It Could Happen Here - Trump's Foreign Policy

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

James and Mia discuss what we know so far about foreign policy under the second Trump administration. Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/12/us/civilian-deaths-war-isis.html https://www.reuters.com/article/world/syrian-surprise-how-trumps-phone-call-changed-the-war-idUSKCN1OR0PN/ https://www.donaldjtrump.com/issues https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2024/trumps-bigger-tariff-proposals-would-cost-typical-american-household-over https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-donald-trump-trade-war-second-presidency-kamala-harris/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-trump-interview-transcript/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/10/09/woodward-war-biden-putin-nuclear-use-trump-russia-logan-act/ https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/border-patrol-tactical-unit-marksman-fires-round-fatally-injuring https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/11/04/trump-mexico-tariff-trade/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMrVdFnjEjs&t=17sSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end

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awards. today is something else which despite my positive tone of voice is sad and depressing yeah yeah it's just a lot of that and like we don't want you to be too sad it doesn't bear moping around you know like uh we've got time to get organized and that's what we should be doing and also like just get out and go outside and see your friends and do things that bring you joy like we'll work out how to get through it somehow. I think it's really easy. And I found myself doing this stay at home and be sad, but don't like I went out with some friends for a hike on Friday.

I feel so much better. So I would advise you to do that. Maybe you're listening on your hike. That would be fun. Actually, I think if I was hiking, I would skip this one and listen to the birds and enjoy the outdoors. Well, I mean, if you want the ideological framing of it the ideological framing of it is that morale is a

charade of struggle yes and it is very easy to lose if your morale is absolutely terrible so yeah we got four years we can't be uh being moping around like we will get through it we will find ways to make it better and part of the way we do that yeah it's keeping our morale up and doing things that bring us joy thing that brings me joy is talking about rajava the autonomous administration of north and east syria and we're going to talk about that today because we're talking about donald trump's foreign policy in his second term so his previous foreign policy was it was a pretty mixed bag and he bombed the shit out of the islamic state right cool based he also bombed the shit out of thousands of syrian and iraqi civilians not so cool also we should note not so different from every other president this century bombing

civilians has been pretty much the uh the through line of American foreign policy in that part of the world for a very long time. In particular, in the Trump administration, I want to talk about there was a single US strike cell called Talon Anvil. I think they were mainly like CAG guys from what I read. So Delta Force guys, Army Special Forces guys who were making these decisions they hired an office building in syria and these guys were constantly looking at drone feeds and various other information and then calling in strikes on various targets right i'm not sure if they had the cag guys

in the like watching computers i'm not entirely sure and like uh why they didn't have someone else who knows but this strike cell dropped more than 120,000 bombs. Jesus Christ. Yeah. The amount of ordnance we dropped on Syria is insane. Its circumvented procedures are in place to prevent civilian deaths in order to do so. They had embedded lawyers who were supposed to approve the strikes,

but these lawyers tried to raise the alarm that some of these strikes were reckless. they weren't hitting things that were actual targets and they sort of ran into an organizational brick wall at some point pilots even refused to engage targets because they didn't think it was yeah which is it's not usual um yeah like that's be pretty fucked for a fighter pilot to be like no i don't think i've ever heard of that before no i so i found this out in uh what is i think it was the uh the uh the new york times uh new york times a pretty good investigation which we linked in our sources and yeah it's like a throwaway line but i would love to hear more about that it could have been

a drone pilot too which is slightly different gig i guess you know if you're sitting uh north of las vegas they're flying a drone kind of kind of a different scene so in the battle to defeat the islamic state thousands of innocent people lost their lives yeah as we reach the end of that battle donald trump who's president at the time personally called erdogan who's the president of Turkey at the time, right, in late 2018. Trump asked Erdogan, if we withdraw our soldiers, can you clean up ISIS? That's a quote. According to an unnamed Turkish official interviewed by Reuters, Erdogan replied that Turkish forces were capable of a mission. Quote, then you do it, Trump told him. And asked his national security advisor, John Bolton, who was also on the call to, quote,

