Judging Freedom - [SPECIAL] Robert Barnes : How Trump Makes Decisions

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

[SPECIAL] Robert Barnes : How Trump Makes DecisionsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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? 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 Wednesday, June 10, 2006, Robert Barnes, the Robert Barnes joins us now. Robert, we have many, many mutual friends, and we've communicated before, but never met in person to the extent this is in person. We're 3,000 miles apart, but welcome here, my dear friend. For those of you who don't know, Mr. Barnes, he is a world-class trial lawyer who has represented figures as disparate as Ralph Nader and Alex Jones, both friends of mine, as he knows, and who comes to us with substantial insight on the Trump administration due to the many friends and former friends that he has there. Do we know how Trump came to decide to invade Iran?

Yeah, from the people that I've talked to, the president's decision-making has changed, and this was in the buildup prior to the going into Iran, but from people that were around the president on a regular basis, communicated that, you know, the president that used to be art of the deal, always planned for the worst, expect for the best, the positive thinking tethered by a form of sort of hardcore realism, the president who loved getting like 55 different second opinions

on any topic or subject, the, you know, that president, the president who was uber rational and hardcore making practical and tactical decisions was mostly gone by December, by late winter. It had been slipping and eroding since the late summer of 2025. And now you had someone that almost, the way they described him, thought like a toddler that were very emotionally driven, would confabulate constantly, didn't like to hear second opinions or even second guess what he was thinking at a given a moment, would get mad

and enraged, and even people like Bessent and others would walk around on eggshells around him because his temper was out of control. You sort of saw it in some of the social filters. But the most disturbing aspect was the confabulation they were describing, that they would tell him something and then he would somehow forget it the next day and not so much out of forgetfulness, but if he didn't want to hear something, he decided it wasn't true, even if he heard it and was told it many, many times over. Vice versa, if he wanted to believe something, he believed it was true even when his top advisors told him it was not true. So in the buildup to the Iran war, that people like vice president, there's literally nobody on board, the war to begin with,

within the U.S. administration. Everybody voiced skepticism and doubt. Even Secretary of State Rubio voiced doubt. Even Pete Hegsteth. Even Pete Hegson voiced out. He became a big war champion once it got rolling. That it was his time to shine because he's Team America World Police, South Park style. He's literally become the caricature of the stereotype. He's fallen off. the neocon wagon as hard as you can pull. I just saw a picture of him getting off his military jet in sneakers. Short shorts. I mean really short shorts, a tight t-shirt and a baseball cap, and everybody was saluting him.

That's Pete in his glory. But forgive me for interrupting. No, you're absolutely right. And one of the things that's got to him is he loves playing, he loves hearing Trump say central casting now. This is like a, that doesn't mean by the whole emotional psychological structure of the White has started to mirror the president, and the president's decline. And so the, like, he likes, yeah, that's right. I look just like I write it walked out of a movie screen as the head of the Secretary of War. What changed Trump's mind? Was it Netanyahu and David Barnaya, the head of

Mossad? A combination. It was mostly delusions of grandeur. So Lindsay Graham has been whispering in his here since last summer, that if he were to go into Iran, he could be the ultimate hero, the ultimate champion, the man who brought peace and freedom to the Middle East, the man who, and Trump has developed this like emperor-like mindset. Like what he used to favor and believe in support and worry about is not what he does now. Now he wants to, like, that's why you're seeing these memes of him as a Roman emperor, him building a 50-foot statue to himself in the Trump's library, him building a statue to himself, golden statue to himself, on a golf course that he then has religious leaders. go and bless. You have him complaining that J.D. Vance, is it like Xi's

acolyte's in China, as if there was a comparison between the two? So you have a Trump that thinks very toddler-rich, and consequently, he wants this sort of grandeur, this delusion of grandeur is what Graham was the number one impact psychologically. The second was BB came to him in early February. They waited until J.D. was out of town. And they said that this will be a no-brainer, this will be easy. This will be like Venezuela. This will be three to four days. And Trump chose to believe it. The intelligence said it was wrong. Military said it was wrong. Vance said it was wrong. Wright said it was wrong. And yet Trump chose to ignore all of them, pretend they didn't even warn him. And rewrote the narrative in live time and just pretended that BB was telling the truth.

