insistence, of putting NATO into Ukraine.
We were involved, of course, in the overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014.
And then we put in our government sympathetic to the United States, which invited Ukraine, invited NATO into the country, which since 1992, the Soviet leadership long before Putin was saying that's a red line for us.
And Russia has good reason for that.
You know, we wouldn't let nuclear weapons be put in Cuba.
I was there in 1962.
And this is on his border.
It's four minutes from Moscow for Aegis with missile systems.
We've already put the Aegis missile tomahawk systems in Romania, in Poland.
Russia has been invaded three times through Ukraine.
The last time they were invaded through Ukraine, Hitler killed one out of every seven Russians.
So they have a rational national security interest in making sure that Ukraine is not occupied by a hostile army.
And, you know, they've been very clear with us about that.
Our own diplomats from George Kennedy, Bill Pierce, Bill Perry, the leading diplomats in our country have said, if you go into Ukraine, you're going to force a violent response from Russia.
Now, even after that, after 2014, after we overthrew the government of Ukraine, Russia said, and Donbas and Lukans voted to join Russia.
Putin said, I don't want them.
I don't want them.
I want them to stay part of Ukraine, but let's have a treaty, the Minsk Accords.
And the key part of the Minsk Accords is that Ukraine would remain neutral.
We wouldn't put NATO in Ukraine.
So Zelensky runs.
He's an actor and a comedian, never been involved in politics, but he wins with 70% of the vote in the landslide.
Why?
Because he said, I'm going to sign the Minsk Accords and make peace with Russia.
People of Ukraine wanted peace.
And then what happens?
The U.S. government, Victoria Newland, and his own right-wing people within Ukraine forced him to pivot.
So he didn't sign the accords.
Putin then goes into the country, but he only sends 40,000 troops.
Clearly, he doesn't want to conquer a nation of 44 million people.
And Putin himself says this.
He says, I just want them back at the negotiating table.
The United States under Biden won't help him.
So Zelensky goes to Naftali Benek of Israel and to Erdogan in Turkey.
And he says, will you help me negotiate a new peace agreement with Putin?
Erdogan says yes.
They negotiated with the former Israeli prime minister and Prime Minister Erdogan in Istanbul.
They signed, they initial a treaty to remove, and the only thing they really want is that NATO doesn't go into Ukraine.
And Putin, after they initial it, begins withdrawing his troops from Kiev.
Then what happens?
President Biden sends Boris Johnson in April of 2022 to the Ukraine and forces Zelensky to tear up that agreement.
So we had peace in our hands, a very, very beneficial and satisfactory peace.
And President Biden made Zelensky tear it up.
Since then, there's been at least 500,000 Ukrainian kids who have died unnecessarily on the front line.
And we are, you know, and who's making all the money?
Norther Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed, Blacks, and all of our military contractors who are the ones who wanted NATO in there.
Because when NATO goes in there into a new country, those countries have to conform their weapons purchase specifications to NATO specifications.
But let me respond to you, because I mean, NATO has not gone into Ukraine, though.
Ukraine is not a NATO member yet.
If it was, then Putin wouldn't have invaded because NATO has a duty to defend its members.
Secondly, I would point out that Ukraine was...
Well, hang on, let me finish.
Ukraine was also urged to give up its nuclear defenses, which now looks like a very stupid decision.
Thirdly, in 2014, you've neglected to mention that Putin took Crimea.
He also attacked Georgia.
This is, to me, you're painting a very benevolent, trusting view of Vladimir Putin.
Someone who seems to me to be a pretty terrible Russian dictator who was former KGB, didn't like the fact the Soviet Union got broken up, and is now on a mission to restore as much of that power as he possibly can, whilst making himself extremely rich in the process and oppressing his people.
I'm just curious why you're so generous towards him and so ungenerous towards Ukraine.
Who are in the end?
They are a sovereign democratic European nation and they were invaded, not just by 40,000.
They were invaded by a lot more than 40,000.
I've been to Kiev.
I mean, there were 150,000 Russian troops on that border.
And they committed massacres.
On the border.
Well, they committed massacres in places like Buka, which were contemptible.
They destroyed cities like Mariupol, completely destroyed them.
And they've carried on trying to raise as much of Ukraine to the ground as they can.
So my question is, why are you so benevolent towards Putin and so trusting of him?
Well, I'm not trusting of Putin.
I don't think you need to trust Vladimir Putin in order to see what happened to Ukraine.
The US, it was involved in provocations.
