“CAN’T Go On!” ICE Chaos + Trump NATO Slur | With Piers Morgan’s Military Brother
The protests in Minneapolis are becoming a demoralizing and deadly crisis for the Trump administration after 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was fatally shot by ICE officers on Saturday. State officials say he was a harmless protester but federals claim he was a “domestic terrorist.” Meanwhile, President Trump spent last week admonishing his allies in Davos, with some of his comments causing genuine outrage in the UK - as thousands of British troops were injured and 457 of them died in Afghanistan, where they categorically did not “stay a little back.” Canada, France, Germany, Denmark - among others - all suffered losses there too. Trump has now backpeddled with a gushing statement about British troops - but he’s not apologized. Should he? Joining Piers Morgan to discuss is The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur, Outkick CEO Clay Travis, former US Navy Seal Rob O’Neill, legendary Democrat strategist James Carville and none other than Piers’ own brother - retired lieutenant-colonel in the British Army, Jeremy Morgan. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent and supported by: Oxford Natural: To watch their full stories, scan the QR code on your screen or visit https://oxfordnatural.com/piers/ to get 70% off your first order when you use code PIERS. Melania: Step inside the 20 days before history is made—watch MELANIA, only in theaters January 30; get your tickets now! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Rewriting History With Hypocrisy00:09:30
If I were a Republican, I would be reminded of Dante's Inferno.
Abandon all hope.
You're going to get beat so bad in November, you have no idea.
They want a violent act, whether it's Renee Good, whether it's this individual.
There is a design.
I don't want to get shot though, do they?
That guy was not a domestic terrorist.
He was a guy who treated veterans.
It's not just left versus right.
Let's all shoot each other.
I'm pretty sure on this panel, I'm the only one who's actually killed people.
You know, they'll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or that.
And they did.
They stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.
Somebody I'm extremely proud of.
That's my younger brother, Jeremy, who was a colonel in the British Army.
We need to hear those words.
He is sorry for what he said.
He got it wrong.
It was ignorant of him to say it.
The president owes Britain and its armed forces an apology.
Weeks feel like decades in the current news climate, and that's not just because, as you may have heard, I recently had a rather painful altercation with gravity and a small step, which led to a fracture of my femur and a brand new hip.
So here I am with my new bionic hip, reporting from my home, at least for the foreseeable future.
But the news doesn't stop, even for my frail torso.
The protests in Minneapolis are becoming a demoralizing and deadly crisis for the Trump administration.
37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretty was fatally shot by ICE officers on Saturday.
State officials say he was a harmless protester.
Federal officials say he was a domestic terrorist.
They're two extreme versions of the same reality.
Just as half the country sees ICE as good, honest law enforcement, delivering on campaign promises, and the other half sees them as the Gestapo.
Homeland Security Chief Christy Noam gave this justification for Pretty's death yesterday.
This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.
Really?
Having watched the footage, as we've all now done many times from many angles, that sounds like a fairly brazen attempt at rewriting history to suit a preferred narrative.
And there's been quite a bit of that going on in the past few days.
Thousands of miles away from the domestic strife, President Trump spent last week admonishing his allies in Davos.
There's no doubt the strong arming NATO has delivered some good results for the United States.
But some of his comments have caused genuine outrage, particularly on this side of the pond.
You might even say they were a fairly brazen attempt to rewrite history for a preferred narrative.
I've always said, will they be there if we ever needed them?
And that's really the ultimate test.
And I'm not sure of that.
I know that we would have been there or we would be there, but will they be there?
And let's hope that that never happens.
We've never needed them.
We have never really asked anything of them.
You know, they'll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or that.
And they did.
They stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.
As a matter of fact, the only time NATO has ever invoked its most powerful clause that an attack on one is an attack on all, it was after 9-11.
Thousands of British troops were injured and 457 of them died in Afghanistan, where they categorically did not stay a little back.
Canada, France, Germany, Denmark, and others all suffered losses there too.
Trump has now backpedaled with a gushing statement about British troops, but he hasn't said the one word he hates using most of all.
And this time I think he should.
The President owes Britain and its armed forces an apology.
Well, joining me to debate all of this is Chen Uger, the founder and CEO of the Young Turks, Autkik CEO Clay Travis, Rob O'Neill, the former US Navy SEAL, and the legendary Democrat strategist James Carville.
Welcome to all of you for my first panel with a new body.
New body, new year, new hip, and new resolve not to trip on a five-inch step in the middle of a London hotel restaurant.
Whilst, and this is the most shameful part of all, as Rob O'Neill will certainly attest, while being completely sober.
But we will move on.
From my own personal issues, welcome to all of you.
We're going to start with Minneapolis and then move on a little later to NATO and Trump.
On Minneapolis, Chen Yuga, it's been very interesting the reaction to this second killing.
In the first one, a lot of people moved to their partisan lines and they held their partisan lines.
Those lines were reinforced, doubled down, trebled down by President Trump and his administration and JD Vance and so on.
This time, I'm seeing big cracks, particularly on the MAGA side, on the Trump administration side.
They realize, I think, that we've all seen the video, right?
You can tell us what you want us to believe, but we've all seen the video.
Nobody can watch that video and not conclude that this guy was not brandishing his weapon.
He wasn't trying to shoot the ICE officers.
