Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Trump's Illegal and Reckless Invasion

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Trump's Illegal and Reckless InvasionSee 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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And with Ollie's in-app on-demand health screenings, tap real experts whenever you need peace of mind. Visit ollie.com slash crossover and use code crossover for 60% off your first box. Undeclared wars are commonplace. Fragically, 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?

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 Friday, January 9th, 2006. My dear friend, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, from halfway around the world, joins us now. Professor Sachs always a pleasure. You're always so intrepid, so always available to us. No matter where on the planet we may find you. Great to be with you.

It spoke earlier this week, and because of time constraints on your part and mine, we weren't on for our full time. but it had an enormous audience, and I know there's been a clamor to have me pick your brain again. And, of course, there have been new developments since we spoke last. Does the United States need a military budget of $1.5 trillion, which would be larger than all the military budgets on the planet combined? We're on a path of war everywhere right now. It's extraordinarily dangerous. It's just about the only thing that threatens the United States is our own behavior. So, of course, we don't need a budget of $1.5 trillion, especially because our government does nothing but hemorrhage debt.

And we have a fiscal crisis aside from that. We don't need more wars. We have a president of the United States that threatens a new country every day. and this has to stop if we're going to survive. We're just on a completely reckless, dangerous, provocative path right now, the likes of which we've never seen. We've never had a foul-mouth president who views himself as above the Constitution, above the domestic law, who dismisses any idea of international law,

and who thinks that he reigns over the world and is determined to do so with the vast military spending and rampant use of the military. The United States has bombed seven countries in the past year, getting to be a habit. One of the reasons we curtailed our last interview is because you were about to speak from a distant land to an emergency session of of the United Nations Security Council. Was the Security Council able to do anything, or does that crazy rule that allows the one-member veto effectively just make it a debating society? Well, no, nothing actually happened at the UN Security Council, but I think it's extremely

important that we not just write off the United Nations. We have right now, a government that is trying to rip up the UN Charter and rip up any semblance of rules and standards and norms and laws and treaties. And if we just go along with that because we're cynical and we side with the extraordinarily dangerous statements of Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff, that the only thing that counts, in this world is power, well, then we're basically saying we're just going to war with the world. And the consequences absolutely will be devastating. And since we have a reckless, intemperate, impulsive, corrupt president, it's very dangerous. It's extraordinary. Here is a statement, a profound statement of the rejection of all constitutional and international legal

restraints that President Trump made yesterday. Now, he was interviewed by four New York Times reporters in the Oval Office for two hours during the course of which he took some telephone calls and he let them stay there and listen to his end of the calls. So we don't have a video, but we have the audio of the most profound statement he made, and we have a photograph of him in the Oval Office with these four reporters. Chris? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to? Yeah, there's one thing.

My own morality, my own mind. It's the only thing that can stop. Not international law. I don't need international law. I'm not looking to hurt people. Do you feel your administration needs to abide by international law on the global state? Yeah. I do, you know, I do, but it depends what your definition of international laws.

You mean in Greenland? We had, in Greenland, we had start in the 1951 agreement, though. It says the United States can reopen these bases anytime you want. You could send as many troops as you want, and you haven't done it. How come? Because I want to do it properly. And properly means own it? Well, it is.

To me, it's ownership. Ownership is very important, you know. Why is ownership important here? Because that's what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can't do, whether you're talking about a lease or a treaty, ownership gives you things and elements that you can't get from just on. More dangerous to come, Jeff.

Well, it's absolutely extraordinary. A man who thinks that his mind is reality, is a deranged mind. And that's basically what he's saying. He's also a very ignorant person. We know that. He doesn't really know much of anything. I would like to give him a start of what international laws is the UN Charter, which is a treaty ratified by the United States Senate in 1945. And written by the United States. It happens to be the creation of the greatest president in American history, Franklin Roosevelt. And it was to prevent another world war. It said that the world had suffered the scourge of two wars.

