Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/26/24 Michael Tracey on the Frustrating Thing about Trump

Episode Date: September 28, 2024

Journalist Michael Tracey joins Scott to talk about Trump’s 2024 campaign. Tracey argues that the anti-establishment credentials of Trump are often overblown, and that when one takes an unemotional look at what a second Trump term is likely to deliver, it’s not anything to get excited about. He and Scott also discuss the campaign of Kamala Harris. Michael Tracey is a New York-based journalist. You can find his writing on Substack and follow him on Twitter @mtracey This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And as retaliation, elements of the Iranian state may wish to take some sort of action against Trump, it's not inconceivable, but just be out there bombastically proclaiming this as apparently an impetus for Trump's vision of foreign policy is kind of insane. I mean, Trump says stuff every single day that liberal pundits screech is quote unquote unhinged, right? Or disconnected from reality or name your pejorative. And usually I'm a bit skeptical. I roll my eyes when I hear those hysterical reactions to whatever Trump flirts out on a given day. But yesterday, he actually did say something I think would qualify as unhinged. But ironically, the liberals don't particularly seem to care about this one, which is that Trump, who's in North Carolina, doing a campaign stop of some kind, and he was saying if he was president, given these threats that are allegedly emanating out of Iran, what he would do is threaten to obliterate the entirety of Iran. He said he would blow up their cities and destroy Iran as a country, right?

I was president and the candidate was under threat any candidate, Republican or Democrat. And by the way, I want to thank the Democrats because they just increased funding for the Secret Service who worked very hard. They increased funding for the Secret Service. And nobody will believe this. It was a unanimous vote, Republicans, every single Republican, every single Democrat present voted in favor. That's the first unanimous vote we've seen in a long time. And that's to increase the funding of the Secret Service. So I thank everybody in Congress.

But if I were the president, I would inform the threatening country, in this case, Iran, that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens. We're going to blow it to smithereens. You can't do that. and there would be no more threats there would be no more threats so there you go and just to add a little bit of context

you can't really tell if you're just listening but apparently those are prepared remarks so this is not just some off the cuff wise crack or you know hint of bravado or something I mean what's funny about the whole thing is that that's true

and it's also true for Joe Biden and the Ayatollah knows it and this is why to disbelieve this rumor until it is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt is because if the Ayatola

the IRGC murdered a major party presidential candidate the sitting president would bomb their cities absolutely he would Joe Biden would send B-52s at B-2s

B-2s and the Navy would pound the crap out of them and they know it and there's no way in the world I just I'm not saying no way ever under any circumstances but there's no way in the world that under these circumstances the Ayatollah is trying to start a war with the United States by killing this candidate and then knowing that he would lose certainly thousands maybe tens of thousands of people in a war with the United States as a repercussion for that. So he's really just being honest. But the point is, that's why the whole thing is stupid. It's because Iran doesn't want that kind of beef with the USA.

You can say whatever you want about the Ayatollah, but not that. That's stupid. And also, in the past couple months, the basic state capacity of Iran has really been called us to question. The former president of Iran died in just the helicopter accident that as far as we know is just due to inclement weather.

They haven't directly retaliated against Israel as was largely anticipated when the senior Hamas commander or official was assassinated in

Tehran. Everybody was on high alert that Iran was going to take some really serious retaliatory action against Israel, above and beyond what it had done in April, when it fired that salvo into Israel, that did minimal damage and seemed to have been telegraphed, and I still don't think we know the full story behind that exchange. But the point is, I mean, hyping Iran as this existential menace, it's becoming more and more farcical.

Not that Iran can't inflict any damage at all, but this idea that it has to be front and center as this designated enemy state is just absurd. And so barring the revelation of whatever evidence these claims are based upon, which of course are as of yet concealed from the public, apparently Trump got some kind of briefing from the Biden administration, which is ironic, again, that he's now just credulously repeating this stuff.

But he's repeating it because, I guess, it seems to be stoking a war frenzy. And it also is the type of war frenzy that is seen as favorable to Israel, because they're always banging on about how they want to cut off the head. of the snake in the Middle East, which to them is Iran, and Trump is running on the most extreme pro-Israel platform of any major party nominee ever. I think that's hard to dispute. He's also open and brazen about how Miriam Adelson is one of his most influential advisors, apparently. She's introducing him. It seems like every other week at certain events, including last week, at some pro-Israel summit in

D.C. And Trump boasted apparently without any shame that while he was president, he quote, gave the Golan Heights to Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, who were his top campaign funders and top funders with the Republican Party.

So that's amazing, right? Because that is how he says it. Like he's, it was his piece of property and he sold it to them for these campaign contributions. Like it was a real estate deal. Yeah. And never that it belongs to the nation state of Syria and the individual human property owners, the Druze

farmers that live there, who it's being stolen from. And I love the way he always tells this story. He says, I told them, give me five minutes on the Golanites, right? Yeah, he only needed five minutes to learn what the ultimate face of that swath of land

should be. That's all the education he needed. And definitely only from Israel's side of the story. To Israel, David Friedman. Yeah. Oh, so what you're saying is you took it and you want to keep it. Okay, good enough for me. Right, and it's also note that, note like the premise that it's his to give.

