Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : REACTION: Was Trump Bored at Meeting with Xi?

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : REACTION: Was Trump Bored at Meeting with Xi?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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org. Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter. or abolish the government? What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best,

which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, September 28th, 2006. Professor Jeffrey Sachs, joins us now. Professor Sacks, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much. I want to spend a little bit of time asking you about the meeting last week between President Trump and President G and whether anything was accomplished or whether it was a social visit. But before we get there, some disjointed questions, if you don't mind, this morning's Wall Street Journal reports that both United Arab Emirates and Egypt warned Prime Minister Netanyahu about October 7th weeks in advance, and he did nothing about it.

Does this surprise you? We've been hearing this report from the Israeli newspaper Haarets for several days. Netanyahu says he's going to sue the reporters, but the reporters know what happened. It's not quite right to say Netanyahu did nothing about it. What he seems to have done is taken off the guard when he heard this. I think it's becoming increasingly likely that Netanyahu invited an attack so that he could retaliate in the way that Israel did. This is what is suggested by these reports. I'm not making any conclusion.

and I certainly have zero inside information, so I want to be clear on that. But it is quite clear that Netyao who heard repeatedly from the Egyptians and from the Emirates that an attack was imminent, that it would be serious, that Hamas was signaling that this was going to happen, and that Net Yahoo let down the guard rather than raising. the guard. So it's extraordinarily serious. This man is one of the most unprincipled persons in the world, and everything is possible in this case. But one thing is certainly possible that this was meant to be an attack that would then lead to an annihilation of Gaza, which is what actually occurred. In other words, this was a setup for a genocide. And whether we ever get to the

bottom of this, I don't know. One of the things you learn in life is that the lying is nonstop and relentless. Everything is falsified. Everything is lied. And so we hear the reports. They have a great deal of credibility. They check out in many ways. It's now reported, by the way, that Netanyahu secretly flew to the Emirates just in the last days in order to ask the leader, don't disclose this information, and met for an hour at the airport with the Emirati leader to make the appeal face-to-face, support me. So a lot is going on. I would not have any surprise at any depravity of this man. I was with a senior former Israeli official, I won't say more, in the last few days, who had actually been in Netyao's party who said the man has absolutely no values whatsoever

and that this person who was a co-partisan with Netyao in Lakoud said that he will have nothing to do with him because he is a man of absolute no principle whatsoever. I don't know how he can face the family. families of those who died? The man is without shame. How can he face the world and stand and rant as he did at the UN General Assembly after he has murdered tens of thousands of people in cold blood? These are women and children that he has been slaughtering.

He has been giving the orders. He has been delighting in this bloodshed. He's been quoting the Old Testament to give himself the power of God to kill all these people. So I don't think that the question of how he can face these people comes up with this man. This is an absolutely heartless person. What does President Trump's threat at the United Nations General Assembly to murder 91 million Iranians due to the concept of American diplomacy when an American president sounds like you never heard a head of state sound in that forum.

Sounded worse than Hitler at a rally because Hitler didn't say how many people he was going to kill in that way. Trump said, we're going to annihilate. Or he says he has a difficult choice. Maybe he'll make the country great, or maybe he'll annihilate them. of course, it shocked the whole world. I'm not in any place, anywhere in the world, that doesn't know now the reality of the United States. Some people hope that we'll get over it somehow.

Some people say they have a nostalgia for America as it once was. But everybody in the world heard Donald Trump. Nobody approved. Nobody thought it was normal. Nobody thought that this is a way that anybody in a position of power anywhere in the world ever should speak. So what he said, while he may have been expressing his views or he may have been talking to his base, reverberated around the world as a disgrace for the United States. America. You and I were at a gathering hosted by the President and the Foreign Minister of

Iran last week. It was fascinating to listen to them speak. By the way, I have to tell everybody, I know you're going to be embarrassed, but I say this with the utmost of praise for you. When you left a few minutes early, I think you had another commitment. I had to I had to host a conference, yes. As you waved goodbye to all of us, the president of Iran stood up and bowed toward you. Because you know everybody, Jeff, and people have such respect for you. The person sitting next to the president of Iran was Foreign Minister Arachi, who when asked over the weekend, are you preparing for this war to resume gave this rather dark answer? Cut number five.

Are you preparing for this war to resume? We are fully prepared for the time for the war to be resumed. And I repeat, we stand firm in the face of any new aggression, even it comes to a doomsday war. But at the same time, we are ready, we stand ready for diplomacy. It is up to the up to the, up to to President Trump to choose. He wanted unconditional surrender in the previous war in two days, and now it's eight months that they are fighting with no result. A new aggression would be certainly the same. We are fully prepared for that.