In the first 45 years of the 20th century and the UN Charter was an agreement among nations to prevent the scourge of war being revisited. Now we have a president who is bombing countries at will out of his, imagination or his so-called morality and threatening other countries every day. The threat of force is against international law. Under the UN Charter, Article 2, Section 4 says that no UN member state may threaten or use force against the sovereignty or the territorial and territorial, of another nation. So President Trump should learn what international law is. He should understand

that in the U.S. Constitution, when we enter a treaty, that treaty is the law of the land. He should understand that 192 other countries have entered that same treaty, have adopted the UN charter, our members of the United Nations, and for very serious reasons of our collective survival. We've decided to live according to rules rather than according to power alone so that we don't destroy ourselves. That's the idea of law rather than the kind of brutality that we're hearing from Trump or from his minions right now, Miller or Hegeseth or Rubio, who are trash-talking the world and making threats. Now, this isn't idle.

This isn't academic what we're talking about. We've had a genocide in the last couple of years because we're not abiding by international law. and when international courts under the UN system say that these crimes are being committed, the United States is sanctioning the judges, the individuals, even the families of the judges in these courts. We're trying to break any kind of constraint using international law because Trump, in his delusional world, thinks America can do what it wants without consequence. Let's look at Venezuela. The prosecutors in the Southern District of New York

at the initial appearing appearance of President Maduro told Judge Hellerstein that his arrest was nothing more than the arrest of a fugitive from justice. Okay. 25 ships, 150 helicopters, 200 to 250 troops, 100 people killed, 40 of them in their sleep. The head of a government removed the government effectively decapitated. Sounds to me more like an invasion than the arrest of a fugitive from justice. I don't think the fugitive from justice argument passes the smirk test.

the specific charges were absurd and have already been disowned, that he was head of a specific gang that had been named, and then it turned out that wasn't really organized crime or a gang. That was a slang expression that was used, not an actual organization. So we have aneptitude, incompetence, and arrogance all built together in our system. I do think it's very important for people to understand. It's not just Trump. We lost our constitutional order years ago. It's been baiting gradually.

But presidents, one after another, have engaged in so-called covert operations, which means you go to war, but you deny it, even if it's quite obvious. You overthrow governments, but you deny. deny it. You confiscate property, but you don't own up to it. And so this has been going on really since the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. And it was already in 1961 that none other than General Dwight D. Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, our most illustrious general, who was the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces,

in World War II told us in his farewell message that we are being taken over by the military industrial complex. That was no idle chit-chat. That was telling us that our Constitution has been profoundly subverted. Took a general to tell us that. And he was telling us how things have actually gone down. Only once was the CIA ever investigated, and that was in 1975, 50 years ago, I said the Church of Idaho. Since then, not again. And so we live in a state of illegality. The difference with Trump is two things. One, he says out loud, the illegality. and he boasts about it. Second, he opens the floodgates to more illegality,

both on a personal sleaze level and on a violence level. So this is the difference, but it's a difference of magnitude, let's say, because President Obama and President Bush and presidents, most of them all the way down the line, have used the CIA as a private. private army, have committed wars that are under our Constitution, the decision of the United States Congress, have violated international law. That doesn't mean it should be so ruthlessly torn to shreds as Trump is explicitly trying to do this week. Because even if we have Sinned and sinned again, it doesn't mean that you rip up every standard.

It means you try to get back to the kind of behavior that can actually make the world safe rather than the kind of world that we're in, which is becoming ever more dangerous for the American people and for the rest of the world because of this general lawlessness. Now Trump is boasting of the lawlessness. And we should mention that from the time I was in the UN Security Council, at the beginning of this week, Trump has pulled out of, I think it's 31 UN agencies and organizations and another 35 or so international activities that are not counted under the UN rubric. In other words, Trump is destroying the basis of applying international law, which is the UN system, and he's pulling the United States out of that. And I think it will get worse.