Yeah, of course. Of course. I'm just like South Sudan. One reason why I'm focusing on this. Northern Western Sahara, too. He did the same thing in the name of the Abraham Accords, recognized Morocco's seizure of Northern Western Sahara and said, yeah, you can have that. The great, the great so-called peace deal.

deal, which is basically just arms deals and buy-offs of Gulf and northern African, you know, potentates for the benefit of Israel. Exactly. To sell out the peace deal. And the Palestinians had no role whatsoever in that grand peace deal, which he and, you know, which that's the point of it. That's exactly the point of it is making a deal with all the Sunni kings without the participation of the Palestinians.

Jared Kushner buying them off with our money. Right. I'm wondering why I'm focusing on this stuff now. Obviously, the election is coming up, but I do feel like there's a bit of a missing critique or there's an insufficient critique of Trump, which sounds bizarre because Trump might be the most critiqued person on the planet, right?

But my issue with the prevailing critiques of Trump is always that they've been focused on the wrong things or they've been, you know, kind of flamboyantly hyperbolic without actually getting into the important substance. And I don't know. I mean, tell me if you agree with this at all, but I just feel like, you know, especially in alternative media sort of circles,

which is a lot of what I, you know, have tended to affiliate with in terms of my sensibilities, there's open and much warranted animus toward Kamal Harris, the Democrats, and Biden. I don't dispute any of that. I also engage in plenty of that animus myself, or at least in a critique. But I don't know. I just feel like there's a comparable sort of lack of vigor with which Trump is critiqued, because there's still this like weird faith in Trump is some kind of threat to the system

that I just don't think is born out in Trump's rhetoric in his record is present when he was in his first term what he has indicated that he would do in the second term his personnel from the first term his prospective personnel in the second in the second term and so I think there's actually I know as strange as it is to say a posity of valid critique of Trump happening right now and I think he's probably I agree with that you know if I had to guess I think he's favored to win so it's

kind of necessary well so first of all I agree with that but I think it's pretty easy to understand too I mean I can't help but root for the guy just because of how much people hate him and the way I break it down is you know I don't know if this is like Rothbardian libertarian class theory kind of thing or what but like essentially you have the all of the biggest rent seekers right that's what politics is it's wall street and the arms dealers big pharma big agriculture and the national security state itself and all of the uh you know when i

say pharma that includes like the whole welfare state for medicare medicate social security and all of the institutional recipients of those funds and all of that, and Israel, these are all the massive players. These are the biggest lobbies. And you could throw in the gun lobby, although they're really about, people confused that the NRA is about gun rights. What they're about is the business of selling guns to government employees and lobbying for those contracts is what they're really about. So out of all of those factions, the only one that supports Trump is Israel. And yeah, it's the thing that he's the worst on and he's probably the worst on it out of anybody.

But like, everybody else is against him. And it doesn't mean that. I don't know about that. I mean, Trump, Trump is backed by huge private equity interests. He's backed by, you know, law enforcement lobbies. He's backed by people who just want their corporate taxes cut, which you probably would delivered, just like he did in the first term, which also have vested interests in different kinds of carve-outs and other interests. So, I mean, look at the top funders of the top

individual donors of the 2024 election, actually in contrast with 2020, are Republican skewing. So what are people like Timothy Mellon, who actually also gave to RFK Jr. in like one of his Well, I think to me, he's kind of an example, right? We're like... What are they... What are they looking to get? I think that's a great example, sort of what I mean is where, like, you know, that guy's got money, but he's essentially a retired old heir, right? He's not a representative of any major power faction.

What does Bill Ackman want? I'm sorry? What about, like, what does Bill Ackman want? How about Elon Musk? I mean, Elon Musk is Trump's biggest promoter. He's like a huge military contractor. So, I mean, I get your point. I do think, you know, there are obviously certain rent-seeking interests that are more aligned with the Democratic Party.

But Trump is doing very well among finance years this time around. I see what you're saying. I think you're right about a lot of those. And I think, as you're saying, too, that I think he said that that's more and more true now than it was. He's a safer bet now that, well, if he's going to win, I guess, you know. But I think the thing is about Trump is, and this is the way I always characterize him, right, is America needed wrong. Paul, and we didn't even get Rand, Paul. We got Rudy Giuliani. That's who Donald Trump is. He's Rudy Giuliani, who's like, you know, close enough to powerful people, but dumb enough to sort of be

a bumbling kind of goober who's like, doesn't always do what they say, because maybe he doesn't even understand what they're talking about. He just has his instincts. He does crazy things, like just insult them and say how they were all wrong about everything. And, you know, let the president of South Korea negotiate with the North if he feels like it, which is absolutely against the rules, right? Like taking a phone call from the president of Taiwan, which W. Bush made that same mistake, I think. But anyway, like, he's so uncouth as far as operating within their circles that they hate him, right? They treat him like a virus to be rejected.

And that's what makes him appealing to everything. I think that might have been arguable in 2016. I just don't think it's anywhere near as arguable in 2024. I mean, Trump is a known commodity now. We have a record from when he wielded power for four years that we can examine. It's not some speculative exercise. Yeah, but I mean, they impeached him twice. Right?

