The Tucker Carlson Show - Ukraine Is Selling American Weapons to Mexican Drug Cartels. Col. Daniel Davis on How to Stop It.

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

The Ukrainian military is selling American weapons systems on the black market, including to drug cartels. This war is killing the United States. Col. Daniel Davis on how Donald Trump can end it. (00:00) Why Crimea Is So Pivotal to the Ukraine/Russia War (13:17) Ukraine Is Powerless Without the US (34:16) Ukraine Selling American Weapons to Cartels (50:02) DEI in Our Military (56:20) Drone Warfare Paid partnerships with: ExpressVPN: Get 4 extra months free at https://ExpressVPN.com/Tucker Policygenius: Get your free life insurance quotes today at https://Policygenius.com/Tucker  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Desjardins.com slash business coverage. Trump gets elected, not exclusively, but heavily on the promise, no more of these nonsense wars that are draining the treasury, getting Americans killed, making America weaker globally. There's no upside at all, particularly the war in Ukraine. Donald Trump says, I'm going to do that. I'm going to bring it to a close in like the first hours after becoming president. I think he says that. And the question to you, who actually knows the answer is, how do you do that?

Yeah, well, how you bring the war to an end, this has been on the table since before the war started. And Trump is going to have a much more difficult position now to bring that to fruition because of the horrific decisions made by the outgoing administration. This war could easily have been avoided before it happened. The Minsk agreements. I know a lot in the West like to say bad things about them. But the fact is that we now know Angela Merkel, Hollande of France have both admitted that that was never supposed to be implemented.

They just wanted to, quote, stop Russia's invasion of the Donbass area. That's what they said that it was for, to buy them time, the Ukraine side time, so that they could defend against it. It wasn't to implement. Russians and the French and German and the Ukrainians was that the Ukrainians would change their constitution to have political autonomy and protections for the Russian-speaking people in the East. That was one of the absolute central features of that Minsk Agreement. In the Belarus, in the Minsk. In the Minsk Agreements, yeah, in 2015, and it was never done, ever. So the Ukraine side didn't implement the most important provision of it. They were also supposed to move back heavy weapons and all this kind of stuff, some of which happened. And then both sides had minor incursions over the time with artillery that was going back and forth, because the Russians are going, all right, we're not going to implement our part of this all fully

until you get that central part. And so they just talked about it all this time. And all we had to do is say, okay, Minsk agreements had no NATO in it. There was no NATO for Ukraine inside there. It was just resolve this situation peacefully. It didn't address NATO. So it definitely didn't say that they were on the table. It didn't talk about it. So since 2008, that had been talked about by the West that they were going to come in.

But the Minsk agreement would have ended all the conflict that was on the line of contact for essentially an eight year civil war before this one broke out. All they had to do was just implement those. And then now then Russia has no need to intervene because the whole issue has always been protection of the rights of the Russian people and the ethnic Russians living in eastern Ukraine and the protection on their border not to have NATO in it. So if you get that off the table, now then there's plenty of room. But then by 2021, which very few Westerners are even aware of, is in March of 2021, Zelensky signs this law that says they're going to now take back all of the temporarily occupied areas, especially Crimea, which is a no-go red line for the Russians, and by force if necessary. Can you possibly describe why – and lots of Biden administration officials talked about taking back Crimea.

You say it's a no-go. It's not even worth discussing. Why is that? What is Crimea? Historically, Crimea was in Russia, too. I think it was – I can't remember the exact year that it was given to Ukraine by – I want to say Nikita Khrushchev. That's correct. So he gave that to them. But it's historically – I mean, for centuries, it's been Russian. The vast majority of people – Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine when Khrushchev controlled Ukraine.

Right. When he controlled the Soviet Union. Yeah, so it was just like moving things left and right within his controlling and holdings. But the people in it were still ethnic Russians primarily. And when they had this plebiscite, like 95 percent of the people voted to go into Russia after the coup that happened that unseated the legally elected government in Ukraine that Victoria Nuland and all these other people supported. Then Putin said, well, I'm certainly not going to have a NATO country around Sevastopol where I have my Black Sea fleet. So he said, we're going to annex this thing.

The people voted for it, and that's what he claimed. Now, you can disagree that that was legitimate, but that's how they voted, and that's why. Does anyone argue that the Crimeans, the residents of Crimea, if allowed to vote on it again, would vote to join Ukraine? Does anybody think that? Anyone argue that? No, no one argues that because they know it wouldn't be the case. And life has improved for the Crimean population since Russia annexed it. It's gotten a lot better and it's gotten even better since the 2022 invasion

because they got water back is one of the big things there. So none of them would ever want to go back into the Ukraine side. So if you cared about democracy, you wouldn't try and steal Crimea from its people and give it to another government that they didn't want to join. Right. No, especially if you care about people getting to make their own decisions, which we claim to in other parts of the world that, yes, the will of the people should rule. Unless, of course, it's somebody we don't like, which goes back to the whole thing that happened in February 2021, I'm sorry, 2014, when we encouraged a coup and then supported the overthrow of the legally elected government because we didn't like what they were doing. And we helped the actual occupant, the other people who were going against it. So everything that violated what we claim to believe, we were

supportive of at that time. And that's not democracy in any way, shape, or form. No, of course not. But still, that's the problem, that we could have ended this war by doing the Minsk agreements. Then in late 2021, and we know this for a fact because Jen Stoltenberg has admitted this stuff very publicly, that Putin said, hey, if we don't get a deal here, we're going to use force. Jen Stoltenberg said for sure, yes. And who is Stoltenberg?

He was the former secretary general of NATO. Right. And so he has led the NATO up until just very recently when Mark Rutte took over. But he said, yes, Putin told us that. But of course, we didn't sign that. We're not going to agree with that because no one can tell us who's going to join NATO. So understand at that point, we and of course, the United States was in complete agreement with this. That war could have been avoided by simply saying what we all knew.

NATO is never going to accept Ukraine. There's no way we would ever do that. But instead of saying that, we said the opposite. They're going to come in. And so Putin says, then you've made my decision for me. I'm going to we're going to take military action, which he said on December 22nd, 2021. He said we will take military specific measures if this continues on. And it certainly we know what happened on February 22nd.

So we could have stopped the war from happening before. And then two months in, we could have stopped it again. It is the Istanbul. People certainly know a lot about that. Putin mentioned that when you interviewed him about a year ago. I think Sergey Lavrov even mentioned it when you talked to him about that, too. They always say we're willing to talk. Everybody has said it that way. Shut down by Boris Johnson, former prime minister of Great Britain, acting on behalf of the Biden administration. That is that is that is what we understand. And Johnson has almost never he's kind of waffled with it.

But he has said you can't talk to putin you can't have a negotiated settlement with him so whether he actually did it all or was with biden we don't know but we know for sure i tried to ask him directly and he demanded a million dollars uh for the interview and i'm seeing him at the end of the month and i hope i'll be able to interview him then wow i'll be watching that one with great interest i don't have a million dollars in my checking account right now to pay Boris Johnson. Yeah, but what he has said makes it very clear that that was his position. No matter who it was, though, that did happen.