start work for the withdrawal of US troops from Syria. What this resulted in was US troops pulling out from some locations in Syria, right? Local people threw tomatoes at them. Even worse than the tomatoes was the fact that it gave NATO's second largest army, which is Turkey, of course, free reign to attack the autonomous administration in North and East Syria, which it did in 2018 and it did again in 2019. Those two operations to claim considerable ground in Syria cost countless civilian lives, continued to perpetrate human rights abuses, to rehabilitate people from ISIS and other jihadi groups as Turkish Free Syrian Army. And they killed some people who were people I care about. And I continue to care about the cause of Rojava or Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria very deeply.

And it really fucking sucks to think about the potential of the US abandoning those people again, not that Biden has done very much. Now, I think this anecdote right of what trump does with early one tells us a lot about his approach to foreign policy which is he really sees it as very transactional which isn't that different from everything else he does i guess like he's a very transactional person and he seems really only to be concerned about what he can get out of it so like in this case i guess he wants to say he bought u.s troops home from syria like he's anti-war this is one of his things he says now right like but he he's he's prepared to also in in the case of the bombing right he's

not so concerned with civilian casualties as long as he can claim that he he was the one who defeated isis right obama couldn't do it. He did it. And he did it on a pile of civilian remains. And also using chiefly the Syrian Democratic Forces, right? Not US forces. Yeah. There were US forces on the ground. They were engaged in combat,

but in minuscule numbers compared to the SDF, who lost 15,000 of their children in a battle against ISIS. And I think Trump would be very willing to admit that he's transactional right like that's kind of his brand is like america first and then and fuck everyone else so i think he'll probably be similar in this term right he will act unilaterally he'll pivot whenever the fuck he feels like it he will continue with his affection for strong men and dictators all around the world. But a lot of stuff has changed since Trump's first term. I think it's illustrative for us

to think about how he will engage with things that have changed. So what has changed? There's a much larger conflict between Russia and Ukraine now. And that conflict has been seen massive and overt support, both from the USA and from the rest of nato there's been a revolution in myanmar i suppose he doesn't know that yeah i really doubt well maybe some of the like weird pro coup memeing from the right got to him yeah perhaps or like i mean the parallels between the coup in myanmar and january 6th are uh pretty obvious right like if january 6th took the landing it looked a lot like that um except that it was a military party not just a political party the islamic state doesn't exist as a territorial entity but it very much does exist as a terrorist

group which continues to and has actually increased its activity this month with sleeper cells continued suicide bombings continued attacks and the SDF continue with their anti-ISIS operations. Without US support, those would be harder. And so we have to ask, I guess, on what Trump's going to do with these things. And I want to look at a few different issues and pick apart what Trump said on his campaign website, pick apart what he said on the campaign trail, and then look at who he's appointed so far. We're recording this on Tuesday the 12th, so if someone gets appointed before you hear this, that's why we've missed them out. So I guess to start with Trump's foreign policy, we should talk about his number one peer competitor, which is China in his eyes, right? Not a big china appreciator it's so i looked

at his campaign website for this which really has some just incredible use of capital letters he just fucking does what he wants it's wild to see so chiefly one of the things that he's been on about for a while now is tariffs on chinese made goods right this is means front policy yeah we just we talked about this last episode yeah You will have heard about tariffs at this point. So as we previously mentioned, right, he's talked about these tariffs. These tariffs would cost a lot of money and they would increase the cost of you going shopping.

