➡ The discussion revolves around the ongoing negotiations between Israel and the U.S. regarding potential action against Iran. The speaker suggests that Israel is pushing for more aggressive action, while the U.S. appears to be resisting. However, the speaker also points out that the U.S. has previously feigned negotiations while taking action. The speaker also discusses Iran’s nuclear program, suggesting that Iran may be willing to negotiate further restrictions on their nuclear program for sanctions relief, but also speculates that Iran may have secretly continued their nuclear program.
➡ The text discusses the complex political situation involving the U.S., Iran, and Israel. It suggests that Trump warned Iran against developing a new facility, which they stopped doing. However, the text also mentions the fear that if the U.S. attacks Iran, Iran might start developing nuclear weapons. The text also discusses the inconsistent messaging from the White House and the low support for a war with Iran among Americans.
➡ The text discusses the U.S. and Israel’s foreign policy, particularly towards the Middle East. It suggests that the U.S. has been supporting Israel’s interests, even to the point of backing groups like Al Qaeda if it hurts their enemies. The ultimate goal, according to the text, is to weaken or change the regime in Iran, either by installing a U.S.-friendly government or causing internal chaos. The text criticizes this approach, arguing it’s based on flawed assumptions and could lead to more instability in the region.
➡ The text discusses the complex political dynamics involving the U.S., Syria, Al Qaeda, and other entities. It highlights the U.S.’s controversial support for certain groups in Syria, including Al Qaeda, under the Obama administration. The text also discusses the potential consequences of a war with Iran, including high casualties among American forces. It ends by questioning the potential impact on U.S. support for Israel if a war breaks out and results in significant U.S. casualties.
➡ The text discusses the complex political dynamics between the U.S., Iran, and other Middle Eastern countries. It highlights the U.S.’s strategic decisions, such as allowing Iran to retaliate to maintain face, and the potential risks of trying to change Iran’s regime. The text also explores the potential consequences for regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Israel if Iran were to be destabilized. Lastly, it questions what advice should be given to President Trump regarding Iran, considering the intricate geopolitical landscape.
➡ The text suggests that Trump, due to his strong personality, could potentially negotiate peace with countries like Iran, North Korea, and China. It argues that instead of preparing for war, Trump should use his influence to make deals and establish peace, similar to how Nixon and Reagan did with China and Russia respectively. The text also criticizes the idea of maintaining a cold war with nuclear powers and suggests that Trump could work towards peace and normalization, even in places like North Korea. It concludes by saying that Trump’s common sense approach could be beneficial in these situations.
➡ The text discusses the potential of U.S. Presidents, like Trump, to use their power for good or bad. It mentions how past Presidents, such as Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, have used their influence to make significant changes. The author suggests that Trump could have used his power to make peace or wage war, depending on his whims. The text also criticizes the increasing power of the presidency and the lack of checks and balances, particularly in the post-World War II era.
➡ The text discusses the idea of reducing government size and military spending to boost prosperity, but acknowledges this could cause short-term economic hardship. It suggests that this approach, which aligns with constitutional principles, would require public acceptance of these temporary difficulties. The text also mentions that opportunities to choose this path have been missed in past elections. Finally, it ends with a thank you to the speaker for sharing his knowledge.

$50,000. I don’t know why you’re laughing. You’re a great stock trader. As I hear, Raskin, we have not downloaded the proper data, the correct, the true data into the minds of younger people. And we’ve assumed that they’re going to grow up intellectually curious and intellectually honest and that they will look for themselves. But they’re not. That’s the problem. Dr. Scott Hahn, one of the most respected Catholic theologians. He’s written over 50 books. He’s a biblical scholar, scholar, professor of church history. He said this stop carelessly leaving people anti Semites. Catholic Christianity does not in any way require you to embrace Zionism as a fulfilled prophecy.

Hello, everyone. My name is Edmond Dimash. I’m with the Trends Journal. I’m happy to be with Scott Horton today. He’s the head of the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, editorial director@antiwar.com and you can follow him on at Scott Horton show all one word on X. Scott, thanks for joining the Trends Journal. Thank you for having me again. Good to be with you. A lot to unpack in those quick little video clips. My my first question to you is Mike Huckabee. He’s back in town with Netanyahu to their meeting at the White House. Are all the reports are indicating that Israel is pushing for the US to take action against Iran.

Where do you see these discussions going? Where do you think we are? Trump came out yesterday saying that it’s kind of been inconclusive. There’s no been no determinations. At least that’s what I read last. What do you think’s happening behind the scenes, Scott, in, in these negotiations between Israel and the White House and war with Iran? Well, on the face of it, the Israelis are more hawkish than the Americans and almost always, especially on this issue, would be pushing for, you know, more activity sooner whether I guess the question is to what degree is the Trump administration just pretending to resist that or, you know, whether they intend to you know, the way they did it last June was they had a meeting scheduled for Sunday.

And so they started the bombing on, I think Friday, maybe it was Thursday. They were feigning ongoing negotiations and then literally blew that up. And so that goes to show, I guess, that we don’t know and we can’t assume that narratives coming out of the White House, such as in Axios, Barack Ravid is saying, well, Trump doesn’t really want to do it. He’s less committed and all of that. The only thing I’ll tell you, though, why that’s believable in a way though is because it would be crazy and stupid and wrong for him to do it.

It would be suicidal for his political fortunes in every way. And he’s got to know that. You know, a new poll came out and said only 40% of Republicans support an attack on Iran right now. And then, you know, 35 said, don’t know, that’s a pretty good cop out, but I’ll take it. You know, count your Blessings, man. That’s 10 solid points short of half do not support or do support the war. Right. And so 60% who refuse to say that they do. And just on the Republican side and of course independents and, and Democrats are against it.

Just if for no other reason for on the Democrat side, then Trump is the one doing it so good. I mean this is a solid like 70% super duper majority of this country does not want to do this. And so he has to know that somebody must have told him that this is not polling well. You know, and for anyone who knows anything about it, we can see that. Oh, come on. Demands that they give up all their mid range missiles. They’re not gonna do that. See, only they have. Yeah, what else do they have? Either, either you let Israel, you voluntarily destroy any deterrent you have and let Israel attack you later, or will attack you now.

That’s no ultimatum to make and no country is going to give in to that. And so that’s obviously made to be a poison pill. And I have to say, you know, it has been the Iranian position for a very long time that hell or high water, they are never giving up their nuclear program and it’s a matter of independence and sovereignty and they swear they’re not making a nuclear bomb. But then it’s pretty obviously a latent nuclear deterrent to have a completed uranium fuel cycle, an ongoing civilian enrichment program for their electricity reactors that could be very quickly converted to nuclear bomb capacity if they so chose.