And he just confabulates all the time now. He believes what he wants, doesn't believe what he doesn't want, no matter what the truth is. You have used some very strong words. Use the word toddler twice and confabulate. Is his mind degraded? When I started describing what people were telling me that were around him on a daily basis, other people that have experienced in the psychological industry are usually with loved ones said what I was describing sounded like prefrontal lobe behavioral emotional dementia. Your cognitive capacity doesn't decline.

but your decision-making does because you start to regress emotionally into a different psychological state, almost down the age scale. And people like Larry Johnson, his mother suffered from it and he described it. Like they would be normal. And then all of a sudden they would say something as if they no longer had a social filter of any kind. You've seen that from Trump in a wide range of context. You've seen, as Daniel Davis was documenting, Trump making up stories that didn't make sense. Remember that Mr. Toyota stuff where he was saying,

met Mr. Toyota and Mr. Toyota agreed to give him a bunch of money to invest. Mr. Toyota had been dead for years before that. Well, the other day, he said he said he spoke to Hesbala. I can't believe that happened. He fantasizes this kind of stuff regularly. They have to correct. How is it that you were able to articulate with such certainty this negative description of him? Do you talk to people that are in his inner circle, Robert? Yes, yes. I've talked to people that see him on a daily basis. And I was the longstanding defender and protector of Trump was his lawyer back during the 2020 election during part of that stage, have a lot of friends. Now, there's fewer and fewer of them there because they're leaving on a regular basis because they don't want to be, some are being pushed out. Some can see the writing on the wall.

Don't want to be part of what this is and where it is going. You even had the inspector, the lead counsel for the Treasury Department recently stepped down. And the reason he stepped down, as I was told from other people. that were in the Treasury Department, was in response to that setting up that separate little slush fund for Trump's friends and allies. So, but yeah, and they've been trying to get the warning out to me since January, since before all this started,

they're like, don't expect the same decision making. His attitude and emotions have changed. If you're going to advocate to him from outside the court of public opinion, look at what he might think of him as a toddler and what are his fears and motivate him with the fears like Joe Kent has done a great. great job of this. He's been hammering home. If you go in, you're going to end up like Jimmy Carter. Haustings are going to be left behind. Trump is now even publicly admitted that that's on his mind.

And that is the reason why we haven't gone back in since that disastrous effort to cease the nuclear material that we did. Joe is an American hero. He'll be on. He's been on the show before and he'll be on with us tomorrow. Why did Tulsi Gabbard quit? Is it for the same reasons as Joe? He was just courageous enough to give them and she wasn't? Well, it was what she was trying to do. It was a combination. She wanted to hold on long enough to finish writing a report on the 2020 election on the Ukraine bio labs and on what happened connected to COVID. So her goal was she thought she could withstand another six months and be able to go through it. There was massive pressure to push her out. Trump was enraged that she wouldn't publicly attack Jo Kent. Trump was enraged that she wouldn't go

before Congress and fully back up his Iran war. So he was already, and he was. And he was, He had regretted picking her when he realized she wouldn't play ball in the summer of last year. From that point forward, she's been persona non grata more often than not around the, you know, do not. The story, as Steve Bannon reported, that was that ODI and I meant do not invite. And so that's what happened to her. But she was willing to stay in there. She was pushed out.

ODINI, Office of Director of National Intelligence. And what did Bannon say it meant? In the White House, it meant office of do not invite. Right, right. Well, we know she was on vacation in Hawaii when they kidnapped Nicholas Maduro. Does Trump know that he's being spied on in the White House and at Mara Lago by the Mossad? Thanks to the good work of the good people still left in the Pentagon. So the two people that are very skeptical of this war from the get-go that are still there

is under Secretary of Defense, Albert Colby, grandson of Bill Colby, who outed the CIA's Crown Jewels all the way back in the early 70s to the Church Committee. And then the, and then his deputy, both of them helped write and craft and were the main authors of the National Security Statement and the National Defense Strategy, both of which said we were not going to be regime chains in the Middle East. So both of them have won it out. They have been able to use the report that the Defense Intelligence Agency got, that the scale and scale, of invasive spying on them in particular. Those two in particular were they don't really, they threw in Whitkoff just to throw in a little

cover as to who the source was of elevating this risk. They don't need to worry about spying on Wickcoff. He talks of Israel, they're right. But they did Colby and his deputy, because those two have been laying out to the president the problems with military escalation, the problems with resource allocation and the conflict, and have been skeptics of this war from the inception and continue to be, and that's why Israel is paranoid as what are they telling the president versus other people. And Israel is more aware than anybody of Trump's diminished decision-making steps.