Yeah, and they would probably destroy vast swaths of the global economy. Yes. Both the Chinese and the American economy. Yes. Just sort of implode. And then all these countries in africa and uh you know myanmar for instance exports a lot of these rare earth metals to china

right and a lot of countries in africa do too aside from the economic sort of aggression his stance on taiwan is weird which is normally where we would like expect to see the most like physical friction between us and china right mike pompeo has pressed for the usa to formally recognize taiwan before which would be a step you know there'll be a pretty big swing trump on the other hand seems to want taiwan to pay the united states for being its ally right now yeah then this is like one of his big sort of foreign policy principles is like try to get people to pay him for stuff because that's sort of the only way his brain works but i remember he did this with nato a lot where he's hit this whole line on nato that like nato should

be like paying us because people like you're not spending enough on defense so we're like paying all their defense budgets this is like one of his kind of yeah it's been his like hobby horse yeah like floats around in his brain sort of colliding with its walls yeah an empty space yeah yeah like a ping pong ball ironically like in the time that trump's been out of office russian aggression has led nato members to spend more on defense yeah rather than donald trump lambasting them so one of his big things is that taiwan should pay the united states but it would seem very unlikely that he if a he's not going to abandon taiwan i think because it gives him a place to grandstand on china yeah and also like you know i mean one of the things about trump is that one of the best ways to sort of influence him is just

get a world leader in a room with him alone yes but unfortunately well fortunately for us trump does not speak chinese and she doesn't seem to like him very much so yeah yes we won't be we won't be joining the prc anytime soon china along with russia right the two countries we've spoken about most so far both make big plays in africa russia has rebranded what was wagner as the africa core and they're sort of providing support to regimes that lack enough legitimacy to exist otherwise yeah they are like sort of classic mercenary shit like it's your state illegitimate and does it lack the capacity to do the violence it needs to maintain itself don't worry here are some uh here are some psychopaths from russia yeah there's a lot of people i think because like a lot of these

sort of governments will kind of like do their like like put a red beret on and start doing their anti-imperialist cosplay and then you like read the the like the fine print of the contracts they've signed with like africa core a thing that that you expect to be spelled like Africa and Corps with a K, like K-O-R-P-S. And it's like, oh, okay, so they've signed away a bunch of the country's middle rights, and they've signed away a bunch of these specific mines to these mercenary groups. It's like, oh, okay, so this is also just imperialism. It's just new management. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's like oh okay so this is like also this is also just imperialism it's just new

management yeah exactly yeah it's just different imperialism and then china has big plays in africa too right like i've personally seen a lot of chinese owned mines in africa chinese roads in africa china does also like offer infrastructure kind of china does a kind of quid pro quo it doesn't come in like with the violence like russia does it comes in with the we'll build your hospital if we can have all your natural resources u.s policy in africa is pretty much to stop those two countries getting too much influence the biden administration is as many liberals are right like there's actually not that much difference between what biden and trump will do in africa the difference is that biden is smart enough not to say it trump's ability to do anything useful in africa is going to be masked by his massive racism

like when he says things like shithole countries it becomes a lot harder for the u.s to do anything in africa that isn't tinged by that right like it doesn't make that sort of imperialist ambition more obvious u.s politicians rarely talk about Africa. They rarely campaign on what they were going to do in Africa. And so pretty much the only things we're going to hear from Donald Trump about Africa, I would imagine, are going to be when he lets his racism out. Yeah. That will have results for like US credibility. Also, my guess is we see intensifications of sort of US drone strikes, particularly

in the Horn. And we see like all of the stuff that Biden is doing strikes particularly in the horn and we see like like all of the stuff that biden is doing but worse and killing even more people somehow yeah i would imagine that we will see these more aggressive drone strikes especially against like islamist groups in africa that u.s has special forces deployments in a few places in africa which will probably maintain i would imagine like i don't think those are things that Trump would... He wouldn't see any benefit from stopping them, I guess. And it may not even know about them.

So yeah, I think we will see little change in Africa, would be my guess. Yeah, mildly worse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talking of mildly worse, Mia, the thing that makes these podcasts mildly worse is our obligation to pivot to advertisements, which we must do now. That was a great one.