That’s kind of the loophole in the non Proliferation Treaty and all of that. And they have maintained all that this whole time. And, but now. So last June, and I’m sorry if I’m repeating myself from your show from before, we may have talked about this, but essentially last June Trump called their bluff. I mean, Netanyahu did too, but Trump called their bluff and, and bombed Natanz and Fordo and so set back and, and the Isfahan conversion facility as well and really set their program back severely. So now it’s possible, it really is possible that they took the program underground.

They kind of said at the time they were going to develop a new facility and they were going to continue enriching uranium there. I think they have not reopened or, or gotten anything at Fordo or Natanz up and going again. All of that has been neutralized since the war last June. That’s a severe setback by just the conversion facility at Isfahan. They have to make a new one somewhere else. And this is the facility where you take the metal, the refined ore and convert it to uranium hexafluoride gas and then convert it back into metal again at a high, you know, enrich it as a gas and then convert it back into metal.

So all that enrichment is useless if you can’t convert it back to metal form to make fuel rods and stuff. Right. So it could be that Trump really did just call their bluff in a way that W. Bush never would. That just. No, actually I say I’m the world law and I say you may not have a civilian nuclear program of any kind or at least not with any enrichment. And if you try to enrich, I’ll just bomb me again. And I mean after all like America is the superpower and Iran ain’t. They have no match for that argument.

Right? So I’m not predicting. Well, I guess I’ll split it two ways. There’s some maybe major chance like whatever, however you quantify in double digit percentages that they have gone ahead and tried to break out toward a nuclear weapon underground in secret over the last year. I think there’s also probably a double digit chance that they feel like their bluff is called and that maybe they would even be willing to back down on enrichment or at least severely restrict enrichment much more than before or some kind of thing in order to appease the United States because they may not have a choice at this point, they want any sanctions relief whatsoever, then they’re under the strictest economic kind of embargo that we can inflict basically.

And so as, as we know their regime is in trouble over that. So yes, they may have already broken out toward a bomb and yes, they may not have and may be willing to negotiate a severe another further portion of their nuclear program away. And I think the administration, first of all the American people and the people of the world need not truly fear a civilian nuclear program as long as it’s safeguarded and inspected and we can verify all the non diversion of nuclear material. They signed the non Proliferation Treaty and promised to abide by all that.

All the hype you hear about their violations or technical things and small traces of this and that that they got when they bought the, in the centrifuges from Pakistan and whatever, all of the stuff has been accounted for, all the so called discrepancies and all that. You know, Trump should be willing to climb down on his ultimatum, you know, which by the way, he will, right? By phrasing it in the most maximal way, he’s actually climbing down he goes, no nuclear weapons. Oh, okay, well that’s great. That’s the deal that they already had signed over and over again and had already promised over and over again.

So that’s. But if by that he means no enrichment whatsoever, well that sure is a hell of a sticking point. And I wish I knew what to tell you. I, I’m not a good future predictor guy. I can tell you what happened before in the past, but those are sort of the stakes, right? Is, is America, Trump has bought Netanyahu’s line that they just cannot have enrichment at all. And again, they really did call their bluff to a severe degree last June and did set their pro. They didn’t obliterate, they did set their program back severely.

They may or may not have isolated whatever enriched material they already had. You know, the Iranians may or may not have moved it all out of there, but I’m not sure they have the facilities to enrich it to any higher grade. Oh, one more thing. This popped up in my head a minute ago and I was saying something else. Trump said either on True social or some kind of statement, I’m sorry, I don’t remember. The, the source was just in the last few weeks. Trump said that he knew just in the last maybe two weeks or one week even, that at some point they knew that the Iranians were trying to dig a new facility.

And he called them and told them, you better not or I’ll just bomb you. And they stopped. So in other words, hey, what are you going to do? It’s America and all our satellites versus you and your two dimensional country, you know what I mean? Like where we can see all of it. So, so according to him then their best intelligence now is that they are not doing that because when they started to, he warned them not to and they quit because they knew that they were poned. They knew that there was no point in trying.

Right? So that argues against the, that really mitigates against the fear that they actually have broken out toward a nuke. On the other hand, as all the anti war forces have warned all along, if you bomb them that’s when they will probably go ahead and break and break out towards a nuclear weapon. Because that was always the standoff was, if you make nuke, we’ll bomb you. And then they said, look, they never explicitly said this, but their posture with their nuclear program was, don’t bomb us, or you might convince us to go ahead and make atom bombs.

Right now we’re not. So that was the standoff. Don’t make nukes or we’ll attack you. Don’t attack us and we won’t make nukes. Well, now they weren’t making nukes and Trump went ahead and attacked him anyway and threw the balance of that whole standoff off. Right? But then again, Donald Trump is the 800 megaton gorilla and the Ayatollah is not. So in the scheme of things, you know, I’m not sure how far they may be willing to bend now just because of the, the facts on the ground, all their pride in face notwithstanding, like, what good is your nuclear program? What good one if you ain’t around to use it? Or if it is only it has to be so limited that it’s basically good for nothing or else America will start bombing again.

But then I guess Iran’s thinking, if we agree to this, if we neuter ourselves with our ballistic missile programs, you really have to have nothing, like you mentioned before, for any future attack from Israel. Oh, I don’t think there’s any chance of them giving that up. There’s no way. These are all red lines that these people are talking about. So how does Trump leave this and save face if the ballistic missile program still stands? How does he, how does he avoid the criticism from the pro Israel neocon wing of his party if he keeps the ballistic missile program in place? I think the good news is that he can just change his mind about whatever he wants.

He can just say whatever, whatever he wants, he can declare victory. When he loses, he just do whatever. Right. So you say whatever. You know, Mark Levin will be angry. But look, I, I think, I mean, whatever. Marco Rubio is the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State. So I don’t know exactly what the President’s being told and by who and how many different sources of information he’s getting on this stuff. I’m not, I’m not saying, oh, he has only the best intentions, only he’s the prisoner of Marco Rubio. I’m not saying that. But I’m just saying for even exactly who he is, he might be very limited in his information, might not be being told Some things about, you know, the overall state of the balance of power or.

Or any of the particulars. And he doesn’t really like particulars. For example, no enrichment one day, no nuclear weapons the next. Well, does he even know that? That’s, you know, there’s difference. And also, one minute, gym coach or something, he doesn’t really know what’s going on here. At one minute, it’s the protesters. This is why we’re interested in Iran. We’re protecting the protesters. We’re sending. Help is on the way. Then it’s back to the nuclear program. Then it’s the missile program. So even the messaging out of the White House has been really inconsistent, which could probably explain why the poll numbers are so low as far as American support for a war with Iran.