We also have the evidence like them framing him for treason for three years. And then the ridiculous impeachment scandals and all of the Havana syndrome and every damn thing of that whole era of hoax against. to him and led by the FBI and the CIA. I just don't know why that would should lead me to have a rooting interest in Trump. Just like, I mean, Biden's approval rating. Well, I'm not trying to recruit you to the cause. I'm just explaining why I think he has appeal to other people, you know. No, I mean, I fully understand that.

I'm just saying, you know, here's, I'm giving you my assessment. Yeah. I mean, Biden in 2021 withdrew from Afghanistan. As you well know, you wrote the, literally wrote the book on it. Yeah, now Trump's attacking it for it. And, you know, right. And Biden's approval rating sank because obviously the withdrawal from Afghanistan was messy. My response to the fracas around the withdrawal from Afghanistan was always that

that seems like the only successful operation that the U.S. military was able to undertake in Afghanistan in like 20 years, meaning actually finally extricate the forces. Well, and the thing is there's a great line there. My point is just because Biden got a lot of pushback for withdrawing from Afghanistan. Afghanistan and people, quote, hated it, it doesn't, wouldn't therefore make me to make me support Biden or have a rooting interest in Biden? I just think that's a kind of a fallacious way of evaluating support or opposition to political figures.

And yeah, I mean, as you noted, Trump is now campaigning on what is apparently his retroactive decision to have never withdrawn from Afghanistan at all. So he was claiming that he was, he's now admitting, confessing that he was lying about that. Well, and he was going to renego to the Doha agreement. Right. And in fact, that's not true at all. And this is what's so, he's such an idiot. It is bothersome. I mean, all he has to say is if he had withdrawn on his timeline, like in the deal he made, it would have been the most beautiful withdrawal ever. But what happened was Biden postponed it by four months. And that ruined everything. And the thing is, Michael, that's true. Like, as a line of political BS, it's great.

Also, it's not a lie. The withdrawal would have been fine if they'd done it in May. And his lie now that, oh, I would have stayed and kept Bogram, not true. If he had tried to do that and he knew this. If he had tried to do that, the Taliban would have gone back to war. He would have had to send 75,000 more troops just to secure that base. And the whole ceasefire would have been off and the war would have been back on and it would have been a catastrophe. The line is, if I worked for him, the line boss is we would have killed.

kept the air base until the evacuation was complete, instead of fleeing from the airport, you know, by the skin of our teeth. But he's saying he's going to keep the Bogram permanently? Oh, yeah, no, I know. That's what he's saying now. Well, that's what Robert O'Brien told him to say, I'm sure. It drives me crazy. Like, where? I'm not going to name any names, okay?

But I am getting frustrated that people who I otherwise generally think have some political discernment. I haven't seen anybody comment on Trump's admission that he was going to keep a permanent occupying force in Afghanistan. Isn't that noteworthy? Yeah, no, you're totally right. I mean, we're covering that at anti-war.com when he's saying, sure, sure, sure. Again, I'm not trying to make any personal beef with anyone. Oh, yeah, yeah, no, I'm just trying to give you, I'm just trying to give you some insight to why I feel a sense of frustration about how Trump is being covered at this point. Because he's gotten no, I mean, the right-wing media is not going to give him any pushback for anything.

I mean, that's pure personality, cult, adulation. Yeah. And so he says, he basically just says he was going to renege on his claimed commitment to withdrawing Afghanistan. He and he gets no criticism for it or scrutiny of it. People always just twist themselves into pretzels to rationalize it. Yeah. It is, it's just like the way they all hold their fire on the other side against the Democrats because they just don't want to help him.

And I got to admit, man, like, I just can't. I am so, like, over the damn Democrats right now. I don't know. I hate them like they burned Waco the other day right now. I'm just my own book I'm putting out. I have a section on Russia Gate. And there's a lot of hateful, horrible stuff in the book. But when I read over and, you know, just editing and whatever and read over my own section on Russia Gate,

I was just groan my teeth, man. Oh, these people. like they deserve it's to me it's equivalent to when w bush lied us into iraq he absolutely should have been unelected in o four as a symbol of how we don't like it when you do that you know same thing here these people trying to censor us for pointing out when they lie and all this trying to overthrow the first amendment turn the whole internet into nothing but a surveillance machine and we don't even get to use it to shout back anymore man somebody should crush them you know like in Trump I'm just silver linings here Trump said and I don't have the exact quote but I'm pretty sure this is right you correct me if I'm wrong but I think this is right

that he said oh that Zuckerberg I'm putting him in prison and then the next day they unscrewed all of his Facebook censorship against his campaign and all of his stuff which they should never have done which they had no right to do and

Zuckerberg blinked immediately and I'm like you know what I don't know man, I'm a libertarian. I just want the U.S. government to go away. But then I do kind of like the idea of him saying that same thing to the board of directors over at Alphabet. That get your thumb off the scale. Go back to the algorithm of 2014. Are you going to be sharing a cell with Ramsey Yusuf in Florence, Colorado for the rest of your life, for your war against the American people? We hate you. And I don't care. I'll break the law. I will persecute you. You will pay. And then see how brave they are then.