We've been holding out on you for three years to get you the good ad pivots. Yeah. Well, there it is. That's what we've got for you. Hey, guys. I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a

chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun.

Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough.

So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, I'm Gianna Prandti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline,

the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. Mm-hmm. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu,

aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15 percent. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting 8, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show.

I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey fam, I'm Simone Boyce. I'm Danielle Robay. And we're the hosts of The Bright Side, you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Beverly Hills 90210 star and host of the podcast, I Choose Me, Jenny Garth. There have been so many times when I've been really lost. I say that because I'm on the other side of it. And the only way to get to the other side of something is to go through it, not around it. Allow your body to feel the pain. And then you have to dig in sometimes and look within to learn from it because that's what all these obstacles are for, I guess. Ultimately, what other choice do you have?

Listen to The Bright Side from Hello Sunshine on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. So I want to talk about Europe. As you've heard in the tariffs episode, right, he wants to put tariffs on European goods. European Union is going to slap tariffs right back on American goods. That doesn't really help anyone. It will make exporting from the USA very, very hard. One thing that the USA might stop exporting

is weapons to Ukraine. It's a little unclear. Trump, he called Zelensky the greatest salesman on earth, but has also claimed that he can personally end the war in 24 hours. I don't think that means

he will be deploying himself to the Donbass like a gun dam, but he claims he can do this with his negotiating skills this seems unlikely to put it mildly I don't think that it would be possible to end this war in 24 hours if both sides declared peace right now getting communications to their frontline troops would be a challenge in 24 hours in some places yeah so the way i interpret this and i may be wrong here is that he is likely to leverage the support that the united states gives to ukraine in order to force zelensky into an unfavorable settlement which would achieve his goal of a being able to say he stopped giving american money to ukraine which has been a big talking point for the uh like every time you start with the western north carolina right after the

hurricane all these republican sort of talking points were like oh well all the money's in ukraine so we can't have fucking mres for people in in western north carolina like fema has no money because we sent ukraine some m4s this is very silly right this is no it's not a zero-sum game it's not really a reasonable critique um but it's one that trump has kind of managed to stick in the culture wars his base seems to see the money going to ukraine is directly coming from things that would otherwise be going to them which he would benefit from if he could bring this war to a close right jd vance has mentioned a demilitarized zone in between russia and ukraine which uh yeah who's gonna who's gonna

benefit the dmz like yeah like is it do we really want this uh are we gonna have troops there like we do in south korea for you know when when was a career on the 1950s 70 years right i don't think that's really uh that's really what they want yeah the thing about dmcs no one actually likes them no they suck it sucks yeah they're awful it's just a bit of land that you can yeet weapons over each other like especially in like modern warfare they're not that effective at stopping two people fighting right but very funny that north korea will be uh two for two on dmz's in wars it has been involved with huge dub for them he essentially seems to be advocating for exactly the peace settlement that putin has proposed and that has been rejected multiple times several sources i've seen suggest that trump has spoken to Putin quite a few times since leaving office. His plan for Ukraine certainly seems closer to the Russian one than the Ukrainian one.

The Ukrainian one being, stop invading us and go home. And the Russian one being, well, we'll just keep all the stuff we've taken so far and then add a buffer zone in between. And Ukraine can keep whatever's left of its country, right? add a buffer zone in between and ukraine can keep whatever's left of its country right what's interesting to me is what other nato members will do in the event of the u.s reducing its aid i would suspect that they will try and step up and meet that gap it might also result in the u.s puts certain restrictions on its aid right how it can be used where it can be used crucially right they don't like ukraine using things to attack in russia proper yeah they they don't mind them using them to attack russian forces but not within russia i did see a picture yesterday of a uh i think it was three guys from rogue i think it's called which is a unit within the international