Because one minute they’re talking about these protesters, then Pompeo’s wishing the Mossad agents there a happy New Year, and then we have the missile program, and now it’s like, which one is it? Can we stick with one main reason? And that hasn’t happened yet. Do you. If you’re Israeli, if you’re. If you’re living in Israel, Scott, why do Israelis want this war? Why. Why. Why would they want to potentially have Iran unload its. Its weapons and missile capacity on Israel in the Middle east and other Gulf states? Are they. Don’t you think they should be afraid? I mean, if you’re pro Israel, shouldn’t you be pro? You know, let’s de.

Escalate. Or. Or is this the one chance they see with Trump in the White House, they have a very willing administration. They may never get this again. They think that Hezbollah is on the run. They think the proxies in the region are on the. Is this like their. Is this why they’re pushing it? They think this is their. This could be the coup de grace. Yeah, I mean, that’s it. You know, think about what all can be rationalized with just the phrase this is war. So, yep, I’m gonna take some hits. But this is the big prize.

The terror masters in Tehran, as Michael Ledeen called them back a generation ago, you know, and they do support Hezbollah, and I don’t know about. I think their support for Hamas is probably pretty overblown since Hamas sided with the revolution in Syria against Assad there. Supposedly, they started backing them again with some money. But it’s not like there’s a port in Gaza where Iran can pull up a ship full of weapons or whatever. They can smuggle a few in under the border in Egypt or whatever through some tunnel, but in a very limited way, you know, very light arms and stuff.

So not really, you know, I think their support for Hamas is really exaggerated. But you know, I think it’s fair to argue, right, that Hezbollah in Lebanon has, is sort of like Iran’s 51st state, which Nasrala was a very powerful and charismatic leader and whatever, so you could call him a very powerful and influential governor of Iran’s 51st state over there. But they were like very beholden and part of, and ingrained with the Iranian revolution there and the, the whole Shiite revolution of that era and all that. So and then, you know, Iran did a lot to support them, you know, for many years, you know, financially and with weapons, you know, by way of Syria and all that.

So this is, even if you go back to the original Clean break strategy about that David Worms or and Richard Pearl wrote for Benjamin NETANYAHU Back in 1996 of why it would be in Israel’s interest and America’s interest to get rid of Saddam Hussein is this. They had a hair brain scheme for how this was supposed to work. But the end goal, to skip the hair brain part, the end goal was to break this terrible Shiite Axis alliance of power between Tyran, Damascus and Beirut. And so the Iraq war of course backfired because it ended up just putting Iran’s best friends from Skiri and Dawa in power in that civil.

And so that backfired and only empowered Iran there by getting rid of Saddam Hussein. And then so that was why Obama started back in the jihadists in Syria in his time was to build a new kind of Sunni roadblock to Iranian power there. If we can’t, if we just put Iran up two pegs in Baghdad, we got to take them down a peg in Damascus by getting rid of Assad. The problem was, if you remember what happened back when you were talking 15 to 10 years ago under Obama, was they built up Al Qaeda in Syria hoping that they would depose Assad or at least pressure Assad into somehow resigning and compromising on some new regime or whatever, when instead they decided to go east and the Islamic State broke off from Syria and Syrian Al Qaeda and the more Iraqi dominated faction went ahead and invaded western Iraq and conquered it and created the Islamic State caliphate.

And so, oops, then we had to launch Iraq, Iraq War 3 in order to destroy the Bin Ladenite caliphate that we had inadvert. Well, so maybe half inadvertently built it up into that mess in order to spite the Shiites that we wished we hadn’t empowered in Iraq War two. And so this is in other words when I say David Worms and Richard Pearl, in other words the neoconservatives, although really Pearl is Wormser was actually just academic type and not actually a car carrying neocon, but a fellow traveler type. But anyway they were putting Israel’s interest first.

And, and they have been this whole time. And you can see, you know, in my book enough already I talk about how in fact, because the story of what Obama did in Syria sounds so crazy that he would back the bin Laden head chopper suicide bombers for years and years and years like that in the highest reason you could possibly imagine, make Benedict Arnold look like George Washington. Just crazy. I, I actually introduced that chapter with just quote after quote after quote after quote of Obama and Hillary and Biden and, and Sullivan and all of their people explaining Jamie Rubin who’s very close to the Clintons writing in foreign policy.

And I have all of them explaining why they’re doing this. And it’s because this is what Israel wants. Because Americans might die at the hands of Al Qaeda, but Israelis die at the hands of Hezbollah. And so America’s policy is to do whatever Israel wants and even to the degree of supporting Al Qaeda and ultimately the Islamic State if it hurts the Shiites. So long way of saying going after the Ayatollah in Tehran, that’s check mate, game over and Israel finally wins. In fact, I wrote an article in 2025I’m pretty sure at the end of 05 for anti war.com call will bush start another war? And it was, the premise was oops, we empowered Iran’s best friends in Baghdad.

But you know how you could fix that? Get a regime change in Tehran and then it doesn’t matter that you put the old Ayatollah’s friends in power, you can somehow fix that mistake. Instead they decided to go after Assad. One country to the west instead of common E one country to the east. But this is like essentially the ultimate culmination of the, the Clean Break slash, you know, seven countries document sort of setup. And by the way, it was in my first debate with Wesley Clark. Not my first. Well, we sort of had an accidental debate, but then we had a real debate on Purse Morgan televised.

Was it, is it on, Was it on YouTube? Yes, it was. That would have been in December of 24, right after Al Qaeda took over Syria. And, and I’m sorry, I lost my train of thought there. You were talking about the seven countries that they wanted to collapse thank you. And yes, he was. That was in that interview. He definitely connected the Wolfowitz Doctrine, the Clean Break doctrine and the seven countries document all as one big thing, essentially, yes. Inspired by Likud, that this is Israeli policy is what it’s all about. Get rid of all these former Soviet backed countries in the Middle east means smash the Arab states into smaller pieces.

If you read the Clean Break and the companion piece, Coping with Crumbling States, the problem is we have these big states, you know, when they’re made up of these smaller forces and we’d be, it’d be easier to manage them. And then they completely hallucinated that they would be able to somehow dominate the Iraqi Shiites and make them lorded over all the other Shiites in the region and make things better for Israel that way. Which of course was a fool’s errand. But go ahead. Is the, is the ultimate goal. I hear a lot of analysts, people who I listen to say that the goal isn’t about the ballistic missile or the ballistic missile program or the nuclear program.

The real goal is to see the collapse of Iran, whether or not it’s the regime, regime change or just fracturing the country into little splinters from in each region, regional country. Do you think that’s like all this talk about these oh, we. The protest missiles. Is this just a waste of time? Is, is the real goal here at the end of the day, either a regime change that we put in a US puppet or the fracture of Iran. Are those the two real goals? The way you see it, yeah, you want to peel the onion. So, you know, it’s hard to.