And if you, you know, if you look at the CIA, Piers spent $5 billion overthrowing the government through USAID in, you know, in funding the Madonna revolution in 2014.
It was only after we put our people in.
And by the way, Victoria Newland, the deputy director of the State Department, you can go on and listen to her taped conversations.
With the U.S. ambassador a month before the coup d'état in which she is picking the new heads of the Ukrainian cabinet.
Vladimir Putin says this, and his rational response to that is to invade Crimea.
I'm not excusing it, and I'm not excusing Putin's invasion of Donbass and Lukans.
But it is rational, and it was predictable that Putin was not going to let the United States take away its only warm water port.
The only way for him to control his warm water port in Vladivostok was to go into Crimea.
And by the way, he didn't fire a shot.
He didn't kill a single Crimean because they wanted him in there.
They voted to have them in there.
I'm not defending Vladimir Putin.
I think I know who Putin is.
And he's very open about the fact that he kills his political enemies.
He's not a nice guy.
Would you be happy?
Do you feel comfortable, Robert, with the idea of Putin winning this war?
Do you not see it as many do as a precursor to a very dangerous shift in power in the global order if he does?
No, we've shifted the power by forcing this war on them.
First of all, I'm not, you know, what I'm saying is we should be negotiating with them.
He's asked to negotiate.
He's repeating.
But what would you give him?
President, I'm not going to tell you what I would give him.
I'm running to be the leader of the country.
I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do in negotiation.
But, you know, I spend my life, my life, my career has been about negotiations.
I've negotiated 500 lawsuits.
I know, and you don't trust the person on the other side of the negotiation.
But I can imagine I would negotiate something that looked like the Minsk Accords or looked like the April 2022 arrangement.
And what we've done, Piers, we have destroyed American power.
We have forced an alliance.
We've demonstrated the weakness of American power in Europe.
We've demonstrated the fact that we can't do what America is supposed to be able to do, which is to reclaim that country that we're not able to.
We can't get equipment over there.
We forced Russia into a very dangerous alliance with China.
We've made Putin immensely popular in his own country.
We've forced BRICS, the rise of BRICS, which is now threatening the domination of the American dollar as a global reserve currency.
And we put Putin in a position where his economy is stronger than it's ever been and more independent from the world economy, which means he has the capacity to do bad things to the world economy.
But if you were president, you would show stronger than ever.
All right, but if you're president come November and this war is still going on, as it's quite likely to be, how are you actually going to resolve it?
Because Putin's not going to give up any of the land he's taken.
I would negotiate.
How, though?
I would negotiate.
You know, listen, I don't know if you know this.
I don't know if you know this, Piers.
President Zelensky has passed a law in Ukraine making it illegal to negotiate with Putin.
You know, you should always lead with diplomacy.
That's what my uncle said.
The primary job of a president of the United States was to keep our country out of war.
We didn't do that with Hitler.
Well, yeah, and I said that that was the one war that was a moral war.
But my point is, we didn't deal with that German dictator.
We didn't deal with him diplomatically.
We dealt with him militarily.
So are you saying we should attack all dictators?
Do you think that the Iraqi government is not afraid of the sovereign?
Last time I checked, America believed in defending and safeguarding democracy wherever it was in the world.
And I share your misgivings about the military conflict.
Well, I do think Ukraine, whether you like it or not, Ukraine is a democratic European country.
It's no longer part of the Soviet Union.
It's not democratic.
And it's the most, you know, according to the World Bank, it's the most corrupt country in the world.
And we have no idea where any of this money is going over there.
There's no accounting.
It's, you know, and a lot of it clearly is going to enrich the oligarchs in that country, but we're killing kids unnecessarily.
My own son fought in Ukraine, Pierce.
You know, he went over there and fought in the Kharkiv offensive with the Foreign Legion in Ukraine.
And, you know, and it's not, this is not a good thing for our country.
It is not a strategic interest in our country.
It's not our job in our country to fight every dictator in the world.
Questioning Wars in Afghanistan 00:10:23
And what if he...
Let me ask you this.
What if he wins, Putin, and he then decides to invade one of the Baltic countries?
What would your view be then?
I don't think that he, I don't think that he, I don't think there's any evidence that he wants to do that.
But what if he did?
And I don't think there is a problem.
Listen, Putin, I'm not, again, you know, my answer to that would be strategic ambiguity.
I'm not going to tell you one way or the other.
If he attacks a NATO country, we're obligated under those articles to go to support those countries.
What if China, let me expand it?