somebody should threaten them with official semi-legal state persecution. That's what I'm saying. And make them stop being the terrorists that, frankly, the government has made them be against us, that the Democrats have made them be against us this whole time. Which, by the way, Trump never stopped it for four years in power. He wasn't man enough to say, hey, Miller or Kushner or somebody on my staff loyal to me, would you please make sure the FBI isn't rigging Twitter? against the right or something you know never occurred to him never occurred to anybody on his staff

either i guess so the whole thing went on from the obama year straight into biden without a blink yeah you know i'm not opposed on principle to noting silver linings in a potential second trump term i guess i'm just fed up with the illusions around trump meaning this idea that he's this existential foe of the military industrial complex when he continues to boast about how he had record busting military budgets and he was he sent troops to taiwan to people even know that that was revealed in 2020 hardly gets any attention biden's expanded on it maybe nobody cares to talk about it because it demonstrates continuity between republican and democratic administrations and doesn't lend itself to partisan flaming on either side, and that stuff always seems to get lost in

the mix. He installed the top lobbyist of Raytheon as his defense secretary. And so, like, I mean, there's these brazen pieces of contradictory evidence against this kind of myth of Trump that I just find. get very little attention. Yeah. So if you want to point out, and the stuff in the Middle East is serious.

I mean, well, you know what it is too? Like, for as horrible as the Biden administration has been on its Israel policy for the past year or so, Trump and the Republicans

simply denounce Biden for not being aggressive enough in supporting Israel. Trump gave a speech last week, week where he repeated his pledge to use the federal government to coerce universities and other institutions into stongying speech critical of Israel. So this like whole RFK idea that the Republicans are the solution to any encroachment of the First Amendment, it's just, I don't know, I have to say it rhymes my gears.

I'm not opposed to having a rational outlook on what Trump would do versus what a Democratic administration would do. But if it's mired in these delusions, I just feel like that needs a corrective, but I'm not really seeing it. Yeah. Well, I think maybe another way to say what you're saying, too, is that for all of the liberals and progressives and whatever standard criticisms of Trump, they are all swinging and missing. And what you're talking about really is your frustration with the people who reject the democratic consensus for the following seven reasons, but then don't apply those same standards to Trump. The people who are really good on what's bad about the Democrats who then look away when it's Trump. And then that way, then nobody's criticizing them for the right things, only for a bunch of crap. I'm still pulling my hair out.

I mean, I'm like the world's leading authority on the national security supplemental bill. like from last April. This is months ago now. I reported it. I confirmed it. I got U.S. senators and members of that Congress on the record. I'll send you the links if you want. Explaining to me how integral Trump was in supporting the passage of the largest ever provision

of U.S. quote unquote aid to Ukraine. Okay. And we have, and it just got no coverage anywhere. I mean, it wasn't conducive to the popular narrative on the right, which is that they supposedly like that Trump allegedly has the skepticism toward U.S. involvement in Ukraine, which I don't view as being borne out by the facts. And it wasn't obviously conducive to the prevailing narrative on the liberal left either because they also need to believe that Trump is some interloper who wants to, you know, hand over Ukraine to Putin or something. That would be nefarious in their mind. So it just doesn't align with the record. I mean, I have Kevin Kramer, the senator from North Dakota,

who literally brokered the deal with Trump on the phone with him, saying on the record that Trump was politically integral in getting that passed. It would not have passed, if not for Trump. Trump has decided to deploy his political capital, just so people understand, to get the largest ever disbursement of U.S. funds to Ukraine past the Republican House and also to get

Republican senators and where was the critical coverage of that? It just didn't exist. You know, I have a section on that. Those are the appropriations that are now being used to supply Ukraine with longer, even longer range missiles to potentially

strike in, you know, in the vicinity of Moscow. What I said at the time was, you should put Trump's gold, gold lettered signature along with Biden's on each of those missiles to capture the partisan agreement that led to the passage of those funds. So I don't know, just this stuff drives me up the wall.

Hey, you guys coming up this October 7th through the 11th, join Miguel Thorup, host of the expat money podcast, the heroic Ron Paul, the great Tom Woods, Doug Casey, Mark Faber, Tom Luongo, myself, and many other great speakers. for the online expat money summit, 2004. My presentation will be on the subject of my new book, Provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine, which is not quite out yet.

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Well, listen, man, so I have a section on that in my book. It's called Trump closes the deal. And, of course, on top of that, it was the first. fraud of it that the loophole that he suggested to get him to vote for it was oh we'll call it a loan but then it's an American taxpayer guaranteed loan which means it's just a give away it's not a loan at all

we got to pay for it and so it's a fraud was what got the got it through and then Mike Johnson used that supposed provision that was inserted by Trump to go around on conservative media trumpeting the deal

yeah so but wait I was going to say I would happily add your reporting to that anecdote because I do have a little section on that and I'd be happy to add your footnote if you would send it to me because that's a great story and it is absolutely as you say

so indicative of the whole situation do you ever you know Walter Russell Mead the foreign policy CFR type guy you know talking about long time Wall Street Journal agitator yeah so but you know

he portrays himself as like a I think a center left CFR kind of type not too hawks center left i thought he was center right hmm uh oh maybe yeah he may be same thing he may right yeah yeah not but anyway yeah he's certainly no winger is my i just remember he was like every week he would be denouncing obama for not projecting power oh yeah okay i buy that so anyway this is the useful thing that he said that i thought of uh while you're talking was he divides the foreign policy schools between hamiltonian jeffersonian uh jacksonian and wilsonian so the jacksonians just want to fight because they're like drunken scotch irish the jeffersonians

are like the rom paul libertarians just want peace commerce and honest friendship with all nations and then you got the hamiltonians are like the wall street corporatists who are sometimes war mongers but whatever money is the most important thing and then you have the wilsonians who tell themselves what heroes they are as they go around slaughtering people in the name of democracy and all this kind of thing and then so like trump in that frame he just falls in with the jacksonians he's just like a right wing he's like he's like tom tank credo or something he's like he's to the right of that's a throwback yeah he's that's you're giving me flashbacks to the 2008 republican but the point is yeah he's like what he's a