We have learned our lesson from the two previous wars, and we have corrected our tactics, we have changed our tactics, and we are fully prepared to do that. Praise, that terrifies me, Jeff, I know you heard this. this, even if it comes to a doomsday war. What does he mean, even if they explode a nuclear device over Tehran? First, I think we should share with people something about President Possackian. He is a soft-spoken, mild-mannered heart surgeon. You and I have heard him on several occasions now. I've seen him repeatedly. He says repeatedly, and I think everybody should hear it. He said, I am a heart surgeon, a thoracic surgeon. My job is to save lives. When somebody is on the operating

table, I don't care who they are, a man or woman or religion or race or ethnicity. This is a sort of a direct quote from him the other day, James. Yes. I'm there to save lives. I feel so sad, actually, because, you know, I've been to Iran, of course. I've worked with Iranian officials. I've studied this country's history for more than 40 years. This is a civilization. This is a civilization that has been one of the glories of world civilization. civilization for more than 2,500 years. Indeed, Cyrus, the founder of the Occamended Persian Empire, was regarded as a savior of the Jewish people. And he was the one that sent the Jewish scribes back to rebuild Jerusalem after they had been exiled by the Babylonians and then the Persians,

the Iranians conquered Babylon and allowed, not only allowed, but encouraged the Jews to go back to rebuild Jerusalem. These are distinguished people. When you watch Foreign Minister Araji speak, he is an extraordinarily intelligent man. He's a very soft-spoken. He is a consummate diplomat, as he expressed in our media. He said, I don't have confidence. They keep trying to kill us when we negotiate. They claim that they will annihilate us, which is what Trump said at the podium of the General Assembly.

He said, but my job is diplomacy. So I try. So I don't have illusions, but I try. We want to negotiate. people should understand that Iran has tried to negotiate for decades with the United States. The United States wants to kill the Iranian leaders and choose a puppet regime. It's done that in the past. In 1953, the United States overthrew a democracy in Iran and installed a police state

and backed that police state for 26 years. When the Iranians had a revolution in 1979 against that police state, the United States immediately armed Saddam Hussein. Remember him, the one that we killed later. They armed Saddam Hussein. And on pretty good evidence, they armed him with chemical poison gas or watched as they understood that he would use poison gas against the Iranians. And the United States backed a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians.

Why? Because Iran stood up to the United States, said we don't want you to impose a police state on us. We want our own system. We want our own government. We don't want one that is imposed by you. So the United States immediately went to war. with Iran. That wasn't about nuclear weapons or any of the claims that Trump may make. This is a hatred that goes back to the fact that Iran was a democracy that was overthrown by the United States.

And then after suffering American-backed oppression for decades, then said we want to govern ourselves. That's intolerable to people in Washington. How dare a country decide that it's going to govern itself rather than to be governed by a puppet put in place by the United States? We've spent since 1979, we've spent 47 years trying to topple this regime. With the best, our Treasury thug, because he's not really a Treasury Secretary, He's an enforcer to break currencies from other countries. That seems to be a whole job in which he has been interested in not helping the American economy.

He has said that the goal was to crash the economy, break the financial system, bring people out onto the streets to overthrow the regime. And when Iran has tried to negotiate, they reached an agreement, of course, in 2015. with not only the United States, they satisfied all of the permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany with an agreement in which Iran said, we will subject ourselves to rigorous inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Well, Netanyahu and Trump weren't having any of that. They're not concerned about nuclear weapons. They want to overthrow. Iran. That's all. And so Trump ripped up the agreement in 2018. He ripped it up. He destroyed the negotiated agreement. Then they started assassinating Iranian leaders. They tried to amp up this economic warfare,

which again, Besson seems to have a certain proclivity. Then in 2020, in 2025, they said, well, let's negotiate again. So they negotiated. And as we were entering the fourth round of negotiation, they started bombing them. And then they did it again this year. Because why were all the Iranian leaders assembled with the Supreme Leader at his place when they killed him on February 28, 2026? They were assembled there. because they were discussing the next round of negotiation that was to take place in Vienna on the following week. And Mossad said, oh, they're all going to be meeting in the Supreme Leader's place. So Trump and Netanyahu as just murderers said, OK, let's kill them.