legion who had been killed within russia and they had a lot of like 84s and things like that right like u.s anti-tank weapons but the united states doesn't want ukraine using the long-range artillery and stuff it's given it to eat projectiles at moscow i can see a situation where if the u.s draws down some of its aid european allies of ukraine might not place some of those restrictions on their aid. And that could lead to some interesting complications for Russia, right? If Ukraine is more affected, like if they get more aid from Europe and Europe doesn't place restrictions on their aid, they could potentially strike Russia within Russia, which is not going to be good for Putin. It's probably not going to be good for like bringing, I mean, unless they can

deal some really crippling blows, it might not be good for bringing, I mean, unless they can deal some really crippling blows, it might not be good for bringing the war to an end, but maybe it will. They've done some pretty effective things, but it's not a huge amount so far. Maybe they'll get lucky on a strike on the Kremlin or something. Just the one, like,

I'm sure that would be their strategy if they didn't have restrictions. To just keep pounding if they didn't have restrictions. It would be to just keep pounding places they think Putin might be. This is the history of Russian warfare. Dumber things than that have happened and have lost Russia wars. Yeah, yeah. A lot dumber than that.

So, yeah, I don't think that Ukraine will be screwed if the U.S. pulls out. I do think it will be a lot harder for them. Yeah. And, you know, if that's something... There are a lot of US citizens still fighting in Ukraine. It would be pretty devastating to abandon Ukraine. And I think also just from the sort of stopping Russian aggression standpoint,

it's much better to stop it here than somewhere else. But, yeah, we will see, I guess. European countries are really ramping up their defence. But right now the u.s is like the heart of the military industrial complex and uh europe really can't keep up with with the u.s production of course the u.s being the heart of the military industrial complex does mean that a lot of trump donors will probably be able to leverage some of their donations to his campaign and so we might not see as much of a drawdown of a to ukraine as as we are we're

worrying about here. Mia, talking of launching things from a long distance at a very small target, I would like to launch these advertisements from iHeartMedia's advertising department directly to your ears. Here you go. Hey, guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a

chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, I'm Gianna Prandenti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this

money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot.

Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, fam. I'm Simone Boyce. I'm Danielle Robay. And we're the hosts of The Bright Side, the daily podcast from Hello Sunshine that is guaranteed to light up your day. Every weekday, we bring you conversations with the culture makers who inspire us. Like our episode with actor, former Beverly Hills 90210 star and host of the podcast, I Choose Me, Jenny Garth.

There have been so many times when I've been really lost. I say that because I'm on the other side of it. And the only way to get to the other side of something is to go through it, not around it, allow your body to feel the pain. And then you have to dig in sometimes and look within to learn from it because that's what all these obstacles are for, I guess. Ultimately, what other choice do you have? Listen to The Bright Side from Hello Sunshine on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hankseth, who's like a Fox News guy who doesn't believe germs are real. Yeah, this is a guy who has not washed his hands in 10 years.

Great. I mean, at least he might die of COVID. Yeah, I was going to say, he made it. Wow. Sorry, that hair is really something. Oh, that's not good at all. Yeah. Wait, what?

On June 14th, 2015, Hankseth accidentally hit a West Point driver with an axe while filming a live TV segment in honor of Black Day. Oh, Wikipedia's incredible. Let's get that link pulled up. Alright, this video's unavailable. Alright, no, we're finding this video. Nothing disappears from the internet. All right. Here we go. Oh!

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Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!!!, I need to write, listen, if you were hit in the dick and balls by an axe thrown by future defence secretary Pete Hegseth,

please contact coolzonemedia.com. Holy shit. I hope the VA is paying for this man's benefit this is the stupidest thing i've ever seen someone do like in in the course of reporting for this show yeah yeah it's amazing like very funny uh again please contact us i hope you're okay service related injury yeah so that's that's peak hexeth right future sec def also I hope you're okay. Service-related injury. Yeah, so that's Pete Hegseth, right? Future SecDef. Also, former reservist who deployed to Guantanamo, was an infantry platoon leader at Guantanamo.

