The Duran Podcast - Trump agenda. Russia and China ready for talks

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

Trump agenda. Russia and China ready for talks

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the Trump inauguration. It is January 20th. It is inauguration day for President Trump. He is on his way in. Biden is on his way out. And the other day, Trump, he pretty much laid out a very, very ambitious program for his first couple of months as president of the United States, both foreign policy and domestic. He wants to meet with Xi Jinping. This is what the Wall Street Journal is reporting. He also wants to get on a call with Putin right away and talk about the conflict in Ukraine. He wants declassified documents connected to JFK, to MLK. He wants to revoke the security clearances of the 51 Intel specialists or former Intel agents or whatever they were, which were connected to the Hunter Biden last.

A massive agenda. In general, it's a very ambitious, massive agenda that Trump is putting forward for the first few months of his presidency. So, and of course we have all the TikTok stuff. All of that is going on as well. So what are your thoughts with the Trump inauguration? And there's issues on the oil and the borders and all kinds of things. And we're told about 100 executive orders are going to be rolled out in perhaps the first. executive orders. I mean, this is the most ambitious presidency that the United States had had since FDR. I mean, if Trump is able to do all of these things, then we are looking at a tremendously consequential presidency, comparable to the FDR Truman presidency of the 30s and 40s, and of, and eclipsing, I would say, the Reagan presidency of the 1980s.

I mean, this is a massive, hugely radical program, and it attacks all of the orthodoxes that have dominated American politics for decades now. So he seems to be working towards some kind of stabilization of the international system. He wants to move from policies of confronts. towards policies of at least dialogue with the other great powers. I notice that he's identified the two most important, which are China and Russia. So he wants to speak to, well, he's already spoken to Xi Jinping. And by the way, the Chinese readout of the call suggests that it was a very warm and friendly call.

That may surprise people. But I do get the sense that the Chinese, like pretty, pretty. much everyone else around the world outside Europe are very, very pleased to see the back of Joe Biden and his presidency. I mean, the relationship between Biden and Xi Jinping just completely collapsed over the course of Biden's presidency with C straightforwardly telling Biden to his face, your line to me. Just say. So the Chinese. You'd be calling him a dictator, calling Xi Jinping a dictator, did it went over the Chinese? It didn't go down very well. It's really like this. So the Chinese, it's the most friendly, the warmest readout I've seen the Chinese foreign ministry publish in relation to any talks with the American or Western leader, including European leaders for a very, very long time.

Now, you know, Xi Jinping read absolutely clear. There's many issues. of disagreement. He actually said that at this point of disagreement. He reiterated the point about Taiwan, but he seems keen to have dialogue with Trump again. The Russians, obviously, we've got reports today that Trump has given instructions to his team that they need to get in touch with Putin and his office today about arranging first a call and then a meeting. So, Again, they're moving very, very fast on the diplomatic political agenda. We've had a very interesting further interview by Mike Waltz on Ukraine, which, by the way, I think also is moving the dial further towards negotiations.

But, you know, the foreign policy is very interesting, but it is the domestic agenda, which is in some ways the most astonishing, because straightforward attack on the deep state, declassifying the RFK documents and the MLK documents, but perhaps especially the JFK, the JFK documents. That is, I mean, something which the various agencies of the US intelligence community have resisted consistently since the 1960s. Now, bear in mind, JFK was assassinated, was murdered in 1963. We are now in 2025.

So what exactly is it that is so sensitive about documents that are now so old? So anyway, I mean, it's very interesting. And as somebody who once studied history, I will be very interested to see what these documents show. But the fact is Trump is going directly, diametrically against what the deep state was. And the revoking of security clearances of 51 top intelligence officials. And we're talking about some very senior people who wrote that letter about the Hunter Biden laptop, orchestrated, as I understand it, by none other than Tony Blinken, by the way. That also is something that is going to have the entire intelligence community, the entire deep state.