He was legally allowed to carry his firearm, which was apparently attached to his waist.
He didn't use that firearm.
And now we have the, to me, utterly extraordinary hypocrisy of people who spent the last 20 years telling me that absolutely an American has a Second Amendment right to take a gun legally to a protest or anywhere they see fit.
But now, because it doesn't suit the narrative, suddenly this is a terrible thing to be doing.
I don't remember that argument with Carl Rittenhouse.
So to me, as always with these things, I don't take a side, but I do look at hypocrisy when I see it and call it out when I see it.
And I'm seeing a bucketload of hypocrisy.
Yeah, there are layers here.
So when Trump first started on the issue of immigration, closed the border, and he takes out people who were undocumented criminals.
At that point, he's very popular on immigration.
So then he goes to do mass deportations.
And a lot of the online media, including the independent podcasters, push back.
And the country pushes back.
It's not popular at all, right?
Okay, so that's layer number one.
So why are you making an issue that you were popular on now turning into an unpopular issue with you?
The reason I bring that up is because I think there is a purpose.
And the purpose is not immigration.
The purpose is to divide us, to get ICE to go into the middle of these cities, of course, blue cities, and cause trouble.
Why do they want to cause trouble?
Because they don't want you to notice the great American robbery.
We've been robbed by the donors for decade after decade after decade.
So what do they need?
They need a distraction and they need us to hate each other.
So you send in shock troops from ICE.
They go and do what they do.
And as Scrumucci said about the Trump team, the fish rots from the head down.
So he didn't, it's not an accident that they're acting in a lawless way.
That's why he put masks on them.
That's why he took away their badges so that they would break the law and they would do outrageous things like this.
So in the case of Renee Good, the first shot has some debate, although I think the fact that now we've seen he was about 10 feet away and she was going about two miles per hour.
But fine, if you want to debate the first shot, just waste your life doing that, okay?
But the last two shots, they murdered her.
They shot her from the side and the third shot killed her.
Now you go to Alex Predi and they called him a domestic terrorist and an assassin who went there to murder law enforcement.
Now guys, look, number one, you can see that's clearly not the case.
They're clearly telling them, ah, who cares?
Just shoot away.
And in the case of Alex Freddy, there's the first five shots, which again are totally unjustifiable because they already took his gun away.
But the second five shots after the pause is nothing but murder and execution.
But not only are they killing people in the streets in an effort to divide America and get us to hate each other, but on top of that, now you see, without a shadow of a doubt, for all the independents who voted for Trump, and even for the right wing who voted for Trump, you see that his team is a bunch of liars.
That guy was not a domestic terrorist.
He was a guy who treated veterans.
And his last words were, trying to protect that poor woman over there.
And that was his last effort.
And to call him an assassin, there is no question that they are giant liars and they're trying to get us to hate each other and don't buy into it.
And yes, finally, the last irony is when we were using our First Amendment rights on the left, a lot of the right wing said, oh, well, free speech, we didn't quite mean it.
Now, and by the way, when I say that, I mean the extreme right, most of the Trump voters are abandoning him on this issue as well.
And now they say, oh, well, now that it involves the Second Amendment rights, maybe we'll pay attention.
Ironically, if he wasn't armed, I think he would get less right-wing support.
And that is a deep irony, but I'll take it because right now it's become obvious to the whole country.
They're taking away our First Amendment rights, our Second Amendment rights, and they're trying to set up a police state.
And a police state isn't going to care if you're left or right-wing.
Okay, Clay Travis, your response to that.
Escaping The Police State00:14:45
Well, first of all, I think you have to begin with how did we get here?
And the answer is: Joe Biden let in 10 million illegal immigrants with a wide open southern border for basically four years of his presidency.
And Trump shut down the southern border within a month with the stroke of a couple of executive orders.
And so the question becomes: if there are, and according to Tom Holman, who I think is right, but if there are, by Tom Holman's count, 20 million illegal immigrants in the country now, and 10 million of those illegal immigrants came in with Joe Biden's imprimatur, basically allowing him in during that four years, what do you do to move them out of this country, right?
And so that is the essence of the challenge.
Initially, you start with people who are engaged in violent acts, and then from there, you aggressively move to try to get more of these people out.
And then I think we can go into the specifics of analyzing the shooting and how it's going to play out going forward and compare it with Renee Good.
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On this shooting, Clay, I'm seeing a lot of people on the conservative right who are beginning to pivot away from where they may have initially been on this.
The more angles you look at this, the more unequivocal it becomes.
There is no one is honestly now suggesting this guy was brandishing a weapon, trying to attack or assault.
There were eight guys all over him.
And then you see one of them reach down, take his legally owned firearm from his side, from his waist, take it away, and it's a second later that they kill him.
I mean, that cannot be right.
Look, I think we're going to figure out more details on this.
It looks to me like maybe his weapon discharged, that is the weapon that they took from him, discharged, and then there was a panic and a thought that a gun shot had been fired and the reaction occurred.
That's my analysis of it right now.
I think there should be an investigation.
If it's determined that he behaved in a way that was outside the law, then this individual should be charged.
And again, I think the real issue here, big picture, again, is how do you get the 10 million that Biden let out?
But also, these individuals are going and intentionally obstructing these ICE agents from being able to do their jobs.