So just think about it. How many Ukrainians, allegedly around a million, are dead? And probably double that or maybe even triple that wounded. It's a staggering number. None of them should have died. All we had to do was just say what we already know. NATO's never going to invite Ukraine in and the war would have been avoided. Absolutely.

Because then there's no reason for Russia to ever have invaded in the first place. Right. Just like if Russia was talking about, I mean, I'm hypothetically here wanting to have missiles, say, on Cuba or so. We had a negotiation. If they had kept the missiles there, we probably would have gone to war. But we had a negotiation and they moved them off. So if we had said no NATO coming into Ukraine at that time, then Russia had no need to do anything. They also would have backed off because it's in their interest to do so. But we didn't. So when

we're talking about now, when we say, no, we democracy and and this, you know, unprovoked aggression, which we know wasn't true because we've admitted that it wasn't true. Now, then we have what we have here. And so all of these opportunities. And by the way, there was one more in November. This is one of the worst ones, in my view. In November of 2022, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, said, hey, by the way, if you want to negotiate a settlement, now is the time to do it. Because remember, that was the one year where there were two big successes for the Ukraine army. They drove Russia out of Kherson City, and they drove them out of a huge swath of Kharkiv area in the north. At that time, Russia was at its weakest

point. They had force-mobilized 300,000 people. They were scrambling just to get uniforms in, much less trained, et cetera, to stop the gap, to stop the bleeding up there. And the Ukraine side had every advantage. And Martin Milley publicly said, if you want to negotiate a settlement, now would be a good time. Russia's at its weakest, Ukraine's at its strongest. He goes, I'm just saying, if you wanted it, now's the time. He knew that Russia, as bad as it had been battered, was still Russia. They still had all the natural resources that they could ever need. They had the military and industrial capacity, which was already starting to gin up.

And they had the manpower. The population, exactly. Everything that you need. And the mentality. Because they view this as an existential fight. It's not like vietnam was for us this is on their front door and it is an existential fight so they will recover and he knew that and so if you want to negotiate from a position of strength which he said millie at the time now is the time but no we didn't zielinski was now i think drunk with power

because he's like we beat them here here. We'll keep beating them. But militarily, Tucker, this is one of the things that's so important. Militarily, it was evident at the time that Ukraine couldn't win because Russia then, they withdrew from Kherson City. And it was talked about a humiliation for Russia at the time. But militarily, that was the wisest decision they could have made because it would have been hard to hold on to Kherson City because of the river behind them. So they moved 40,000 guys across the river, blew all the bridges so that now Ukraine can't follow that up. And so they preserved all of that manpower and all of the experience that they had. And then they ended up using them elsewhere to build a fortified defensive series of about five different periods. And Russia

was really good at defensives. So there was every reason to think. They've had some practice. They have had practice, and even when I was serving during the Cold War, we studied the Russian tactics, and we knew how hard it would be. I was in an armor unit, so I knew how hard it would be to try to do an offensive against a dug-in Russian defensive line. And so when I heard in 2023 that the Ukraine was going to have this big combined arms operation going into the Russian lines, I said, there's no way that they're going to do that. I've conducted operations like that before in Desert Storm with Doug McGregor and an armored cav regiment. I knew what it was like to go into prepared enemy defenses. And that was against a not very good unit. But to go against the Russians when they

had six months to prepare was suicide. Our leaders should have recognized that. Our secretary of defense should have recognized that. But instead, they said, no, we're going to succeed. We've trained them up. We've given them all these thousands of military vehicles, millions of rounds of ammunition, training, intelligence support. You know, I think it was HIMARS at that time that we've given them already stingers all kinds of stuff and i said look and i wrote about this ahead of time so this is not revisionist history i wrote ahead of time this will fail and here's why you have no air force effectively there's no ukrainian air force you don't have enough air defense and you don't have enough uh engineering support to penetrate these minefields and the most important

one is you don't have the trained manpower. It doesn't matter how many people they mobilize. I know from Armory Cav how hard it is to maneuver in coordinated fashion across a broad front. It's extremely difficult. And they had this much experience in doing that. And you can't train that up in two or three months. It just can't be done. Our leaders should have known that. But instead can't train that up in two or three months. It just can't be done. Our leaders should have known that, but instead they encouraged it. And then you had, I'll never forget this one,

David Petraeus at the end of May, 2023, went on the BBC and said, I think that the Ukraine side is going to do this combined arms operation. And he listed all the reasons why they're going to, and the tanks and the Bradleys and all this stuff. I think that they're going to penetrate the Russian lines. The defensive lines will crumble, crack, and maybe even collapse, and they'll go to the Azov coast. That's what he said on the eve of this thing. And, of course, it worked out the way any rational analysis would have said was a complete disaster.

It never even penetrated the first line of defense. So all of 2023 went to a predictable failure. And so now then, that was the next chance we had to end the suffering. May I just ask, you're describing the war as really a war between the United States and Russia. You're saying that these are decisions that our military leadership made or should have made. That is what I'm saying. Because the Ukrainian leadership and military, they don't have the historical experience. They only existed for 30 years.

Right. We've got all of this stuff going all the way back to World War Two, World War One. I mean, we've had all kind of institutional knowledge. And without us, nothing happens. Doesn't matter what Ukraine wants to do without our willingness to give the information, the ammunition, the weapon systems, all of it. And to apparently help with some of the plans, they can't do anything. Okay, so I just don't think, I mean, thank you. Everything you're saying makes sense.

I think it's obvious once you think about it, but too few do think about it. And I think a lot of people have been lulled into this idea that, you know, there's this valiant, they may be valiant, but, you know, Ukrainian military that's fighting this war against a foreign aggressor, Russia, and sort of leaving out the key point, which is that the strategy and the munitions come from the United States. So this is a failure on the part of our military leadership as well. But 100 percent. Thank you. It's avoided. It was such an avoidable situation. We knew better. So when Ukraine loses, you can look at the Pentagon and say, nice job, guys, yet again.

That is exactly what I say. And very quantifiable reasons why that is. Though I will say, it's not exclusively us, because Zelensky deserves specific arguments and criticism, because he continued to take these operations and actions. However much who actually made the decisions is unclear, but he actually has a lot of the say over what they did, especially over how they employ them. And so he sent his troops to do operations that really had no chance of success. And especially, and he deserves, people claim that he's, you know, like this modern day Winston Churchill kind of thing, right? I mean, he got all this publicity in the first. Well, Winston Churchill made some huge mistakes in early in his career. And because of that, I was just thinking about Gallipoli.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he had his Gallipoli. I guess he is like Churchill, right? Well, he was back then. Yeah, he's that version of Churchill. Good point. But he learned from those mistakes. And so he did a bunch of things right in Second World War, because he learned from his mistakes in most parts. Italy is a separate issue. That wasn't so, but Italy. But he eventually did help with that. Well, Zelensky doesn't have any of that experience at all.

