Who Will Trump Choose? Jim Rickards Predicts Trump VP
Summary
➡ The article discusses the potential political strategies and candidates for the upcoming elections. It mentions Elise Stefanik, a conservative who played a key role in a recent hearing, and RFK Jr., a member of the Democratic Kennedy family who is now running as an independent. The article also discusses the role of third parties and the possibility of RFK Jr. aligning with the Libertarian party. Lastly, it talks about the importance of swing states in the election and the current lead of Trump in these areas.
➡ The article discusses the complexities of the U.S. electoral system, focusing on swing states that can determine the outcome of a presidential election. It mentions potential manipulation and voter fraud, particularly in Arizona. The article also talks about the legal challenges faced by former President Trump, including impeachment and lawsuits. Lastly, it discusses the use of the 14th Amendment to potentially disqualify Trump from future elections.
➡ The article discusses the possibility of Chinese hackers disrupting US infrastructure, with the FBI warning about potential threats to oil and gas pipelines, water treatment facilities, and the electrical grid. However, the author suggests that the US has similar capabilities to disrupt Chinese infrastructure, leading to a stalemate situation. The author also speculates that the FBI might be using the threat of Chinese interference as a cover for their own potential interference in the upcoming election. The article ends by encouraging readers to share their thoughts on the upcoming election and potential topics for future discussions.
Transcript
So for that answer, we reached out to legendary macroeconomist Jim Rickards, who correctly predicted Trump’s surprising win over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Jim, a lot of conjecture about this right now. Who do you think is on Trump’s short list of potential running mates? Right? It’s a great question, subject of a lot of speculation. And you’re right, it’s very early in the season to even be discussing this. But I agree with you that the likelihood of Trump being the nominee is so clear he will be the nominee absent some extreme event, that it’s probably not too soon to start having the discussion.
We have the South Carolina primary coming up at the end of February. We’ll see what happens. Nikki Haley’s putting her bets on the table because she was the former governor of South Carolina, she’s from South Carolina, she thinks that’s her good chance. But the polls don’t back that up. The polls show Trump with just as big a lead, maybe bigger, actually, in South Carolina than he had in New Hampshire.
And you’re right, he won New Hampshire. He got well over 50% of all the votes, and Nikki Haley was about twelve points behind. But that included a lot of Democrats. In New Hampshire, we have what’s called an open primary. If you’re an independent, the independent party, there’s not a party, but those who declare themselves independent are the biggest group in New Hampshire. It’s about 30% Democrat, 30% Republican, and 40% independent.
So all this independence can walk into the voting booth or polling area on election Day and request either ballot. You can ask for a republican ballot or a Democrat ballot. You can’t get both, obviously. And I know people, a lot of, I would say, Democrat leaning, left leaning New Hampshire residents asked for republican ballots for the sole purpose of voting for Nikki Haley because they hate Trump. So we don’t have to dig any deeper than that.
But that was probably as good as it gets for Nikki Haley because of that group that were really not voting for her. Even though they did, they were voting against Trump and Trump still won going away. So South Carolina, the margin is even bigger. My expectation is that she’ll actually drop out of the race before the South Carolina primary. We’ll see what happens. But she’s saying no, and she’s apparently got the money, but she’s going to lose pretty badly, South Carolina.
So at that point, the race is over. We still have Super Tuesday, I think ten big state primaries that day, and then that’s in March. And then the excel, what they call the accelerate, which is some of the northeastern states, but it’s pretty much over. So let this speculation begin. The short list, you would see the people who ran against Trump now. So forget Chris Christie. Well, I have my views on him, but Trump can’t stand him.
And I think the feeling is mutual. So you can cross him off the list. Same thing with Nikki Haley. A lot of people say, wouldn’t Nikki Haley be a great choice because she’s a woman and she has a lot of support among independents and independent women, and Trump needs those, et cetera. Some of those factors are true, but Trump is kind of, he holds a grudge, I’ll put it that way.
