The Duran Podcast - Trump's program for America, end of globalism

Episode Date: July 18, 2024

Trump's program for America, end of globalism

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the Bloomberg interview with Donald Trump. The interview was actually on June 25th. So it was a good two plus weeks before the assassination attempt occurred. But they covered a lot of ground. Bloomberg covered a lot of ground with Trump, an interesting interview, interesting answers from Trump. I wonder if any of his answers. will change after the assassination attempt,

some of his policies or some of the answers that it gave Bloomberg will be amended or will change given what has just happened. But what were your thoughts on the interview? Well, first of all, to answer your question, I predict no. I think this is the Trump program that we're reading. And I found that the most interesting interview

I have ever read from a U.S. presidential candidate going back as far as I can remember. I mean, this is a very, very interesting interview indeed. The summaries that have been provided by Bloomberg itself and by other, other, you know, news agencies, in my opinion, don't remotely do this interview justice. It's very long. It's also, you know, very much in the style of Donald Trump.

He doesn't speak in a structure. should weigh in the way that other political leaders, Putin, for example, do. But, you know, there's a very, very clear threads and ideas coming through this interview, which, you know, are very fully set out there and which, if implemented, which is a massive issue, of course, if implemented, would indeed mark a fundamental break with the policies that the United States has been following for decades now. I mean, it would be a massive change in the whole direction of US policy. So let me first of all begin by saying that Trump actually talked history. That's not something you usually expect from Donald Trump, but he did.

and he conjured up the person of William McKinley. Now, most people don't, I think in America probably don't think very much of William McKinley at all. I mean, I don't say don't think much about him. I mean that literally. I don't think he's somebody who features very strongly in the American consciousness. He was the 25th president of the United States elected in 1896. He was a Republican. He came from Ohio.

He was born in Ohio. He was active in the politics of Ohio. Note someone else comes from Ohio. J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance was also born in Ohio and is also the junior senator of Ohio. And I cannot believe that is a coincidence, by the way. I wonder whether J.D. Vance has been talking to Trump about McKinley because I understand that McKinley is better remembered in Ohio than he is

elsewhere in the United States. Anyway, McKinley was somebody who stood for high tariffs, industrial development, support for domestic manufacturing. He's very, very keen and connected with that. He was completely committed to, you know, the capitalist system of the United States. I mean, he was no sort of interventionist or socialist, but he did believe, as I said, in high tariffs and protection. And he had a very complex and a very contested foreign policy legacy, because it was during the 1890s, that the United States became for the first time a great power. It fought a war against Spain. It established a kind of hegemony over Cuba. It eventually acquired the Philippines. It was, I think, also in McKinley's time that the United States acquired Hawaii. I'm not absolutely

sure about that. And there's been a lot of controversy and discussion about what McKinley's personal role was in all of this. Since I studied him long ago, I can say with confidence that in my opinion he opposed it. He didn't like any of these things. He didn't believe in any of them. He believed that America should mind its own business. And that was very much his own ideas. But he was very heavily outnumbered within his cabinet. His vice president, who's, Thedorel Roosevelt, was very much a supporter of American expansionism, and he didn't want to compromise his domestic program so that he went along with it. So it's interesting that Donald Trump brings up this person. He talks about McKinley rather than Lincoln or Roosevelt or Washington or other presidents like that.

And what he does over the course of this interview is he sets out an economic program, which looks back to the kind of economic program with which McKinley is associated. So running through the entire thread of this interview, Trump is repeatedly talking about manufacturing, he is repeatedly talking about restoring America's industrial base, and he sees high tariffs, protectionism, as the way to do it.

This is the single most important thing in this interview that comes through. And when I say high tariffs, very high tariffs and very high tariffs against everyone, he's not looking at high tariffs just against China. For example, he's also looking at high tariffs against the Europeans. He clearly doesn't think very much. of the way in which the Europeans have conducted economic policy. He talks at one point about how he asked Angela Merkel, how many American cars are the driving around Munich?