What if China looks at America being supine in its defense of Ukraine, allowing Putin to win?
Why would that not be just a massive green light to China to then take Taiwan, as they're desperate to do?
I think it's been a green light to China to show how weak we are in Ukraine and how depleted we are and how ineffective our equipment is.
Wouldn't we be even weaker, surely?
Wouldn't we be even weaker if we let him win?
If we let Russia win, I think that we look weak anyway, and I think we are weak now.
And I think we're weak because of the, you know, that our military equipment is bad and that the morale within our military is bad.
And I think that just getting in continual wars has been bad for our country.
Try to name, Pierce, we've spent $8 trillion on wars since 2000.
Name one country that's better off because of those wars.
Iraq is worse off than we found it.
We killed more Iraqis in Saddam Hussein.
We created ISIS.
We pushed Iraq into a proxy posture with Iran.
We drove 4 million refugees into Europe.
We destabilized every country in Europe.
You could trace that a straight line to Brexit and England.
You could argue, I mean, I agree with you, but I would put up an argument that the military operation in Afghanistan was justified in the sense that there had to be a big response to 9-11.
And actually, Al-Qaeda's ability to train in Afghanistan was severely dented by the military operation there.
I didn't like the way it was suddenly ended because the Taliban just took back all the power that they'd lost.
I would have liked a few thousand troops to have been left there, as America and the allies have done all around the world.
But I do think that the ability to stop al-Qaeda being as effective as they were was definitely a good result of the Afghanistan war.
Okay, well, you and I differ there.
I don't think 20 years in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history, and then, you know, inevitably turning it back to the Taliban, I don't think, and having all the people who are allied with us for 20 years and we promised to defend knowing that ultimately we're going to have to leave and we would leave them at the mercy of their enemies.
I don't think it was a good result.
But what you can't do, but surely what you can't do.
You and I will differ there.
Okay, but surely what you can't do, you can't let a bunch of terrorists take down the World Trade Center and not respond, certainly if you know where they're all being trained and where they're being harbored.
Similarly, you can't allow a Russian dictator to justify.
Hang on.
Nor to me can you...
Nor can you allow a Russian dictator to run into a European country.
And here's where I would put your slight moral, I would argue, and correct me if I'm wrong, I would say that this is where there's a slight inconsistency in your moral worldview of these things.
Because when it comes to Israel, whose leader, Netanyahu, is facing corruption charges, unlike Zelensky, and whose leader authorized payments of billions and billions of dollars to Hamas because it suited him to keep the Palestinian Authority and Hamas at loggerheads with each other,
that you support, without any equivocation, continued ongoing support for that government and Netanyahu and what he's doing when much of the world is enraged by the scale of the response to October the 7th.
And I would simply say that there's an inconsistency there.
You don't seem bothered about Israel corruption or about the billions of dollars being funneled to Hamas to prop them up.
And yet, that's the kind of stick you want to beat Ukraine with, where the leader is not facing corruption charges.
What do you say?
Let me answer your first point first.
I supported the attack on Tora Bora to get rid of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
I did not support the takeover of Afghanistan.
And I think that there was an appropriate response to 9-11.
And the U.S. response under President Bush and Vice President Cheney and Rumsfeld was a catastrophe Catastrophe for our country, for the world, for our moral standing around the world, and for our strength.
I'm not a supporter of President Netanyahu.
I've been a longtime critic of him.
I was critical of his judicial reforms.
I'm not a co-signing anything for Likud or President Netanyahu.
The Israeli government and Israeli, Israelis themselves are very, very critical of President Netanyahu and absolutely dismayed and disgusted with his authorization of the $1.4 billion payment from Qatar to Hamas and the reasons for he did it,
which he was explicit about, to strengthen Hamas, to make the, you know, to make peace impossible or any kind of conciliation with the Palestinian Authority impossible.
Most people in Israel are not supportive of President Netanyahu, but they are supportive of this policy.
There's a unity government, as you know, in Israel that is on all sides.
And there's a war cabinet that is represented by all sides, and they support the need to get rid of Hamas.
Well, the war cabinet is three people, and one of them just resigned.
So they're not all in agreement, are they?
Yeah, well, no, but Benny Gantz did not resign in protest of any specific war policy.
No, he resigned because he doesn't believe there's any end game.
There's no end game, he says.
There's no plan for the day after the war.
He's right, there isn't.
Well, I agree.
There should be an end plan as well.
But that's not the question.
The question is: do we need to disarm?