Let's kill them. This is called foreign policy of the United States. So this is what's sad when we are sitting in a room with these people. They are diplomats. They are a heart surgeon. They are measured. President Poshtihan said many times, I felt bad because I did want to speak to say something in this context. He said, I just can't figure it out.

I just can't figure it out. We've offered peace. I don't understand it. I don't understand it. But it's easy to understand, actually, President Poser. and these people are murderers. Netanyahu without flinching, murdered tens of thousands of people just now. Trump delights in the idea that he will run Iran.

So it's as crude as that. I think it is shocking to an ancient civilization that has a history of governance that is 10 times older than the United States to come in the face of this kind of behavior. I do think it is shocking. I think they are deeply, truly puzzled. But this is where we are. But what do you think Foreign Minister Raqi meant in the clip I just played when he said, even if it comes to a doomsday war? Well, you know, Israel has nuclear weapons. Israel is in the hands of people who have lost

their minds. So maybe he thinks that. Maybe he observes Trump. Who knows what Mr. Trump will do when he stands at the podium of the United Nations, the president of the United States, and says it's my

choice, whether to make Iran great or to annihilate it and to send the people to hell. And I'm quoting, this is a president of the United States, one sentence is enough to disqualify this person.

This is a violation of every sacred responsibility as well as of his constitutional order. And what I bemoaned about all of this is that these absolutely useless, pusillanimous Republicans don't say a word because the Democrats have been saying, well, take back the power of war from this person before he gets us all killed. And the Republicans say, oh, no, no, no, we won't do that. We won't. We will not exercise our constitutional responsibility. It's not a choice for Congress.

It's their job. You want your job, you do your job, damn it. And that's your job. Article 1, Section 8, only the Congress. can declare war. It's not the job of an American king to decide on the survival of another civilization. It's the job of Congress to govern this country when it comes to the declaration of war. And it's only Congress's job. It can't abdicate it. It can't give it away. It can't give it to the President of the United States. It's Congress's job. I say vote them all out of office,

people that refuse to do their job. Because this is bringing us to the brink of complete disaster. I didn't hear a single Republican condemn that phrase that he made that you just quoted. Let me jump to President G before we finish. What if anything was accomplished over the weekend? Donald Trump seemed to be bored. Took him on a helicopter ride. They spent time at the National Archives.

You gave a tour of the construction in the ballroom. Did President Xi really come here for that? Yes, in one sense, which is that given the madness that can happen in Washington, this was an excellent summit. And by that I mean, Trump didn't do anything stupid to bring the world closer to annihilation. He didn't make any threat. he didn't launch new trade wars. Frankly, Judge, I'm grateful. No, I don't think they discussed anything at depth. I don't know whether the president of the United States could do so anyway.

But he was very happy to host a dinner. I counted 19 U.S. billionaires at the dinner. That's Trump's favorite milieu. He was in his element. He was having a glorious time. Fine. He wasn't launching a new war. He wasn't bringing us closer to destruction. He wasn't making threats to China. I thought it was just wonderful, frankly. Everything you see is true, but it manifests a degradation of American diplomacy if we rejoice because the president did not do damage rather than rejoicing because they came to some constructive agreement. Well, look, this is not a serious government. this is a show. There's nothing serious about any of the government right now.

It's all improv time. It's all whatever Trump decides in the middle of the night to post on true social. It's all whatever war of whim he decides. This is not a functioning government. I'm sorry to say it. It's not. Nothing is done by law. Nothing is done by serious study.

There is no serious diplomacy. There is no search for solutions to very challenging issues. You know last week the heads of the American artificial intelligence companies, both the Anthropic and Open AI, came to the UN Security Council, to the world's chamber of security. and said this is out of control. And since they've been saying this, and they said it to all of the permanent members of the Security Council and the other 10 elected members, Trump hasn't shown the slightest interest

for one second in understanding anything. This is whimsical what is happening right now. That's why a summit in which nothing happened is a huge relief. All right. You persuaded me. Professor Sachs, thank you very much. I know it's the middle of the night where you are. You're always so gracious to come on when we need you.

Thank you for your time. Safe travels. Thanks a lot. See again soon. All the best. Wonderful. Thanks. Of course. Coming up tomorrow, Tuesday, at 8 in the morning, Ambassador Chaz Freeman,

at 9 in the morning, Professor John Mearsheimer at 10 in the morning, Aaron Mate, at 2 in the afternoon. He's been away for two months. I can't wait to chat with him. Matt Ho at 3 in the afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwikowski, Judge Nippoeltan for judging the Palatano for judging freedom.