Trump Isn’t Negotiating—He’s Crushing Iran’s Regime

person1: Well, you mentioned the war, Victor. So the Straits of Hormuz are—the Iranians say they’re in control. This is from two days ago, where clearly Donald Trump’s saying we are now in control. Anyway, what’s your take on the latest headlines, ? 
person 2: Nothing that the Iranians say can be taken at face value because there is no Iranian government. The first and second echelon of that apparatus is gone. So you have the people in the military, that’s one clique. You’ve got the theocracy, the Khamenei, you know, surrogates. That’s another. You’ve got the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It’s probably the most dominant. Then you’ve got these elected politicians. And they have two driving concerns. 

One, they are terrified that one of the other three groups will think they’re weak and are negotiating with the Americans and either kill ’em or marginalize ’em or cut off their revenues, such as it is. So they always want to outdo each other. At the same time, they want to outdo each other by saying, you know, we’re winning and all this crazy stuff. 

They are also afraid of an uprising. Because if there’s an uprising, any of their hardline stuff that protects them from each other is gonna put a noose around their neck, in a Nuremberg-like trial, given they’ve killed 30,000 to 40,000 people.  

So you got the schizophrenia that on one day they want to be moderate and signal the Iranian people that maybe we might transition someday, with me as a figure. On the other day, it’s hardliner, or please don’t kill me if you’re in the Guard Corps. So it’s almost impossible. 

The other thing that’s going on is they did a—and everybody says, well, why didn’t he blockade Iran and open the strait? He had a sequence that makes sense. He destroyed their air, capital, navy, air defenses, most of their military, industrial, nuclear complex.

And then he said, let’s talk. And he had negotiations. And now he started a blockade that reportedly is costing them $430 million a day in revenue. Now this is on top of losing probably a 50-year investment of a half a trillion dollars in a missile arsenal, barracks, military apparatus, vehicles, planes, drones, nuclear factories—you name it. It’s wiped out. 

I just make a little footnote of that, Jack, because Ben Rhodes and the Obama people are all on TV saying, oh, Trump—people don’t understand, he’s just reinstituting the Obama joint plan—you know, the comprehensive plan, joint plan action. 

person 1: Are we sending pallets of cash over? 

person 2: Yeah, exactly. We’re not. It’s nothing the same. Obama was rearming an ascendant Iran that was scary and indomitable, so people thought. We are dealing with a prostrate, weakened, and feeble corpse of Iran. And we’re dictating. We’re not negotiating, we’re dictating to it.  

So if these negotiations break down and Iran thinks it’s going to send some missiles into Saudi Arabia or storm a tanker, Donald Trump will take out their bridges, the first day, probably. He will take out their power plants. 

And what is Iran thinking? Well, Iran is thinking that we’re going to go into the traditional rug—I don’t think that’s an ethnic stereotype. I’ve been in the Middle East. I bought a rug in Turkey once and one in Greece, and it’s—you barter. But that’s what they think. 

They’re gonna go to the bazaar and barter, and yesterday, today, and tomorrow, whatever they say doesn’t matter, and draw out the negotiations, hoping that the Left will win the midterms.  

The midterms will be lost, Trump will be impeached, and the Republican Congresspeople will put pressure on him, and before the midterms, to get out. The Europeans will put pressure, Japan, everybody—they think time is on their side, and he will fold, and then they can reconstruct, and they probably feel they have some fissionable material they can fish out. 

OK. Time is not on their side, not when you’re losing $400 million-plus a day. All he has to do is not give in for the next five to six, 10 days, and he still has plenty of time during the midterms. Just don’t put the boot off their neck.

Make sure they suffer $400 million, $450 million in lost revenue, and that’ll mean finally these people who are living lavishly and sending their children and their friends all over Europe, the United States, money—it’ll cut off. And then they will negotiate. 

And if you want to accelerate a little bit, if they start to do crazy things, then yeah, take out their bridges or something. And if anybody complains from the Left and says that you’re going to impeach them, just remind everybody that Bill Clinton took out every bridge on the Danube in 1999 when he bombed, and he also bombed all the electrical facilities in Belgrade, so don’t fall for that hysteria. 

So I think we’re in a pretty good place. I think a lot of people are getting nervous that it’s going on too long, but he’s got another week or two to put—he’s right on the verge. If he can hold out against all this European and domestic pressure and Asian pressure and the Gulf pressure. The Gulf pressure is either cut a deal with ’em or destroy them, but don’t leave them. 

person 1: How do cut a deal with liars though, Victor? 

person 2: You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You have to dictate. It’s like talking to the Japanese after World War II. We learned that they bombed Pearl Harbor while they were telling us that they wanted to have peace, and they were working right in the middle of negotiations with Cordell Hull. Right. That fleet was already on its way to Pearl Harbor when the negotiations started. So they knew that. 

And so, when we saw them on Sept. 2 in Tokyo Bay, [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur handed them a list of demands on unconditional surrender: free use of your country by the United States military, United States military will be the occupying power and the military government to reform. And they looked around and they thought, we do not want another atomic bomb. We didn’t have another atomic bomb for months, but they didn’t know that. We don’t want Curtis LeMay bombing us back to the Stone Age again. They agreed. 