I think he also deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, and previously he'd also deployed to Iraq. He had two voluntary deployments, or he's in two locations in Iraq, at least. he'd also deployed to Iraq. He had two voluntary deployments, or he's in two locations in Iraq, at least. So he's hit the greatest hits of US foreign policy in the last 20 years, I guess. He's made his career as a Fox News pundit. Yeah, he's just like a right-wing ghoul. Yeah, I mean, in the last Trump administration, when he was punditing, he advised... Trump had been considering pardoning several war criminals and did pardon several war criminals right and Hexeth was one of the people who A. he talked about it on Fox News

while he was advising Trump to do it and B. he was advising Trump to do it. Jesus Christ Yeah you can read up about the Trump pardons of war criminals. It's bad enough that a guy was getting turned in by his own special forces unit like do you know how bad how like fucking hideous the shit you have to do

is for, like, your own guys in a special forces unit to be like, holy shit, we have to stop this guy. Like, it's awful. Yeah, I mean, you should look up Clint Lawrence's stuff as well. Like, L-O-I-N-C-E, if you're interested in this stuff. He was convicted, I think, of two murder counts for ordering his soldiers to fire on unarmed people. And then, yeah, the other one was a Green Beret

named Matt Galtian, who was also charged with the murder of someone in Afghanistan, someone who had been making IEDs. So, like, I think we can see where this guy is going. We've just found this out as we're recording for context. That's quite troubling. His other two foreign policy appointments that I've seen so far have been less so.

Look, I'd say less so. Marco Rubio is a turd, right? I think we all know that I share very little with Marco Rubio. On Turkey and Rojava, he is good. He is not a fan of Erdogan he's in contact with gulenists he kind of puts turkey in in the brits box yeah which which leads us to the very funny idea of marco rubio ordering a drone strike on eric adams i mean well here's the thing though gulen's dead now so so like there's there's like a secession crisis of like who's gonna head up the gulenist anti-pope marco rubio yeah um that

could be very good for rajava at least right the big concern among those of us who care very deeply about rajava has been that trump will abandon them as he did in the past right and so i guess we're looking for glimmers of hope and i think rubio kind of oddly weirdly was one compared to i was expecting more of the hegthus like fox news commentator type people in foreign policy positions because trump fundamentally doesn't care about foreign policy and it's an area where he can kind of give something to those kind of insane far-right commentator types. He also did appoint Mark Walsh. I think it could be Walsh.

He's one of the first army special forces guys serving Congress, maybe the first as a national security advisor. Walsh is a member of the Kurdish caucus in Congress. So again, positive for Rojava. Talking of army special forces, there's one more insane Trump foreign policy proposal that I want to discuss. And that is his desire to use the United States Army in Mexico.

I'm just going to read from his campaign website here. President Trump will take down the drug cartels just as he took down ISIS. He will impose a total naval embargo on cartels, order the Department of Defense to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership and operations, and designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and choke off their access to the global financial system. President Trump will get the full cooperation of neighboring governments to dismantle the cartels or else expose every bribe and kickback that allows these criminal networks to preserve their brutal reign.

He will ask Congress to ensure that drug smugglers and traffickers can receive the death penalty. There's a lot there. The way that Donald Trump helped defeat ISIS was exclusively by bombing things and with some small contributions from u.s ground troops but we don't really have a partner force in mexico like that and i think especially with a new administration in mexico and especially with trump proposing 100 tariffs on mexican goods we're unlikely to find one which leaves the very strange kind of prospect of u.s troops carrying out like

unapproved undeconflicted hits on mexican nationals in mexico which like is an act of war yeah you are invading mexico is what you're doing i should point out that bortak under biden did shoot one mexican national this year who was he was holding up migrants with a gun he was he's rubbing him with a gun it wasn't it's a place where i've been dozens of times when they shot him and there didn't seem to be much fuffle about that but that is not invading mexico yeah like if they're invading mexico like you know as as close as american mexican sort of security cooperation has been and as many people as that's killed from the Mexican side. Like, that's...