And, and I really should read the bad guys in the Post, the Times in the Journal every morning. You know, it’s the worst part of my job, but you got to do it kind of thing. So I, I might be able to know more about that if I just even paid attention to those racks. Because that is who the government talks to, after all, you know. But you know, in Iraq War two, it was supposed to be easy and then it turned into a nightmare and they thought, oh yeah, no, a nightmare is a good plan B.

You know, if we can’t pwn the Iraqis, we’ll at least break them into warring tribes and make them weaker. Right? From the Israeli point of view, who do you want to fight? A state with a mechanized armored division and air force and a chemical weapons storehouse or like a barefoot tribesman with an AK47, you know what I mean? It’s just go ahead and you know, it’d be easy way to be the most dominant state in the regions, to not even have states, just have weak and warring tribes all around us. You know, that goes back to the Oded yanon Plan from 1981.

But I think. I’m pretty sure they’re conflicting arguments here. But I’m. I’m fairly certain that when they went into Iraq, it was supposed to be easy. They were going to tell the Shiites what to do, and then the Shiites were going to tell all the rest of regional Shiites what to do, and everything was going to be happily ever after. But then, no, you know, they really misjudged that, I think. And then chaos was plan B, or just the result of what they did, in fact, was what it was. And. But they were happy enough with that, I guess, in Iran.

Look, I think if they thought that they could just parachute the old shah’s son in there to be the monarch, and then the various people of the country would say, finally, the monarch has come to save us from the Ayatollah, just like we always wanted, or whatever, then they, I think, would do that. Well, it depends on who’s they, right? Because, you know, there are some people maybe who prefer chaos and others would prefer stability and, you know, think a regime change could lead to it mistakenly or what. You hear that from some, but I think if you look at that protest movement that you mentioned there carefully, and this is even in the Wall Street Journal, you can see how.

Yeah, no, CIA is backing pjak. They call him just Pack or Piak or something. I think they dropped the J. But it’s the Kurdish Communists, you know, the PKK in Turkey, they’re the YPG in Syria. And in, you know, they. There were PKK from time to time in northern Iraq, but northern Iraq is really ruled by separate clans that are not Marxists, but. And these guys are sort of pseudo Marxists. But anyway, the pkk, the ypg, and they’re called PJ in Iran, and it was in the Wall street journal. I’m like, 99 sure on that source, man.

It’s in my brain. I’m almost certain it was the Wall Street Journal where they’re like, yeah, we’re backing Kurdish rebels rising up against Iran heroically. Isn’t that great to announce to the world that we’re doing. But that gives away the whole game that these people who are chanting death to the Ayatollah, they’re the worst traitors you can imagine. Like, just think of how bad of a tyranny America would have to be before you were inviting the Chinese or the Russians or the British or someone to come and invade our country. Maybe put some baby blue helmet UN peacekeepers on our streets to keep to change our regime and fix everything up for us.

Anyone who did that, speaking of Benedict Arnold, we’d string them up on behalf of our evil regime that we hate and also want to overthrow. We’re not going to invite foreigners to come and intervene in our domestic political rule that way. Are you crazy? And then. But you can see how from the point of view of the Israelis and the CIA, I don’t know if there’s a difference there or not. That may be just redundant, but I’m not exactly sure how that relationship works, quite honestly. But you know, seemingly they’re all perfectly happy to pour millions of dollars in weapons into the mujahideen cult communist terrorist culture to groups of rampaging monarchists.

I mean just think about. Yes, America is backing the monarchist insurrection, trying to overthrow the theocracy wherever it is. I mean for God’s sake. Which it is a very flawed republic by the way. They have a bicameral legislature and an independent judiciary. You know what I mean? It’s not perfect, but look who’s talking from flawed republic headquarters here. You know, and so. But it, they do have regular elections and I’m, it’s whatever. I’m not apologizing for it. But having monarchists overthrow that. Yes, they do have a supreme leader theocrat on top, no question. But to have monarchists overthrow that.

Oh, and like some guy in Texas and some guy in Virginia or something, wherever you’re at, we agree that that’s what’s best for them. That’s crazy. And, and then supporting Pjak communists and then are we also now going to support John Dolla suicide bomber head chopper bin Ladenite crazies like Obama did in fact as, as W. Bush did too back John Dolla and that was when it started was under W. Bush and Obama continued it. Those guys were pure bin Ladenite savages suicide bombers. Look how we now support Al Shara from, from Syria. He’s in the White House taking pictures with Trump because remember what’s his name? Sullivan wrote an email that there are terrorists.

Right? It was something along those lines. He says, look, AQ is on our side in Syria on our side. See what happened was it was in. I’m pretty sure it was in December of 2011 that. No, no, no. It would have been January of 12. I think that I’m Al Zawahiri the new leader by then of Al Qaeda after bin Laden’s death. But his partner in Al Qaeda, the former leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, he put out a thing saying all good true Muslims should rise up and overthrow Bashar al Assad and the Baathists in Syria.

And that made Reuters and anti. This was in emails that were FOIA by Jason Leopold, the journalist not linked to WikiLeaks, but they are posted on WikiLeaks, but Jason Leopold was the one who got them. And what happens is Sullivan sends an email to Hillary Clinton with that article attached and he, he makes a few different points in the email, but then he says, and lastly, look, al Qaeda is on our or he says, AQ is on our side in Syria. And if you’re searching that there’s a space between the A and the Q, that’s the way he wrote it.

It’s on WikiLeaks. You can find it very easily. And, and then what’s interesting about that too is that she did an interview with Wyatt somebody from CBS News at the end of February. And on I’m going to say it’s February 28th, I think, so I’m pretty sure it’s February 28th of 2012. And she does this interview. She’s Secretary of State again at the time, working for Obama. And she’s interviewed by Wyatt somebody or other from cbs. And he says, why aren’t we doing more to help the terrorist insurrection here, you know, the bin Laden night crazies? And she says, because that was the entire frame at the time.

Now she was more hawkish and she was trying to convince Obama to escalate more than he already was, which he was guilty as sin, don’t get me wrong. But his almost entire government wanted him to be even worse than he was on this. But she is in this position. She’s defending his reluctance to go all the way on behalf of these kooks. And so she says, listen, you know, we have, oh, and by the way, this is just after, maybe it’s the next day or it’s two days after it’s in the book. It’s either one day or two days after a big failed meeting in, was it in Tunisia somewhere in North Africa, I guess in Tunisia, they had had a big meeting, the Friends of Syria, to try to come up with a new regime to take over.