And so the fact that she hasn’t dropped out, hasn’t endorsed him, that’s probably enough to cross her off the list. And by the way, there are a lot of Republicans, and Tucker Carlson has said this, but I know a lot of people who agree, who say, you know what? I like Trump or I would vote for Trump or I like Trump’s policies. But if he picks Nikki Haley, I’m not voting for Trump.
That’s not about Trump. It’s about Nikki Haley. She’s a neocon. She’s a warmonger. She’s a bushy in disguise. She’s part of the uni party. There are lots of reasons, if you’re a real so called MAGA Republican, not to like Nikki Haley. So I think Trump knows that, hopefully. I’m sure he does. And so I’d cross her off the list. I’m not really answering your question, Doug. What I’m doing is I’m eliminating a lot of people.
Vivek Ramaswani, smart guy. I met him up in New Hampshire. It’s a great thing about the New Hampshire primary. It’s retail politics at its best. All the candidates go to town halls and bars and country clubs, and you really can meet them and shake hands to get a picture and all that good stuff. Vivek’s sharp, smart, but he’s very young, which we probably need at this point. But he’ll be around.
He’ll be around in 2028 and 2032. And 2036, for that matter. So there’s no rush to put him on the ticket. He’ll be back. And DeSantis, I personally like a lot of his policies. I know his campaign never caught fire. He seems to lack the x factor, the charisma factor. But I do like his policies. He’s a smart guy. I like him because he’s a doer. A lot of people talk about things, and you might agree, but the question is, do they actually do them? Do they actually get them done? And DeSantis is a guy who does.
But the problem with Trump, DeSantis, is this is the 21st century, two conservative white guys. What does that get you in terms of broadening the base or attracting other voters, et cetera. So I’m not in favor of DeI. I’m not in favor of quotas or affirmative action or anything else, but I am a realist about politics. And I don’t think that’s a ticket that necessarily gets you very far other than Trump himself.
And so that opens up a couple really interesting choices. The one I would rank most likely, and again, this is not a hard and fast prediction, I’m not going to put a stake in the ground. But the one I would rank most likely is Elise Stefanik. And everyone like, who’s Elise Stefanik? Well, she’s a member of the House representatives, a congresswoman from New York. So just the fact that she’s a New York Republican is unusual because New York is, as we know, heavily democratic.
But there are a lot of upstate areas away from New York City and Buffalo where republicans can hold their own. But she is in the leadership. She’s, I believe, the number three ranking Republican. So you have Mike Johnson, who’s the speaker of the House. You have Tom Emmer, who’s the majority leader. And then I believe Elise is number three. She’s either the whip in what they call the whip, or they have a policy committee head or caucus head.
And she has won, I forget which role exactly. But whatever it is, she’s ranked the third ranking Republican in terms of the House leadership. So she’s proved her ability. She’s kind of worked her way up the ranks. She’s very conservative, but she has a lot else to offer. She’s younger. She’s a woman. Obviously, that will help in terms of it’s not going to help with your most far left Ivy League graduate.
35 year old single woman living in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, might not help with that demographic, but across the country, it’ll have a lot of appeal. She was also, the one recently, this goes back maybe two months, when they had the presidents of MIT, University of Pennsylvania, where I went to school, and Harvard, on the question of, it was really free speech and the anti semitic protest going on on their campuses.
And Elise Stefanik was the one who asked the three presidents, Liz McGill, Claudine Gay, and sorry, I forget the name of the lady from MIT. She’s done a good job of keeping her head down. But she asked him, point bank, point blank, if you advocate genocide against the Jews in Israel, is that protected by your school’s free speech policy? And the correct answer is, no. That’s too much.
It’s not that you don’t have First Amendment rights. No one disputes that. But these schools have their own policies. They have their own, basically, decision makers. They decide who can be expelled or who can be held accountable, et cetera. And so the question was, if you run around campus saying, kill the Jews, in effect, or maybe explicitly, is that okay? And they punted. They were like, oh, it depends on the context.
By the way, what was interesting is they were clones of each other. They had all been, like, indoctrinated, or at least they talked to the same DEI officials before they went there. But it was just a really stupid answer. These are supposed to be the leaders of three of the biggest, most prestigious universities in the world, and they couldn’t give a good answer to the question. But my point is, I don’t want to rehash that whole debate.