And this, I believe, is the intent.
They want a violent act, whether it's Renee Goode, whether it's this individual.
There is a desire to get away from the state.
They don't want to get shot though, do they?
They don't want to get shot.
They don't want to get shot.
I can remember, Pierce, the Axio story that came out, I believe it was in July, said that Democrats were instructing people that they did need to have a shooting because politically they saw it as beneficial.
In other words, a consequence of trying to get in front of this.
And I will just say, look, I am a first and a second amendment guy.
If the guy, there's a difference between what you can legally do and what you should intelligently do.
If I were giving advice to anybody who is going out to protest ICE right now, I would say don't go armed.
I think if this guy had not had the weapon that he did, he would have been arrested.
He would still be alive.
I think there was a panic brought on by the gun being there.
And so I think you have to analyze this situation in general.
If my own kids were going to protest, Pierce, I would say, okay, do not take any weapons at all.
You might legally have the right to do it, but I would tell them that is not a smart thing to do.
And certainly.
Yeah, but you know what?
Again, okay.
But Clay, before I move to the other, the other two panelists, again, I am struck by an irony here because Renee Good wasn't armed and it didn't save her, right?
And the bottom line is, I thought the position on the conservative right, which is mainly supportive of the NRA, for example, is that actually the answer, say, to school shootings is everyone should have guns at schools, right?
To stop this happening.
That would stop it happening.
If you take that logic, then after two shootings, two people being shot dead by ICE agents, wouldn't the logical thing be to do, to take a gun, if you're legally allowed to have one, to protect yourself against the same thing happening to you?
In other words, is the argument not being put forward here by people on the right who love guns?
I'm not going to get into that debate again.
Litigated that years ago.
We've moved on.
It's your country, your debate, your guns.
However, again, it does seem hypocritical to me.
It's like this is the completely opposite advice that you would normally give to a situation which keeps recurring where people are being shot.
The normal advice is you should, if you're allowed to carry a gun, take it to defend yourself.
My argument has been, my kids all go to schools with armed security.
I want trained security with armed guns at every one of my kids' schools, Pierce.
That's different than someone going to protest and carrying a gun to me quite significantly.
Because again, if you're going to get arrested potentially or you're going to get involved with ICE agents, I don't think that the position should be, well, you should take a gun and get into a shootout with them.
You shouldn't take up arms against lawful citizens in the country who are executing their lawful jobs.
So Clay, you're against the same house.
My kids' school, for my kids' school, I want armed security.
If my kids were going to protest on any issue under the sun and they were going there, I would tell them I would not advise them to take a gun.
There's a difference between what you're legally allowed to take and what I would advise a smaller person.
So you're against Kyle Riddle.
Okay, I got it.
I would not have told you what I had said at the time.
I didn't think it was smart for Kyle Rittenhouse to take a gun to the middle of that crazy riot.
I would have advised against my kids doing it.
Once he was there, I think the jury reached the right verdict in that case.
Okay, let me bring in James Carville.
James, it seems to me this is heading to a very dark place in America.
You've got these ICE agents who, for their own self-protection, because they're getting dox, they're getting identified, they're getting targeted and so on.
They're wearing masks.
They're out there.
A lot of them apparently do not have proper crowd control training.
They're getting into regular skirmishes now with protesters, which are turning deadly.
And I think the American people are increasingly appalled by this, which is why you're seeing Donald Trump reigning back in this particular incident in a way we haven't seen him before.
But this is getting Tinderbox stuff, isn't it?
Well, first of all, a fanciful Republican economist, I think his name was Herb Sein, said that which can't continue won't.
This is not going to continue.
By the way, if I were a Republican, I would be reminded of the sign on the entrance of Dante's Inferno, abandon all hope.
You're going to get beat so bad in November, you have no idea.
The Democrats are going to pick up six or seven Senate seats.
And the idea that somebody exercising poor judgment, which I'm sure I do 10 times a day, is the excuse of someone to shoot me is utterly ludicrous.
So people make mistakes all the time.
They park in no parking zones.
They exceed feed limits.
They might drink too much.
None of this suggests that you ought to be out shooting people.
And honestly, what you have there is a bunch of undertrained, not particularly qualified people with bandages and guns.
And this is going to be the result of it.
The American people don't like it overwhelmingly.
Stand by, sit still, and get the crap beat out of you because that's what's going to happen.
Rob O'Neill, it seems to me, we've discussed this a lot on the show with various panels.
It seems to me most Americans fundamentally agree with what Donald Trump has done on the southern border.
They realized it was particularly porous under Joe Biden, that millions came in illegally into the United States.
That was unsustainable.
And they think it's great that the border's been effectively closed.
I also think there's no argument with most Americans about identifying and deporting people who are in the country illegally who then commit other crimes.
The flashpoint is on these ICE agents going into cities and going after people who perhaps came in, you know, with their parents or perhaps came in 10 years ago and built families in America who are law-abiding, committed no other crimes, who pay their taxes, who contribute to society, who are the bedrock in many ways of the ideology of the United States of America.
And that is where this administration, it seems to me, is overreaching and getting into serious trouble.
Then you add this series of incidents now involving people being shot dead as they protest against that.
And you've got this unholy mess with him.
What do you make of it?
Well, there's a lot to unpack.