Does Israel need to disarm Hamas before a ceasefire or get the hostages back?
And I would say the hostages have to be returned and Hamas has to be disarmed.
Or else, how can you have a peace?
I don't know.
How do you disarm Hamas?
But how do you disarm the rest of Hamas?
We're not sure how many are left, but certainly thousands of them, when they're embedded now in refugee camps amongst thousands, hundreds of thousands of civilians, millions of them.
And so every time you launch an offensive against them, as we saw with the apparent targeted attack on two Hamas terrorists in the Rafah camp, and as you saw with the rescue of these hostages, one of them led to 50 civilians being killed.
The other ones led to, depending which numbers you believe, anything between 100 and 274 people being killed.
So at what point does this desperation to eliminate the last members of Hamas get overtaken by the sheer volume of civilians being killed in the process, which I cannot believe will do anything longer term than foment the ideology that drove Hamas in the first place?
Yeah, I mean, you're asking a lot of questions, and I'd like you to give me time to answer them.
Sure.
You know, and you could ask the same.
You brought up Nazi Germany as a kind of an analogy for what's happening in the Mideast.
And in 1945 or 44 at Casablanca, Churchill and Roosevelt had an argument because Roosevelt said we have to denazify Germany.
And if we don't denazify Germany, it is going to, you know, the Nazis are going to rise up and do the same thing again.
Churchill did not want an unconditional surrender for the Nazis.
He said, we'll have to kill too many civilians to do that, and everybody will fight for the death.
But Roosevelt won that argument.
We killed about 2 million Germans during World War II in order to get into Berlin and denazify it.
Today, Germany is the richest country in Europe.
It's one of the most powerful economies in the world.
I think it's the fourth most powerful.
And nobody's scared of Germany because it's a peaceful country.
And today, Hamas, which is authoritarian control of, hasn't won an election in 16 years, of Gaza, is a corporate kleptocracy.
And it's absolutely intent on one issue, one issue only.
to just annihilate Israel and to kill all the Jews.
And in their charter, Hamas has a provision that says it is against Islamic law to even negotiate with Israel except as a ruse.
So I don't see how people who are saying, well, you should have a ceasefire, then what?
Then what you've rewarded Hamas for taking hostages, and they're going to keep taking hostages to get more and more advantage.
And this is, by the way, the fifth ceasefire.
On October 7th, they broke a ceasefire.
Voice Issues and Apologies 00:05:03
Yeah, yeah, I know.
Are you going to go back to that status quo?
Well, I don't think there's any future.
I don't think you can have any future.
I don't think you can have any future there with Hamas retaining any form of power whatsoever.
Nor do I think Netanyahu is a privilege.
I agree.
Nor do I think Netanyahu is a person that's going to bring peace to that region at all.
No, neither do I. You and I are agreed on that.
Well, there we go.
You see?
That's diplomacy at work in front of our viewers' very eyes.
I want to just ask you a couple of health questions.
One is you've got everyone going with this extraordinary revelation about the worm in your brain.
Did you expect the reaction that you got to that?
And what is the lasting consequence of that health issue you had?
Well, first of all, Piers, are you under the impression that I announced that to the world?
I don't think you did explicitly, no.
No, I didn't.
It was a short discussion in a deposition almost 15 years ago in my divorce.
And the New York Times dug that up and announced it as if it was recent news.
It was a, you know, it was something I discovered.
It's interesting.
It had no impact on my cognitive capacity.
I did have at that time, I was having brain fog and I was having some memory and word retrieval issues that I noticed.
Nobody else noticed them.
And I ended up getting treated for that.
And that was one of the things I discovered during the course of my treatment.
But it wasn't something that was any kind of a threat to me.
That's a pretty extraordinary.
And by the way, I've offered to do.
Well, I was going to say, apparently, you know, what I learned during the discussion of this, because this was widely discussed after the New York Times published that article, I learned during that discussion that a billion people in the world have that particular parasite.
Really?
It's very, very widespread.
Yeah, it's very widespread.
I think I got it what my doctor said.
There were two plays that I could have gotten it.
One was in India where I had traveled extensively.
And the other was in the hog industry because I've been litigating against factory farms in North Carolina and Utah around the country.
And apparently this parasite is very, very common among people who are in that industry.
So I don't know where it came from, but whatever it was, the one that was inside of my brain died on its own, thank God.
So to reassure potential voters, there is no remaining worm in your brain.
Yeah, thank you very much, Pierce.
And I've said I'm very, very happy to take cognitive tests, along with President Trump and President Trump.