Oh, boy. Yeah, like, it remains to be seen how much of this actually happens, right? Mexico has a new president. The United States has a new president. They're not exactly politically fellow travelers, I'll say that. Yeah, I mean, I will say, like, AMLO and Trump got along, like, decently well, largely off of AMLO's, like, anti-immigrant policies,

but I don't know if that's going to work with Scheinbaum-like. And, like, in the final year of AMLO, like, they definitely, they did a lot to help Biden with effectively enforcing US border policy by deporting people south. People I spoke to in the Darien series have been sent south again this week. But Biden's had, actually,

some pretty high-profile cartel arrests, right, within Sinaloa cartel. He's destabilized that cartel, but those happen within the U.S. They didn't send teams into Mexico. And the way that the U.S. has traditionally got hold of cartel leaders before is for them to be arrested in Mexico in cooperation with Mexican government forces, be they police or military, and then extradited them to the US for trial. That doesn't seem to be what Trump is proposing, but again,

the bombastic rhetoric and the reality are sometimes very different. Yeah, I have some vague memory that last time he wanted to send special forces guys to do this, and his advisors were like, what the fuck are you talking about? We can't send people into Mexico.

Look, just to be real, those organizations have reached inside the United States and that would be an extremely messy situation. Yeah. And the way this would have to be done, I don't think you can do this with drone strikes. You have to do this with boots on the ground

and that's going to be contrary to what he's promised to do which is not risk more u.s soldiers lives who knows what this will actually look like yeah my guess is he will find a way to get the maximum number of civilians killed yes yeah yeah he would himself yeah like it's that's probably going to be the result of this yeah exactly and i think as you sort of this down like civilian deaths are probably going to increase right he's never shown himself to be unduly concerned about those things he doesn't see that the problem the second thing the u.s will lose is what joseph nye called soft power right which is like the power to influence people without projecting force

cultural power cultural capitals board you might have called it uh really getting heavy on the uh university shit at the back half of this episode the u.s lost a lot of that in the first trump term right and it will lose more of it in the second trump term some of that is you know the u.s maybe shouldn't be influencing and the u.s has had some pretty malign influence around the world yeah you can listen to a song called washington bullets to learn more about it but it will mean that like there will be a space for other bad actors right russia china you know russia has not shown itself to be uh any more concerned with human rights and probably less so than the united states went in in its uh time in syria right it's been an unmitigated disaster for the syrian the Russian cooperation with the Assad regime we do not need more of that around the world the Wagner slash

Africa core deployments in Africa have been horrific in terms of human rights and this will open more spaces for that so yeah I mean it doesn't look great this uh second F appointment maybe we'll we'll learn more about that in the coming days but that doesn't look great there are some bright spots for a java i guess or some glimmers of hope there which is a nice thing trump's policy on gaza fits with this general model of like he wants to end conflicts and the way he sees of doing that is doing away with any restraint in terms of civilian casualties and so the way that he went after isis was to just say bomb them all i can see him doing the same thing in gaza right just saying like he wants to claim that he bought an end to the war and he doesn't care how many

bodies he's standing on when he says that yeah same thing in lebanon obviously so yeah these are not great things these are things that we will have to deal with for decades to come, whatever happens. And I guess the way that you can do something here, like my little glimmer of hope, it's like you can reach out to people all around the world and let them know that like, even if America's foreign policy is shit, you're not.

I have sat in Rojava and I have seen them taking the children to the hospitals and i've watched the u.s soldiers sit in their bases and do nothing and like it didn't help really i didn't i wasn't able to do very much couldn't even give blood but i was able to be there with them and maybe that meant something and like you can you can do little things to show your solidarity around the world because there won't be much of it coming from the government. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,

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