Same thing with Hitler. They thought as soon as [Adolf] Hitler killed himself, all these people came out of the woodwork. [Karl] Dönitz, [Hermann] Göring, they—you know, even Himmler—oh, we’re the government, deal with us, will you not?

No, no, no. You were defeated, and here’s what’s going to happen. You’re gonna be occupied, you’re gonna be zones of occupation, you’re gonna have no military, nothing. And this time you’re not gonna cheat like you did after World War I. And that’s what they did. 

They don’t have any cards to play. They have none. The only card they have is the dream house of the Democratic media nexus that thinks this is a disaster. 

And by the way, not to get off topic, did you see Tim Walz, Jack, in Spain? 

person 1: No. What? What happened? 

person 2: He went over to Spain to this international Socialist conference at a time— 

person 1: To a Socialist conference? 

person 2: Yes, in Madrid. 

person 1: What? 

person 2: Yeah. And he goes over there, and he’s one of the keynotes. Now he’s being hosted by this anti-American government that’s utterly corrupt and stolen money and is very unpopular and knows the next election it has, it’ll be thrown out. But it has just denied the United States, at a time of war, the use of its airspace and its joint NATO base, in large part paid for by the United States.  

And he gets up in front of this foreign audience at a time when Americans are risking their lives in their Gulf, and he says that this is a fascistic agenda enterprise. This is fascism. What we’re doing is fascism. 

In other words, you go into a foreign country and you basically say to the soldiers out risking their lives, you’re engaged in a fascist enterprise, and I’m gonna trash you to your enemies, which are our enemies—the socialist government of Spain as an enemy. I’ve never seen anything quite like that. I never have. 

person 1: Maybe he was trained well when he was in China, communist China. How many times did he go there? 

person 2: Seventeen. You know what’s funny about all these—have you noticed all of these left-wing icons, they all had these flaws that they covered up. 

Now we knew that guy was a pathological liar. He had gone to China, and they rebooted him as working man, that changed his own oil  

person 1: Coach. 

Coach Tim. 

person 2: And now he’s just a complete—and they did the same thing with Jussie Smollett. They said he was this, this, this. They did the same, and he was—you know, everybody knew that guy was a faker unless you believe the laws of chemistry don’t apply when you throw bleach out at minus 40 degrees and it doesn’t freeze. And you can kickbox holding your sandwich in one hand and your cell phone in the other against two huge attackers in your definitive—  

person 1: Bustle. 

Yeah. 

person 2: Yeah, yeah. You believe all that. And Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden did believe that. And then there was Jeffrey Epstein, who was kind—well, you know, Jeffrey’s got some girl. He’s kind of a—he always wants to be an intellectual. He wants an office at Harvard. And then there was [Eric]Swalwell. Well, you know, he is a little randy. He has this little tendency to get a little drunk and get a little handsy, but he’s our guy. And they do that with all of them. 

George Floyd? Well, yeah. George Floyd put a gun to a woman’s stomach. He had a home invasion. He was four years in prison. He was a career felon. When he was arrested, he was high on fentanyl. He was resisting arrest. He was passing counterfeit currency, and you know—but he was a martyr, and he has angel wings on. He’s the same.  

That’s what they do. They take all of these people and they manufacture them into something they never were, and it ends up just the opposite. I mean, they end up as just—they implode, and then they go to the next one. 

Another one is that lawyer for Stormy Daniels. 

person 1: Oh yeah. 

person 2: Michael Avenatti. 

person 1: Yeah. 

person 2: That guy was a complete crook. And remember, he was on CNN, and they said he is so handsome, he’s dynamic. 

person 1: He was gonna run for president. 

person 2: Yes. He was gonna run for president. Then he stole Stormy— 

person 1: Yeah. 

person 2: By the way, another one was Stormy Daniels. Well, she had to put out in this—she had to go into this sordid career because she was a working mom, all this stuff. 

person 1: Oh yeah. 

person 2: And then she never paid the fine. The court ordered her to pay Trump for violation of the nondisclosure—I think it was the attorney fees, $400,000, and she never paid. But they had a picture of it the other day. It was very sad. Did you see her on the internet? 

person 1: I did, yeah. 

person 2: She kind of covered with tattoos and obese, smoking a cigarette. 

person 1: Yeah. A lot of city miles on that lady. 

person 2: Where are all her leftist champions? Why doesn’t any of them that had her on TV every night call her up and say, Stormy, I’m really sad that you’re destitute. Here’s $10,000? 

person 1: Yeah. 

HANSON: They’ll never do that. She was a useful idiot.

Iran Thought It Was Untouchable … Then Trump Changed the Rules

 If you look at Iran, it’s a very strange situation because its command and control have been decapitated. Its military has been, I guess you’d call it, inert. There is no air force. There are only PT boats left of its navy. Its army is of no use, since this is an air war. Its nuclear, military, industrial complex has been bombed to smithereens. It’s probably lost half a trillion dollars in a half-century-long investment in military hardware and military industries, at the expense of a very restive population. 