That's why they're having more success manipulating him than even his own vice president is able to persuade him on a given day, a given moment. And so that's why they've escalated that. They know he's declining state, and they don't want anybody whispering the truth in his ear. Does Trump control Netanyahu or does Netanyahu control Trump? I think it's, I mean, Trump, if he wants to, it can absolutely control Netanyahu. He's got arguably more, I agree with Dr. Parcy of the Quincy Institute, that Trump has more control over Israel than any American president due to his popularity within Israel and that he could sink.

I mean, I would know Trump's poster, Tony Fabrizio, is working from Natali Bennett, who is challenging BB. And I saw Professor Mamdani float the idea that the Israel lobby might want to, treat BB as a sacrificial lamb, kind of Nixon Watergate style, and say any people, any problems you had with what we've done in the last half decade with Gaza, the Lebanon, Iran, and elsewhere, that was all Beebe's fault. So there we've got even the Tali Bennett's as hawkish as Bibi, but they're hoping maybe they could purge their history. So there may be some of that a foot too. So Trump's got all the leverage over Bibi. Other than the fact that Bibi knows of this risk,

He also knows that if he doesn't win re-election, then he's going to go to prison, probably for the rest of his natural poor in life because his physical health is clearly declining, as you can see in live time. So given that, that's the only caveat to all of this. But Trump can provide a degree of protection. Without Trump, BB can't win re-election and goes to prison. So that's why Trump has the ultimate leverage. But BB must understand that when he and Barnaya meet alone with Trump in the Oval Office,

they have them wrapped around their fingers. Yeah, well, particularly because they know how to motivate him when it's current mental state. The old days, Trump would say, as the New York Times reported, Middle East is just blood and sand. You just give up a lot of blood just to get a little saying. That Trump is gone. And so they know how they, they know the trigger, now what Iran did smart, as reported by Larry Johnson and Pepe Escobar about 10 days ago or so, they put out the idea, the possibility that they would develop nuclear weapons and that they would test them for the world to see.

And that got to Trump. That information didn't get back to Trump. And that you saw if Trump behave rational for about a week after that. It's because of the fear. It's what fear? Does he fear humiliation more? Does he fear the economy collapsing more? Does he fear getting wiped out in midterms and being impeached more?

Or does he fear the Israel lobby, particularly what it impacts him is your old Fowles of Fox News. He watches them obsessively every night now. talks to Sean Hannity on the phone, told a buddy of mine that right over lunch at the White House, says, oh, I know what's going on. I talk to Sean every night. It's, wow. You know from Fox. That's about the last guy. You would want to rely on trust for an advisor. Of course, of course, Sean, and Sean's been a friend of mine for many years. We disagree on many issues. But Sean will tell the president what he thinks the president wants to hear, which is what you're telling me. Everybody around him now does because they fear the explosive response.

Does J.D. Vance think he can run to succeed Trump and defend the war? No, no. And in fact, Vance is highly unlikely to run in 2028. He's already leaning heavily in that direction. His focus has been, he sees the war as such a global catastrophe waiting to happen economically, that it is essential that we get out sooner rather than later, and has been willing to take all the slings and arrows for doing so. And you saw, like, you know, the main source to the New York Times two weeks ago,

in the weekend press that was saying how Trump has doubts about Vance and all that, that comes from Trump himself. He was the main source. Trump is enraged that Vance was right. I mean, Trump was asking people questions this past month about could he fire the vice president? Like he doesn't, you know, the Constitution works. So Vance is the one guy who can stand up to him, but he takes tons of crap for doing it. You still go see the Murdoch press will leak against him regularly that happened with a daily mail two weeks ago.

So he takes all kinds of heat and crap for it. When he was dispatched to Islamabad and he called Trump 13 times in Netanyahu twice, was he just the stooge? No, he was there to get a deal done, but he thought he could talk Trump into the deal when he was there in Islamabad. And Trump, in fact, would often agree to the deal over on the phone with JD and then change his mind and road pull him two minutes later. That's why the Iranians were like, what's going on?

It looks like we got something and then all of a sudden, rug pulled. And it's going well and all of a sudden it's on the other direction again. So he just rug pulls. I think Vance has got a deal from people I talk to at least six different times that Trump has agreed to. And then he rug pulled it at the last minute. Wow. And that's why he just did that. Where there's supposed to be an announcement of a deal this week?