Two of them have been fired. One is, like I say, keeping her head down. But Elise was the one who led that question, who really dominated that hearing and basically led the charge to get the two of them fired. So she’s got the chops, she’s got the x factor. Very personable, nice smile, bright. So she has very conservative views, but she’s not one of these screamers. And Trump likes her, so I would put her high on the list.
Now, I got one more choice for you, Doug, and this one is maybe not as far. It sounds like it’s out of left field, but maybe not so much, which is RFK Jr. Now, the Kennedys are synonymous with the Democratic Party. The Kennedy family are a democratic dynasty going back before John F. Kennedy, all the way back to Joseph P. Kennedy, who was ambassador to England, to the UK before World War II.
Joseph P. Kennedy was also selected by FDR to be the first head of the SEC after it was created in the 1930s. And everyone said, you kidding? Kennedy was the biggest stock manipulator in the world. And FDR said, well, who better to chase stock manipulators than the guy who knows all about it? And it goes back even further than that to the Fitzpatricks and so forth. So a real democratic dynasty.
But what happened was when RFK Jr. Declared he was going to run as a Democrat, he was going to challenge Biden in the primaries, run as a Democrat, starting with the New Hampshire primary, the DNC Democratic National Committee ran him off the road. They said, first of all, New Hampshire can’t be the first primary. They got to go second. After South Carolina, New Hampshire said, shove it, we’re going first.
And DNC said, ok, if you go first, you don’t count. If anyone wins. They didn’t win no delegates for them. And it went back and forth that basically they drove Kennedy off the ballot to the point where he is running an independent campaign. And I had a good dialogue with Steve Bannon recently. We went back and forth on this a little bit. And he said, because I say the third parties are going to be the deciding factor, that Trump has a solid base.
It’s like, solid as, like granite. You can’t crack it, but it’s not enough. So the conventional wisdom is, yeah, Trump’s got 40% locked in. Like, it won’t quit, but it’s not enough to win. He needs to get at least ten, maybe 10%, maybe a little bit less, depending on the state, to win. And that’s pretty good political analysis 101. But what it ignores is the role of third parties.
Now, if third parties come in at one or 2%, it won’t matter. But if they come in at ten to 15% or 20%, it will matter. And the elections where we saw that and it did matter were 1990, 219 68, and 1912. I don’t want to go through all those in detail. People forget 1968. George Wallace won five states. He didn’t just get votes or be a third.
He actually won five states. And Hubert Humphrey only won, I think, 18 states. He was the Democrat, so this can matter. And Steve said, he said, yeah, but it’s hard to get on the ballot. You got a lot of legal expense, a lot of time and effort gathering signatures. Depending on the state, they do everything possible to stand in your way. They force you to litigate. And I’ve actually worked on, I was an advisor to a potential presidential candidate who was going to run on a third party ticket.
And I spent a lot of time with the organizers of the third party. It was called Americans elect in 2012. So I actually know a lot about it. And Steve was right. It is difficult. But I said, Kenny’s got the money and the savvy and the resources and he has time. Because once you decide to do that, you’re focused on November. You don’t have to run in the primaries because there are no primaries for an independent.
We kind of left that open. Okay, let’s see how he does. But what has happened in the meantime since we had that discussion, and I’ll bring it up the next time I’m on Steve Balen’s war room is Kennedy is talking to the libertarian party. Now, the libertarian party is on the ballot in all 50 states. They’re in every election. I usually consider them a pain in the neck.
That’s where all your austrian economists and your liberty van mes, there’s good economics there. I’m not dismissing the economics, but I think it’s a little bit narrow. But be that as it may, that’s where your libertarians go. I’m not a libertarian. I’m a conservative, I would say, but the party’s there, they’re on the ballot, and no decision has been made. But it has been reported reliably that RFK Jr.
And the libertarian party are talking to each other. Now back to Trump. Trump has said he really likes RFK Jr. Remember, Trump started as a Democrat. He migrated to the republican party because it was like a better platform for him. He’s very transactional. He’s not ideological, he’s transactional. And so you have a former Democrat who probably grew up, not probably, he did grow up in Queens and New York City in the, even the 80s when it was the heyday of the Democratic Party and the Kennedys were still a force.