So, what was it thinking? How did it get itself in this place? What happened to it? Well, it had an expansive view of itself—an inflated view. Why?  https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=THEDAILYSIGNAL7572163569

During the Obama administration, the Obama State Department and President Barack Obama himself sent messages to Iran that maybe a Shiite crescent—Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, Gaza, people in Yemen—might balance the Sunni Arabs of the Gulf with their money and the military power of the Jewish state of Israel. And Obama might step in from time to time to adjudicate this—I guess they called it creative tension.

In other words, we said there was no moral difference between the Iranian bloc and its opponents, when there was, of course. 

Well, that gave the impression to Iran that we were afraid of them, or that we would always be willing to make concessions. When Joe Biden came in, the first thing he did was beg them to get back into the Iran deal. That inflated their egos even further. Then he lifted sanctions and gave them $100 billion of new revenue. 

Meanwhile, the Iranians were looking at Russia going into Ukraine, and the United States had done nothing other than say our reaction would hinge on whether it was a minor or major invasion. Then came Oct. 7. The Iranians had subsidized Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, and their proxies and clients in Syria and Iraq, with the idea that they had created a ring of fire around the Jewish state.

After the Oct. 7 massacres—which they denied having knowledge of, but which they obviously strategically planned with their clients—they thought the United States wouldn’t do anything. And they were pretty much right about that during the Biden administration, if not worse. 

We kind of distanced ourselves from Israel, and Iran knew that. They felt that after Oct. 7 it would be such a traumatic experience for the Israeli government that it wouldn’t do much. A lot of this was hinged on the pseudo-reputation they had of being militarily invincible, but there was never any proof that was true. 

They ran the Iraq War of 1980, and they didn’t do very well. Khomeini had to sue for peace, even though they had almost one and a half times the population of Iraq. But they were the terror of the Middle East. People said, “Whatever you do—go into Afghanistan, go into Iraq, bomb—don’t get near Iran.” 

They’re crazy people. They have 93 million people. They’re the second-largest country in the Middle East by population. They’re the second-largest by area. They’re dangerous people. 

They’re fanatic Shiites, and they’re willing to die for their cause. But if you actually looked at what they had done, they had achieved that reputation through surrogate use of terrorism—blowing up embassies, blowing up Marine barracks, assassinating individuals, sending weaponry to kill Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq—but they’d never really shown any impressive performance on the battlefield, either at sea, on the ground, or in the air. 

And so, they thought they could get away with Oct. 7. That gave them an even greater inflated sense of self, because they kept telling us that between all of their proxies and their own arsenals they might have 300,000 short- and long-range missiles, rockets, and drones, and they would collapse Israel under a sea of explosives. 

They thought that even after Oct. 7, Israel wouldn’t dare do anything to them because they had sophisticated Chinese and Russian air defenses. What they didn’t count on were two things. 

Oct. 7 changed the entire mentality of Israel. It was the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. Israelis said you cannot live like this. You cannot sustain a country like this. You can’t have a sword of Damocles descending on you periodically. 

So we’re going to have to go to the head of the snake. Hezbollah we’ll deal with. Yes, Hamas we’re going to deal with. The Houthis we will deal with. The people in Syria we’ll deal with. But in one way or another, they get money and weapons from Tehran. 

And we don’t believe they’re indomitable—not now, not after Oct. 7. In that 12-day war last year, they destroyed the entire air-defense system of Iran, and then they began taking out its military capability and its nuclear industry and infrastructure. 

They called us in and asked us, and we were more than ready to comply because it was in our national interest. In about 25 to 30 hours, we blew up their nuclear facilities. We thought that might be the end. We thought they got the message—but, of course, they didn’t. 

Their proxies began to shoot missiles again. They began, according to our intelligence, to resume work on their nuclear facilities and nuclear proliferation trajectory. And so, the United States entered negotiations with them again. Like all negotiations with the Iranians, they were drawn out. They were meant to delay while they rearm, enrich more uranium, or sic their terrorist proxies on Israel or individuals in the West through terrorist attacks. 

But again, they didn’t count on two things: Donald Trump doesn’t care, and Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t care. So, they resumed the war. Now, as we go into the seventh week, all of Iran’s assets are destroyed. It’s losing more than $400 million a day in lost revenue because of the U.S. blockade. It has no cards to play. 

All it can hope is that someone will call off the United States. And we will talk about that in a later video—who those something-or-somebodies are that might save Iran at the 11th hour. Because it will not be able to save itself if the United States decides to take out its bridges, take out its electrical generation capability, and force it back to the negotiating table—not to negotiate, but to submit to terms. 

How Trump Outsmarted Iran While Critics Rooted Against America and the Media Melted Down

I know a lot of you have been exasperated by the reaction to the Iran war, from the Democratic grandees in the House and Senate, the liberal media, The New York Times, particularly The Washington Post, NPR, PBS, and network—even The Wall Street Journal’s news section. And then we have some people on the right who have also looked at the war and said it was lost, it went south, it was gonna—World War III, blah, blah, blah.

All of them share one thing in common, excuse me, two things in common. One, they wanted it not to go well. Wanted it not to go well because it would reflect badly on President Donald Trump and his administration. And if you were a Democrat, that would give you some momentum going into the midterms. And if you were a disaffected former supporter, it would prove to the world that you were right all along, and Donald Trump is reckless and got us into a forever, unwinnable war.