And she said not so many. And Trump said, actually, if you go to Munich, you won't see one. So he feels that the Europeans have pursued protectionist economic policies by stealth. he isn't going to allow this situation to continue where others conduct protectionist policies against the United States. He is going to start bringing back protectionism to the United States. And he also talks a lot about foreign policy. And it's foreign policy very much in the way that I think McKinley would have approved all because he sees it all entirely against. about American interests. So interestingly enough, he does not want to go to war with China over Taiwan.

He doesn't think that Taiwan is worth fighting over. I mean, he makes that absolutely clear. He wants to sort out the problems with Putin in Ukraine. He wants to do all of these things so that the United States can have peace with these countries and can sort itself out and resolve its own problems. Now, if this policy is implemented, and I'm not sure that it will be, but even if Trump is elected, but if it is implemented in the way that Donald Trump wants it to be, it is the obvious end of the globalist project, it is the obvious end of the NEOCOM project. I cannot myself see how structures like NATO, World Trade Organization, all of those things can survive for very long with the kind of United States

that Donald Trump wants to recreate. Yeah, the big question is if this is implemented. Trump said many things similar to what he said to Bloomberg in 2016 when he was president and he got bogged down in Russiagate and the Ukraine phone call. impeachment one, impeachment two, whatever. They tied him up. I think the fact that he has J.D. Vance, if J.D. Vance turns out to be very, very aligned and loyal to Trump and is not like Mike Pence, then it's going to be difficult to stop Trump's agenda by tying Trump down because you're going to have a very energetic, very young, J.D. Vance, who's on the same page as Trump with these policies.

What do you make of the fact that Trump said many good things in 2016, and for whatever reasons? He couldn't make a lot of those things happen. He did make many of his promises happen, but he also had a lot of promises that were not fulfilled. One of the big fears is that many people have with Trump, myself included, is his cabinet picks. In the interview, he mentioned Jamie Diamond. as Treasury Secretary, a lot of people are very worried about that one. Not that Janet Yellen was anything great, but still, you know, there are a lot of, a lot of fears that what Trump says and what Trump does or is allowed to do are two very

different things. And of course, you always have the rhinos and the neocons in Congress who will absolutely work against Trump. And in the rhino crowd, it's not only, you know, the outgoing rhinos like McConnell, who you could say, okay, well, he's done anyway. You know, I consider something like Mike Johnson to be a rhino. I think Mike Johnson is very much a neocon and is very much someone, this new, this new school of neocons. It's younger, younger neocon crowd, which could align against Trump as well if he puts these policies forward. What do you think?

Yeah, first of all, deal with the Jamie Diamond thing, which is very bizarre. Now, of course, it's very difficult to be absolutely sure about this because I read the interview. I didn't see it because, of course, that's the kind of interview we have. But the way I read it, it looked to me like a joke. I don't think he meant it seriously. I mean, he was making jokes about the fact that, you know, an awful lot of business people who had previously been opposed to him

are now supporting him and Jamie Diamond, who is, of course, I believe, a registered Democrat, is one of them. And he's, oh, well, you know, why did we have Jamie Diamond as, you know, as a Treasury Secretary? So, you know, I'm not, I'm not sure that that is his plan. Now, I absolutely.

He threw the name out there. He threw the name out. Exactly. Exactly. But, I mean, he was talking about the fact that all of these people who were so opposed to him before are now coming round within the business world. and that was where he came from.

But, you know, I didn't sense myself when I read that. That was a serious proposal. But going back to what Trump was saying in 2015, 2016, yes, he said many of these things then, but he never said them in the coherent and structured way or semi-structured way that he does over the course of this interview. I got the sense that in 2015, 2016, these were ideas that were floating around in Trump's mind, but that they hadn't been worked out into a program. This time, this is what made the interview so different.