And they just couldn’t. They didn’t have anything like the bare bones of a government in exile that they could really credibly put forward. And so she admits that to Him. She says, listen, when we look for who’s prepared to take power instead and replace Assad, I’m, I’m poorly paraphrasing this part, but it’s the same thing. We don’t see that. That part’s the quote. We don’t see that somebody prepared to take over, right? And then she says, and look, Hamas. Now she’s almost like, desperate, right, for an excuse. She’s making excuses for why we’re not doing a regime change.

Look, Hamas is supporting the revolution in Syria. Al Qaeda is supporting the revolution in Syria. Are we supporting Hamas? Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria? And now the answer is, yes, we are. And she’s right to insist that, only she doesn’t mean it. Her idea is, yeah, we should back Al Qaeda in Syria, but she’s using that as the excuse in this public TV interview of why Obama’s not doing more in defending his position. Now, if I can give the devil her due a little bit here, there was an argument that, no, we want to back the moderates, and the moderates will marginalize all the extremists and the regime and all their foreign allies in Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, whoever, and they’ll hold the bin Ladenites at bay, too.

But that was total nonsense. And Obama himself said to Thomas Friedman in an interview in the New York Times that it was a total fantasy that you had something like a militia of, as they would always put it, doctors and lawyers and teachers and pharmacists and regular people, not only regular people, but regular people to a liberal Democrat. Right? Get it. Professionals from the neighborhood, from their very nice neighborhood. Those would be the people who would lead the revolution over there. Right? Which is just completely crazy. I mean, they were Al Qaeda in Iraq already flooding across the border to lead the thing with the full rubber stamp endorsement of Aman Al Zawahiri.

And so instead of her saying, boy, I made a really good argument on CBS today for why we shouldn’t be doing this, she continued to be horrible on it for the next year and continue to encourage Obama to make it worse. And then one year and five months later, the Islamic State broke off from Al Qaeda. And one year after that, they invaded western Iraq and conquered it and created the caliphate. Scott, I want to get back to before you mentioned, Trump and his presidency wouldn’t survive this war with Iran or be badly damaged. It could be.

That’s not even considering the, the casualties that could occur for the US Troops if there is a major war with Iran. So that’d be part of it, yeah. What do you think would happen in the United States? I mean you saw in the beginning clip with Carrie Pran Bowler talking about support for, for is for Zionism with Catholics and we see support for Israel at least among the conversations being questioned and people getting very defensive over it. What, what would happen to the country in your view if a war does break out and hundreds of US soldiers begin dying, God forbid, in, in a war, how fast would that, how fast would the support for Israel diminish? I mean I, I don’t know.

I would expect if, if we have a worst case scenario where the Ayatollah, unlike last June, gives the command, fire everything we got. This is it boys. They’re coming for us all and they decide to shoot everything they’ve got, then yes, that very well could lead to extremely high casualties among American forces. Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe they have a plan where, nope, they’re going to put a bunker buster here, here, here, here and here on the first wave and Iran is just going to be, their missile capability is going to be so eroded that it’s going to be just fine shooting down the rest, whatever.

Sometimes they convince themselves maybe they could get a nuclear first strike on Russia. Surely they think they could get a conventional first strike on Iran. So maybe they could talk themselves into it. And maybe they’re right. I mean American technology kicks the Iranians ass. Now obviously China I think is already said to be providing them with some intelligence. I don’t know how far they’re willing to go in supporting them. The Russians have supposedly given them some new anti aircraft although I don’t know how effective and I don’t know how many really it seemed like Israel and the United States had no problem, you know, taking out their anti aircraft and going where they wanted last year.

But and honestly, you know, I mean they say that like boy, in the name of martyrdom, Ayatollah would love to just go down fighting and even if that means bringing his whole country down, it’s like that’s what they’re for, is self sacrifice as part of their religious thing and that it could go that far. I don’t know that that’s true. He seems to have been very cautious and conservative in his foreign policy in terms of dealing with the United States and trying to keep his people out of trouble, you know, within limits. Again, they have not been willing to give up enrichment for sanctions relief this whole time.

But he has also. The worst thing he ever did in our century was accept Baghdad when Bush handed it to Him, Right, and so whatever, you know what I mean, you can, you can blame him for exploiting that as cynically as he could, but whatever. I mean, anyway, I’m sorry, I was about to go on a whole thing about that again. But point is that, look at last June, they took it on the chin, man. Trump bombed them 14 times. And then they called and go, look, we’re gonna fire 14 missiles at your base. Shoot them down.

Okay, this is the base and this is what time we’re gonna fire. You know, they. And just enough to save face. Just enough to prove that like, hey, we, we’re not pacifists. You can’t push us around. Watch. And then that was it. Because even us agree to it. Why the US Agree to that? Then why, if, if the US Was in such a dominant position, why would, why wouldn’t the US Just tell Iran, you launch those missiles and we’ll do it again? Like, does that show a certain level of respect between Washington and Tehran? The fact that the US did allow them to do that, or at least the, the very real fear of us and the American people that, you know, we broadly divine, not including me, will tolerate the kidnapping of a president here if nobody gets shot down, you know what I mean? And hell, maybe even dropping a 2,000 pound bomb on the Ayatollah, but don’t send in the 82nd and try to, what, build a new nation there.

But then, so this is, you have to imagine, part of the argument all along has been, in fact, Marco Rubio admitted this himself to Congress. He said, we do not have someone to replace the current government with. In other words, I don’t think, I didn’t watch the entire clip, quite honestly, but I did see the, the piece about it with a partial quote or whatever. But implicitly he’s clearly saying he does not believe that we can install the monarchy there, that they would have the support of the people. Remember what Trump said about installing the right wing in Venezuela? He said, oh, she just doesn’t have the popular support of the people.

We have to go with the next communist in line because there’s nobody else to go with. Because if we try to put the right winger in there, the whole place is going to fall apart and we’re not going to do that. We don’t want that. So, and you know, he even said in his interview with the New York Times, they did an extended interview with him. They sat in the whole office with him for two hours. He’s so desperate to please Maggie Haberman, of all people. Or whatever. But in there he said, boy, that was really risky.

That could have gone very bad. That could have been like Operation Eagle Claw, where a bunch of guys got killed. That was when Jimmy Carter tried to rescue the hostages in Iran in 1990. I forget if it was late 79 or early 80. I need to go back and read that. I’m stupid, but I think it was late 79. He tried and failed. And it was just a total humiliation for the United States that their elite troops got, you know, bogged down in a sandstorm and one helicopter crash into one of the planes out in the desert, and they were just pwned.

They couldn’t do it. They had to retreat and the whole thing fell apart. So Trump remembers that from when he was young, right? They’re like, boy, did he not want to be Jimmy Carter. And that’s how you got to put things to. To Trump, right? Man, you don’t want to be W. Bush or Carter, so maybe you should try being Ron Paul. You know what I mean? You got to give him like a. Somebody to emulate, you know, but. So that was the way he put it to them, that he was. He was really taking a risk, and he knew it.