Probably he'll announce one day that the United States isn't part of the UN at all. I have to emphasize, I'm, as you say, halfway around the world, and I'm on an extended trip, meeting senior government officials and leaders in different parts of the world now in Asia. The rest of the world is aghast. The rest of the world is shocked. The rest of the world is dismayed. They don't like to see the United States become a rogue nation. The U.S. isn't earning respect. It's not gaining security. It's not winning its resources and war. It's sowing instability, but without support anywhere. People watch what's happening with great alarm,

and that's true everywhere in the world. How is it viewed as best you can analyze Professor Sachs from the Kremlin in light of recent events? The decapitation of the Venezuelan government and seizure President Maduro, the seizure of tankers, oil tankers all over the world, particularly two that were flying a Russian flag, and the indisputable evidence that the CIA was involved in the attack on President Putin's home. What do you think they're saying in the Kremlin? Do they really want to sit down with the two real estate agents that Trump sends to negotiate with them?

No, I think that they have come to understand that there is no basis for. peace or agreements in this way. I think they have reached this conclusion, I imagine, with great reluctance because they hoped that something would be different. It always recalls the statement that President Putin made in an interview in a French newspaper in 2017 when he said at that point that he had dealt with three U.S. presidents. They come into office with ideas. Then the men in the gray suits and the blue ties come to tell them about the world the way that it is. Well, Trump may have come into office a year ago with the idea that he would make peace with Russia and end the Ukraine war. But Project Ukraine, which has been a CIA-led project to take Ukraine for the West, proved to be rather durable.

Trump proved to be incompetent there, as in so many other areas, the war rages on. And I don't think that the Russians have much confidence. Ships are being seized. The high sea. sees, it has become an area of U.S. piracy. Attacks are made inside Russia on the president's residence and so forth. This is absolutely shocking. It should be shocking. Nothing shocking anymore for us. And Trump has recently said, I'm out of the country, so I don't know all the details, but apparently has said, sure, let's go on with even more punitive sanctions against the Russians and so forth. So I think that they're quite aware of the situation. But I wanted to add one thing.

The real worry that I think is the imminent and most dangerous point on the planet is not Venezuela, not even. not even Greenland, though the U.S. will take that, but is Iran? I think that there is a very real chance that there will be a war with Iran very soon. The United States is in the midst of what we call a color revolution or regime change revolution, which is that the U.S. puts on sanctions, threats, tries to crush the economy. That leads to unrest. And then Trump says, if you address that unrest, if you crack down on it, we're going to go to war with you. So it's a game.

This is a game that goes back decades. Crush the economy, provoke unrest. If the unrest then provokes a crackdown, then you try to overthrow the government that makes the crackdown in the name of protecting the people. It's the oldest game in the U.S. playbook. I think that this is very close to what's happening right now in Iran and extremely dangerous. Because Iran, unlike Venezuela, is in the midst of the great powers. Many nuclear powers are all around that region. And it's not like Venezuela, where the president cynically, ruthlessly,

amasses U.S. vessels all alone. It's a heavily armed region. Iran itself is a heavily armed country. It's surrounded by heavily armed countries. It's a powder keg. And it seems like also because of Israel, which is the other rogue nation on the planet, it seems like we're going to be provoked to do something there as well. Professor Sachs, thank you very much for your time. It's probably the middle of the night. It might already be Saturday where you are, but thank you very much appreciated. It's sad, dark, serious matters that we discuss, but it's a delight to be able to pick your brain. Thank you, my dear friend. See you next week. Okay, you got it. Safe travels. Coming up later today at 3.30 this afternoon, Pepe Escobar, he is fuming over the American

theft or attempted theft he'll tell you why it's only attempted of venezuel and oil and at four o'clock our favorite way to end the day and the week the intelligence community roundtable with larry johnson and ryan mcouverett just the palatano for judging freedom