This time, it looked and felt much more like a program. and the first appointment that Trump has made, which is of J.D. Vance, is consistent with this program. And I would say I'm pretty confident. This is why I come back to McKinley and McKinley being someone from Ohio and J.D. Vance being someone from Ohio. I think Vance has had a pretty big input into, you know, sort of. out and working out these ideas. And of course, the Republican Party is a very different preacher today from the one it was in 2015, 2016. In 2015, 2016, it was dominated by people like McConnell. I mean, McConnell was in full control of the Republicans in the Senate. The Republicans in the House were also basically led by the Rino leadership of that time. It's a different

Republican Party today. Trump didn't know how things worked in Washington. A fact, by the way, he admits in this interview. He says that this time, he has a much better understanding of how things work

and are done in Washington than he did then. So he actually makes that point himself. So he has a a better understanding of things, of how things work in Washington.

And by all accounts, this time, he actually has a proper strong team behind him to an extent that he didn't back in 2015, 2016. But it's a huge but, he would be up against many of the same forces that derailed him in his first term, the intelligence community still. there. The Justice Department is still there. There's the financial interests, the social media interests. Very interestingly, he is now reversed himself about TikTok. He wants TikTok to continue because he sees TikTok as providing competition to meta, to Facebook. He's now having experienced what social media can do, he seems much, much more alive to problems that social media would present.

So anyway, so he seems to have a better understanding of the forces that he would be up against now than he was then. But those forces remain incredibly strong and whether he really can prevail against them is another matter completely. I mean, you know, I'm not sure that he can and I'm not sure that he will, but he is shifting the dial in American politics more and more to his side. Vance has given some interesting statements. He's made some interesting statements with regards to Iran and to China, of course, to Ukraine. It definitely seems like when it comes to Ukraine in Europe, Vance wants out. He doesn't want the U.S. bob down in Ukraine and in Europe. In China,

it does look like he's aligning with Trump when it comes to China. And we did many shows in 2016. During Trump's presidency, we documented, we talked about how what Trump wants with China is not escalation, an aggressive escalation, but he wanted an amicable divorce. And China understood this, and it seemed like they were working together, I guess, for lack of a better word, they did understand that the U.S. and China, the Chinese understood that they were going to have to part ways, but they wanted it to be a very soft landing. And that's what it looked like they were working towards until the Biden White House came in. And, well, they just escalated things in a very aggressive manner because that's what the Biden White House does. But it looks like Vance is aligning with Trump on China. and then you have Iran.

And many people are worried about what Vance said with regards to Iran and the Middle East. I guess that is kind of aligned with Trump in a way. I mean, his Middle East policy. I think a lot of analysts attribute the escalation in Syria and Iran with Soleimani. I mean, they attribute that to Trump, and he was the commander-in-chief at the time when we did have the threat of conflict. But I do remember when we covered these stories, and we covered these stories in detail. I remember that Soleimani was very much the work of Pompeo and Bolton, if I'm not mistaken. They're the ones that spearheaded that, and it was via Switzerland that the Trump White House worked through.

Bruce Switzerland does a conduit to get an off-ramp. And pretty much the same with Syria, I believe, as well. The escalation that occurred with Syria was also part of his neocon cabinet, and then they worked out a way to de-escalate. You probably remember the stories, the events that occurred back then a lot better than I do. But what do you think of how Trump's foreign policy is going to shape up with Vance's vice president. Absolutely. It's very interesting. Now, let's just talk about China

because, of course, Trump discusses that at length, actually, in this interview. And he makes exactly the points that you just made, that he has no actual personal animus against China at all. He goes out of his way to say that. He points out that he and Xi Jinping used to get on quite well, that, you know, at a personal level, They were, you know, they were on friendly terms.

And Trump says that this continued right up to the moment when the pandemic started. And it was at the time of the pandemic, the things began to go wrong between them. But up to that point, they'd been on friendly terms. And he goes out of his way in this interview to make it clear that his personal thing with China is purely economic. he says that the Chinese took advantage for 30 years of America's open door. He does not criticize them for doing it. He thinks it's the Americans, the previous people who were in charge of the United States, who failed the United States by opening the door to China, to enable China to take advantage.