He's a click to the right of Trump on most things, which is sometimes good, but usually not. But there's nothing really special about it. What was special about Ron Paul was that Ron Paul knows everything the founders ever wrote and everything all the Austrian economists ever wrote and was personally right about everything for 50 years in a row. And was, you know, good on everything and knew the real history of everything could break, you know, as a real intellectual, a real economist and historian and, you know, all the things Trump speaking. the cop about the overthrow of mosa dick you know yeah i mean which which obviously ron paul has more than the ability to do i remember him bringing that up in one of the republican debates that's right

well and in in the definitive moment for so many people when he bodied really rudy juliani who tried to make him take back his uh lecture about blowback bringing on the september 11th attacks bomb in iraq from bases in saudi and uh and then he won the point on that big big time. And that woke up a lot of people, that a Republican can just tell the truth that Bill Clinton caused September 11th from all the violence he committed. Come on, grow up. And everybody went, oh, it's okay to admit that now. Okay, fine. That makes sense. I remember Bill Clinton killing people every day for eight years. So, yeah, what's the problem with that? That makes, you know, why wouldn't they take revenge for that? Of course, that's what it was about. And so. You know, interestingly, I'm not sure if Randall has even endorsed Trump got. He might well have recently, but I do know for a fact that that's a July. Forgive me. You take the interview back, man. Sorry. I was just going to say, like, I do know right before the Republican convention, I got word that Rand Paul was not attending the Republican convention

and that he had not yet endorsed Trump. So he was kind of a holdout. I haven't checked more recently to see if anything is transpired. It's not, but I mean, that's just like, that's not, it's clearly not an endorsement that Trump is really that concerned with courting, you know? Yeah, that's interesting. thing about Rand. I wonder if there's a reason for that. Hey man, so let me ask you about Miriam Adelson there. You mentioned her and of course, you know, I think it. The correct

pronunciation, Adelson. And I was told that because I went to a Zionist organization of America Gala back in 2014. And I got to watch Ted Cruz attempting to warm his way into Adelson's good races because remember that was the place of the first year or the second presidential cycle this is leading up to 2016 where there was something called an adelson primary which was this you know backroom primary deal where each of the republicans were competing for his uh large s and trump initially had indicated or pretended that he was going to be repudiating the influence of big donors like Adelson and he would ridicule people like

Marco Rubio for being mulled into perfect puppets of Adelson but anyway I was given a shorthand hint on how to pronounce his name which is it's Adelson not Adelson because and you remember that with the with a reminder that he adds up his money

so it's Adelson yeah which is Chinese casino money yeah Macau funneled through the Likud Party and into the Republican Party and this is the part that gets me You know where he's buried? Somewhere in the West Bank probably East Jerusalem

Yeah, East Jerusalem of course Mount Olives, Mount of Olives God, so They had his body flown from Beverly Hills Or somewhere else Like his lavish estates in Southern California to the Mount of Olives in annexed East Jerusalem to give him his proper burial. Man, I really think that under Trump, there's a real danger that he's just going to give

the Netanyahu regime over there, the green light to cleanse the whole West Bank and Gaza too and just finish the job. That's what Sheldon would want, and thanks for the money. Well, they were on their way to doing that when Kushner, And Trump still touts this peace plan as having been brilliant. I mean, Kushner was amazingly put in charge of resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict. And I just recently went and checked this again. He put out a roadmap to peace, which had a proposed Palestinian, quote-unquote, state over which the Palestinian would have no real autonomy or sovereignty.

But even the pittance of a state that was in this roadmap. it looked like absurd Swiss cheese where they wouldn't have a land border with Jordan and it was like the most laughably unworkable state you could possibly imagine and even if they did receive it it wouldn't be a functioning state

because Israel would still retain control of the airspace, control of the population inflows, etc. Um, and so obviously that was, and they kind of just circumvented the, um, the Palestinian authority, and not that that's anything but like a toothless, uh, entity, but it really did give the impression that they were like setting up a situation where they could say, oh, look, we, this was our last try now, because the Palestinians are still so obstinate that they wouldn't accept this absurd quote unquote road nap now uh israel has free reign to just uh do what needs to be done

and an next um the west bank and actually the the wheels were seemingly already in motion for that because i don't know if you recall but pompeo and i think it was october or november of 2020 uh took the first senior level trip of a u.s official to the west bank well and declare that the settlements were not illegal right Exactly. So they seem, it's that, that seemed like that was in, in the works. And given the, uh, given the sway of Adelson, um, who's, uh, Miriam seems to be more involved politically with Trump than even Sheldon was. I don't remember. Shelton never, Sheldon and Adelson never went around introducing Trump at events, like setting up his schedules. Trump said last week that Miriam Adelson gave him a schedule effectively for, uh, Israel American council's son. and just kind of organized his time and that they they were in that she and uh sheldon were in the white house almost more than anybody of course that was probably a little bit but that could have just been some uh hyperbole on trump's part but yeah probably wasn't too far from the truth right

so um you know what i i see i think there's every reason to think that the policy will be again outsourced to those um interest and probably even more extreme because israel itself is If it were even possible, it's radicalized much further, much more dramatically than have been the case when Trump was last in office. Yeah. I mean, the thing is about it, according to the New York Times, he really is a billionaire. They got his tax returns. His children and his grandchildren are completely and totally set for life.