I mean, they're going to be shocked, they're going to be concerned about it, and they'll be worried about what comes. But then underpinning it all, this huge economic agenda, moving back to tariffs, restating the restating the border perhaps sending people getting people

lots of people removed from the United States the complete shift of policy on energy we've had a situation over the last 20 years where every single administration has moved forward

with the climate change agenda. One gets the distinct sense that Trump basically is repudiating all of that. He wants to drill oil. He's focused, it seems clear, is on U.S. energy security. So this is a revolutionary transformation. And it'll be interested to see where it goes. And of course, he's got Elon Musk and Vivek Rameswamy to cut down the state. they want to shave off two trillion dollars off the budget. If all of this is achieved, or even if only part of it is achieved, if only 30% of it is achieved in domestic terms,

this will be a transformative change. Can you make the argument that Trump made all of these big claims and promises in 2016 and not many of them came about? Well, yes, and that brings us back to... Domestic and foreign, by the way. Domestic and foreign. He has actually, and I think this is a thing that people say, people always talk about Trump as being this erratic, volatile personality

who shifts from one thing to another. On the contrary, if you look at the entire arc of his political life, which only began in 2015, it's just existed for 10 years. The real story, actually, is one of incredible consistency. He wants to move away from a globalist foreign policy towards a policy of a transaction, well, not transactional, but a policy of working with the other great powers. And he wants to carry out these huge changes within the United States, on the border, on taking on the deep state, if you will, on changing the economic system of the United States.

cutting back the federal government to an extent that has never happened before. He's always wanted to do these things. In his first term, he was unable to do them. He was very inexperienced. He didn't know very much about Washington. He was easily led by all sorts of people who came along telling him that they would help him and support him and then went out of their way to undermine him. He had a very hostile vice president.

I mean, I don't mean that they were personally hostile at the beginning, but Mike Pence clearly was not signed up to any part of Donald Trump's agenda. And, of course, it got nowhere. And of course, he had all the problems with the deep stake. He had the Russia Gates scandal to work his way through. He had all of those things. Nonetheless, he stuck with it. And the most extraordinary thing is that America has followed.

him. When I say America, obviously, I don't mean the political class in Washington. I think they are collectively horrified by what he's proposing to do. But the mass of the American people outside certain, you know, big states, California, New York, have swung solidly behind his program. They've, I think, been attracted to the fact that he is so conceiving. about it. I think they've also started to identify, in fact, they have identified their own future and their own self-interest with his programme. And he himself has not only remained consistent politically, but he is also, this is the

most remarkable thing, he's also managed to absorb every single blow that has been thrown at him over the last 10 years, the extent of which have been extraordinary. I mean, I think that we said this before in previous programs, but the political phenomenon of Donald Trump, his ability to see off challenges, his ability to absorb attacks which would have destroyed anyone else, his ability to remain undismayed and to come back and to remain himself is like nothing that American politics has produced, certainly in my lifetime. I mean, you have to go back again to FDR to find anything similar. So he's come back. He's going to do all the things that he wanted to do in 2016. He's got a much, much more coherent team. He's got a vice president

who's on his side. He's got a, he's got Congress. The Republican Party in Congress has changed significantly since 2016, I think he basically has the support of Republicans in the House. It's not so easy with the Senate. McConnell is still there. He still has some supporters in the Senate. But one gets the sense that the momentum is with Trump and he's moving things forward. Now, I just wanted to make one other quick observation, which is that if you look at the total arc of American history. From the time when the US gained its independence in the 1780s and the constitution was established right up till today, you could argue that on the contrary, it is Trump who represents the main American orthodoxy. He is returning to the orthodoxes

that the United States followed, if you like, the mainstream of American policy and American political and economic thought before the crisis of the mid-20th century, which diverted the United States onto a different path, made it a more social democratic society closer in some respects in terms of economic and social policies to Europe and involved it deeply in European affairs. The United States before had not been like that. And you could argue that what Trump is trying to do is to return the United States back to the point which in some respects is closer to an actual one. So in which case, the last 80, 90 years will be the anomaly. Anyway, we'll see whether it works. Yeah, the argument is that Trump is just going to shift the power from

the imperialism and the power, let's put it that way, from the neoliberal neocon oligarch political class to a different oligarch and political class. Biden kind of mentioned this during his Oval office address where he gave a warning about the big tech oligarchs and then supporting the, and being, being a warning, a warning against the big tech oligarch. I forgot what Biden said. Anyway, he gave a warning about all of the oligarchs now that are now with Trump. But, you know, I think that's the argument that a lot of analysts are making is that there really isn't going to be a fundamental change or shift in the U.S. What we're going to see is just a shift from one oligarch class that we've known and been reporting on for God knows how many, how many decades to this new

oligarch class, the plundering, the pillaging, the wars will continue. It'll just be rebranded into something else. The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article as well today with the title. In a New Age of Empire, Great Powers aimed to carve up the planet. And it has a featured image, a cartoon featured image of Putin, Xi Jinping, and Trump carving up a pie or a cake, which has the planet on it. Because the frosting, the planet is the frosting. And basically, the Wall Street Journal is just copying us. And our analysis is a sphere of influence.