But whatever the particular reason was, both of them were not historical analyses. Both these people never were empirical. They were never historical. Had they looked at America’s wars in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and more importantly, more recently, the bombing campaign in Serbia, or the bombing campaign in Libya, or the first Gulf War, or the second Gulf War, or the Afghan—they would’ve come up with some data, some information.

And then they could have compared this particular engagement and compared it with the others, or they could have said to themselves, I’m not going to prejudice what happens. I’m gonna look at exactly what the data is on the ground. How many missiles were destroyed, who was taken out? Had they taken out the Israeli commander, command and control, have they shot down 45 planes as they did during the first Gulf War, U.S. craft? And then they could have come up with a reasoned analysis.

But they didn’t do that. They didn’t do that. But the evidence was there. The evidence was there. In the first five weeks, the United States, with the Israeli Air Force, wiped out most of the top echelon of the four ruling cliques in the Iranian nation. That would be the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regular army, the theocratic apparatus at top and the elected politicians, such as they do have elections. All four of them were attrited.

And right now, they would also say to themselves that they are motivated by two or three catalysts that explain everything they say. One, they don’t know who is in charge, and they’re all grasping for power, and they’re all terrified somebody is in charge that they don’t know about. Two, they’ve seen 30, 40, 50 people taken out, and they don’t want to identify and be a leader and be dead. Three, they’re competing for power, and that manifests itself in two ways.

No. 1, they’re afraid of the hardliners. So, they send out, communiqués, they freelance, not official all the time, and they wanna sound harder than the other person. So, they’re not accused of being soft. Usually the theocratic clique, what’s left of it, or the Revolutionary Guard, what’s left of it, accuses the politicians and the army of being too soft.

And the final catalyst that explains this crazy stuff that emanates from Iran is they’re afraid of the Iranian people. The Iranian people are sick and tired. Before the war even started, the hyperinflation was strangling them. They couldn’t afford gas. They couldn’t afford food, they can’t go out of the country, they couldn’t get … and it’s 10 times worse now. And they’re gonna be restive just like during the fall of the Berlin Wall. You didn’t see a revolution immediately. It was weeks and months in Eastern Europe and two years in the Soviet Union before it became Russia again.

That means in the next two years, I think, you’re going to see a lot of popular resistance, and these people know it and they know that if they go down, they’re going to be … they’re gonna have a Nuremberg war crimes trial, and the people are gonna take it out on them, so they don’t know where the nexus of power is.

So, it is confused. But people couldn’t just accept that they had to say, Donald Trump got us in a forever war, even though, tragically, but, lost 13 or 14 or 15 depending on the calculus we use. We never have had a war like that before. We’ve never taken on a country of 93 million people that had the most fearsome, terrible reputation of being dangerous and unpredictable, and running the Middle East with a ring of fire proxies in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon, indomitable.

They had terrified seven presidents. And yet in five weeks, we destroyed its ability to make war. Yes, they have a few drones, a few ballistic missiles that can cause damage, but not if that damage will be replied to as Donald Trump has warned them, by the destruction of their oil capacity or their electrical generation, which all presidents had done. We did it to Serbia, we did things to Libya. We did it in the first Gulf War, it being dual-use. We took out bridges, we took out generation. We didn’t in World War II, we didn’t Korea, we didn’t Vietnam. Donald Trump’s the first president that hasn’t done that in a wide-scale fashion.

So, what has happened? It took four or five weeks in the country of that size, area and population, to find these tunnels, to find these hidden airfields, to find these silos, to find these people in bunkers, and systematically we got to the point where their military is almost gone.

Then the next stage happened. Trump said to them: We can have a negotiation style if you meet our demands. And that was to—it was self-interested in the sense that he wanted a peace, so the prices would go down, oil would be more available. The midterms are coming up, but it was also to let the regime, such as it was after this main luminaries had been killed, it was to give them a chance and show the world that Trump was not a madman. He was willing to negotiate.

And they, of course, said no. They said no because they hoped that popular resistance in Europe and popular resistance in the Democratic Party and on the left and on the old, some of the MAGA apostates on the right, they would so pressure Trump that he would give in to them. He didn’t. So, that was obvious. He’s never given in to anybody. He’s always done what he thought was right, whether you agree with it or not.

So, then we came into the third phase. We had the destruction of the military, No. 1. No. 2, we had the negotiation cycle, and now it’s the ultimate and finale to the war, and that is economic strangulation. Iran walked right, put their head right into a noose. They said, we’re gonna shut down the Strait of Hormuz, only us can determine who gets in and who gets out, and they have to be pro-Iranian. And we’re not gonna let Gulf states sell oil. Ha ha ha. We’re gonna—and everybody said, oh, that was brilliant.

The Left went crazy. It was delighted. Oh my gosh. The Pentagon was caught on unprepared … The Pentagon had been preparing that for 50 years. Under Reagan, they opened it. They know how to do it. So, all that Trump said is that’s a good idea. Shut down the strait. And let in the good guys and stop the bad guys.