So don’t rule that out. And that ticket, you can just go right to the swear answer I’m running that ticket will win. Because why would you put, like a liberal know on a republican ticket? The answer is Kennedy. Trump is very hard to categorize, but RFK Jr. Is very hard to categorize. I don’t agree with everything RFK Jr. Says, but I agree with him completely on calling out the COVID hoax.
The fact that the vaccines didn’t work, the masks don’t work, social distancing doesn’t work. It was invented in a lab. Fauci was more concerned about covering up his own involvement than he was in solving a public health cris. We were lied to by the government over and over again. If there’s ever another pandemic, no one’s going to listen to the government because they lied to us the last time, et cetera.
Kennedy has been a thought leader in all of those vectors and has got an awful lot of support from Republicans, from conservative Republicans. So whereas Nikki Haley would send people running for the hills, RFK Jr. People would say, yeah, actually that’s a pretty good choice. He’s a smart guy. We agree with him on a lot of things. He thinks the border has to come under control. Now, does he have views on taxation and other issues that conservatives might not agree with? Yeah, of course he does.
But I think the positives outweigh the negatives. And in a really strange way, some of Kennedy’s views on subjects like abortion, which most conservative Republicans would not agree with, would appeal to some of these women, college educated women in some of these swing counties, like Montgomery County, Maryland, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Loudoun County, Virginia. These are where the liberals gather. But could they maybe vote for a trump ticket if RFK Jr.
Were on it? Maybe. So at least you don’t need all of them by any means. You just need some to would. I would rank Elise Stefanik as my number one choice, but I would put down RFK Jr. As a wild card and maybe not such a stretch. All right. Well, if I were a betting man, I would have thought Vivek Ramaswami would have been higher on your list.
So I’m glad. Happy to be wrong. I mean, I find him very interesting, but I like these as well. Jim, I wanted to ask you a question, because Trump, I believe I read something recently that he is ahead in every single swing state. With Trump ahead, how panicked are the Democrats about those swing states? And putting my tinfoil hat on, what steps would they potentially take to make sure that a Trump presidency doesn’t happen? Well, they’re definitely panicked.
You’re absolutely right about that. And you’re right about the polls. I mean, they’ll show some national poll that shows Biden ahead of Trump by two points. And my answer is, who cares? National polls don’t matter. This is what people don’t understand about us elections. We do not have a national election for president. We have state by state by state. And you don’t even have to win a majority of the popular vote.
You just have to get more than the next guy and you get those electoral votes and you can lose a lot of states. But if you get 270 electoral votes, you’re the president. So it’s important, and I know people understand this, but it’s important to understand how the system actually works. So, for example, let’s take the state of California. Biden will get somewhere between six and 7 million more votes than Trump in California.
But who cares? You can only win California once. You don’t get to win it five times just because you got five times as many votes. I’ll leave California to its destiny. And if they love, you know, enjoy, as we say in New Jersey. But Biden will probably win the popular vote, and California will ship six or 7 million extra votes, all wasted, because you only need to win by one vote to these totals.
And that’s why Biden may appear ahead in the totals, but it doesn’t matter. That’s not how we elect presidents, just not how we do it. So you put your finger on the right issue, which is the swing states, and there are only ten, approximately. Some people would say seven, but we have 50 states. You know what? Trump’s going to win Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, and Biden’s going to win California, New York and Massachusetts.
We already know that. We can just skip the election, just hand you those electoral votes. So what are the swing states? Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, kind of Virginia, Colorado and New Hampshire, believe it or not. And there might be one or two more. I don’t have a map in front of me, but that’s pretty much it. And New Hampshire, for example, only has four electoral votes.
It’s not a giant, but it’s a real honest to goodness swing state. And in a race where it’s 260 to 260 in terms of electoral votes, and you’re fighting for those last ten electoral votes, four is a big chunk of ten. New Hampshire could play a role, but the big ones are some of the ones I mentioned, basically. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona. I forgot to mention, georgia is in the same category.