And it would help both sides if they were honest with each other and not just trying to get political points proven.
As a registered independent, I'm absolutely appalled that law enforcement is killing Americans on American soil at any time.
And as someone who's been in close to close armed combat with everyone from Chechens to Afghans to Iraqis to Syrians to our friends in Somalia, no gunfight is the same.
And when I walk down the streets of New York, people get, I mean, I see people crossing the street without the right-of-way.
Some of them get hit and killed.
It doesn't mean it didn't happen.
You should be armed.
Wherever you go, and it doesn't matter how many full magazines you have, when you introduce yourself into an ongoing arrest and you're armed, you're just escalating the force.
Does the person who got killed by a bus because they weren't looking deserve it?
No.
Does this guy deserve it?
No.
You shouldn't, it shouldn't have to happen, but we're not being honest.
It's like the left is now saying, yeah, they're just coming in and separating children from their families.
There should be a way, and I think law-abiding citizens should have a different route.
But there are criminals they're going after and the left won't even admit it.
A lot of people in Minnesota voted for this, but the problem in some of the parts of Minnesota is they've infiltrated so many illegal voters.
Look at the front.
And look, again, if I'm wrong, tell me I'm wrong and prove it.
I'll admit it, but there's a lot of bad stuff going on right now.
And then it's distracting on both.
Look at the law.
No one's considering the gun was introduced.
There's law enforcement officers right there.
They're in so much, they're feeling so much stress right now because of the paid activists that are all over them, screaming, blowing whistles, shooting projectiles, everything at them.
They think about their family too.
They think about previous events.
They think about previous shootings.
All the stuff that they're like up to include, I don't want to shoot this guy.
When it happens, it happens.
We can easily minimize the amount of stuff going on.
No shooting is the same.
I killed a dude that was driving a car at me in 2012.
Different place.
That's a big, heavy weapon.
She was armed too.
Here we go again.
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So Rob, when you've watched this video, as everybody has multiple times from multiple angles, do you see anything in there which would justify shooting that guy dead?
Well, I have the comfort of watching after the fact.
And I'm someone who's been involved with stuff with Monday morning.
They certainly come after me and tell me that it should have gone a different way.
Would I have shot him from here 24 hours later?
No.
At the time, I don't know.
I have been in spots where I have let people go that were armed that I could have killed that I didn't.
I feel good about it.
I've killed dudes that I often wonder, should I have?
This is not all broad-brush stroke.
The human life was ended by a law enforcement agent.
We should look at it by the incident by incident, not a broad brush stroke.
And I mean, everything from these, the ICE guys aren't out there to kill people.
They're not masked because they're renegades.
They don't want to get docked.
They have families.
I have families.
I know what getting doxxed is like.
There's so much going on here.
It's not just left versus right.
Let's all shoot each other.
I'm pretty sure on this panel, I'm the only one who's actually killed people really, really close.
And I think I have an idea of knowing what I'm talking about with lethality.
And I don't like it.
I'm anti-war, actually.
But I mean, as long as we're not going to convince each other the way we're doing it, and if we're not being honest, it's never going to happen anyway.
Be honest with case by case, line by line, like we should be doing in Congress.
But instead, we get here and we yell at each other about the, he should have been armed.
He should have had as many bullets as he wants.
That's his right.
Should he have been killed?
I don't know.
I wasn't there.
Well, Cheng, Yugi, let me ask you the question I didn't think I'd ever ask you.
Cheng, hang on one sec.
Cheng, I want to ask you the question I never thought I'd ever ask you.
Have you ever killed anyone?
No, not to my knowledge.
Hey, Chen, he's a heart attacks.
I don't know.
It's always the quiet ones.
You know, it's interesting, Cheng, because we've seen President Clinton, Bill Clinton, and we've seen Barack Obama, another former president, both come out with pretty strong denunciations of this.
What would be interesting would be if, I think, if George W. Bush was to come out and add his name to this to make it more of a bipartisan response, because this cannot go on.
Asymmetric Warfare In Afghanistan00:15:52
The rest of the world, I can tell you, over here in the UK, people are looking on completely aghast that this is happening repeatedly.
And no one can quite understand why those who have the power to cool things down aren't doing that.
Now, Tom Homan has been sent down there tonight.
We know there's a White House press briefing going on in the next hour or so, which may add some more clarity too.
But what should happen here?
What do you think is the obvious thing to do?
To have ICE completely remove themselves from Minneapolis?
But then it begs the question, well, where do they go next?
Should they continue their work?
Is not a lot of what ICE is doing, because I believe it probably is, is not a lot of what they're doing valid?
If they are actually catching and deporting genuinely bad criminals who are in the country illegally anyway, then they should be allowed to do their job, shouldn't they?
Yeah.
So let me build on what James said.
So, look, at this point, the polling is in even before this Alex Predi shooting, and this one is going to put it way, way over the top.
So already over 60% of Americans thought ICE was going too far before the shooting.
Over 70% of independents thought that.
And now the fact that he was armed and was exercising his Second Amendment rights just by having a gun, and he seemed to have been killed because he had a gun and was exercising his Second Amendment rights, I think has driven a lot of the right wing to realize, hey, you know what?
Maybe we're not supposed to be murdering American citizens in the streets, that that is not supposed to be the point of ICE.