But your bad guys are our good guys. And your good guys are our bad guys. So, we’re gonna take a page outta your book, and we’re not gonna let in anybody anywhere near Iran, and we’re gonna let in everybody else. And the difference between the strategies is not just that we flipped it, but you have no wherewithal, PT boats, and a bunch of mines won’t stop us, but we have a huge fleet. And that will stop you from stopping us. And if you decide that you wanna send the remnants of your missiles into the Gulf or Israel, or at our fleet, go ahead. Because we haven’t even decided to hit dual-use targets yet. We’re not like Barack Obama and Libya and taking out television stations and ports.

We’re not like Bill Clinton and Serbia that destroyed every bridge on the Danube and took out their grid of a million and a half people. We’re not Harry Truman that destroyed all the hydroelectric plants in North Korea. We let you off easy. Well, it doesn’t mean there’s not an American tradition of hitting dual-use targets.

So, we’re gonna hit your electrical and put you in darkness and we’re gonna hit Kharg or take it. We’ll either take the oil and rob it from you or take it. And what was the result of all that in the last 48 hours? Ships are coming in that we let, and ships are not coming in, that we don’t let, and people, economists at the major research universities in Europe, the United States, have now flipped on a dime and they’re actually looking in empirical fashion, at last, at what this means. And the ranges are absolutely stunning. $400 million, and more, per day lost economically to Iran, whether that’s lack of oil sales or petrochemical sales, or lack of key imported mechanical goods, electrical goods that keep their infrastructure running, or food. They’re in dire straits.

They’re losing all of their income from the Strait of Hormuz and they’re losing all of their income from the petrochemical and oil. And they were broke to begin with, and they can’t do anything about it because Trump did it sequentially. Military, first, chance of negotiation, second, put the boot on the neck, third.

So, what is gonna happen now? You’ll see two things. Two things, possibly three. They may decide they want to go down in a blaze of glory and empty their arsenal of remnant ballistic missiles and drones. If they do that, they will be in darkness, and they will have no oil for the next 10 years. So, that we’ll see if there’s saner heads among them.

No. 2, they have a choice to agree to negotiations, and this time they’re not gonna have every clique saying 15 here and 10 demands here, and no, no, they’re just gonna have 10. And if they don’t abide by them, the United States can force them to abide by them. Or they can just simply give up, give up, no demands, nothing.

Just say we’re done. And they’re gonna have a … and what I meant by give up is the regime gives up. I don’t know if it’s gonna be immediate, but the people take over. All of those are favorable results for us. And so to conclude, I don’t think that it’s a very wise thing every 24 hours to be glued to your computer or the television and whatever. A pundit on the left or a Democratic senator says, or disgruntled person on the right says, then take that as gospel and not look at the data and not look at the evidence that’s out there to examine both, as I said, empirically or historically.

’Cause if you did do that, you could see there was very, very little chance of winning. There’s only one last caveat: Iran is ruined militarily and it’s going to be ruined economically if it doesn’t give in, and they they’re now going to negotiate with a different attitude. If you believe that they will abide by a demand that we’ve given them, no nuclear material for 20 years, whatever it is, then you have to believe that they will never break their word.

I don’t think they’ve ever kept their word.

And No. 2, that there will be a president someday, like Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, and people of that caliber and mindset would enforce every one of those negotiated demands. And I don’t think they will ever tell the truth or honor any of their commitments.

And I don’t think that the next left-wing or Democratic president would ever force them to, which means we better get them to surrender unconditionally or [have them] face economic ruin, which will usher in a regime change. 

Victor Davis Hanson Calls Out MAGA’s New ‘Defectors’

 The Left is making quite a deal of attention to what they call the anti-MAGA Right, that is former staunch supporters of [President] Donald Trump that have now parted ways with him. And the names that they fixate on, the Left, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned from Congress after a big fight with Donald Trump over the Epstein files and the [Iran] war. 

Tucker Carlson, the former Fox host, news host, and now has become a fierce Trump critic. Megyn Kelly, who had a very successful Fox show herself and then went to NBC and now has a very successful podcast, and she seems to have parted ways with Donald Trump over the same issues as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson. 

Then, of course, Joe Rogan has expressed disappointment. Perhaps he is now not in the MAGA fold. Candace Owens has been a virulent critic. Steve Bannon, I don’t know what his status is, but there’s a group of people. And then further to the right, of course, there’s the Groypers and Nick Fuentes and all those people.

But what was their beef? The first thing that seems to really bother them is the current war. I shouldn’t say the first thing. The first thing that bothered some of them was the summer 2025 attack by the United States for about 25 hours on the nuclear facilities in Iran. It was a one-off. Tucker Carlson said this was unnecessary. 

It could lead to World War III. It didn’t. It did retard the progression of nuclear acquisition. Then new information came in that they had much more ballistic missiles than had been anticipated. And there may have been other areas where they had stored nuclear material. So, then, that reopened negotiations this year to remove those peacefully. 

They didn’t work. And so, then the United States began, at the end of February, bombing, and now we’re in the sixth week and they feel that is a forever war and an endless war.