And so he fought in this place called Severodonetsk, Lysychonsk, and even Mariupol early in the war. And in every case, he stayed too long. So when it was clear that the Russian forces had moved in and into the outskirts of the city, they should have withdrawn to the next defensive line. They should have been building subsequent defensive lines, knowing that the Russians were going to eventually get there. Make it as expensive as you can on every go back, and then you'll have like, all right, well, back here, we're not going to allow penetration, or we have to bring the war to an end. But instead, he just stayed there and almost

like Hitler in the end of World War II, not one inch. So instead of pulling his forces back, he kept them in there and they were methodically destroyed. Now then you have to have new guys for the next city and then they're destroyed. And you see what happens, Tucker, is that you destroy the ability to have a coherent offensive or defensive because the guys who know how to fight, who've learned, die. So now then you have to bring in new guys and it's starting from scratch again. Bakhmut was the worst because they lost probably 10,000 people to defend a city that gave them no value. They should have moved back to another area because here's the key. So like Bakhmut is here and it's tough to move into, but if you had moved back here where there's a lot of open land and to

the next defensive position, which high ground, then it would cost the Russians a lot more to move across this territory. And they could have defended themselves better. But instead, they stayed there. Then they lost thousands of men. Avdivka, the same thing. They keep repeating the same mistake over and over. They've done it now in Turetsk, in Chasov Yar. And they're doing the same thing, head up on Pokrovsk in the area down there.

Let's see, the one in the south there in the Kupyansk area. The one in the south was one of the worst, too, because the Ukraine side held out in that town for a year and a half in Vulidar. But then the Russians learned a lot. And so now that instead of going head on, they start flanking it and it becomes evident you're going to lose it. But again, they would not give the order to receive. So they keep losing thousands upon thousands of trained people. So now then they're talking about lowering the age to 18 so that they can bring more people in. They're talking about it.

Actually, our incoming national security advisor is talking about it on television, whom I like. So it's not a personal attack. But u.s policymakers have completely destroyed ukraine they pushed this where they started this war i think it's i think it's very obvious that that's what happened you just described how and you know ukraine has been devastated they the ukrainian parliament made it legal for outsiders non-citizens to buy their land so they're going to lose their country physically. And a whole generation has been destroyed. And now U.S. policymakers are saying it's your fault.

You need to lower conscription age to 18. I mean, I don't – she says a Christian. I'm infuriated and repelled by that. Like what is that? I think it's one of the most disgusting things I've ever heard. I'll tell you what I hope is really at play here. No, I know what you're going to say. What? That this is tactical.

This is like trying to strike a tough pose to put the incoming administration in a better spot for negotiations. No. I think that it is the incoming administrations to put Zelensky in a position. Yeah. To say, look, if you want to do this, you have to go and put these people in here. But you can't because it's so – this has been talked about for probably close to a year in Ukraine. It keeps getting pushed back for the reasons that you just illuminated there. Don't you wreck the country and kill more young people? Why would you take another generation and sacrifice them for nothing?

And so people are violently against that. So he's putting them in a position, I think, I hope. No, you're right. So that Zelensky will realize then now you have to have a negotiated settlement. We don't talk that way because it's repulsive. Okay. I agree with you. Human sacrifice is immoral.

I agree with you. It is anguishing for me to hear. Even if it is a negotiating position, I hope it works. If that gets the war over, then okay. But I fear that they may say, okay. Why not just say, look, I mean, why even include the Ukrainian leadership in these conversations? I don't understand. I mean, I do think we should apologize for what the Biden administration just did to Ukraine. I think that is our fault or their fault. But I don't know why going forward you would even why would you have Zelensky, the, you know, Mr.

Play the piano with his dick guy what does he have to do no i'm serious like why why he's unelected he's not the democratically elected leader of ukraine there has been no he it's his term expired he has no moral right to run that country well see then there's more truth to that than a lot of people might realize because putin last month reiterated that point it It's a fact. We're willing to talk, but we can't sign any deal with Zelensky because he's not a legitimate leader. He went past his term. He's not legally the president of the country. That's right. So he said, until somebody gets in there, then we can sign a deal, but we can talk to the United States right now.

And so I think Trump's coming in. Trump's not going to be tied to what Zelensky does, like Biden apparently was. I can't imagine he's going to. Who cares what he thinks? Because we call all the cards. And Russia says, yes, America has to. I think Sergey Lavrov, in the interview you had with him, said the same thing. We'll talk. We're open to talk with the Trump administration.

We're willing to do that. And the Biden administration could have done it at any point and they refused to do it. And now we have the wreckage that we have. Yeah, we do. Shadowy online tech figures are buying and selling and spying on your personal information. There are plenty of privacy services out there that help prevent your data from getting stolen. But how do you get your privacy back when it's already been taken? And that's where ExpressVPN comes in. Not only do they protect your online activity going forward, preventing anyone from seeing what you're doing, they can also remove your information from the third parties who snatched it from you. ExpressVPN is the best. We spend a

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you just described why it's a very tough position for the incoming president. How do you end this? And I didn't describe the worst part of it yet. Because of everything we have done, and by the way, we set as an objective, Biden did on the first day of the war in his speech to the United States, and the Secretary of Defense, Austin, did so in April, was to weaken Russia. That's what we said. Ukraine must prevail.

Russia must fail. I think that was the exact phrase that Biden used. And Austin said that we have to weaken Russia. That was our objective. Instead. Why would we want to weaken Russia? Just to be impossible to secure their nuclear arsenal and to make sure that like some violent Muslim separatist group takes control of parts of the country. Like what?

I don't. Because we don't like them just because we don't like russia that there's too many people in power still today in washington that grew up in the cold war and and were mourning the loss of the of the soviet union and the enemy we should have ended nato like mamar kaddafi but has libya improved since he was murdered oh lord yeah they have slave markets in Tripoli. So how's that a win for anyone? Like, who are these people? Like, how can people that stupid be in charge of anything?

Because they replicate themselves. They're the ones that are in charge. And so they don't let anybody else rise up, even to the lower and the middle levels, unless they give in to the way people think they're. If you're not like me, forget it. If you're talking about doing something that makes sense, that doesn't mean more war, you're going to get rid of. Look at Tulsi Gabbard. They are terrified of having somebody of her quality in that position

at DNI because they know she'll actually tell the truth. She'll actually faithfully tell what the intelligence is as opposed to just slanting it so that the president gets wrong information or slanted information that makes him think, yeah, you should go and use more military force, whatever it is. So that's why these people are still in power today. But yeah, you're right. There was no reason to want to weaken Russia. We should have wanted to end the war. And if we cared about the Ukrainian people, that's what we would have done. We would have prevented it or at least ended it when it came in. But instead, we wanted to weaken Russia. So why not keep the war going? Because the Ukrainian people are willing to do it. Zelensky is willing to keep them going in there, even though any rational explanation could have shown the opposite.