And now a lot of people are worried that that is the point of ICE.
And I'm old enough to remember when, James, you remember when G. Gordon Liddy would tell the right wing about the jack-booted thugs of the government, and if they came to your house, gun them down?
Now they're saying, if the government comes to your house, surrender immediately and let them do whatever they want in a police state.
But you know that the police state is not going to be for the left or the right.
It's going to be for the powerful and they're going to use it against all of us.
But that jury has come in.
So what's going to happen next is a lot of Republicans are starting to turn on Trump.
He has lost his magic touch that he used to be able to bully and intimidate people.
And back in his first term, he did it a little bit more intelligently, one by one, so that it had more power.
Now he just blasts everybody, right?
We hate Europe.
We hate we're going to take Greenland, Venezuela, Cuba, blah, blah, blah.
That's on foreign policy.
Then he comes back home and he attacks all of the Indiana Republicans.
Then he attacks half the Republicans in the Senate.
He attacks Marjorie Taylor Greene and calls her a traitor when she's like one of the most right-wing people in the country.
He attacks Tom Hesse.
The point is, now that he's sitting in the 30s and dropping, by the way, like Biden was, he has lost all of his leverage.
So you see Republicans abandoning him.
Why are they abandoning him?
Because of what James said.
Because the elections are coming.
And if they stick with Trump, they're going to get wiped out with the tide.
So now people are going to have to turn on Trump on the Republican Party side.
So that's politics.
And that's important because that takes away his power and leverage.
But also more importantly for the American people, for God's sake, let's unite.
And remember, you don't want the government to tread on you.
The right wing was right about tyrannical government.
So this is the time that you need to stand up against that tyrannical government.
Okay, Clay Travis, just respond to that quickly, and then we're going to move on to Trump and NATO and the issue of the NATO forces.
Look, I think this has to be inextricable.
First of all, I don't think Trump's base is going to turn on him.
Trump's base has never turned on him for anything.
That's not going to happen, period.
It's 90, 10, 95, 5, whatever percentages.
Most people voted for Trump and for ICE to do exactly this.
What I think is important here too, Piers, is it's a huge story that should get more attention.
It's actually a super positive, unlike all these details.
I'm sure you saw it, Piers.
I don't know how much you talked about it because you were laid up in the hospital.
And I hope you're doing well, by the way.
125-year low in murders in the United States in 2025.
No one alive today, not even Democrat voters on the rolls in Chicago, were able to live in a country that was safer than since 1900.
You cannot tell me that shutting down the border and beginning to deport violent ICE criminals is not a big part of why we have the lowest murder rate in 125 years in the United States.
So again, big picture.
There are 10 million illegals here.
Do we allow them to stay?
And look, this is a real debate going forward that I think is not getting talked about.
The 2030 census.
What is going to happen with the 2030 census is far more impactful than what's going to happen in 26, what's going to happen in 28, because it sets the stage for a generation of how the Electoral College map is going to be set up for where and how seats are going to be allocated in the 435 house seats.
That is really underlying, I think, why this is occurring now, the battle that is going on.
Okay, I want to play a clip.
This is the infamous clip already of Donald Trump talking about NATO forces and their contribution to the war in Afghanistan.
I've always said, will they be there if we ever needed them?
And that's really the ultimate test.
And I'm not sure of that.
I know that we would have been there or we would be there, but will they be there?
And let's hope that that never happens.
We've never needed them.
We have never really asked anything of them.
You know, they'll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this of that.
And they did.
They stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.
Well, I was trying to think who best I could bring into this debate now to discuss this.
And I realized I had somebody in my own family, somebody who I have regularly mentioned on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
I come from a family with lots of military.
My brother retired as a colonel.
My brother was an army colonel.
I've got a lot of military in my family.
We've discussed before.
I've lost some military, ex-military in my family.
My brother was an army colonel for many years.
My brother was a British Army colonel.
My brother-in-law was a British Army colonel.
Lots of military in my family.
My younger brother, Jeremy, who was a colonel in the British Army, was in the army for 37 years.
He did three tours of Afghanistan during the war.
And he joins me now from the London studio, which ironically, I'm not at today.
So Jeremy, welcome to Uncensored.
Thank you.
Hello, Piers.
So you were very angry about this.
You messaged me immediately.
You heard it.
And you were furious about the way that the contribution of the British Armed Forces and indeed the wider NATO armed forces from Canada to Germany to France, Denmark, and so on, had been really had their reputation chucked through the hedge over this with the implication that they had sat back and watched as Americans did all the frontline fighting.
Just explain what your role was predominantly in Afghanistan when you were there, but also your reaction to what Trump said.
The tours that I did in Afghanistan, I was mainly supporting the Afghan National Army in their training and education.
I was supporting their branch schools up and around Kabul.
And I had a multinational force that helped me to deliver that mission.
And what was your experience?
This concept that there was a front line in Afghanistan, you don't think that even is a genuine concept.
Why?
I think anyone who was part of that campaign in Afghanistan will be able to say it's an asymmetric warfare situation.
It was a counterinsurgency.
It was the Taliban against us, but they were part of the people.
They were amongst the people.
It was a 360-degree battlefield.
It wasn't a case of them on one side of a field and us on the other.
It was largely, you know, you could be attacked anywhere at any time.