But it’s a very funny forever war, isn’t it? I mean, if you look at it, there’s been tragically 13 Americans killed, but it’s not 4,000 or 5,000, as we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, 7,000 total, perhaps another 20,000 casualties.

It’s an air war, almost exclusively an air war except for the rescue of the pilot, and it’s completely asymmetrical. We have destroyed, as people have said, their navy, except for their patrol boats, which I think will be destroyed shortly if they try to interrupt traffic any further in the Strait [of Hormuz]. 

We’ve destroyed their air force. We’ve destroyed their missile defense. We’ve taken out the first and second tier of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regular army, the theocrats, and even some of the politicians. So, their command and control is in disarray, and we have suffered really no major downfall other than politics. 

The future of that war is entirely political. I mean, the United States is at liberty to do what it wants, whatever the military feels is necessary to disarm Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and to stop its ballistic missile potential.

But it’s a political question. Just a question of what’s the effect on the world economy? 

What’s the effect on the American economy, and more importantly, how does that affect the midterms and the future of the Trump presidency? But people are conflating those and suggest that militarily it’s a defeat. That’s absurd.

What else did this new group of critics, this new old group of critics, get angry about? Trump tweeted that if, Iran had not met these conditions, and were not going to negotiate then he would, destroy their civilization. 

It was pretty poorly worded. And they felt that this was beneath him, beneath the United States. They joined the Left in saying that this was outrageous. The Left took him literally, not figuratively, but I don’t think anybody believed he meant all of the Iranian people.

And we know that because, of course, as I had said earlier, no president has avoided dual-use civilian targets as much as Trump. We didn’t do it in World War II. We hit every civilian target we could, from power plants to highways to water facilities to oil production in Germany and Japan. 

We did it again in Korea. We did it certainly in Vietnam. We took out all the bridges in the Danube in the 1999 bombing under [Bill] Clinton. And of course, we knocked out the power grid of Belgrade, a million and a half people several times. We did the same thing in Libya. We denied we did it, but we hit civilian ships, we hit port facilities, we hit TV stations. 

Trump hasn’t done that except for one bridge, so he didn’t really, I mean, his record shows that he doesn’t believe he wants to destroy the civilization. In fact, it’s just the opposite, and I think his critics know that, or he wouldn’t have said, help is on the way. Help is on the way. 

The whole subtext of this entire campaign is while regime change is not the primary agenda, he hopes that by weakening and humiliating this theocracy, then the people will rise up. And that is why he’s selected targets that would allow them to rise up and not hurt the people. 

So, was it an overstatement? Yes, but they should know better what he meant. Of course he did, because his deeds prove what he meant. 

So, what’s going on here? I think part of the problem is in the intimacy that some people on the Right have cultivated and developed with Trump. In other words. If you’re going to campaign with Trump, if you’re gonna be a regular visitor at Mar-a-Lago with Trump, if you’re gonna be an intimate of the family and if you’re gonna work with him and you’re a news person, then you feel… It’s apparently Steve Bannon felt that way. 

Maybe Tucker feels that way. Maybe Megyn feels that way. Maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene felt that way. But if you feel that you have a special relationship, then you feel downcast or betrayed because not only your president, but your friend and associate that you’d helped, didn’t quite agree with you, but that it’s always better to have some distance so you can be empirical. 

And if you’re empirical, then the question is: What’s the alternative to Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda? Because if you look at the border, it’s closed. If you look at illegal immigration, he has deported 500,000 criminals. Another million have self-deported, and he is in the process of probably finishing another 500,000 deportees. 

We should have two million. We’ve never done that before.

If you look at energy right now, the United States has never produced so much oil and gas, and we’re right on the verge of a nuclear energy renaissance, and we’re going in Alaska. We’re going offshore. We’re trying to get more oil and gas in California. For all practical purposes, at least for now, DEI is dead. 

No other president would’ve done that, this reverse racism or this tribal chauvinism that has so plagued the nation. Donald Trump ended that. He has put the universities on notice that they cannot continually defy civil rights laws and Supreme Court decisions. No one did that before. 

As far as transgenderism, they’re on the defensive now. The idea that biological men will dominate female sports and men with biological male characteristics will dress among women is over. 

So, what I’m getting at is this: All of these critics agree with what Donald Trump has done on 80% of the issues. At least their record says they do. So, why on one particular issue, in which you disagree, and it’s very doubtful that you can categorize this a forever or endless war. 

It’s much more in the flavor of the Venezuela, the [Qasem] Soleimani, the [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi, the ISIS bombing. It is not anything near fighting house to house in Fallujah or going into hostile villages in Helmand province. 

We’re not on the ground. We’re not fighting on the jihadist turf. We’re using our strength, air power and a distance from to mitigate casualties and inflict greater damage on the theocracy. 

It’s not a forever, endless war, and they know that.

So, if you are apostates from the whole Trump agenda because of your disagreement about this one particular issue, and you feel that he betrayed you because you categorize it a forever or endless war, which he promised to avoid, then you’re nullifying the entire agenda. 

And what is the alternative? A Kamala Harris agenda? I don’t know, an Eric Swalwell agenda? A Gavin Newsom agenda that’s antithetical to everything these people have stood for and lobbied for and advanced for?