He's got nothing to worry about there. He's, what, 78 years old? So why not just sell a business? building and finance all this stuff himself. It's just a few hundred million dollars. He's got a few billion, right? Like probably less than 10, but maybe in less than five, but still. You cash in half a billion dollars worth assets.

Bankroll the Republican Party answer to no one. You're running for Emperor of the Planet Earth anyway. Why let some lady tell you what to do? Why let anybody tell you what to do? Mike Bloomberg actually would have. have been a self-funder. I mean, he actually did fund an incredible apparatus when he briefly tried to obtain the Democratic nomination in 2020. But remember, when Trump was first running in 2016, one of his big selling points, one of the things that drew people to him, I think understandably

so, was I'm a self-funder. I don't have to count out to the donor class. Look at all these other look at all these other losers who have to go and grovel for campaign contributions and then look at me, I'm rich, I'm a self-funder, I'm not going to be influenced by them. That lasted about, I don't know, a month or two. And now he doesn't even give the pretext that that's what he's attempting to do.

He's just giving away stuff to the highest bidder, it seems. All right, now let me ask you this. When you think about Harris? I mean, I don't even really, I find it even, I find it difficult to even accept her as, I find it difficult to accept the legitimacy of her even being the nominee. I know that makes me weirdly obsessed with the proceduralist stuff that led to her getting nominated,

but she just bypassed her entire primary. I mean, Barack, Hillary Clinton, okay, she's, Kamala Harris has gotten me so alienated that I'm even forced to kind of look back wistfully on Hillary Clinton, just in the sense that Hillary Clinton, for whatever, all the advantages that she had as the spouse of a former president, she did have to demonstrate some degree of grit and political tenacity to become the nominee of a major party. She ran for like two years against Barack Obama, narrowly lost, then had to do a extended campaign in 2016 and then ultimately did win.

I'm not defending the ins and outs of how those processes work necessarily, but she wasn't just like coronated overnight in some like backroom switch or rude deal in a donor Putsch, which is what happened with Kamala Harris. So last night was literally, so we're talking on, this is talking on Thursday, September 26th, yesterday, Wednesday, September 25th was Kamala Harris's first solo network television interview as Democratic nominee. And we're, we're now like, what, under six weeks to the election? So she's just been able to bypass scrutiny to an extraordinary degree.

She never got a single primary voter delegate. So I find it hard to even treat her as a legitimate candidate in a way. I know that's maybe a little bit irrational on my part. But I guess I just can't get over the process by which she came to be the nominee. That's just going to color everything I see of hers and the lack of scrutiny. I mean, I also think Trump actually has a lack of scrutiny as well because although he does more media appearances, a lot of them are with sycophantic media or like dopey podcasters where they say, we're going to have a conversation, everybody. It's not an interview. Don't get your hopes up.

It's a conversation. But at least it's more, there's more of opportunity to evaluate Trump's remarks in like a unfiltered setting with Kamala. It's just like, just something that's been foisted on everyone with like no input. And so in that respect, I find it hard to treat her with like a degree of legitimacy. See, you know, one thing that was real, that was the most pathetic thing about her ascendance, I feel like, is this uncommitted movement. We got the, I went, when I was at the Democratic Convention, I covered the uncommitted delegates who were all, you know, riled up about how they were going to use their leverage to extract policy concessions from Kamala Harris. and, you know, because they couldn't support a quote-unquote genocide in Israel, and they certainly couldn't support the, you know, an administration that had facilitated that.

Okay. You know, that's a perfectly intelligible position. But then they forfeited basically the entirety of this leverage that they had claimed that they had built up. And as of last week, you know, that they got in the zealph. Zero concessions of the Democratic Convention. If anything, they got shunned and disregarded. They couldn't even get the pittance of a concession, which is to have had a vetted speech given on the convention floor by a Palestinian-American state legislator in which

that person was going to endorse Kamala Harris. They didn't even get that. And then in her first joint interview with Tim Walts on CNN, the only. piece of notable information that came out of her mouth in that interview, which would have been easily foreseeable to anybody with the brain, but it was good to at least have it confirmed to the record, was that she had no policy differences with Biden as it related to Israel. So these uncommitted delegates people squandered whatever even small leverage they might have had to affect some kind of policy shift.

And now, you know, the icing on the cake is that last week, I think it was, the uncommitted umbrella organization, and these people actually did accomplish something of note, which is that they got like 40 or so delegates elected to the Democratic convention by fielding candidates or fielding delegates in Democratic primaries. So, you know, I'm technically a registered Democrat still. I don't really put much stock in it, but it allowed me to vote in the Democratic primary in New Jersey. So for the hell of it, I voted for the uncommitted, you know, option. And there actually was, I think, one or two delegates who got nominated from New Jersey to the convention.