Well, there is no equation for how to change the regime in Iran from this one to a new, different one. Right. You can back Jandala and Mek and P. Jack and monarchists on the ground, and then they could potentially. I don’t know what you’d have to give them for them to be able to potentially somehow bring down the regime. Maybe they could, but then I would expect a war of all against all between not the people of the country, but those crazy groups who lead the fight with this treasonous support of foreign powers, you know, against not just their own government, but against their own country, really.

And I don’t know about Persian nationalism, man. You know, the. The Shiite Persians are the majority of the country, but I don’t even know that they’re the super majority. They may be the super majority. You may know better than that. But I know that there are a lot of Arabs in the southwest as well as in. There are Sunnis in the east. I mean, the Arabs are Sunnis in the southwest, they’re Sunni Balukis in the east, there are Kurds and Aeris in the north. And from the point of view of foreign intelligence, you know, America and Israel, they want to support all those groups and help those groups, you know, stabilize, you know.

Yeah. Destabilize and divide and conquer their power, you know, Remember when you first learned about the Conquistadors turning the Indian tribes against each other and you thought, wow, but couldn’t they tell that that was a bad idea? But like, nope, they had those grudges. They wanted to fight them out and they’ll take even the support of the Spanish to do it. And of course, they’re next to the sword. Hey, hey, Scott, I want to hear your opinion on this. We all know about Greater, the Greater Israel Project. Smote Rich, who’s, like, who’s. He’s always identified as the Israeli extremist.

When people are talking about Israeli extremists, he’s mentioned it. And there was one point, Netanyahu was interviewed about the Greater Israel and whether or not he wants to achieve that, and he, he kind of demurred. He was, he wasn’t really completely upfront with his opinion, but he kind of smirked, indicating that, wink, wink. If you’re Saudi Arabia, if you’re Egypt, if you’re Jordan, and you see, let’s say, for example, Iran taken out of the picture, let’s say, let’s say it’s successful in neck, the country is destroyed. Do you think, in, do you think the Saudis would be concerned giving Israel full reign power over the region? And does Iran serve these countries a purpose in just being there? Do what do you think? Do you think these countries watch this with little concern that Israel will become too strong? Or do you think they just are happy to see Iran a competitor and a potential enemy, defeated? Good question.

I mean, the, all the reports are that the locals are warning against it, but that could all be lies. You know what I mean? They might very well be egging Trump on behind the scenes and just saying that. On the other hand, again, just like with Trump, there’s very good reason for him to not do it, and there’s very good reason for them to warn him not to do it. I think, you know, you might even wonder whether Netanyahu, I maybe not. He seems pretty damn committed, but you could see why he might not be. You can see why he might worry because having Iran there helps to force all those Sunni kings into his camp that like, hey, we all got Iran in common.

And in fact, man, I don’t even think I say this. I wonder if I could find this or maybe some of your audience knows or whatever. I’ll have to find it again. Somebody sent me, it was on archive.org and they had good sourcing and stuff. And it was a document from the 80s. I’m pretty sure it Was the, it was an American assessment of Israel’s assessment, maybe, like, with. It must have had heavy quotes in it, you know, but it was, you know, Israel supporting Iran in the Iran Iraq war and America supporting Iraq. And in this memo, they’re saying, we don’t really want for our support for Iran to go too far.

We don’t want them to win the war and take Baghdad. You know, that would give them way too much power. We would prefer to do this stalemate. But if on the off chance that, you know, Ronald Reagan doesn’t calibrate his support for Saddam Hussein’s side quite enough and Iran is able to get that advantage and take Baghdad, well, that would be okay for us, too, really, because it would really give all the Sunni kings a reason to want to suck up to us if Iranian Shiite power had been expanded to such a great degree. Well, so that is the situation since 2003, since George W.

Bush took the Iranian revolution to Baghdad. I mean, so it really is like a chess game, Scott. I mean, not to sound cliche, but it’s like, it’s amazing all the, the moves and, you know, you think about one side. My last question is if you were, if you, let’s say you mentioned before how, how Rubio is juggling those two top jobs with the national intelligence guy and I’m sorry, national advisor, security advisor, and secretary of State. If you were Trump’s national security advisor, what would you tell him right now with Iran? And what would you, what would you recommend that he does from this point right now? So we’re at, we’re negotiating with Iran right now where he may be sending another carrier group to the region.

There’s one there now. Bases evidently are being, are prepared to take strikes if they need to. I think missiles are on, like, their launch pads around the region. So we’re at the cusp of what seems to be war. If you were his advisor, what would you tell. And you could, what would, what would you tell Trump that he should do and from this point now? Well, I would. The first thing I would remind him, and this is something I should really say in every interview that I ever do, for people to understand that only Nixon could go to China.

You know, imagine Walter Mondale negotiating with Gorbachev to give up 90% of our nuclear weapons or what, 80 or something. Percent of our nuclear weapons. Right. We could never tolerate that. But Nixon can shake hands with Mao and Reagan can shake hands with Gorbachev. Trump can shake hands with Ayatollah because he’s man enough because he’s big and tall and successful and wealthy and macho and great. He’s Trump the Great. That’s why he ain’t scared of no ayatollah. And he can go over there and make a deal with this guy the same as any other man in this world.

If Donald Trump is 112ft tall, then what does he have to fear from any man? And with that frame of reference, then just get on Air Force One and first of all tell the navy to sail back two or three horizons away and then get on Air Force One and go to Tehran, demand an air Runway at Tehran International Airport and say, I want to meet with the President and then I want to talk to the Ayatollah, let’s do this. And then from there he ought to be able to go to Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang and just make peace with all of America’s so called rivals in the world.

You know what are we going to do a regime change in Korea next? Or just make a deal with the guy? Because you know what, what goes on inside of North Korea, you could describe it however you want. Tragic would be to say the very least of those poor people’s plight. But it doesn’t serve America’s interest to maintain a cold war against a nuclear power on the Korean peninsula right now when there is no Soviet Union or Communist China standing behind them in a way like anything, like in the Cold war days. Trump already likes Kim.

Trump already crossed over the DMZ onto the northern side of the line and shook hands and smiled. We are. And John Bolton doesn’t work for him anymore. Right. And so he could just do nothing but move forward with peace in Korea. What do you want to do? You want to, let’s do this, let’s do that. It, here’s what it comes down to. Stephen Began gave a big speech and said, you know what, we don’t have to put denuclearization first. This is Bush and Obama’s poison pill. We won’t talk to you unless you promise to give up all your nuclear weapons first.