Though the Wall Street Journal will never admit it, they're basically copying what we've been saying for the past three weeks, which is spheres of influence. But in our video, you know, we talked about how spheres of influence could be good, could be bad. We don't know. The world is moving towards a spheres of influence, moving towards some sort of multipolarity. how that works out. I mean, time will tell. But in the Wall Street Journal article, they're clearly saying that the spheres of influence is going to be very, very bad. It's going to be horrific. The imperialism, the war, is everything that's going to come with. Trump's plan for a sphere of influence is going

to be horrific for the world. And we're ditching this world order that was created after World War II, the neoliberal world order, and this is going to be terrible for the world. Of course, the Wall Street Journal talks about China and Russia's imperialism, but they never talk about Clinton or Bush or Biden or Obama's imperialism. They don't talk about any of that. They're just basically saying that Trump is going to wreck everything because he's going to be divvying up the world with Xi Jinping and with Putin. Well, you know, it's very interesting.

I mean, first of all, let's talk about Biden's farewell address, which is one of the most incoherent and mumbling, a farewell address is I think any president has given. There's an absolutely excoriating take on it, by the way, in National Review, which bear in mind is a neocon globalist magazine, that is in my perspective. But anyway, all this business about, you know,

that we're replacing one oligarchy with another and that this is a new group of tech oligarchs who are going to take control. I have to say, this all seems to me absolutely ludicrous stuff. It basically comes down to the fact that Trump has won over the support of a small group of people within the tech world. Elon Musk, obviously Vivek Ramoswami, Peter Thiel, people of that kind. That does not constitute an oligarchy. Anybody who knows about oligarchies and knows how oligarchies function, this is not an oligarch. This is just a group of undoubtedly very wealthy and very, very powerful individuals.

But we are not talking here about a defined class of people. What it is is, again, part of the raging, if you like, against the change that you get from the real oligarchs, the people who have wielded power increasingly in the United States over the last 20. 40, 50, 70 years. One of them, by the way, I should just say, I'm not going to mention his name, but we all know who might mean, was just given, you know, the medal of whatever it was by Biden in the last couple of days. So, I mean, that is what this is really all about.

Magic Johnson? Well, in Trump's own mind, he's absolutely not about substituting one oligarchy with another. Now, of course, you know, how things turn out, what will happen from all of this is something completely different. I mean, things might not work out at all the way Trump expects, and it could be that at the end of it, we will actually see a new oligarchy emerge. That is quite plausible. But if I can just make one simple point to somebody who studied American history very closely, I mean, Biden talked about the robber barons of the gilded age of the late 19th century. The point is that those people were not an oligarchy.

They were, by the way, deeply patriotic. They were deeply involved with American society. They had an absolute vision for building up America, obviously in their own interests, but as they saw it also very much on behalf of the American people. And the other thing to say about the rob of Barron's is that quite effortlessly, in fact, they were brought to heel. I mean, you know, Theodore Roosevelt, the progressives came to power. This is not the progressives today. This is what Theodore Roosevelt's own branch of the Republican Party called itself. Anyway, they came to power in the early 20th century and they had very little difficulty bringing. the so-called robber barons back under control and, you know, bringing in antitrust legislation and doing all those kind of things, which the robber barons were in no position to resist.

So Biden is just misinformed. I'm going to be careful about, gentle here, about that earlier period of American history. What he's also trying to do, or his speechwriters, of course, are trying to do is that they're trying to discredit some of Donald Trump's ideas, because Donald Trump himself has been talking about some kind of return to the economic policies of late 19th century America. He talks all the time about the period of William McKinley and of the presidency of William McKinley in the 1890s, which is, of course, precisely the period when the so-called