So those five states, I say there are ten swing states and there are, but those five will probably determine the election. And Trump is running ahead in all of them. Now, you’ve got to factor in manipulation. The voter fraud seems to be worse in Arizona. I’ve followed Arizona closely. And by the way, Arizona is like a big state that’s empty. I’ve been there many times. Some pretty places.
Sedona is a nice place, it’s empty. It’s basically desert and some mountains, but mostly desert. So the whole population lives in Phoenix. Scottsdale, which is called. It’s not, it’s Phoenix and Scottsdale is what it is, but call it Maricopa county. And they have a county commissioner. Man, are they like the stuff that they know. You don’t have to buy into all this dominion voting. Machines, and they’ve been hacked by Venezuela.
I mean, forget all that stuff. I’m not buying into any of that stuff. But they do simple things. For example, and this is true around a lot of the country, and this is true in New Hampshire when I wrote it, they give you a ballot. It’s a paper ballot. You take a pen and you just fill in the circles for your candidates. And you walk over and you hand it to a poll worker.
And they have a scanner. I always ask them, is this a shredder? And they go, no, it’s a scanner, and it just scans the vote. So this is not digital voting. Where some states, it’s like an atm where you have a screen and you hit those. Those are really easy to hack, really easy to manipulate. I’m not throwing any accusations around. I’m just saying I don’t know what I would do.
I’d actually write in ballot and write in where I want it. But those things are kind of easy to manipulate. But you got to prove it. Separate issue. But the scanner that I described is quite common. It’s not a digital vote. It’s just a scanner reads the little ink marks. That’s what we have here in Virginia. Yeah, we have them in New Hampshire. But what they did is they set the scanner to accept a certain size paper, and then they handed out ballots that were a different size.
So when the people took them to the scanner, they just kept popping out. Oh, gee, sorry, the scanner’s not working. We’ll take this and we’ll count it later. And they put them in boxes, and they put the boxes in a warehouse, and they never opened them. They’re still there. And this was done in districts that were, this was the Senate race with Kerry Lake, and it was done in districts that heavily favored Kerry Lake, no surprise.
And she litigated. But the judges were corrupt, the county commissions were corrupt, so it never went anywhere. But that’s the kind of stuff that’s a really simple thing, that you don’t have to hack the ATM type machine from Germany or Venezuela or whatever they said. You just set the slide a little narrow relative to the ballot. So with that kind of stuff going on, it’s hard to say how things will actually play out.
You have to separate the polls. But Trump is ahead. Now. What are the Democrats doing? What else can they do? I mean, they came up with a Russia hoax that paralyzed the administration for three years. He got impeached for a phone call to Zelensky in Ukraine. You got Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley and Joe Biden, all these people going to Kiev, marching around the town square with Zelensky, they got their arms around them, they’re hugging, et cetera, et cetera.
$100 billion of weapons. Trump makes one phone call. One phone call says, hey, could you look into this Biden thing? Which, by the way, all turned out to be true because the hunter Biden laptop showed that it was true. And he gets impeached. So then Nancy Pelosi impeaches him again, even after he was president. Not even clear that’s constitutional. But they did it. So he was impeached twice.
The Russia hoax for three years. What else? 91 felony indictments, two civil suits in New York, one which will strip his business license, put all of his assets in the hands of a trustee or receiver, who will then be legally authorized to sell them off. And you say, well, that’s pretty bad. You’ve destroyed Trump’s real estate empire, but at least he gets the money. No, because they want a 300 million dollar fine.
So when you sell the assets, you’re going to take the 300 million. So Trump will be broke. Like, he’ll be in one of these homeless tents. At least that’s the goal. The Georgia thing is imploding. Fanny got in trouble with a fanny, so to speak. So we’ll see how that plays out. And then you got the January 6 case in Washington, DC. And there, there are some serious constitutional issues.
But the point is, what else can you do to the man? But the answer is, they’re trying. Sorry, we forgot the section three of the 14th amendment, which can knock you off the ballot if you’re a so called insurrectionist. And as of now, Trump is off the ballot in Maine and Colorado. By the way, Maine is a swing state. Small, but it’s got two districts. Maine is one of the few states where it’s not winner take all.