And then we’ll talk to you about any other thing. Well, you see how it’s completely stupid. What a red line, what a red pill that is, or you know, poison pillow deal that cannot possibly be accepted. That is. Well, Stephen Began, who worked for Trump in the first administration, said, well, we don’t have to do that. You know what, let’s just talk about normalization, let’s talk about a real peace treaty to finally end the Korean War. Let’s talk about maybe even steps toward reunification and warming up of relations, because let’s be realistic. They’ve got a few dozen nukes at least by now, and they’re not just going to hand them over to you, not without a hell of a sweet deal.

And. And they’re certainly not going to give them up in the hopes of a sweet deal. Okay, Come on. So. And then what they do, they drop that. They said, forget Stephen Vegan, he has to sit in the back and John Bolton gets to sit at the table and ruin everything. But they could undo that. Donald Trump could see a North Korea deal through tomorrow for all I know. He’s working on one right now. He ought to be. His NSC should be hard at work on North Korea right now to make things better. There’s. And then the same thing for whatever are outstanding issues with China.

There’s no reason in the world we have to have this, oh, thudicity’s trap where they’re the rising power and we’re the falling one, so we have to attack them. Because somebody said that because it happened one time in some other place. The whole thing is completely stupid. And, and you know what Donald Trump himself said one year ago before all the courtiers in his ear reminded him that that’s not how it works around here. He said we should slash our military budget in half and we should make a deal with Russia and China where they all slash their military budget in half.

And then you know what we should do? We should slash our nuclear weapons arsenals way, way down, too, and we’ll just have a deal. And you know what? I think I don’t want to pivot from the Middle east to Russia and China. Great power conflict. How about we just don’t pivot to anyone? How about we just take care of ourselves and then we just have for the rest of the century we just trade with everyone and be prosperous and great. Like, he really said that. That’s a very close paraphrase to what he said. We don’t have to have great power competition instead of the terror war.

We could have none of that. We could just send. He said it in February 2025, like weeks into his office. And I remember our. The Trench Journal covered it and we were like, celebrating, oh, my God, could this be true? I mean, a president talked about cutting the military budget in half, you know, and he wasn’t being insincere, it’s just, he was. The problem is he was just musing. And then, oh, yeah, all those interests that have to be satisfied. All those things I got to do. So, you know, he ain’t, you know, Thomas Jefferson or Ron Paul, but, you know, he does to give him his credit on this.

Like, for example, he looked at Afghanistan. He didn’t really know the difference between Pashto and a Tajik or any of that. He just said, here’s the land far away, very big, very rugged terrain with wild men who are armed and have the home field advantage and, in fact, the mountaintop advantage. And so, like, what’s the point of this? It’s a money pit. It’s a bad investment. He didn’t have to be all bleeding heart humanitarian. It’s so wrong that we’re killing these poor Afghans in the name of building a new society for them and all this crazy stuff, which was completely crazy and wrong.

But. But, like, what do you need Donald Trump to play a violin and be all sentimental for you? How about this? We’re wasting money on a stupid mission that cannot be accomplished. Like, I’m sorry, I actually did title my first book Fool’s Errand. In other words, this ain’t gonna work. Regardless of, you know, wherever you fall on what you think is more immoral, trying to stay and fix it somehow or whatever. That ain’t gonna work ever. You’re just making it worse by staying is a fact. Donald Trump could recognize that and called it off. Now, Biden was the one who botched the dismount, but Donald Trump, to his credit, he sent, it’s unbelievable, really, the card carrying literal neoconservative henchman Zame Khalilzad over there to make a deal with the Taliban, to exclude Kabul and to make a deal with the Taliban.

You stop shooting our guys and give us time to get out of here, and we will get out of here, man. No one else wanted to make that deal. Donald Trump said, screw this. Why are we doing this? So this is his instinct, right? It isn’t his deep philosophy. Ron Paul wrote a whole book about it or whatever. It’s just Donald Trump going, this seems stupid to me. Well, you could see how he would also think it’s stupid that we would have to always have a fight with Iran. It’s stupid that we got to always have a fight with Russia.

It’s stupid that we got to have a big contest with China. Aren’t they our biggest trading partner and our second now, or what? Like, and what are we going to do? The planet Earth ain’t big enough for us and Chinese civilization or we’re going to have to figure it out, man. You know, I don’t know. So that kind of common sense stuff is totally available to Donald Trump and he speaks that way enough that you know, he at least understands when he then turns around and does the wrong thing anyway, quite frankly, it’s makes it worse kind of.

Scott, my last thing you mentioned about Nixon immediately going to China. Are you suggesting that you think Trump is uniquely gifted in having the personality or presence. He’s a Republican. Right. George W. Bush could have gone to Baghdad too. George W. Bush, I heard you tried to kill my dad and Saddam and say I swear to God, that’s a bunch of crap. It’s a whiskey smuggling ring. Had nothing to do with it. I’ve never. And like whatever. And they could just be friends again. Or he could have sent Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld over there. Donald, we got Donald Rumsfeld on film shaking hands with Saddam Hussein back when he’s trying to get him to build a pipeline to the port of Aaba.

So and promising him support for his side of the war back in 1983. They could have sent and by the way, the Secretary of state at the time was the former four star general and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell. You might think he would be tough enough to go and deal with Saddam Hussein and if not him, then fine. The gruff, meaner than Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld absolutely could have gone over there and said listen Saddam, it’s you and me against Bin Laden. You keep the bin Ladenites down and I won’t kill you, but also I want you to do these other things for me.

Whatever, whatever. And Saddam Hussein would have rolled over and, and begged and played dead if they told him to. At that point he did try to surrender in every way and, and it’s absolutely why it was okay for Nixon to deal with Mao. If anybody else did it, Nixon would have called him a commie. So everyone knew that when Nixon did it, it’s not because he’s a commie, it must be because he and Kissinger have just decided this is real politic, this is in America’s national interests to stop having a cold war with China and split them away from the Soviets.

Nobody thought, well maybe some people on the right really did, you know, but by and large in America the narrative was not, oh, Nixon bows down to the ChiComs. It was Nixon knows what he’s doing. This is a great accomplishment. Right. And the New York Times that hated his guts praised the move and said it was the right thing to do, you know, and then same thing with Gorbachev. Ronald Reagan went over there and I don’t. Not the expert about this, but I’ve read about the first time they ever met. I hope this is right, the first time they ever met.

Ronald Reagan’s there and he’s wearing his big kind of trench coat and he’s got his cowboy hat on and he’s just like a full head and a half taller than Gorbachev or something. And he just walks right up to him and gives him a big old handshake and says, you know, when the aliens attack your guys and our guys, we’re gonna have to team up to fight them and defend the Earth. And then Gorbachov doesn’t know what to say. Like, okay, I guess we will, right? Like, ah, whatever. And then. But from that point, they’re friends.