OK, so we achieved the opposite. Russia is now much stronger than it was in February 2022. The Ukraine side is much weaker than it was. We're much weaker than we were. Just imagine, just fundamentally, how many thousands of armored vehicles have we sent to the Ukraine side? How many interceptor missiles have we sent? Almost all of our ATACOM's missiles have been sent to Ukraine. We don't even have a handful left. What if we get into a war with somebody? God forbid it should be China or North Korea or, you know, even more, God forbid, if it should be Russia. What if we have to defend ourselves? We have now just eaten into our capacity to even wage war. And now then you have the Russian side has gone to the opposite side because they have

now mobilized their industry. They've now expanded their army by 50 percent from where it started. They do have a lot of people that have gotten experience in this army and lived. And so now then their institution is growing even more capable. So that's why this is so hard for Trump, because Putin is coming in saying he's willing to talk. He's willing to have negotiations. But he set some pretty high standards. I think when you talked to Putin in February of last year, when you asked him what his terms were, he kind of went back. He said, well, we've already talked about this at Istanbul. So maybe something like that. Well, because we didn't take it and then we allowed long range weapons to be used by Americans into Russia, Putin said that deal's now off the table. Now,

on June 14th, he listed a new set of deal, which is all for the Oblast, all of it, even the territory that Ukraine still owns. So now it's not going to be that deal before, because that would have been just the Donbass area, just the Luhansk and Donetsk. Now it's going to be bigger. But then Biden didn't accept that either. And so now then, with all the price that Russia has paid there and the strength, they don't have to negotiate. This is so important to understand. Ukraine has to negotiate to survive. We have to negotiate to get the war over. Putin doesn't. If he doesn't get the deal he wants, he'll just keep rolling until he does. And I believe that the likelihood is that they would take all the way up to the Dnieper River, even if it took another six, nine months of fighting. I don't see any way that they're going to stop fighting here. And they've

said so. They've said, we're not, Lavrov, about three weeks ago, said, no kind of ceasefire. We're not going to do a pause because that would just help the other side there. We're going to keep fighting and we'll negotiate, we'll talk, but we're not going to stop fighting. So there's no ceasefire that's going to be involved because that would help the Ukraine side. So to the river, which is a considerable distance from where they are. Yeah. But see, here's the... So how far does that put them from the capital city? Well, it never goes into Kiev. I'm aware. That's why I'm asking that. So I think that the likelihood is that Odessa and Kharkiv cities are probably not going to remain on the Western side if Trump doesn't come in and give Putin everything he wants on the first day. And I perceive, and I certainly don't know this.

No, I haven't talked to Putin, so I don't know. But I perceive that he's set these lines here on the 14 June lines, which were all of those four oblasts, because there's large swaths that Ukraine still owns, it would be so hard, maybe even impossible, politically, domestically for Trump to give away areas that Ukraine hasn't lost in the war and agree to that. And so if Trump, you know, with the Kellogg plan or whatever, they try to say they want NATO put off or, you know, they want the current line of contact to be the dividing line, then Russia will just say, okay, we tried to negotiate with you. We didn't. And they'll just keep going until they get to the Dnieper River because we can't stop them. If Trump says, okay, well, I'm going to get tough and I'll give more stuff to you than Biden did. Well, first, we don't have it. But second,

it doesn't matter because they don't have the manpower to use it. They literally don't have it. We don't. And, Tucker, if Trump said, all right, well, I'm going to go in big. I'm going to take the 1st Armored Division, 1st Infantry Division, 1st Cav Division, all of that equipment, the whole set, and just give it powerful divisions that we have there and just hand it to the Ukrainians, they don't have the manpower to use it. They would still lose just as much but then you also have a problem which is this donald trump just ran for

office on the promise no more you know counterproductive wars and so if his first act in you know as president in office is to arm ukraine like i i don't i don't see how that works honestly it's i i can see where he would have that temptation and i know that he's going arm Ukraine. I don't see how that works, honestly. Do you? I can see where he would have that temptation, and I know that he's going to have that suggestion from many of his supporters, because I've been reading about him already, because they say, we've got to show him he's tough.

Well, not his supporters, the neocons in Washington. Fair point, yes. I don't know how many Trump voters are for that, like right around the circle, probably. Yeah, they're definitely not, because they know, the neocons in Washington. Fair point. Yes. I don't know how many Trump voters are for that, like right around the circle, probably. Yeah, they're definitely not because they know, they can see what we're talking about here.

It's nothing but a losing prospect. Why pay more to lose? Also, why is it our, how do we get involved in this? Because of the bad hand. The two guys get in a fight down the street and I like bankrupt my family and put their lives at risk to,

like what? That is exactly what we're talking about here. And it's much worse because that and also we're bankrupting ourselves while we're enabling that family to die even more. Exactly. More of them. So it's immoral and irrational in my view. So but but here's the problem that Trump's political enemies here. And I've already seen it. Biden is absolutely set this up. He just said last week that I have created all this great situation here where our enemies are weaker and our friends are stronger. And I'm handing this over to Trump. You had Secretary Blinken say, you know what, we have... Secretary

Blinken's a criminal, by the way. And if he retains his security clearance after January 20th, I'm going to, every single day, raise the alarm. I mean, there's no way that Tony Blinken should have a security clearance after Trump is inaugurated. But I know he's going to, it's super simple. Just pull Tony Blinken's security clearance. Tony Blinken is a, you know, I think was running the U.S. government, hurting this country more than maybe any other single person in my lifetime. And that man deserves to, should be held to account for what he did. A hundred percent agree. And his exit interview showed why. He actually told that interviewer last week that we have put Ukraine in a stronger position militarily, economically, and domestically.

Are you serious? Oh, yeah. He said straight up, and we have them on a sustained path to continue improving. And then he said, but if Trump comes in and they negotiate an end, that's up to them. Those are lies. He's a liar. 100%. And I know because I travel a lot. And last weekend, I had a meeting in a ski resort in the Alps, which is probably the most expensive town in the world.

I was not there to ski, for the record. But the whole town is Ukrainian. All the visitors are Ukrainian. And they're rolling into Air Maze and dropping a million dollars in an afternoon. Okay? So it's all through Europe you see this. The richest people are the Ukrainians. That money is ours. It belongs to me and you and every other American taxpayer.

That's where it's going. Second fact, fact, not guess, fact, is Ukrainian military is selling a huge percentage, up to half of the arms that we send them. Half. And I'm not guessing about this. I know that for a fact, okay? Not speculation. And they're selling it, and a lot of us winding up with the drug cartels on our border. So this is a crime, what's happening. Our intel agencies are fully aware of this. You tell me they're not profiting from this. Of course, you think the CIA is not profiting from this? Yes, they are.