So that's like a measure of power in some respect. I mean, it's not like they're going to really have a huge amount of wind at their sales, but they could have done something. And they just decided to subsume themselves to the Democratic board. and content themselves with these signals that maybe Conall Harris was, quote, listening to them or wanted to, quote, hear them, which of course correlated to no policy shift in any tangible sense at all. And then last week they put out a state, this like umbrella group put out a statement saying, we're not endorsing Kamala Harris, but we're also, we also must oppose Trump and we must not support any third party. candidate who could detract from our ability to defeat Trump. So that's just an endorsement of Kamala Harris, but they're too embarrassed, I guess, to admit it because they got literally nothing for all their efforts.

So that's a telling symbol, I think, of Kamala Harris's artificial ascendance and the enablers of Yeah. So, you know, again, I'm like working on this book. I'm not really got my thumb on the pulse of the news cycle all the time. But I'm seeing in the news that there's real enthusiasm behind this lady. And I can see why a lot of people, as we've been discussing, and for other reasons too, would have plenty of reason to be against Trump. But to see just regular human Americans from the neighborhood go all in, for this lady, to me, it's just amazing to see. Like, they really can just jerk everybody's chain and get them to go along with any damn thing, I guess. I don't know. It's just something else. I'm of mixed minds about this supposed enthusiasm.

Well, I know. Well, that was what I was going to say. Maybe it's a hoax, and I'm a fool. The initial surge of supposed enthusiasm when she first was swooped in to replace Biden, which is kind of like... a sense of relief that they that biden's liabilities would no longer be dogging the democrats um but you know look i mean there's there's a lot of people in the united states people

are going to be enthusiastic about things that i wouldn't personally relate to but i i do kind of question how broad-based this enthusiasm supposedly is like for one thing the enthusiasm that undergirded previous campaigns could have been tested in the primaries, right? You could evaluate turn. This is one of my metrics that I used to use to evaluate, like, who might be favored in a general election, like party turnout within primary races, definitely did favor the Democrats in 2020, favor the Republicans in 2016. it's not a foolproof way of projecting out who might win the general election, but it's an indicator. And now that's just like, that's just white from the slate for 24. So I do get a, I do think there's some indication that some of this hype is a bit manufactured, to say the least.

and I would find it shocking if the level of enthusiasm in the populace for Kamala is comparable to that of Obama in 2008 or even Biden in 2020 as bizarre as that is to say because you know Biden was the person who was the anti-Trump and I just feel like the you know the animus around Trump it's just bad. down to have diminished somewhat because he's been out of office. He's not the incumbent technically right now. And with a former president, and Trump's actually been able to utilize this to his political advantage, which is unusual. But any former president, as time goes on, they tend to be looked back on with more nostalgia and fondness. I mean, that's why you see, like, even George W. Bush's approval ratings, they go up in retrospect. But Trump can kind of funnel that into a support base for his campaign. And so, you know, the animus that that Biden would have benefited from in 2020 is just not quite there for Kamala.

Obviously, it's still around, but not the same level, I don't think. So, I don't know. I mean, for like the, for a couple of weeks leading up to the election, I'll be on the road and maybe get. a better sense just out in the uh amongst the ordinary folks to see to gauge this supposed enthusiasm but um i i do question it and um i think the polling does bear that out to some degree now i mean if uh comel is ahead by a point or it's tied on in the national polling that's a pretty good sign that trump is favored to uh to win yeah given the election college but you know who knows i mean i think it was the times of the post said that like 20% of

people said they don't really know anything about her and really need to know more and i'm going well she's running against a guy who's like the golden arches right who's like americana itself so how could that possibly work yeah i don't know i mean but he is all putting in his ways so what the hell i don't know people maybe know them all too well i feel like i do so And another thing on, so, Kamala, to the extent anybody can ascertain what her position is on Ukraine, since you've been involved in, you know, running a book on this stuff for however long it's been, I'm sort of curious what you've made of this. Kamala is going to apparently just continue the status quo, the Biden administration on Ukraine,

which is there's these incremental escalations. Today, I think it was announced that Biden is going to be sending the longer range missile system. to Russia, to Ukraine, although the authorities as to where Ukraine can use them to strike inside Russia are, like, not entirely defined, but you could just expect that it's going to be whatever, you know, Ukraine is agitating for. And she claims to have this ideological commitment to, you know, the rules-based international order and Ukraine is the front line of the struggle between democracy and autocracy, all this sort of problem.

So there's not much to be aspirational for if you're looking for some sort of re-evaluation of policy on the Ukraine War if the Democratic administration is perpetuated next year. And by the way, I mean, one of the amazing things to me, and I saw this at the Democratic Convention, I think I'm the only person, the only journalist there who was asking about this. but every Democratic elected official that I encountered at the debate

I was in the spin room for the debate earlier this month in Philadelphia I'll send you some of the clips if you want but you know

most of the time when I can if I'll ask a Democratic legislator a member of Congress etc. How is it and I actually

you know I had a long exchange about this with Rokana as well who's you know They're usually open to at least engaging among Democrats. Most of them kind of just shut you out. Like, at what point is it going to be seen as tolerable among the elected Democrats to do even a modicum of re-evaluation around the wisdom of this war strategy?