robber barons who were in their, you know, their ascendancy. So it's all very complicated, but we don't really need, in my opinion, to spend so much time on it. The same goes about, the same goes for this narrative about empire, you know, the cutting up of the pie between the three great powers. That actually goes back to a famous British cartoon from the time of the Napoleonic Wars, which had William Pitt and Napoleon, you know, cutting up the globe and dividing it between them. Again, I think in Trump's own mind, he's not thinking about this in quite that way. What he wants to do, as we discussed in previous programmes, is he wants to secure the heartland. And he's looking at the areas that immediately adjoined the heartland, the heartland being the United States itself,

the areas that adjoined the heartland and setting out to the other great powers that this is our sphere of influence. It's not necessarily an aggressive foreign policy, an imperialist foreign policy in the sense that the Wall Street Journal and other people are saying. It is on the contrary, a foreign policy of retrenchment of the United States consolidating, of what, is actually important to itself, even as it acknowledges, that the other great powers are going to do the same. Now, again, this is not controversial in terms of American foreign policy until the arrival of the globalist era. I'm old enough to remember Walt Littman, by the way, who was the most important left-wing journalist in the United States in the 1960s and the 1960s, and for long before, and it was in fact a colossus of journalism.

And Lippman, Walter Lippman, was a supporter of spheres of influence. And he supported their existence from the left. He said that they are a stabilising factor in global affairs and that great powers, by definition, were inevitably going to have spheres of influence and the right way to try and maintain a peaceful and stable international system was to recognize that fact and to accept that the great powers, the various great powers, should not encroach on each other's. Now, what has been happening during the globalist era is that the United States doesn't accept

that any of the other great powers, any of the other important states, China, Russia, India, have any kind of right to have spheres of influence or spheres of interest, which is becoming now the more popular phase, the United States has insisted on its right to encroach on all of these, to conduct color revolutions there, to try to weave, you know, to pull countries away from their historic alignments, with the great powers close to them. You see the same thing, that very thing happening,

even as we are making this program with Armenia. It's being attempted by the United States with Armenia. And Walter Lippman said back in the 60, this is a terrible mistake. All it does is create tensions between the great powers, and it fosters war. It was fosters war because, actually, as we have seen. When you do that, you put the country, in this case Armenia, in a very, very dangerous

potential position. And Walter Lippmann argued, look, move away from that, except the spheres of influence exist. Don't try and impose some kind of globalist agenda instead. That is what creates tension and violence and instability, except that this is the natural system in a world where there are great powers and work together with the other great powers to keep the state, the system, peaceful and stable. Now, Walter Lippman could say that all in the 60s, and people didn't come after him and said that he was being anti-American, it was betraying democracy or doing anything of that kind. Theodore Roosevelt said similar things back in the early 20th century. And Trump is again reverting to those policies of the past. Yeah. Yeah. Globalism, neoliberalism.

That's imperialism. Yes, it is. I mean, it isn't, it is an attempt. Clinton, Bush, Obama. Yeah. You could even argue four years of Biden. That was imperialism. Absolutely. I mean, what it is. Biden's was failed, imperialism. It is completely fell. Imperialism that was pushed back for the first time by China and Russia.

Absolutely. The multipolar world, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the point about globalism and near-comism, especially near-conism, is that it basically treats the entire world as an American sphere of influence. It even it demands that even great powers subordinate themselves to the only real great power, which is, of course, the United States, the international hegem. I mean, you have the most extreme statement of this position by John Bolton when he was George W. Bush's ambassador to the United Nations.

He actually once said, you know, I'm here in the UN Security Council. I think the UN Security Council should only have one state represented on it, which is mine, the United States, because no other state really deserves to be here. That that was an imperialism ultimately that went mad, and which was disastrous and which failed and which ultimately overstretched and exhausted the United States. Trump is saying, we can't do that. This doesn't make any kind of sense. Let's focus on American priorities.

Let's draw back, consolidate, look at what is important to us. And as I said, previous generations of American leaders would have understood this. Yeah. You called it retrenchment, huh? Retrenchment. That's what's freaking them out. That's what freaks out the Wall Street Journal is retrenchment because they've been doing really, really well off of the imperialism. Yeah.