I can't prove that, but I believe that. What, they don't know this? I know this, but they don't know this? They know this. And no one is saying it. Like, no American seems aware of this. We're sending these arms to Ukraine, billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, and it's being stolen and sold to our actual enemies. Like, what the?

I'm trying not to swear. What is this? Yeah, well, the reason why is because you have Zelensky, it was about three weeks ago, I think, was specifically asked this question. So he went at some length in one of his interviews to say,

oh, no, absolutely not. There's no truth to that at all. We've implemented all these things. I know that, but the media just reported what he said. The New York Times could get on the web and order Ukrainian weapons. That's a fact.

I'm not guessing. It's a fact. They could do that today. Like, everyone who wants to know what's going on knows. And yet they're telling me, oh, 70,000 Ukrainians have died. 70,000? Really? You think that's the number? Everything about this is a lie. And Tony Blinken, of course, because he's running the U.S. government, knows that it's all a lie. And so for him to say that out loud is evil. Like, that's truly deceptive, I think. Oh, 100% it is because it is in a direct contradiction to reality on the ground. They're selling weapons to the drug cartels? Are you kidding? This is a nightmare. I don't understand. Why is nobody reporting? How come I know that?

Yeah, that's one of the bigger questions. So the New York Times doesn't know that? Yeah. Yeah, I haven't seen that report. I think they do. Yeah. I mean, how could they not? I mean, this stuff is all over the place. And this has been an open secret for almost a duration of this. Yes! And sometimes they put a little caveat headline and then move on to

whatever's next. And no one says the implication of, wait, this stuff could come back to bite us on our own border. Well, yeah, we saw that in the 80s with the Majideen. Of course. How are you going to have commercial air travel around the world? By the way, if they're missile systems, you know, handheld missiles, you know,

you can shoot down a commercial airliner pretty easily with a lot of this stuff. That's what it's designed to do. And if it's in the hands of separatist groups, terror groups, drug cartels, which it is now, how do you have a civilization? How do you have global air travel? I don't get it. Well, yeah, I mean i i pray that remains a potential and not something that actually gets manifest but it's out of our hands and that's the problem but how can you send hundreds

of billions of dollars of aid and weapons to a country and then not keep track of what happens to it i i can only speculate that they just don't care about that. If it ends up, if some of it ends up hurting Russia, then cool. And I think that's the extent of it. Well, they're also sponsoring terror attacks inside Russia, a lot of them. Yeah. So since when does the U.S. government sponsor terror attacks? Like, this is our government. Well, of course, we just put a different tag on it.

Well, no, we're just helping the Ukrainian side fight its war against the Russian aggression. You're assassinating people. I mean, and I think you've talked about before dugan's daughter who was a lot of other people yeah certainly yeah yeah general not again not speculating months at all um i know firsthand so uh anyway sorry to get upset uh it's that the lincoln stuff is like it's beyond yeah and then austin did the same thing this about six days ago to be specific where he says we have given ukraine everything we can and we still he's saying this still at this point we can't let ukraine lose that liar that liar

the war is already lost oh i know past tense there is no possibility to even maintain anything for him to say that to is to continue the fiction that they have. So that and here's why I think all this is happening. So that when Trump comes in and whatever he ends up negotiating, it's Trump's fault. We had Ukraine set up. We were doing everything we could. And then Trump comes in and hands it back to Putin. That's why I think it's going to be so hard for for Trump to do what makes sense and what's rational, because he's going to come under withering attack from the political left. I mean, it's just going to happen. I think, you know, you're effective. You can exercise power to the extent that you're willing

to exercise that power and to the extent that you're willing to ignore, you know, your faithless critics. Like, who actually cares what they say? Who cares? Do you know what I mean? And that's what I hope Trump does. I hope he says, yeah, y'all are the ones that set all the stage for this. I hope he's clarified on what he can be. He's just committed genocide in Eastern Europe. Shut up. Yeah. A million people. We're talking

World War I. We lost in World War I and World War II combined about a half a million people. Yeah, exactly. That is two world wars, and they have doubled that in all probability. And now then, we're not even talking about how many have lost limbs, how many have severe PTSD that will take the rest of their lives to recover. They've lost generations of people. I think like 22 million people have fled the country.

That's what we produced, Tucker. That's what we built, and that's how prideful it is for america to say what we generated that is why i was so distressed when i heard the incoming national security advisor who i really like personally he's a good man actually but use the term democracy to describe what's happening in ukraine or our motives in ukraine i mean that is so dishonest that is so false i don't know maybe he believes it but that is just not true right and i don't think there's any evidence that it's true at all the opposite is true right it's a tyranny that's banned forms of christianity yes yeah political opponents the any opposition media everything just jailed all these murdering murdering people a lot of people too again

not guessing so So, okay. Sorry, my rant. Okay. So, what should, thank you for being patient. What's, so given everything you've described, what should the incoming administration do? I think that Trump should come in and try to get this resolved as fast as possible and rationally understand that the June 15th line that Putin laid out is the best that he can possibly get. And he's going to have to put a good face on it. He can't just come in and literally say, OK, whatever you want is fine. We'll just sign here. But there are some other there's some leverage we can do elsewhere that's like, hey, look, we can even remove some of these sanctions on Russia as long as we get this in return for it. You know, some increase, some security

guarantees that Russia is not going to do anything beyond this, etc., which is going to be hard because they have the capacity, should they want to go further than the Dnieper River. But I think that he should just say, hey, this is the best we're going to get right here. I'm going to end this war as soon as we can on these lines right here, because all we're going to do is get more Ukrainians killed if we keep delaying this. So we're going to get this done here. We're going to do is get more Ukrainians killed if we keep delaying this. So we're going to get this done here. We're going to start the process of letting the Ukraine side recover and just help them rebuild. Europe needs to handle the lion's share of that, not the United States.

But we can help diplomacy, you know, build that with diplomacy. Especially the Eastern Europeans, let them build up their own national security and defense, get bigger on there. Not the United States, not put more money in NATO, but the Europeans need to handle that. That's one of the big things here. And then the other thing is we just have to acknowledge this is where the lines are going to be because that's already a reality on the ground. If you get that over with now, then we can start the next hard thing, which is to rebuild relations with Russia going forward. And I know many don't want to do that, but Russia is going to exist into the perpetual, into the future. Why are we supposed to hate Russia exactly?

Because these people can't escape the Cold War that we won in 1990. But like, why, as long as Bill Kristol is chirping his vile little lies in your head, like, you're never going to get anything done. Like, why don't you just ignore them? Like, Russia should not be our enemy. There's no reason. And you showed that so graphically with both the Lavrov and the Putin interviews. They're very reasonable. They're not doing things that are, they're not asking us to, you know. It's a civilized country, and now it's aligned with China in a larger, much larger military

and economic bloc than NATO. So, by the way, we just destroyed the European economy by blowing up Nord Stream. No one's ever been held accountable for that. I don't know how the Europeans are going to pay for Ukraine reconstruction when we wreck their economy by blowing up their natural gas pipeline, but whatever. You don't want, we have lost our preeminence because of this. Yes. And now Russia is aligned with China.