I mean, how many bodies have to pile up on the Donbass, you know? And none of them have an answer. It's just like this ideological. fanaticism slash kind of inertia slash in curiosity and so this makes people think that the Republicans

must be the superior alternative there and I don't know I just I'm not so sure I mean Trump at various times in the past couple he's caging about it now

he doesn't he like on principle refuses to provide any details about how he would supposedly solve the Ukraine war in 24 hours I'm sort of curious to know how his secret strategy comports with his support of the $61 billion in Ukraine more funding which they still got another six months to a year or more

that they can squeeze out of that appropriations bill in terms of funding to Ukraine but he doesn't even provide like he on principle refuses to provide any details He just wants people to trust his. Oh, yeah, it's just a line. Wisdom and judgment. J.D. Vance was asked, like, what would I, like, this week, I think, what would Trump actually do?

Like, what would be his strategy to solving the war in Ukraine? Can you give us, like, a detail? And J.D. Vance said, oh, here's what, here's Trump's strategy, to not, to not be dumb and to not be weak. It's just like, okay, what does that mean? So. So for further clues, you kind of have to look around just like to read the tea leaves, right? And the America First Policy Institute was basically the Trump, the second Trump administration think tank in waiting. Linda McMahon runs it.

There's a co-chair of it. She's now the co-chair of the transition team for Trump. And these are all just like standard Republican. interventionists and hawks who have rebranded under the banner of america first and they submitted to trump i interviewed the one of the authors of the submission to trump of a supposed peace deal for ukraine uh fred flights who is a former um john bolton uh understudy he was on the national security council in the first trump administration and um if you read that plan which you seem to have done I'm sort of saddled with this burden.

It calls for continuing to arm Ukraine, right? Calls for accepting no territorial concessions to Russia. And at various times, Trump has even said that one of his bargaining chips would be to threaten Russia with even further escalation. Robert O'Brien, who was the national security advisor under Trump, has said that part of the Trump strategy would be to intensify the same.

sanctions against Russia by sanctioning the Russian Central Bank. So, I don't know, we're six weeks or less to the election and nobody's been able to pry a single detail out of Trump because, you know, the right-wing media is not going to do it. They're like enamored of this mystique of Trump where he's like concealing his foreign policy plans for the public or the public so nobody can know what they're voting on. They just have to like, you know, trust him to do the right thing. but I don't know. That's not,

I don't feel like that's a healthy way to treat any politician. Yeah. Yeah, and he does that with Palestine too. He goes, well,

it would never happen if I was there? Well, but it happened because of his Abraham Accords. And so, it was like a direct connection between the,

hey, Palestinians, you're never getting nothing and them saying, oh, yeah, and doing the thing that they did, that's a one-to-one

connection right there is the direct result of his policy he surely doesn't even know that because he doesn't know anything about it and then he just says what like he would have stood there and flexed his chest muscles and then Hamas wouldn't have dared no that's been the constant refrain from Trump for years now yeah it doesn't mean any Ukraine war never would have happened the Israel situation never would have happened because he would have just been so strong and what's the utility for him and just repeating that constantly and never being pressed on it particularly by sycophantic right-wing media nor even liberal media if they had the opportunity to question him because like what they would be primed to ask is something like

oh aren't you racist what about january 6th they don't care to delve into these details yeah exactly well and on ukraine it's only very hard choices to be made there an unprovable counterfactual is like not a prospective policy right you know yeah well and as you're as you're saying too that it's unfalsifiable the the point is that like on the question of ukraine oh you're going to solve it huh well but we all know what the parameters are and they're very hard for all sides you're going to get the russians to back down you're going to get the ukrainians to just give up the dombas and stop fighting about it how are you going to make this stick and then it not become another conflict it

if it wasn't so difficult it wouldn't be a war in the first place you know he has no answer for that you know what's he going to do repeal his the decree that he issued under the ages of pompeo which is to declare that Crimea will never be recognized as no he's not Russian territory I mean one thing another thing drives me crazy is that you know again there's a there's a there's a a very fulsome record that people can evaluate based on what Trump did when he was in power. I remember that we're still getting this like dumbedown recapitulation of 2016 around people kind of speculating as to what Trump would do.

I don't know if you recall, but in 2016, this is sort of like in concert with how Russiagate initially arose. Like Trump made some would make like offhanded remarks about how oh, you know, maybe Crimea is better off within Russia or

you know we have to see how he negotiates that situation but don't anybody worry then he gets into power he immediately takes the most hardline available position on Crimea that's anti-Russia and people just forget it I mean like I don't know I guess I'm just a stickler for what people for what political figures actually do when they wield power I don't know

I don't know why that should be controversial or strange, but I don't know. I think it's a useful heuristic. Yeah. All right. Well, listen, man, I should let you go. I've kept you long enough, but I really appreciate you coming back on the show. It's all very interesting stuff.

Give them your websites there. Okay, yeah, M. Tracy with an e. dot net, and then M. Tracy with an E on X. Great. All right. Thanks again, man. Talk soon. All right. Talk you later.

the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk ninety point seven fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scot horton dot org and libertarian institute dot org