And it's exactly what he said. He wants an amicable divorce. He wants to rebuild America's industrial. base. He doesn't want China to be running massive trade surpluses with the US, eroding American industry, losing American workers, their jobs, the kind of things that he talks about. I know the Chinese take a different view about this, but anyway, that's what he says. But for him, fundamentally, it's all about economics. It's also very striking that as I say, he sort of reaches out to China in some ways. He talks about Xi Jinping's a former friend, who perhaps he can get on

with again. He talks about Taiwan in a very different way from the way that so many people in Congress, including many Republicans are talking. He doesn't want a war over Taiwan. He says, look, Taiwan also took advantage. They took mastery, gained mastery in chip industry at the expense of the US, They're a very, very rich country. Why can't they sort out their own problems with China by themselves? Why do they need to involve the United States in it? And he says, you're 9,000 kilometers away, whatever it was. China is only 68 kilometers from Taiwan.

I'm not sure these are what the actual numbers that he gave, but they're in the order of magnitude. Why should we go a whole ocean, you know, across a whole ocean, to defend Taiwan when given the fact that Taiwan is so close to China, it's China that has this enormous advantage over us in Taiwan. So, you know, it's very pragmatic, very realist, if you like, in the most unadulterated form sort of thinking about China. He wants tariffs against Chinese goods,

as he wants tariffs against all other goods, but he's not picking on China specifically. Now, about Iran and the Middle East, it's different because he does have strong feelings about Israel, of that there is absolutely no doubt. He has strong feelings about Iran as well. I think that I suspect the Republican Party, many Americans share those, as you absolutely rightly say,

over the course of the first Trump administration, Trump was actually very, very careful not to allow these visceral feelings that he has about Iran to draw him into an outright clash with Iran. And again, if you read his interview careful, that clearly is not what he wants. And he is, I won't say he's the first American politician to talk in this way. But it's very striking. He's the first presidential candidate that I know to talk in this way. He says, look, when I was president, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea,

they were all, you know, just doing their own thing. Maybe they were talking to each other. Maybe they were not, but we had contacts with all of them. He talks in particular about North Korea. And he says, now, look what's happened in the three and a half years since I became president as a result of the policies that the Biden administration has been following, all of these countries feeling the kind of pressure that they've been under. They've all come together, and they've formed a block. And how is that in the interests of, the United States. And, you know, that was for me one of the most interesting points of insight that you've gotten this into whole interview because, all right, it's true. Some

would say it is blindingly obvious. But who in the mainstream in the United States, in the media, in the think tanks, in Congress, who else says it? Says it as simply and straightforwardly as Donald Trump did in this interview. So it was a very interesting interview altogether. And the way that he talks about politics, geopolitics in general, make me think that despite the fact, as I said, that he has these visual feelings about Iran, just as he just has happened over the course of his previous presidency, he's not going to let those feelings draw him and the United States into a clash with Iran. That's my sense of Donald Trump coming out of this interview.

What do you make of the argument that it was Trump that imposed the Caesar sanctions? It was Trump that imposed the Caesar sanctions, right, on Syria, devastating, a crippling, inhumane sanctions against Syria, which really serve no geopolitical purpose or interest for the United States. It's just a punishment of the Syrian people. I was going to say Assad, but it's really just a punishment of the Syrian people. What do you make of the argument that it was Trump that escalated weapons deliveries, lethal weapons deliveries to Ukraine, including the javelins?