You could be in a logistics base.
You could be manning a medical facility.
You could get indirect fire.
You could have insider attacks.
You could be on a logistic convoy and you could be attacked by roadside bombs.
Of course, the heavy fighting was taking place in certain hotspots, but the whole of the country was unsafe to some degree or another.
And so it was completely wrong and disingenuous for the President to be referring to only American forces being based on the front line.
There wasn't a front line.
It was a 360-degree battlefield.
I know some friends of yours who got very badly injured.
A guy called Stuart Hill, who's an extremely brave man.
I've met him.
He's an artist now, extraordinarily.
Suffered brain damage from an IED explosion.
But explain just briefly what happened to him as an example of what you're talking about.
Well, he was with the British task force in Helmand.
He was a company commander with the 2nd Battalion, the Mercian battle group.
And he took part in a major offensive operation against the Taliban in 2009, Operation Panthers Claw.
And no sooner had he crossed the start line to sort of take the fight to the enemy, if you like, his company came under attack.
He had a vehicle blown up.
A soldier was killed.
The troop leader lost a foot.
Other people were seriously wounded.
He facilitated their extraction from the battlefield by a helicopter.
And while that was happening, another one of his men stood on an improvised explosive device.
He was blown to pieces.
Stewart was blown 20 meters away from where he was standing.
And the next thing he remembers is waking up in a hospital in Birmingham three weeks later, having suffered traumatic brain injuries with shrapnel in the back of his head.
So he was very much on the front line, if you want to call it that.
Yeah, and the bottom line, if you look at the casualties, the UK suffered, well, the US suffered 2,461 fatalities throughout the duration of the war in Afghanistan.
The UK was the second highest number of military deaths.
457 British military personnel died in Afghanistan.
Thousands more wounded.
The Canadians lost 150.
The French lost 90.
I know that you had personal dealings with a lot of the Germans and the Danes and so on.
Just describe to me what they were like as fighters in the war, these NATO forces.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I didn't serve with the British task force in Helmand, but the Danes did.
They had a contingent down there.
The Estonians did.
There are other elements of our NATO partners down there as well.
The Canadians were in Kandahar, which was quite a hot area.
The Australians in Uruzgan.
There's no doubt that the American forces were holding some of the toughest areas to tame in that insurgency out in the east.
And they joined us down in Helmand as well.
But so were other members of the coalition.
From my own experience, I commanded a task force centered around Kabul, but we had training teams across the whole of the country.
So I got a particularly useful insight as to what was going on, whether it was with the German contingent in Mazarus Sharif in the north, or whether it's with the Italians in Herat province on the border with Iran to the west, or indeed with our American friends on the border with Pakistan to the east.
And I can tell you that everybody was putting their weight out there.
There were different areas with different levels of risk, different levels of intensity when it came to the insurgency.
But everyone was up for it.
And I certainly remember in my own experience working out of the base that I was in in the centre of Kabul.
I had force protection provided by a Danish company, and they were warriors through and through.
And you could have put them anywhere in Afghanistan and they would have performed as strongly.
And indeed, they did in Helmand.
I also had a German contingent, very well trained, extremely professional.
And again, I think they could have done anything anywhere.
And it's wrong to think that these were benign and passive areas.
They were not.
Yes, the Americans were holding some of the most difficult parts.
As I said earlier, so were the British and those who were prepared to fight alongside us.
But the whole country was difficult to some degree or another.
The level of casualties is just an odd way to judge a nation's contribution as well, I feel.
Donald Trump, I think, under huge pressure from all sides.
I've never known the British Prime Minister Kierstama be so critical of him, but certainly members of the American Republican Party were also, I think, dismayed by this.
He came out with a statement saying the great and very brave soldiers of the United Kingdom will always be with the United States of America.
In Afghanistan, 457 died.
Many were badly injured.
They were among the greatest of all warriors.
It's a bond too strong to ever be broken.
The UK military, with tremendous heart and soul, is second to none except for the USA.
We love you all and always will.
You know, he went a long way there to try and modify the rage that his comments had inspired.
But there was no apology.
Do you think he owes the NATO forces that committed themselves there and particularly the families of those who lost their lives an apology?
I absolutely do.
I mean, I'm very grateful that he issued that statement.
It goes some way to assuage the feelings and revulsion that would have been felt by lots of the families who heard his comments last week for the British anyway.
But he needs to extend that to our NATO partners who were also on the front line, whatever that may be in an environment like that.
And he should apologise.
We need to hear those words.
He is sorry for what he said.
He got it wrong.
It was ignorant of him to say it.
It was offensive.
Can you imagine if I had been killed out there and our mother heard those words?
It would be a complete kick in the stomach to have it recycled by him in such a flagrantly ignorant and wrong way.
Rob O'Neill, let's bring in the panel now.
Rob O'Neill has no one better to go to from the American side of this.
I mean, there's no doubt it caused widespread fury, and Donald Trump went as near as I've seen him, actually, to apologising, but he didn't apologise.
What do you make of this debate?
There's obviously a wider debate about NATO and how it's constructed, the contribution from NATO countries.
I think Trump's been very effective in getting NATO countries to pay their dues in the way they actually shamefully weren't doing before.
And there can be no doubt that overall, America, obviously, being the most powerful military in the world, does the lion's share of the fighting.