Like, that's, you know, big picture. China. That's the headline. An actual military alliance with North Korea. Oh, yeah. And the cooperation with Iran as well. Of course. All those things.

And the BRICS, like you say, that is the wreckage of this outgoing administration. That's what they have produced. None of those things existed prior to October 22 when we started making Russia weaker. We have made them stronger in every capacity. If you stayed in the United States for the past four years, you didn't leave, and you didn't read any non-American, non-U.S. media, you have no idea. No clue.

No idea that any of this happened. You would think that it was 1997 and this was, you know, we had a unipolar world and we're in charge of everything. The blue passport's a big deal and all this stuff. You'd have no idea. And that freaks me out. If people don't know, they should know.

If they did know, I mean, you know, they'd be upset at the damage, pointless damage done to this country. They need to be upset. And I hope that's why I'm so grateful for your show here that you separated from the mainstream media. Because now then you're putting it to millions of people. They get this information that they aren't getting in any of these places i live here i am american my ancestors came here a long time ago and they're all buried here i'm not going anywhere i love the united states and so to see a bunch of people who have no interest in the united states whatsoever destroy it it's like it drives me crazy i don't know why what i don't know. That's my only motive. Oh, you love Putin. Oh, fuck off. I love Putin.

Right, right. There's no reason to antagonize a nuclear superpower when they're happy to just cooperate with us and actually help us in the Western European countries with cheap energy so that they can develop their economies. Why do you want to harm that? Well, it's also like it's a Christian country. And so why wouldn't we be allies with them? Why would we drive them into a permanent alliance? Lavrov told me it's a permanent alliance with China. Game over.

Look at a map. Get a map someday. Like, look at it. You want to move Russia west. And it's, of course, it's not a fully Western country. And the Mongols invaded it. It's like a complicated country. But it is, in some deep sense, Western because it's Christian, mostly Christian. So why wouldn't they be on our side? Because

certain people in the US government hate that idea. They hate Russia because it is Christian. They loved it when it was atheist. They loved it. They defended it. Their ancestors were agents for it. You know what I mean? And the entire American left was working on behalf of Stalin at one point, but now they hate it? What's the difference? I don't know, but it's to our harm. It's a Christian country now, not an atheist country. Yes.

That's my view. Whatever. I mean, anyway, excuse me. So do you think that Trump can do that? And what would this settlement look like? What settlement do you think the Russians would accept? What do you think the new administration can actually pull off, given the enormous political pressure on them from its enemies? If Trump takes your advice there and just says, I don't care what anybody else thinks.

This is what's good for America. This is what I was elected to do. Then he's going to say, all right, we're going to acknowledge the June 15th line, and it's going to be those four regions there. And that's where the Ukraine side will pull back to those lines, et cetera. We will declare no NATO. We're never going to go in there. We were never going to go in there. So we'll just acknowledge reality.

Bottom line here, no NATO, and that's not going to happen on the border here. And then let's start seeing how we can rebuild relations to our advantage. And like you said, this stuff with China and this other stuff, that's irreparable. We can't fix that, but we can. And again, back to your interview with Lavrov, he still desires that. He even called us a great country. I listened to that again earlier today from your interview. He called America a great country. We're demonizing them, and he still is calling us a great country that they want to have relations with. So Trump can exploit that and say, we're going to start repairing that to our advantage and to our benefit, because there is still advantage to have, and instead of going down any other path. I don't know if he'll do it,

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And you can watch every match for free on DAZN starting on June 14th and running until July 13th. Sign up now at DAZN.com slash FIFA. That's D-A-Z-N.com slash FIFA. Yeah, I mean, I think it would, you know, take every member of Congress, 535 House and Senate, and send them for a week to Moscow, then send them to Beijing, then send them to Delhi, and ask them, which of these cities would you live in?

Which has a population that, you know, has more in common with Americans? And it's not even close, actually. It's not even close. And so your alliances should be built on shared interests, but also shared attitudes and history and shared goals. And they're a natural ally of ours. And, you know, the East is not. It's just a fact. And they fundamentally like us, the people like us. Putin and Lavrov are the most pro-Western Russian leaders we'll see in my

lifetime, actually. The people who will replace them will not have those same attitudes. And this is just self-harm, what we're hurting ourselves. Yeah, and you know, to those people who, and I saw a lot of them complaining against you after you, especially if you went to Putin and they're saying, oh, it's Putin apologists. And I would say to them, you show me a map of the last three years,

physically and also calendar-wise, and you show me where we're better off today because we followed the path that you said. We did turn them into an enemy. And how have we improved because of that? A million people are dead here. We've lost all this energy here. Our economy has been severely constrained all because you won't acknowledge reality.

Is Tony Blinken mad at Russia or something? Yeah. Yeah. No, our country is held hostage by people who hate America. Obvious hate america obvious i mean even if they don't maybe they maybe they think they like america but they're harming us the worst than the russians are that's the perversion of this they are harming american interests left and right making our own military weaker we are weaker today if we have to fight than we were in february 2022 okay so this is an area in which you have deep expertise. I don't have any expertise.

Where are we right now from a standpoint of military readiness? We have made ourselves substantially less good than we used to be. So I fought in an armored warfare in 1991, and we were at our preeminent power because we had been training for a potential Cold War clash all this time. And so we had the force structure, we had the training, we had the institutionalized training, we had all the different levels, everything you can ever want, we had it at that time. Well, then all of a sudden we win the Cold War. And then after 9-11, we completely get rid of all that institutional knowledge we had. And now we're starting to fight, you know, Arabs in the Middle East. And so you had the Iraq war, you had the Afghan war, which dragged on for one

and two decades each. And we're doing counterinsurgency stuff. And now we have these stupid bases all over the place. Every time you send a guy there, that means he's not training for our core requirement to defend America. That's why I'm hopeful that probably the new Secretary of Defense Pete Hexeth, he said he's focused on national defense, on our borders and our skies, and to rebuild the military to make them lethal warfighters, which is what we need to get back to. It's all women now, right? I mean, I just keep reading all these stories about how they couldn't meet recruitment goals, so we're just having women fight our wars. Well, it's not all women. The problem is, what is true is that when this DEI stuff, whatever, and they wanted to give women opportunity, they gave the women opportunity everywhere, even when they weren't physically capable of doing so, so they lowered the standards.

But it's not just physical. There's, like, women, I'm sure, are better drone operators than men. I have no trouble believing that. I mean, I have mostly female staff. I think they're smarter and more capable than I am. That's why I've hired them. You know, I'm not against women at all. Of course. I think they're smarter and more capable than I am. That's why I've hired them. You know, I'm not against women at all. I think it's a moral problem.