I would love to see that.
Maybe they could end.
Maybe they should get you on the debate stage and at the end, put you all through a live cognitive test.
My money would be on you, actually.
Let me ask you also, because you've been doing a...
Your campaign's been money for me.
You've been campaigning a long time.
It's hard, grueling work.
It involves a lot of talking, never mind just the media, but talking to people you meet, talking to groups and so on.
And you have got this issue with your voice that you've talked about very openly.
It's no secret and it happened to you in your 40s.
But how hard is it to just talk all day long when you're campaigning on your voice?
You know, the talking is not a hardship on me at all.
It's a hardship on people who have to listen to me.
And I can't listen to myself.
If I hear myself on TV or the radio, I turn it off.
Really?
Yeah, it's painful for me to listen to it.
And I know it's painful for other people.
And I apologize to all of your audience and people all over the world.
Actually, I don't even notice it now.
Honestly, I don't even notice it now.
I've interviewed you a few times.
And to me, that's very kind of you.
I don't, honestly.
I actually find you a lot more.
I find you a lot more easy to understand than Joe Biden.
Well, you know, actually, I'm doing some treatments now that seem to be working really well.
And Cheryl and I went over to Japan about, I don't know, like right before the campaign started.
And I did a surgery over there where they put a little titanium bridge in my vocal cords in Kyoto.
And it really helped me a lot.
But I'm doing a treatment now that actually appears to be working really, really well.
Cricket, Pakistan, and Sports 00:03:58
So I'm hopeful.
That's great.
And I apologize to everybody who has to listen to me.
I don't think you should ever apologize.
I think it's incredible that you have just basically, I think, made people not even notice.
I don't even notice when I talk to you because I find you fascinating what you're saying.
I don't care, actually, about your voice.
Here's something I do care about, Pasha.
It's my last question for you.
But there's been a phenomenon that's erupted in America, certainly in my eyes, in the last couple of weeks, and it's called cricket.
Now, I didn't realize that cricket actually used to be America's most popular sport before the Civil War.
In fact, the first international cricket match ever took place in the mid-19th century between America and Canada in New York and was watched by 5,000 people a day.
And last week, America beat Pakistan, which was, in cricket terms, unbelievable, totally unexpected, and was watched again by 5,000 people a day in New York.
And it says to me that maybe finally, because apparently in the Civil War, soldiers gave up playing cricket because it was too complicated to play in their downtime from fighting.
And they morphed into baseball.
It's an easier game.
It felt more exclusively American.
But now I feel that cricket's making a massive comeback in America.
Are you a cricket fan?
Do you intend going to some of the games?
And do you feel that you'll become a more civilized country the more you embrace cricket again?
You know, I lived in London for a year.
I went to the London School of Economics.
And while I was there, I became very close to Lady Antonia Fraser and her daughter Rebecca Fraser.
I knew her father, Lord Longford, very well.
Yeah, and she at that time was married to Harold Pinter.
Yeah.
Who loved cricket?
The playwright.
Yeah, and he loved cricket, and he forced me to learn the game and to watch the game with him.
So that is my experience with cricket.
And I'll say this: I don't know what you're talking about because I have not seen this.
I'm very, very, because I know how devoted Pakistan is to this sport.
So it surprised me.
It gives me a lot of pride that Americans are beating him.
It seems so counterintuitive because American, particularly young people, now have very short attention spans.
And because of all the social media, and cricket is a very long game with some long spots where nothing appears to happen.
Well, you see, this is the...
Okay, so let me help you.
I'll help you understand it because this is the T20 World Cup tournament, which is actually only three hours long.
So it's the same length as a baseball game, right?
So it's a much shortened version.
Now, test cricket that you're talking about.
When England play Australia in the Ashes Test Series, it's five matches, five test matches.
Each one lasts five days.
Each day is six hours play.
So that's a maximum of 150 hours of cricket.
And at the end of it, the score might end up 0-0.
And we did that deliberately so Americans would never actually either want to play it or enjoy watching it.
It was a great strategy.
Robert, we'll leave it there.
I'm not going to keep pumping you about cricket, but it's great to talk to you.
I think you're a brilliantly important figure in this race.
I hope you get on that debate stage.
I hope you keep creating mischief and holding them all to account because we need it.
The whole Western world needs you to do this.
It's an important role.
And I thank you for coming back to Uncensored.
Thank you very much.
Anytime, Piers, thank you so much for having me.
Really enjoyed it.
Thank you.
Thanks again.
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