What do you make of that analysis or argument when it comes to Trump? foreign policies in his in his first term um you know my my my point is that's that yes trump kept the united states out of conflict uh but he did his administration absolutely laid the the groundwork the foundation for which a very aggressive a very hawkish uh Biden white house could could build on And that's exactly what the Biden White House did do. Maria Zaharava in response to a comment that Richard Grinnell made about autonomous zones in Ukraine. And many people are saying that Grinnell, who was the U.S. ambassador to Germany under the Trump first term, could be the Secretary of State in a Trump second term. Maria Zaharovar made the good point in addressing Grinnell's idea of autonomous zones in Ukraine.

you know, you, you were in the Trump administration in 2016, and, you know, you did nothing with regards to enforcing Minsk 1 and Minsk 2. And you were in Germany. Why didn't you pressure Angelo Merkel to enforce Minsk 1 and Minsk 2? Instead, what you guys did is you, you escalated with weapons deliveries, and you allowed Ukraine to continue to try and dupe us with the Minsk agreements. What do you make of all? all of these. Well, absolutely. I mean, it's this idea of autonomous regions. Like, how do you square this? That's what I'm asking you, I guess. How do you square the first term with the Bloomberg interview? Well, this is a good, this is an excellent point because of course, this is where we have

the problems with the Bloomberg interview, because if you or I had been conducting that interview, we would have asked those questions, but Bloomberg doesn't. So Trump isn't really put in a position where he has to respond to these questions. So we don't know what is in his own mind here. What he does say at one point in the interview is that he doesn't like sanctions, period. He thinks that sanctions are wrong. That seems to be a view that he's gradually come round to. I think more likely it's been the failure of sanctions against Russia that have pulled him in this direction,

rather than the Caesar sanctions against Syria. But he makes a distinction between sanctions, which he thinks are bad and a bad instrument, and tariffs which he thinks are good and the way to go. So, you know, it may be that he's looking back on all of this and has rethought about it and has come to change his views about this. It's also fair to point out that a lot of these things that we criticize Trump for, the Caesar sanctions, the arms deliveries to Ukraine, the undermining of the Minsk agreement, the sharp turn towards confrontation with China, which began, in fact, before the pandemic, despite what Trump says in this interview, that at that time, Trump was not in full control of the government. he brought in people like Pompeo and Bolton to run things for him.

It may be that, you know, you could argue. You wanted to argue to make a case for Trump, that, you know, he wasn't really fully in control. He was having to fight off allegations that would be made about him all the time. He had to fight off an impeachment. He had to fight out, get through all of that, that he wasn't really in charge fully of the government of the United States during that period. But ultimately, only Trump himself can answer these questions for us.

It's what he does as president that will ultimately matter. And that's where we come back to your original point about the kind of people he's going to choose. If he does populate his administration with neocons, if he brings in people, like Bolton and Pompeo, if he follows along, you know, follows where Lindsay Graham is leading him, and Lindsay Graham is always there lurking like a shadow in the background wherever Trump is. Well, if all of that happens, then every part of this program that he outlined in this interview, including the tariffs, by the way, will fall by the wayside. and we will have an administration that is every bit as chaotic as the previous one,

but even less successful, even more of a failure in some ways. It ultimately depends on him. He's in a much stronger political position now than he has ever been. If he is re-elected in November, he will be in a stronger position still he's got to seize the moment, appoint the people he trusts. This time, Congress is far more likely to approve them. The Senate is far more likely to approve them than was the case in 2017. I know, you remember, but we went right through 2017,

and the Senate was simply slow walking all of his nominees for his positions. For the, you know, for positions. I mean, it was, it was a great. awful business. Well, this time, one assumes that won't happen. And as I said, he's got to seize the chance and prove to all of us that this time it's going to be different. As I say, he seems a lot more coherent this time than he did then. He's clearly thought things through. He's got a team behind him. He's got a vice president who's very different from Mike Pence. Let's see what he does. Yeah, I'm in full agreement with that. I really believe that we'll understand, if Trump wins, we will understand what kind of a president who will be, especially with regards to foreign policy by the team that he puts in place, without a doubt. I wonder if the Trump team, a final question, I wonder if they know what Lindsay Graham is up to. I mean, I see Lindsay Graham as being planted next to Trump by the neocons in order to do, as you say, in order to be that shadow.