And so, if you sit out the midterms, or you oppose Trump de facto, whether you know it or not, you are favoring the alternate agenda. 

And that agenda is something that, at least in your recent positions, you have adamantly opposed. The Left is making quite a deal of attention to what they call the anti-MAGA Right, that is former staunch supporters of [President] Donald Trump that have now parted ways with him. And the names that they fixate on, the Left, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned from Congress after a big fight with Donald Trump over the Epstein files and the [Iran] war. 

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Tucker Carlson, the former Fox host, news host, and now has become a fierce Trump critic. Megyn Kelly, who had a very successful Fox show herself and then went to NBC and now has a very successful podcast, and she seems to have parted ways with Donald Trump over the same issues as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson. 

Then, of course, Joe Rogan has expressed disappointment. Perhaps he is now not in the MAGA fold. Candace Owens has been a virulent critic. Steve Bannon, I don’t know what his status is, but there’s a group of people. And then further to the right, of course, there’s the Groypers and Nick Fuentes and all those people.

But what was their beef? The first thing that seems to really bother them is the current war. I shouldn’t say the first thing. The first thing that bothered some of them was the summer 2025 attack by the United States for about 25 hours on the nuclear facilities in Iran. It was a one-off. Tucker Carlson said this was unnecessary. 

It could lead to World War III. It didn’t. It did retard the progression of nuclear acquisition. Then new information came in that they had much more ballistic missiles than had been anticipated. And there may have been other areas where they had stored nuclear material. So, then, that reopened negotiations this year to remove those peacefully. 

They didn’t work. And so, then the United States began, at the end of February, bombing, and now we’re in the sixth week and they feel that is a forever war and an endless war.

But it’s a very funny forever war, isn’t it? I mean, if you look at it, there’s been tragically 13 Americans killed, but it’s not 4,000 or 5,000, as we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, 7,000 total, perhaps another 20,000 casualties.

It’s an air war, almost exclusively an air war except for the rescue of the pilot, and it’s completely asymmetrical. We have destroyed, as people have said, their navy, except for their patrol boats, which I think will be destroyed shortly if they try to interrupt traffic any further in the Strait [of Hormuz]. 

We’ve destroyed their air force. We’ve destroyed their missile defense. We’ve taken out the first and second tier of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regular army, the theocrats, and even some of the politicians. So, their command and control is in disarray, and we have suffered really no major downfall other than politics. 

The future of that war is entirely political. I mean, the United States is at liberty to do what it wants, whatever the military feels is necessary to disarm Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and to stop its ballistic missile potential.

But it’s a political question. Just a question of what’s the effect on the world economy? 

What’s the effect on the American economy, and more importantly, how does that affect the midterms and the future of the Trump presidency? But people are conflating those and suggest that militarily it’s a defeat. That’s absurd.

What else did this new group of critics, this new old group of critics, get angry about? Trump tweeted that if, Iran had not met these conditions, and were not going to negotiate then he would, destroy their civilization. 

It was pretty poorly worded. And they felt that this was beneath him, beneath the United States. They joined the Left in saying that this was outrageous. The Left took him literally, not figuratively, but I don’t think anybody believed he meant all of the Iranian people.

And we know that because, of course, as I had said earlier, no president has avoided dual-use civilian targets as much as Trump. We didn’t do it in World War II. We hit every civilian target we could, from power plants to highways to water facilities to oil production in Germany and Japan. 

We did it again in Korea. We did it certainly in Vietnam. We took out all the bridges in the Danube in the 1999 bombing under [Bill] Clinton. And of course, we knocked out the power grid of Belgrade, a million and a half people several times. We did the same thing in Libya. We denied we did it, but we hit civilian ships, we hit port facilities, we hit TV stations. 

Trump hasn’t done that except for one bridge, so he didn’t really, I mean, his record shows that he doesn’t believe he wants to destroy the civilization. In fact, it’s just the opposite, and I think his critics know that, or he wouldn’t have said, help is on the way. Help is on the way. 

The whole subtext of this entire campaign is while regime change is not the primary agenda, he hopes that by weakening and humiliating this theocracy, then the people will rise up. And that is why he’s selected targets that would allow them to rise up and not hurt the people. 

So, was it an overstatement? Yes, but they should know better what he meant. Of course he did, because his deeds prove what he meant. 

So, what’s going on here? I think part of the problem is in the intimacy that some people on the Right have cultivated and developed with Trump. In other words. If you’re going to campaign with Trump, if you’re gonna be a regular visitor at Mar-a-Lago with Trump, if you’re gonna be an intimate of the family and if you’re gonna work with him and you’re a news person, then you feel… It’s apparently Steve Bannon felt that way. 

Maybe Tucker feels that way. Maybe Megyn feels that way. Maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene felt that way. But if you feel that you have a special relationship, then you feel downcast or betrayed because not only your president, but your friend and associate that you’d helped, didn’t quite agree with you, but that it’s always better to have some distance so you can be empirical. 

And if you’re empirical, then the question is: What’s the alternative to Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda? Because if you look at the border, it’s closed. If you look at illegal immigration, he has deported 500,000 criminals. Another million have self-deported, and he is in the process of probably finishing another 500,000 deportees. 