But, you know, if you're on the receiving end of that initial comment by Donald Trump that you all just sat back, everybody else in NATO, it's pretty offensive.
I mean, you guys would hate it if it was the other way around.
Yeah, I would hate it, and it is offensive.
NATO Dues And Truth00:11:11
And, you know, I've given thousands of seminars and speeches.
And I think 100% of the time I've mentioned my close work with the Special Boat Service, the SBS from the UK.
I've worked with them so much.
I mean, we're exactly the same.
I remember them telling me stories of the invasion of Iraq.
They're getting shot at by Fediene Saddam with 23 millimeter twin anti-aircraft guns.
And I'm not big into the metric system, but I don't want to get all technical.
That's a big-ass bullet to get shot at you.
They've been in the lion's share of Kanahar, all that stuff.
The SBS, I know I've worked with the Danes.
I've worked with the Canadian snipers have the longest, a team of them, the longest sniper shot confirmed kill in the U.S. or in military history worldwide, farther than the U.S. Our allies, especially our special forces, the German Komsomers, the Norwegian Jaegers, stellar.
And they have something similar with us.
They don't really agree with their politicians, their lawyers, and their government all the time.
And the government's inserting themselves like they always do for midterms, for debates, for elections.
The special operators don't really care.
They do their job.
The Norwegian Jaegers are some of the best special forces I've ever worked with.
Mountaineering, close quarters battle, everything to do with the water.
They don't get to fight much because they're government.
These guys know that stuff.
We've hosted the Canadians.
We've hosted the SBS, all that stuff.
They know it.
It's just politics being politics.
We're just going to talk midterms.
They're going to forget about this stuff in a few days.
It is insulting.
I assure you, there are special forces.
And I mean, and even like, I think Chenk was saying earlier, actually, it wasn't Chenk.
Sorry, but there is no, it was your previous guest.
There is no front line.
You can get hit by a mortar walking out of the port-a-potty.
So everyone there, anyone that's gone over there, regardless of admin or combat, you're in a war zone.
And something that simple of a comment, it should be checked.
And take a deep breath before you say something like that.
James Carville, this came at the end of a long week in Davos where Trump made a number of incendiary comments.
A lot of stuff, obviously, about Greenland, which he seemed to reign back on as well.
What is going on here with Trump?
There seems to be a kind of frenzy to what he's doing.
Is it because he's trying to get as much done as possible before the midterms, perhaps anticipating that he may lose control of the house and therefore lose his ability to fundamentally do very much in his remaining two years?
Is that what's behind this?
Or is it just that he believes in chaos theory, where you throw enough stuff at the wall, you go extreme, you go hard, and then you rein back and get what you may have wanted in the first place?
Well, first of all, his statements about the UK soldiers is completely consistent with his entire life.
He is the single most anti-military president we've ever had in the United States.
Let's review the facts.
The Bonespurs?
Oh, really?
What about in Bella Wood that he refused to leave Paris and go on maybe one of the five greatest battles in American history?
You can't go on a Marine Corps base that there's not a Bella Wood Avenue.
Then he tells General Kelly, and yes, he told General Kelly, that American military people were suckers for serving their country like this.
You're going to keep bringing up these old points that aren't true.
It's just disingenuous.
Excuse me for speaking while you're interrupting.
Okay, then.
Again, excuse me for, I apologize for speaking.
I admire your service, but your manners don't come to snuff here.
He told John McCain publicly he didn't like people who were captured, who was shot down, was a POW, was a pilot in the Navy.
Yes, he told General Kelly that people were suckers.
Jeffrey Goldberg reported it and they tried time and time again to have General Kelly say he didn't say it.
He never did.
This is the most consistently anti-military president the United States has ever had.
And I hope we'll never have one like him again.
Clay Travis, I thought it was a massive misstep by Donald Trump.
I don't actually to this day understand why he said it, what he hoped to gain.
You know, the whole point of a special relationship with particularly the UK is that we've always been there with the United States forces when we've been asked to be.
And our forces are up there with the best in the world.
I don't understand why he did it or what he thought, why he thought people would respond well to it.
Well, look, I think President Trump sees America as a unique force for good that often has to go it alone.
And I think that was the impetus behind what he said.
Trump, as often is the case, is a bull in a china shop.
You have to kind of pay attention to his direction, not all the time, every single word that he says.
Building on what James Carville said, I actually think Trump is one of the least likely to use American boots on the ground forces that we've ever seen.
And I actually think that's because he despises what he saw happen with the Iraq war and the trillions of dollars and lost lives that we spent in a war where we gained virtually nothing.
In fact, the first time my eyebrow really raised and I thought this Trump guy is going to be interesting was when he went after George W. Bush aggressively in the summer of 2015 in the Fox News debate.
At that point in time, no one would acknowledge that our response post 9-11 was a disaster and that we had failed and that we had made a lot of awful choices because everybody was still bending the knee to the Bush-Cheney wing of the Republican Party.
Trump broke that relationship.
And if you look at his use of military force, it has been very judicious.
It's primarily been special forces.
It's tended to be remote in nature.
And he has been, and as a general rule, someone who is seeking peace, not war in the world.
I mean, we just, as we were doing this show, the 20th body was finally returned from Gaza that has been held there.