always whispering in Trump's ear, that evil, that evil presence whispering in Trump's ear, appoint Pompeo, appoint Bolton, or people like that, you know, put them in your cabinet. These are the people you want, Mr. Trump. This should be their Secretary of State. This should be your national security advisor. I wonder if this team understands that, and it's a case of keeping your enemy close to you. Or if Trump really does like Lindsay Graham and really does listen to his advice, which would be catastrophic. It was absolutely catastrophic. I mean, if you remember when Michael Flynn was forced

to stand down as Trump's national security adviser, Trump turned to McCain and Lindsay Graham, and he ended up with McMasters, who was, you know, the his national security advisor, who was, you know, obviously taking instructions from Lindsay Graham and McCain rather than Trump. And then Bolton, exactly. I mean, again, only time will tell. I am sure that there are people in Trump's team who understand exactly how dangerous a figure Lindsay Graham ultimately is.

I'm sure they do. What Trump himself thinks, whether Trump feels he needs Lindsay Graham at this time, because Lindsay Graham has support in, was it, South Carolina? South Carolina where he is. If that's what this is all about, well, you know, that's politics and that's the way that politics are done.

But if, as you correctly said, he generally likes Lindsay Graham and is going to be pulled towards Lindsay Graham, then, as I said, it's all going to go horribly wrong. The other big thing that, of course, I think Trump needs to understand is that the people he talks to on the other side, are going to have their own points of view.

So when, you know, Grinnell comes forward and talks about autonomous zones in Ukraine and all of this, if that's the plan that Trump has at the moment, he must be prepared for the fact that the Russians are going to say no. And if he thinks that all he has to do is come up with some proposals and the Chinese and the Russians will be so happy to see the back of Joe Biden that they will agree to whatever it is that he proposes,

then again, that is going to be a huge mistake. I think that Trump by now is savvy enough to understand that. I have to ask you one more question, Alexander, maybe something that you can debunk. Many analysts, prominent, prominent conservative analysts, they come out with the claim that if Trump was president, there would be no conflict in Ukraine because Trump would tell Putin, don't you dare go into Ukraine. If you do, we're going to come down hard on you. And ultimately, Putin was afraid of Trump and would fear Trump.

And that is why there would be no conflict in Ukraine. That is why there was no conflict in Ukraine from 2016 to 2020. during Trump's first term, because ultimately it was Putin's fear of Trump that kept Putin in check. I think the opposite. I think that Putin would have done what was in the best interests of Russia. And the only thing that would prevent Putin from exercising those interests of Russia would have been diplomacy and talking to Russia, which is what I think Trump would have done. He would have tried to, he would have definitely talked to Putin, would definitely try to to work out some sort of a deal or compromise. I don't think it would have been Trump barking orders at Putin or threatening Putin

that would have caused Russia to be in check or to stand down. I don't think that's the way Russia or Putin operates. But there are many people that say if Trump was president from in 2020, well, then he would have put the fear of God into Putin and Russia. And Putin would not have dared to do anything with Ukraine. and that's that would have been all the difference. That's that's difference between Biden and Trump. Biden is weak. Trump is strong and Putin smells the weakness in Biden and that's why he went there. I think that's very lazy geopolitical thinking. What are your thoughts? You're absolutely right.

It's complete nonsense. And again, if you read the interview carefully, the Bloomberg interview carefully, it's absolutely clear that Trump himself doesn't think that. He has said many times that if he had been president, there would never have been a Ukraine war. But what he also says in the interview, the Bloomberg interview, is that the reason there wouldn't have been a Ukraine war was because he and Putin worked together and respected each other. In other words, that Trump understood Putin and Putin to some level understood and worked well with Trump. It was not that Putin was scared of Trump. And I think this is right, actually. I think that what caused the war in Ukraine, this is my own view. I've expressed it in many programs. We've discussed it many times.