They go district by district. They’re only two districts. And the winner in each district gets that electoral vote. And Trump won an electoral vote from Maine, even though Biden got more votes in the state as a whole. So taking him off the ballot actually could cost him an electoral vote. That’s not an automatic Democrat win. In Colorado, they ruled that he’s off the ballot, but they held up the implementation that ruled pending the Supreme Court case.
And remember some of these, we’re talking about the primaries, everything, we’re talking about, everything we’re discussing with section three of the 14th Amendment could come back in round two in the general election, because some of the courts have said, well, the 14th amendment doesn’t apply to a primary election. That’s, like a party thing. You’re not being elected president. You’re just being elected to be the nominee. But come back in September when the conventions are over, and refile your lawsuit, and we’ll talk about the general election.
So that’s another effort. What else? I mean, I’m kind of racking my brain to think. You covered a lot there. Well, the thing is, they’re not done. And they had this super lawyer, Mark Elias, and all this guy does is sit and stare at statues and has his associates and lawyers and clerks and everything, looking and thinking up, dreaming up new ways. It’s called lawfare. It’s taking the law and using it as a form of warfare.
So combined law and warfare. This is lawfare. All these things you talk to, I’ll say neutral scholars, people who know the law, but they don’t have a political axe to ground. They’re like, this has never happened. We’ve never seen these cases. We’ve never seen these arguments. Everyone thought section three of the 14th amendment. I mean, it had to do with the Civil War. It had to do with certain confederate members not being able to run for seats in Congress.
That’s what it was for. Here we are. That was the 19th century. We’re in the 21st century. There hasn’t been a case on the section three since 1931. And the government lost that case. And the Congress. Actually, there’s a part of the 14th Amendment. It’s not section three, I believe it’s section four that says, and, oh, by the way, Congress has the authority to enact statutes to implement section three.
And they did. They had amnesty statutes. They said, okay, civil war is over. We got to fight the spanish american war. Let’s give the Confederates a break. They posthumously decided that Robert E. Lee would not have been disqualified. That was sometime in the 1920s. So if Robert E. Lee is not an insurrectionist, according to the US Congress, this is not popular. This is not a poll. This is the US Congress.
Why is Donald Trump. Well, no one cares. We’re litigating that. What else could they do? Well, Jim, before. Before you kind of lay out another one, I. Look, there are a lot of things that they’re doing to try to keep him off the ballot, lots of states, and just make sure he doesn’t win. We got a couple of minutes left here. But coming from the man who wrote currency wars lawfare, there may be something there for another book sometime down the road.
That’s an interesting idea, especially since I think a lot of people out there feel this deficit of trust between Americans and the government, and I think that that deficit tends to eat from the inside out. And then if you can’t trust anything, then what do you mean? Are you really a country united? But that’s the topic for another day. I have one last comment I want to make because there was a news article earlier this week that I saw, and it was from CNN.
It says, chinese hacking threat. FBI director says hackers plan to wreak havoc on us infrastructure, citing things like oil and gas pipelines, water treatment facilities, as well as the electrical grid. And, Jim, I just wanted to know if you’re hearing anything chirping from your channels on that. I know we only got a couple of minutes here. We’re running over, but I’m very interested to hear your take on that.
Yeah, I saw the same story. Thanks, Doug. A couple of things. This is coming from Christopher Ray. So the first thing you have to say is, who’s Christopher Ray? Well, of course, he’s director of the FBI, but he’s running a totally corrupt agency, and I don’t want to go down all the lists. Sean Handy loves to yell. Well, there’s some bad apples at the top of the FBI, but the 90% rank and file are all good.
That’s not true. They couldn’t be this bad if that were true. It might be the opposite. There might be 10% good, loyal american agents and 90% corrupt, or at least keeping their heads down, but that place is rotten from top to bottom. And as we know, they covered up the hunter Biden laptop. They put Peter Navarro in leg irons, but they ignored contempt of Congress and, you know, and then all the prosecutions kind of thing, we just.