You have a home invasion. You're lying in bed with your wife. Do you say to your wife, hey, you get this one. No, no, no. The point of war, the point of having a military is to defend your women and children. There's no other reason. I don't understand.

So you have women fight your wars for you? You're disgusting. I think that. I know everyone's oh shut up you hate women actually i love women and i hate anyone who would put a woman in combat in this in this day and age you can't who gives a shit what you can't say they've wrecked our society like at some point if you start the iraq war or you start feminism you start something it's like or the transgender brain virus something that's so clearly hurt a lot of people, the Ukraine war. Don't you, aren't you disqualified from weighing in on like future issues? Unfortunately, no.

Hey, you know, Iraq war guy, shut up. Hey, Gloria Steinem, you know, dying alone, unmarried and childless. I think you kind of proved it doesn't work, right? Just by your own life. Shut up. Like, I don't understand why, why people with a long track record of failure get to talk about, you know, what we do next. Do you have to go any further than David Petraeus,

former CIA director, the architect of the disaster in Afghanistan, to this day is still putting a mic in his face. Ben Hodges, the worst analyst I've ever seen, still to this day, and I'm talking like two or three days ago, is still saying Ukraine can win and eventually get back Crimea. It's totally detached from reality, but they keep putting the mic in front of them. That's what needs to change. Recognize the failure

and don't put your mic in front of that guy. I do think that's the central problem in the United States, is that we do not punish anything, really. We only punish disobedience to the regime, but nothing else is ever punished. So you can be like, you know, the worst fire captain in the Western United States and let your city burn. And it's like, you go, girl, or whatever. But I just do think there's something repulsive

about sending women to go defend your country. We're the men. That's your job is to defend and provide. That is your job. And that's not my opinion. That's nature. And there's never been a society, a functional society in which men weren't required to defend and sustain, you know, work to protect the women and children. That's the whole point. Less than the Titanic. That's Western civilization in a sentence. And we've just inverted it. And like, hey, ladies, go defend us while we stay home and game and get high or whatever. Like, I just find it, like, there's nothing closer.

You know, and one of the reasons for that is because we have lowered the standards so much that a lot of the good guys, they don't want to come in. Like some of your staff members I've talked to, those are the good guys, right? But a lot of those kind of people, now they don't want to come into this force because it's like your standards are low. And I see you're not serious about it. You keep saying the guys who won the Second World War are somehow too immoral to serve in the military now? And that the fat guy who runs the military, I can't even remember his name, Mark Milley, you know, with the chest full of medals, that guy's like, oh, white rage, white men are bad. Really?

Who won the Second World War? Do you have Google? Look at the pictures. I think it think it was white men actually they're the ones who beat antlers so why don't you shut up tubby so and so if you can't recruit enough men like that then you have to recruit something so that's that's why we're lowering the standards like i love women and that's why but i just think it's i mean just think about it for a second what is the point of having an army It's so people don't show up and rape your wife, carry off your daughters, murder your children. Like, that's the only point, actually. See, that hasn't been exposed yet, though. And I fear that one day we will have to fight a peer or a near peer.

And we haven't since, really, you can say Korea, maybe Vietnam, but none since then where we fought anybody who was any good. So you can have anybody, honestly. You know, even our base is so good that we can beat, you know, the Taliban. Well, we can tactically beat the Taliban in any engagement with our military. So there's nobody in Iraq that could have beat us, et cetera. But if we had to fight, I'm just telling you, if we had to fight the Russian army right now, like war broke out tomorrow and all of a sudden we have to send in our divisions, I think we would probably get hammered. Well, obviously. I mean, not even just because of the stuff that you're talking about there, which will also be exposed, but because we don't have the combat experience that they do.

And we're still locked in like the 1991 or 2003 Iraq War, and the Russians have gone way beyond that, and we're way behind on that. But all these things would be exposed, and then until then, they're not exposed. And still then, we still are the greatest military power on earth, and who's to say differently graphically? So the Ukrainians took out a bunch of Russian bombers, long-range bombers on an airfield with drones early in the war. And I thought to myself, wow, you know, this war, which I don't know, are we studying this like carefully? I mean, I guess we're running it, but are we taking its lessons? Shows that, you know, drone technology has got to change our calculations about where we spend our money, right? So how many aircraft carriers do you

need in a world with drones? I don't know the answer to these questions, but is anyone smart thinking about this? Well, I think about it a lot. And in fact, I saw whatever we're building two new aircraft carriers right now, and they're already naming them what they're going to be. And I'm like, did y'all not watch what happened to the Black Sea fleet, the Russian Black Sea fleet, because of naval drones? I mean, dude, they were sent to the bottom of the ocean. We would get hammered if we had to fight. That's World War II level. We're not at World War II anymore. And look, to your point there.

They're already named. One's called the George Bush, I think. Yeah, yeah. And Clinton. Bill Clinton is the other one. I'm not making that up. That's what's being reported. Bill Clinton, the draft dodger as an aircraft carrier.

Unbelievable. We've reached like peak parity. But why are we building aircraft? I mean, look, you know, you're the retired colonel, but it does seem like we should pause and ask, what are we learning from what's happening in Ukraine? Yeah, well, that's what I was going to say. I was a little surprised that Russia didn't start off on a higher level tactically than it did in February 22. They were behind the curve for a long period of time because Armenian-Azerbaijan had a war in 2020 where all of this stuff was put on full display for the first time in a large scale. The Armenian armor was hammered from the Azerbaijanis because they used the long-range

drones. They had missiles. They had drones. And then they were able to bring them in and vector in other targets. So stuff that Doug McGregor wrote about in 1997, they employed for the first time. And I thought when I saw that, okay, this has now changed warfare. No one's going to fight the old one anymore because you see how powerful drones are. And the Russians didn't.

Well, here's the problem. We still haven't. And now that not just the 2020, and it was a really short conflict, we've had now three years. And we're tinkering around the edges with stuff. There have been some changes. But it's like about this much when you need this much because if we had to fight russia today even everything we've observed for the last three years we are not up to the standard we are way behind the ball and we would die and i think large numbers so i mean this is like a what we're watching does seem to

have like lots of precedent in history but the most obvious is the british army that spends the entire 19th century fighting all these colonial wars against the Pashtuns and the mutant, you know, the mutinous forces in India and, you know, the Zulus. And they win most of those engagements. And then they have this peer-to-peer war in the First World War,

and it commences with like British cavalry charges into machine gun fire. And, you know, it it destroyed britain it's never been a great power really since then it's pretended to be but it's not it's wrecked the country forever and destroyed the british empire that war first world war and everyone makes fun of them for that like you didn't keep track of what real war was as you were like killing all the villagers around the world and let me tell you 25 years later it was the french army's turn they were the preeminent power on the european continent and then they just they were destroyed in a month oh i know it when the germans came in using modern technology modern tactics and new doctrine that they were and everyone knew the germans knew that

they were better but they had to go fight anyway But because they were still in the not in World War I mentality, that's what happened to them. So you have, yeah, British from World War I, French from World War II. Are we going to be the next in line? Well, I mean, because it is, the parallels are pretty obvious. I mean, you know, whatever, you don't want to be mean or anything. But the truth is fighting, you know, third world nations is different from fighting, you know, technologically advanced, you know, nations that have satellite stations and stuff. And so, yeah, I'm really worried. Did you think –