And then he ruggles it yesterday. And he's at. Here's Trump on national television. in the largest, loudest arena in the United States, Madison Square Garden. That's Jimmy Dolan, the owner of the next to him, sound asleep. Is this typical of him falling asleep

in Madison Square Garden and at cabinet meetings? Yeah, it's atypical of Trump historically. I mean, he had freakish energy, et cetera. We never saw this in his first term. Now it happens on a regular basis, and it's accelerating. He's just not, I increasingly think constitutionally we should consider an age cap. You know, we have an age limitation for office because it's not that no 30-year-old is smart enough to be president.

We just don't trust them on average to be so. I think, you know, between Biden and Trump, we've seen that somehow you hit 77, 78. I mean, it happened with Reagan, led a part of his second term. We're seeing these declines. So, yeah, this happens regularly. He even does it live on TV, did it two days ago. Yeah. What you are saying about the president, which is once removed from those observing it,

the people doing the observations are longtime friends of yours and confidants of his, is really quite damning what will happen if the public comes to these realizations that the president is degraded. I mean, not degraded as obviously as Joe Biden was, but degraded nevertheless. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, and it degraded in a different direction, but with worse consequence.

I mean, even Biden in his diminished state knew, don't go into Iran. Don't try to knock off the Persians, one of the most ancient civilizations in the world. The, you know, knew not to try to assassinate Putin. I mean, the CIA was neck deep and tied in that attempt with the Ukraine December when he's talking with Trump on the phone and then all of a sudden they try to hit with

the residents they thought he was in, which has set U.S. Russia relations all the way back again to the Biden era or worse. So if the people around him are seeing it, that's why they've got out the story in different ways so that people can adjust accordingly and accommodate accordingly, especially on the global level. So, you know, people shouldn't overreact to Trump in places. This is why they told the Iranians ignore every single thing Trump says. I mean, how often you see that during negotiations. Is he going to invade Cuba or kidnap a 95-year-old Raul Castro? He wants to. He absolutely wants to. Now, that's been a Rubio obsession, too.

So even Venezuela was really about Cuba. I heard that at the time, that Rubio wanted to cut off Cuba's oil and gas supply. And that was his goal with Venezuela. It wasn't. to change the Venezuelan government didn't really care. So kidnapping Maduro was removing a key layer of protection for Cuba. And they absolutely want to overthrow the government. And that's why Ratcliffe has been down there. And the message he delivered to Cuba was, we need regime change here. So you guys figure out how you want to do it.

Once again, Trump thought he could just bribe his way through. It's turned out the Cubans are tougher to bribe than the Venezuelans. The much longer lasting regime has, you know, its ideologies kind of is in its bloodstream. the indictment of, I mean, the indictment of Maduro. I mean, you've seen it, Judge. It's many legally shaky components to it. It's garbage. And it should be, it should be dismissed for a variety of reasons. We can talk about that at another time. I'd love to, I'd love to analyze it with you. Who runs American foreign policy? Donald Trump or Marco Rubio? That's a good question. I would say predominantly it's the Israel lobby at the moment,

but not alone. And then Trump's emotional psychological whims. it's really that kind of egregious. That's why you can't get, I mean, notice that not a single trade deal that Trump has supposedly cut has been made into law, not a single one. The deal with China is just almost kind of on paper based on behavior. It's not based on anything in writing that's been, that's enforceable in American law. It's one of Iran's concerns with this. Now, they might legally be able to go through the UN Security Council to try to find an enforceable mechanism for the deal. because nobody believes Trump can have the guts.

I mean, look at Congress. Almost everybody on the Republican side who voted for the release of the Epstein files from the get-go is now out of Congress. Nancy Mace is now out after last night's primaries in South Carolina and lost her gubernatorial nomination bid solely because of how she voted on Epstein that led to the Trump endorsing a more establishment candidate in that race. Are Republican leaders in the Congress and in the various state houses, Republican governors, aware of Trump's degraded mental state? Some are, some are not. Most are not. Most are unaware. They keep waiting. Is John Thune, who leads the Republicans in the Senate, aware of it? As the Speaker of the House, a crazy Christian nationalist who thinks God the Father gave present-day Israel to the Israelites 3,000. years ago, whatever, do they know? When I've been up on the hill, I have not heard people's recognition of this,

even from people that are on the Democratic side, even the problem is the Democrats always imagined Trump as this egotistical, narcissist little kid running around. And so their caricature of Trump, when it actually comes true, they don't recognize it. You know, it's like they kept saying wolf, wolf, wolf, like the old shepherd's boy. And now the wolf is actually there, they don't realize the wolf's actually there. So that's what happened. Does Trump fear impeachment over his drastic increase in wealth during these two years, well, now a year and a half in the White House?