As we were doing this show, he just posted that he got off the phone with Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, and was sending Tom Homan to try to figure out how to get the violent criminals out of Minnesota without any more loss of life.
I actually think you can criticize Trump for a great deal, not being bellicose, not being wanting to go to war or regularly committing American troops is, I think, actually one of the strengths of both Trump 1.0 and so far Trump 2.0.
You know, as we're talking, an interesting development, Cheng.
Donald Trump has just posted on his Truth Social.
Governor Tim Waltz called me with a request to work together with respect to Minnesota.
It was a very good call, and we actually seem to be on a similar wavelength.
I told Governor Waltz that I would have Tom Homan call him and that what we're looking for are any and all criminals that they have in their possession.
The governor very respectfully understood that and I'll be speaking to him in the near future.
He was happy Tom Homan was going to Minnesota and so am I. We've had tremendous success in Washington, D.C., Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana, and virtually every other place we have touched.
And even in Minnesota, crime is way down.
But both Governor Waltz and I want to make it better.
President Donald J. Trump.
Wasn't expecting that on my bingo card, but that's what we need to see, isn't it?
I think you need to see collaboration rather than this constant animosity and friction between federal and state officials.
Yeah, I mean, a very rare upside of Donald Trump is that he does backpedal.
Like when he gets into a heap of trouble, he oftentimes backs away from it.
That's what it looks like he's doing here.
So by mentioning Tom Homan, he's basically sidelining Christy Noam.
And that makes sense.
Christy Noam started treating American citizens like we were her dog.
Take us out to the gravel pit and shoot us.
And so she's way too extreme before she knew anything about this shooting.
She called Preddy a domestic terrorist, as she did with Renee Goode.
Everyone knows that he was an American citizen who was treating veterans, not a domestic terrorist.
It's sick to say that.
And now Trump wouldn't have minded any of that if it was popular, but it was intensely unpopular.
And he lost a lot of his own voters, let alone almost all independents with that.
So now he's saying, oh, I'm going to bring in Tom Homan and do a fresh start.
And part of the reason he's doing that is because he lost a tremendous number of the Republicans in Congress.
They were saying, hey, this is a bridge too far.
Again, not because it offended their moral sensibilities.
I don't know if they have any, but because they see it is very clearly deeply unpopular.
And as James Carville said earlier, they're going to get their clock cleaned in 2026.
So this is Trump doing a political adjustment.
And you could tell by how nice he's been to Tim Walz, let alone sending in Homan.
So yeah, he's going to start to back away because the American people hate what ICE is doing.
Yeah, we lost James Carville.
He slipped off.
It's a shame because I actually owe him some money from a bet that I lost to him, which given he's disappeared early, he's now not going to get.
Jeremy, I just wanted to, before we finish this, the big debate, obviously, in Davos about NATO as an organization.
Do you think it is sustainable going forward?
Absolutely, I do.
Yeah.
I mean, it's served us so incredibly well for so long.
It's the bedrock of our security.
And I really hope that it does continue.
I don't see any reason why it shouldn't.
I do believe the president's been right to give it a bit of a shake and get the European partners to contribute more.
And I'm glad to see that they are beginning to do so.
But it's been long overdue.
But yes, NATO must survive.
I believe it will survive.
And it will continue to be the bedrock of our security.
And given Rob O'Neill's very kind comments about the UK forces, would you like to return the favor, given that he's the man who killed Osama bin Laden, amongst many other things?
Well, I have the utmost respect for our American brothers.
They are the most wonderful soldiers and Marines, and I've never worked with finer people.
And all hats off to them for all that they do for their country and for NATO and for all our collective security.
So thanks.
Yeah, that's a good point right there, too.
And I think that I also wanted, even though James Carville's gone, I wanted to tell him Senate for Five, and I am a fan.
The point that I was trying to make with him is if we keep bringing up, we keep bringing up the old stuff like bone spurs and like, I'm pretty sure Bill Clinton and Al Gore didn't fight in Vietnam.
I know that George Bush was instrumental with the International Guard keeping the Viet Cong out of Houston.
But let's not pretend that our politicians at that level are going to go fight the wars either.
I think it comes back to telling the truth.
Just from this conversation right here, you can tell there's respect for the inner service, even rivalries.
And again, even interrupting James Carville's like, he's a Marine.
Tipping Point For Videos00:01:43
Maybe I can learn too.
You know what?
I think we've reached a bit of a tipping point here where videos being taken.
You know, it's a bit like the George Floyd, it's a bit like the ones we're seeing now.
There's a power to videos.
And what's become really bizarre is watching people, particularly in authority, trying to tell us what we've seen with our own eyes.
You know, they can't get away with it.
And the public are not going to put up with it.
Yes, there will be people on the partisan left and right who are going to play that partisan card and see what they want to see.
But actually, there's a lot of normal people in the United States and around the world who look at these videos and they can make their own minds up about what they're looking at.
And if you lie to them, your own credibility gets shredded because you can't lie to people about what they're watching with their own eyes.
And that is one of the things of modern technology.
Great to end on a positive note.
Unusual, but what a good start to the year, particularly after my own bone-crushing start.
So thank you all very much.
And Jeremy, you managed to survive your uncensored debut.
Don't leave us alone next time.
Okay.
Thanks all very much.
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