Because Russia's talked openly about if they get into conflict with us, our satellites are the first thing coming down. They've said that recently, I'm talking about. And I'm telling you, we don't even know how to fight without all of our connectivity. And the Russians do because they've learned how to. And that's another factor that if we get into a fight, I think that we're going to get hammered. Do you think, so the real question is, do smart people at the Pentagon, like, are they throw away all the procurement stuff, the defense contractor pressure and all that, is like seems determinative and a lot of a lot of the time but like is anyone just thinking about this is can does anyone have the power to change the way the u.s military now i retired in 2015 so i can't speak of anything beyond that but i can tell you that a lot of

my experience prior that when i was in the future combat systems uh program at fort bliss texas in the early 2000s. You had the senior leaders that were totally disconnected from reality. All these exercises and tests that they claim were showing how this new modern force is going to be fantastic. It was all video and fake because the tests were lied. All the guys, I was a major at the time, all of the major and below, the guys who were physically doing this stuff, we knew it was absurd. And so we told people. But to my context earlier in this conversation, those guys don't get promoted. The guys get promoted who signed off on this fake test results here. I know it's your Colonel Davis, not General Davis. Well, indeed. I'm probably lucky to get Colonel, but that's a separate issue. So what is, I mean, I just know from living, I know very little about the military, but I've been around it a lot.

And I know from living in Washington, you do run into tons of smart majors and colonels, but like flag officer, no. Like, what is that? What is that? What, the leap from colonel to general, what does it require? And how do they manage to weed out all the smart, free-thinking people? Because in order to become a general, you have to have the approval of the generals. That's how technically the president designates these people. But in reality, they just, the president signs off on whatever, and then the Senate signs off on whoever the generals approve of. So they don't approve of anyone that doesn't already play the game.

That is one of the big things that I think needs to be reformed because that's why I say they replicate each other. So nobody gets up into that upper echelon. And I just got to say, and I hate to use this example, but H.R. McMaster, who was the former National Security Advisor, I fought under him in Desert Storm. He was my direct commander at the time, and he was fantastic under fire. He was brilliant. And I had the highest respect for him. For 20 years, we were close friends all the way through until we both went to Afghanistan in 2011, 2010, 2011 at the same time. And then all of a sudden he gets promoted by David Petraeus

after he had not been promoted several times before that. Petraeus gets him promoted. And now he becomes a general. And almost overnight, he starts sounding like Petraeus. And stuff that he and I had talked about before, that's like, you know, there's so much, this is unreal, untrue. This is not going to work. All of a sudden, now he's saying it. He was put in charge during that time of the anti-corruption process for the Afghan government. And he claimed over and over how they were making progress and all this stuff. And as we talked

about earlier in this show, that never happened. But then since that time, now that he's going on and saying all kinds of stuff, like, yes, he needs to, you know, he's anti-Russian and all this, he became like them. And so now he's just another one of them. He got absorbed. And all the stuff that happened before that,

when he was the one who was talking on the outside, I don't understand. He was, I mean, even I knew who he was. And again, I don't follow this that closely, but he was famous for his, well, intellectual horsepower, but also curiosity, honesty. Like, he was a well-known guy. Right. Yeah, the Battle of 7th Re-Easting that he was in command of was, I mean, they still study it today in West Point.

And for good reason, because it was tremendous. But something happened to him after he got promoted from colonel to brigadier general. Just like swimming in the filthy pool of power politics? Or what do you think? I can, I really, because we literally never spoke after that time. What? It was really sad. We had a good friendship up until that time, but then we broke and in 2011 never spoke again.

So I don't have any idea what may or may not be the case. I just broke and since 2011 never spoke again. So I don't have any idea what may or may not be the case. I just see him on TV all the time. So I don't know. Wow. How do you feel about the national security team being assembled? I am a huge fan of Tulsi Gabbard. I think I had recommended and sent, I mean, I don't have a lot of influence, but to people who have the knowledge, I suggested she would have been a better Secretary of State, maybe even Secretary of Defense, because I think her mind is brilliant and her focus on America and keeping America safe. If you look at everything she's done and said consistently through her career, it's always focused on what's going to benefit America. And she's smart and knows how to do it. I hope that Pete Hegseth does what he said he was going to do in his opening statement, that he revitalizes the national security, the defense department, and picks up the warfighting

ethos mentality, holds people accountable, passes, and I hope he does all those things. If he does, then I think we're going to be in a lot better shape. And Mike Walz, I've also been concerned by some of the statements he has made. But if President Trump is calling the shots, I think he'll do what President Trump tells him. We'll just have to hope and see with that. But those are the main ones in there. And so some of the, oh, Bridge Colby is another really good situation there, a good person there. So I think that having him in a position right now is going to be very good. So there's a number of people right now in the Trump team here that he's going to start with that was a huge anchor that he didn't have in 2016. So I'm hopeful that he can move forward. How hard is it to reform the Pentagon?

It's enormously difficult. I don't want to underestimate how that is because it is absolutely built on no change. It wants to perpetuate. Because all those generals I just talked about who have been replicated are still in control of that. So it's going to be really hard. I tell you what I would love to see. I would love to see Trump come in and do what he did or what President Roosevelt did just before World War II where he had the Army chief of staff come in and say, you know what, we're going to review everybody here, and anybody who's not pulling their weight or is not modernized, they're going to get low. They're going to get rid of

them. And I think it was like hundreds of senior colonels and generals were retired from the service, and then they elevated new people who could get the job done who were smart etc stalin did that with gun with gunfire but i don't want that path but i do want the george marshall path no but i mean look what did the winning side do in both in both cases in the u.s and in the soviet union they they got new leadership yeah because guys who aren't performing need to get out of the way no i agree and by the way i'm not calling for a purge of the U.S. military by force or anything like that, but I think it needs a peaceful purge.

It does. I strongly so, because these guys all have an incentive to maintain the status quo and they will, I think, push against anything Hegseth does

if they're all left in power. So I kind of think that he does need that. So really it comes down to what it always comes down to, which is how the information is presented to the public through the media, who are working, you know, every day assiduously with their allies and paymasters in the federal

bureaucracy. And if you care what they think, you will achieve nothing. They will control you. And if you don't care what they think, then you have a chance at eliminating corruption and righting the country. Because you look at what history is going to say. Biden did all the things you mentioned. He got along with everybody. Everybody loved him. But history will condemn him and all his leaders. Trump will face heat up at the front. But if he does these things, then history will love him if it improves our country.

And that's what I hope we see. Colin Davis, thank you very much. That was great.