His fear, like what's interesting is during the whole Iran process, his primary fear was the economy falling off because of the dual hit that took. The hit that took to his midterm prospects and risk of impeachment, and the investigations that would flow with that. But also it's all of his buddies and pals that are deeply embedded within the equity markets, especially the AI portion of the equity markets. And so consequently, that was his primary fear because it went to both. It went to impeachment and personal wealth and friends and family wealth.

But the other factor that was interesting is the number one factor that motivated them to really back off and really consider signing a deal was the risk of humiliation of Iran developing nukes, more so than him getting impeached and removed from office. So it's been, and now what he does, it's easier on the impeachment side because he convinces himself it won't happen. He convinces himself to win the House, they'll win the Senate, they'll at least win the Senate. So don't worry about it.

And that's where his confabulation messes up his decision-making all the time now. Convinces himself of things are just not true. When he called the doubling of gasoline prices from $2.50 to north of five bucks peanuts, I mean, how does that react to Joe Sixpack and his trying to fill his pickup truck? Not very well. No, and that's one of a half dozen idiotic statements he's made over the last six months.

If Americans die, Americans die, that's the nature of war. That is a Trump. I mean, that is the old Trump. Trump used to be paranoid of Americans being dead on his watch from a military adventure. Now it's like, yeah, okay. The H-1B visas we can bring in as many as we want because let's face it, Americans just don't have any talent, you know, that bit of genius statements. I don't really care about the economy as it relates to the midterms.

I don't really care about the midterms. You know, I mean, to be flipping off the blue collar worker up in Michigan. He's always had, you know, a low filter, but his filter is completely gone. That's why he's able and capable of saying anything in comparing himself to the Pope. Who's he going to fire next, blame the war loss on Heggseth and fire Pete? Yeah, I think that's highly likely. because Trump is not in a mind. He's never been in a great mindset for accountability anyway,

but now that is completely gone. So he'll look for people to blame for anything that went sideways. He would have loved to blame Vance if he could, but that's, you know, he can't fire vans. So he would have blamed Cabbert in part, and that was partially how she got pushed out early and went out quietly so that she couldn't get the blame for something that she doesn't deserve any blame for. But, yeah, Hegsteth is the life and Cash Patel, because Patel is such a disaster over at the FBI, that he's going to blame these people for his own mistakes, Trump's mistakes.

But the Cash Patel and Hegstaff, they're unlikely to still be there when 2027 rolls around. I don't think Todd Blanche is going to get confirmed. I think you should be disbarred for being on both sides of that case involving the Trump tax immunity. Well, he was preined and tutored in the Southern District of New York, or as I like to call it, the sovereign district of New York. So let's just say I'm not totally shocked by the Trump. the scale and scope of his personal and political and professional corruption. My producer, Chris Leonard, who's a big fan of yours, just text me.

I think Trump's amazing. My truck used to hold only $100 worth of fuel. It now magically holds $155 worth. Exactly. I mean, I don't know where the Trump that we've known for a decade plus has gone. But the best explanation I have is some combination of corruption, the Israel lobby, and his decision-making capacity decline as the best explanation for seeing a Trump that we didn't. This is a Trump who bragged about not going to war with Iran in his first term,

so much so that they partially, one of his counts of indictment, was him sharing information related to proving the how he declined the efforts to go to war with Iran. And now he's eager to justify and rationalize escalation over something that looks like, whatever the official narrative doesn't hold up in terms of the helicopter. So he knew that. Robert Barnes, this has been a great, great conversation. Will you come back again? Oh, yeah, happy to, Judge.

Anytime. You're already a fan fave. Thank you, Robert. All the best to you. Absolutely. Thanks, Your Honor. Bye-bye. A great conversation indeed.

And I'm sure nearly all of you agree with me. Coming up, if you're watching us live in 18 minutes, Professor Glenn Deeson at 2 o'clock and at 3 o'clock. and at three o'clock on all of this, the great Phil Giroldi. Judge Napao Tano for judging freedom.