And Ronald Reagan is Ronald Reagan from horseback in the big screen thing that you’ve seen, right? So he’s macho enough that he can deal with the chicoms. Imagine Walter Mondale trying to deal with the, I mean, pardon me, the. With the Soviets. Imagine Walter Mondale going, yeah, let’s negotiate away all our nuclear stockpile or whatever. But no, Reagan and Bush senior could do that and did do that, you know, so same thing here. Donald Trump can go, look, I’m Trump the great. I am Trump the wealthy, I am Trump the successful. I am Trump the great Peacemaker.

And go around and make peace. He could just do it. He could just do it. He could be a great warlord or he could be the great peacemaker, just depending like on maybe the last person who talked to him or you know, maybe just like his, whatever he imagines he wants to be remembered as. I mean he, he clearly is so interested in going down in history in a way like all this flirting with taking Greenland and he’s building this giant Arch of Triumph in Washington, you know, like they have in Paris or whatever this thing like he wants, which is a pretty stupid legacy lead.

A big concrete thing, dude. How about, how about like concrete things for the people? Figuratively, things you could do, things you could stop doing, you know, stuff like that. But, but anyway, yes, I think, look, if you’re the President of the United States, the world is yours, man. You know, you get your, your power is almost unlimited other than, I guess, the degree to which you’re hemmed in by your own regime. But you know, the implied powers in Article 2 there, man, are pretty severe. And, and you can see especially in the post World War II era and hell, whatever, it’s steadily increasing all the time.

The power of the imperial presidency. You see Donald Trump, Justice Joe Biden and Obama and Bush before, and Clinton before him, they all just write executive orders all day long. Congress just check, check with the wars, the, no, no, no going through Congress. They do what they want. Any military action. That means sitting in that same chair behind that same desk and calling out, you do this, you do this, you do this, man, you got, you’re really like in charge of the rudder of the world empire. And there’s a lot of difference that can be made there.

And I know people say, oh no, the President’s just a figurehead and oh, you think voting is, means anything? Whatever. Well, boy, you, you sure are right. I mean, Trump is probably the most rogue president we’ve had and he’s still one of Hillary Clinton’s friends, like from that same social circle basically, even though he was not a Bush or a Clinton. And he does differ with them on some things and certainly he’s made some great enemies out of the worst of them. So I give him credit for that, that and that kind of thing. But, and, and it’s true that especially in his first term that the, the regime itself went to war against him with the Russia gate hoax and Ukraine impeachment and all of that in order to really prevent him from ever exercising his true authority as president in foreign policy and all.

First term in a really bad way. Yeah, in his first term. But you know, it seems like that’s what’s going to happen if Democrats take over Congress again. Yeah, it’ll be much harder for him to do the right thing. I mean, they’ll probably always be worse than him on everything, demanding that he also be worse too and challenging him for not being bad enough just like that CBS reporter. Why aren’t we doing more to back okay to Hillary? Like that’s the only thing they can do is be to the worst of everyone and demand, you know, that they get worse.

So that’ll be, you know, a huge part of, of what he has to deal with going forward. And, but it just sucks because he’s really wasted at least his first year doing a lot of wrong things and, and even in things that, you know, like he finally had consensus for reversing all the illegal immigration, the mass migration really. And then he blew that by sending stormtroopers out in such a ham handed way. I don’t know if you saw the headline today, they’re scaling back all their ice Enforcement in the state of Minnesota now because I mean, and just think of the damage that that’s going to do in the midterms and the, and the gen, the next general election.

The way that they went out there, you know, ski mask thugs out there cracking just the optics, wind, just all of it. And, and, and with so many things you got to look at it as, you know, it’s the same thing with Barack Obama. Like he was good on a few things in his head anyway. You heard him say smart things on a couple of things, but ultimately his presidency was nothing but treason. And it wasn’t even what he wanted to do, but it was him doing what they said and like, and he was just terrible.

And I always, it’s not too hard for me, I guess, to put myself in their position and just think, man, you know, eight years can go by really quickly and just think if you have two, two terms in a row even and then to have it be over and be like, oh man, it’s already over. And then I really did nothing but what they said the whole time and didn’t really do the right thing ever. Like, you know, maybe there were a couple times where it could have been worse, but like what a, what a waste of a chance to have that much power when you really could turn it to the good, you know.

But that’s a good relationship. Yeah. Oh, I’m sorry, what would you say? I was just gonna say you’d have to be willing to take one hell of a strong but hopefully very short recession when you bring all those troops home and fire all those government employees and try to reset a constitutional republic and hard money. But then again, that’s where prosperity comes from is limited government and hard money and property rights and free people in the private sector in the free market trading with each other. As Ron Paul said, we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines.

We don’t need a massive military establishment to maintain our independence, not one bit. You know, we could be in the business of business and be prosperous, but you’d have to be willing to talk about suffering in the midterms. President Rand Paul, boy, would he have to be willing to take a hit from the short term consequences of the so called austerity of abolishing militarism and abolishing, you know, the, the executive branch establishment in Washington. I don’t know if you saw. Sorry, I’m ranting over time. There’s a Dave Chappelle thing where he lives in Ohio and one of the things he talks about.

I don’t even know if there’s a joke there, but whatever. He just kind of talks about how a lot of people in his town in Ohio work for the federal government and they got laid off under this Doge stuff. And he was like, man, this is economically devastating to this town that a few federal employees lost their job. And from their point of view, they don’t see like, yeah, but they’re tax parasites. They don’t have the right to other people’s money. They should get a real job. They don’t look at it like that. They look at it like this was a cruel, terrible thing to do and, and it hurt the local economy and all that.

Well, you’d have to do that in spades to really reset this government the way anything like according to the blueprint of constitutional government. And so it would have taken Ron Paul, but the Republican voters of America, you might remember, voted for John McCain and Mitt Romney in the primaries instead back in 08 and 12. So we never had that chance. You know, Garrett Gorett said the American people never had the opportunity to choose between Republican Empire. It’s always Wilkie versus FDR or Dewey versus Truman. The people don’t ever get to choose. Well, here we had the chance to choose Republic or Empire and chose Empire.

So, Scott, it’s always, always great to have you on. I always love to hear your encyclopedic knowledge on the history of these things. I appreciate you joining the Trends Journal. And I’m going to have all the links down below for people to follow you. And Anti War and the Scott Horton Institute Foreign Policy and, And freedom. Yes. And so I will have all those links down below. Scott, thank you so much for joining the Trench Journal. Thanks so much for having me again.
[tr:tra].

See more of Trends Journal on their Public Channel and the MPN Trends Journal channel.