And they try to brand spheres of influence as imperialism. Yes. When in fact, it's their globalist model, their globalist ideology, that is the real imperialism. Absolutely. I think this is the world that we're going to move back towards. And I actually like this expression, spheres of interest, but ultimately it is for the great powers together to manage the international system. has happened before in history, as by the way, FDR tried to do in the 30s and 40s. It's very misunderstood what his foreign policy actually was. And of course, subsequently, during the Cold War,

and after, especially after the Cold War, America was diverted to a different course. You could argue in a sense that what Trump is trying to do is in foreign policy, he's taking the United States, back to its natural foreign policy, which existed before the crisis, again, the mid-20th century crisis. And it's the natural foreign policy of the United States. And I have to say straightforwardly, I think it is a massive advance on what we have seen over the last 30 years, which has been an unending disaster. Yeah.

And the European Union, NATO, they want to divert. Trump into getting bogged down in the foreign wars. I mean, even Steve Bannon sent out a warning, a message, not a warning, a message to Trump telling him what we've been saying for the past three months, which is don't get bogged down in Ukraine. Exactly. Because if you get bogged down in Ukraine, I think Bannon even compared it to being Trump's Vietnam moment because bogged down in Ukraine, then it's going to be very much the same way

that the US got bought down in Vietnam. Absolutely. I mean, if I can just mention that, I mean, back in the 60s, Lyndon Johnson had, again, a very ambitious program. Nothing like as ambitious as Trump's, by the way. Just saying, I mean, it didn't deal with fundamental issues as Trumps does in quite the same way.

But it was massively ambitious by the standard of this time. It was basically an attempt to, as Lyndon Johnson put it, complete FDR's new deal. So you had Medicare, Medicaid, you had major changes, you had the Civil Rights Act, you had all of those kind of things. Now, as I said, Trump is going to some extent in the opposite direction, not in everything, but in some respects. The point was, Lyndon Johnson's whole program completely got submerged by the Vietnam War.

he was never able to really see it through to completion because increasingly his time was taken up fighting the war in Vietnam and ultimately he saw his own political base turn on him. So that is the warning, if you like for Trump. He doesn't need to be in Ukraine any more than Lyndon Johnson actually needed to be in Vietnam. And if he is allowed, if he's drawn to. into Vietnam, by, sorry, into Ukraine, by all the siren voices from Europe and from within his own deep state that are trying to lure him there, then his entire program, domestic program, is going to fail because he's going to take up all the time and all the energy and all the

oxygen and all the intellectual thought and things like that. They're going to be worrying more about battles in Kourachovor or Salidovor or about, you know, fighting here and, you know, trying to come up with the next aid package that will keep Ukraine going for another three months or something like that, rather than concentrate on this massively ambitious domestic agenda, which Donald Trump is trying to work through. So Vietnam should stand as a warning to him. And above all, he should not be scared by all of these people who are trying to fix the blame for the debacle in Ukraine upon him. It's completely wrong to do that. This was never his war. He's absolutely right in saying, I believe, that had he been re-elected in 2020, the war

would not have happened. I think this is probably true. The point is, it did happen. It happened under Biden's watch. The more we learn about what Biden and Blinken especially were up to. We The more we find out how absolutely they own this war and brought us to the position that we are in now. Yeah. New York Times, Blinken's Department of War, not the State Department. Absolutely. They called it Blinken's Department of War. Yeah. And Vietnam very much became Johnson's war.

Absolutely. Which is the warning to Trump. Right now it's not Trump's war. No. But if he gets bogged down in Ukraine, it is going to become his war. Absolutely. And it's going to become his defeat. because Ukraine is going to lose.

Absolutely. So he's got to be very, very careful. Absolutely. I think he understands that, actually. I mean, his early moves suggest that he does. As I said, there's all the siren voices, especially from Britain, which is now working over time to try and divert him onto a completely different course. We see Robert Kagan, you know, Arch Neacombe writing pieces that if Ukraine is defeated,

it'll be transful. As I said, these are, these are unfriendly voices that are trying to divert Trump from what is his real domestic, his real agenda, which is primarily a domestic one. He needs to stabilize the international system, but in order to focus on the internal changes he wants to carry out within the United States, which he sees as essentially, to restore the strength, the long-term strength of the United States. In order to do that, he needs the cooperation of the other great powers of China and Russia first and foremost, and that means having a dialogue with them and not getting sidetracked into pointless conflicts like the one in Ukraine.

All right. We will end the video there. They're durand.com. We are on Rumble, Odyssey, Bitshut, Telegram, Rockfin, Finan. Go to the Durandshop, pick up some merch like what we are wearing in this video. you will find a link to the Duran Shop in the description box down below. Take care.