I don’t need to go down the whole list. It’s a long list of utterly corrupt, one sided prosecutions, selective prosecutions, et cetera. So that’s who Christopher Ray is. So whenever you get a statement or testimony of the kind you described, the first question you’re asking yourself is, who’s talking and why? What’s behind this? So you got a completely corrupt agency now? A couple of reasons. One, something like this could happen.
I’ve spent a lot of time in cyber warfare and financial warfare, and China in particular, been to China many times. This could happen. So at a minimum, you’re just kind of covering your butt, so to speak. The typical bureaucratic behavior. If something actually happens, let’s say this summer, the power grid goes out because the Chinese acted. Well, at least Christopher Ray didn’t prevent it, but he can say, well, I warned you, I told you so.
There’s that normal bureaucratic impulse, which I’m like, why don’t you do something about it as opposed to just shouting from the rooftops? And then it happens. So you protected yourself. What about the country? But there’s a deeper possibility here that I would consider, which is, first of all, there’s nothing new here. He may have given some testimony this week, but there’s nothing new. The Chinese have had this capability for a very long time.
I don’t doubt that they are perfecting it and it’s getting better and more extensive, et cetera. And we put up defenses and they do workarounds, but there’s nothing new about it, number one. But what he didn’t say, and this would be classified, is that the US is just as good. Can China shut down us infrastructure, disrupt us infrastructure, or interfere with the elections? Yes, but the US can do the same to China.
We can shut down their infrastructure, their pipelines, their electrical grid, their banking system, et cetera. So you end up with what’s called mutual shore destruction. The analysis is very similar to nuclear war fighting. There are some differences, but remember, nuclear war fighting, it’s like, well, why don’t you just shoot all your missiles at the other guy and blow them up and kill 50 million people and you win the war? Well, the answer is that states that are the target of that retain what’s called a second strike capability and they can shoot back.
So the reason you don’t shoot in the first place is because the other state can shoot back and then you’re both destroyed. Nobody wants that. So that’s called mutual assured destruction. So a lot more to it, how reliable is the second strike, and do you actually have one, and could you survive a first strike, et cetera? But that’s the basic idea. You get to the same place with this electronic hacking warfare.
If China wants an attack on the US, which they could do, I don’t dispute that the US could just as easily launch an attack on China and then that prevents everybody from doing it in the first place because you don’t want to be the victim of the second strike. Now, it gets interesting with digital warfare because the question you have to ask yourself, if you’re relying on that, could the first strike be so potent that the second strike capability disappears? If you’re relying on your computers and they’ve shut down your computers, can you actually shoot back? Separate issue, one, that requires a lot of thought, but that’s kind of the analysis.
So, a, there’s nothing new about it, and b, the mutual shore destruction element. The idea that if they targeted us, we could target them, in theory, keeps everyone from doing it in the first place. So why this warning now? Well, my thought is that Ray and the FBI are getting ready to interfere with the election in some way. And what they want to do is it’s exactly like Covid.
They want to create a boogeyman. They want to create a panic. They want to create fear so that they have an excuse to intervene in various systems in the United States to say, hey, we’re just doing this to keep the Chinese or keep the Chinese from interfering. Or if the FBI interferes with the election, they’ll blame it on the Chinese. So maybe I’m overthinking this, Doug, but I’ve seen too much in the last five or six years, and I’ve seen too much about the FBI, and I know too much about it from personal experience to just say, oh, yeah, we’d be, keep us up.
And now we got to worry about the Chinese. That’s not new. We’ve been worrying about the Chinese for a long time. We’re just as good as they are. That’s a mexican standoff, if you want to put it that. So when I say, why is he doing this? It seems to me know. Remember Rahman, Manuel said, never let a good crisis go to waste. They could be creating a boogeyman as an excuse to do things that look like they’re anti chinese but are actually interfering with our election process.
All right, there you have it, folks. That was Jim Rickards. Thank you, Jim, for your analysis and for everyone watching. If you’re interested in more topics like this, be sure to and subscribe to this channel and leave a comment. Let us know what you think will happen this election year, plus anything else you want us to cover in future episodes, votes. Thanks, and we’ll see you soon. .
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