The reason we had a war in Ukraine was not because the Russians in 2021 and 2022 decided that they wanted to go to war because they wanted to test Biden. It was on the contrary, because the Biden team came in and were trying to either humiliate Putin or to engineer regime change there. And they wanted to provoke a crisis in Ukraine. They wrote about it. I've discussed it many times. They're actually writing about it. People ignore this, but there was, you know, is that article by West Mitchell in the national interest? There were other places there, that they wanted to create a crisis in Ukraine, which they were confident that the Russians would not be able to resolve, that there would be a military defeat, that there would be massive sanctions imposed on Russia, and that

would provoke regime change in Moscow. That is my opinion, well, what this war was all about. This is why I think we ended up having a war. This is what Putin himself has said, by the way. So, you know, this turns everything on its head. It assumes that the main agent in 2021, 2022, was Putin and the Russians, whereas in my opinion, it was Biden and the Democrats, just saying, and the Europeans as well. And I remember having all that view crystallized for myself conclusively. I always come back to it at the Munich Security Conference in February 2020.

They were all absolutely ecstatic at the thought that there was going to be a war and that they were going to impose these massive sanctions and that that was going to bring the entire Russian economic system crashing down and that that would be the final end of this terrible man who had been such a problem for them. So I think this is a complete misreading of what would have happened. And if you were to say, read Trump's own interview, the interview he's just given to Bloomberg.

Carefully, he clearly doesn't think that Putin is a weak person and was scared of him. What he recognizes in Putin is a strong, tough, realistic leader who Trump, in his own self-conception, as a strong, tough, realistic leader, can make deals with. That is Trump's perspective.

And he thinks that if he thinks that if he, he'd been president during that period, we wouldn't have had the crisis that we had because there wouldn't have been this breakdown in relations that there was and that some kind of deal and understanding in everybody's interests would have been done. It's a radically different perspective

from this, you know, arch neocon type, conservative view, that it's because of a, of Biden's weakness that we had a war. The opposite is true, in my opinion. It was Biden and his team looking for a war, looking for a crisis, because they had this plan to create a either persuade Putin to break with China, which is apparently what they tried to do when Putin and Biden met at that one summit they had in Geneva in the summer of 2021. And then when that didn't work out, They were going to engineer regime change in Moscow, break up the country, and isolate China and reestablish

Western and U.S. supremacy and that sort of thing. That was the cause of the war. Yeah, well said. The Trump administration, there would not have been a war if Trump was president because ultimately Trump did not want to bring down Putin. He did not want to destroy the Russian Federation. It was the Biden White House. that wanted to bring Putin down and wanted to destroy the Russian Federation.

That's the difference right there. Trump had no interest in dismantling and destroying Russia. And that's why there would not have been a war, not because Trump would have scared Putin or warned Putin or something like that. And he doesn't want to destroy anybody. That's the one thing that comes across very obviously in the program. Maybe the regime in Iran to some extent. but not all of the others, even, even, you know, North Korea,

he wants to do deals with them. That's what he's about. That's at least in his own self-conception. That's what he's about. And that's one reason, by the way, that the, you know, political class, the neocons and all the rest, that's why they loathe him so much

because he doesn't want to do these things. He wants to, instead of wanting to overthrow Putin, he wants to cut a deal with him. Yeah, the conservative, conservative neocan commentators, they really do Trump a disservice by saying, oh, it would have been Trump's warnings and his tough stance towards Putin that would have prevented the Ukraine war. They do them a disservice because they really don't understand Trump and they don't understand Russia. Trump was very good and is very good at diplomacy. Yes. And he enjoys diplomacy and he enjoys negotiations.

and that's what he would have done with Russia. Exactly. Exactly. Let's hope you picks a good foreign policy team, a national security advisor, and a secretary of state that you can actually work with. Absolutely. No more Pompeos and no more. Bolton's and McMasters. My God.

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