We should have two million. We’ve never done that before.

If you look at energy right now, the United States has never produced so much oil and gas, and we’re right on the verge of a nuclear energy renaissance, and we’re going in Alaska. We’re going offshore. We’re trying to get more oil and gas in California. For all practical purposes, at least for now, DEI is dead. 

No other president would’ve done that, this reverse racism or this tribal chauvinism that has so plagued the nation. Donald Trump ended that. He has put the universities on notice that they cannot continually defy civil rights laws and Supreme Court decisions. No one did that before. 

As far as transgenderism, they’re on the defensive now. The idea that biological men will dominate female sports and men with biological male characteristics will dress among women is over. 

So, what I’m getting at is this: All of these critics agree with what Donald Trump has done on 80% of the issues. At least their record says they do. So, why on one particular issue, in which you disagree, and it’s very doubtful that you can categorize this a forever or endless war. 

It’s much more in the flavor of the Venezuela, the [Qasem] Soleimani, the [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi, the ISIS bombing. It is not anything near fighting house to house in Fallujah or going into hostile villages in Helmand province. 

We’re not on the ground. We’re not fighting on the jihadist turf. We’re using our strength, air power and a distance from to mitigate casualties and inflict greater damage on the theocracy. 

It’s not a forever, endless war, and they know that.

So, if you are apostates from the whole Trump agenda because of your disagreement about this one particular issue, and you feel that he betrayed you because you categorize it a forever or endless war, which he promised to avoid, then you’re nullifying the entire agenda. 

And what is the alternative? A Kamala Harris agenda? I don’t know, an Eric Swalwell agenda? A Gavin Newsom agenda that’s antithetical to everything these people have stood for and lobbied for and advanced for?

And so, if you sit out the midterms, or you oppose Trump de facto, whether you know it or not, you are favoring the alternate agenda. 

And that agenda is something that, at least in your recent positions, you have adamantly opposed. 

‘We’ll Be Your Canada’: Brutal Reality Check for NATO Free Riders

 Once again, NATO is in crisis. It seems like this is happening every three or four years. It predates and will postdate President Donald Trump. We are engaged in a bombing campaign to disarm the Iranian theocracy that, for 47 years, has killed Americans in embassies and military installations.

It supplies the terrorists of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. It funds and subsidizes terrorists in Europe, tried to kill President Trump—I could go on forever.

So, we decided enough is enough, because we felt that their ballistic missiles had a range that could harm Europe and soon us, and that was proven by its launching of two missiles toward Diego Garcia islands in the Indian Ocean.

And what was the result of our NATO allies when we said, “We don’t have to do it, we’ll do the heavy lifting along with Israel, you don’t have to do anything. I know we helped you in Ukraine. I know we helped you in Serbia. I know we helped you, French, in Chad. I know we helped you, British, when you went to the Falklands on that long adventure and you needed fuel and reconnaissance and resupplies and Tomahawks.

“We know all that, but we’re not asking that. All we want to do is land at the bases that we share with you on your soil under NATO.” So, Spain said, “Nope, can’t do it. You can’t fly through our airspace.” We said, “Well, maybe if we’re going from our base in Britain, we’ll go across France.”

Nope, can’t do that either.

“Well, how about when our bombers want to refuel in Italy?” No, you can’t do that. Can’t do that. “Well, how about Diego Garcia? We’ve used that before.” And Mr. [Keir] Starmer, “Not our war, not our war.”

I think somebody should have said the Falklands were not our war either. And 1939, 1940, it wasn’t our war either in 1941, 1942, but we came over there. But nevertheless, that was what they wanted to do.

So, the question is, what do we do? Well, we’ve almost finished the campaign in Iran. Apparently, we didn’t need those bases, because we’re still supplying them very well with bases we do have access to.

The Greeks have been wonderful. There’s a NATO base at Souda Bay, Crete, and they’re helping repair the new Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier.

It seems to me that when they say they won’t do it, part of it is they can’t do it.

They have made a series of investments, policies, protocols that have paralyzed that entire continent. They have dreamed of utopia and the good life, and the result is their fertility rate is 1.3. They are shrinking. They are aging. They’re not competitive. So, they don’t have the manpower, even though they have a 450 million-person population. Europe is larger than us by 100 million.

And even though they have $22 trillion gross domestic product, which is the third largest, apparently they don’t want to invest that in their own defense , or they haven’t so far. They don’t want us to use it when we need it.

They have no energy to speak of. They went whole hog, a complete Green New Deal—solar, wind. We’re not going to use our natural gas reserves. We’re not going to drill for them. We’re going to be dependent on the Middle East and Russia.

So, we’re going to put you in an absurd situation, U.S.: You’re going to come over here to Europe to defend us from a potential [Russian President Vladimir] Putin invasion while we beg you not to sanction that oil. We need it. So, we want to give him money for the oil so he can use the money to buy arms to invade Ukraine and maybe us.

When Trump said it was crazy, they laughed at him.

It’s not just energy. It’s not just fertility. They have no borders, so to speak. They’ve had millions of people coming from a hostile Middle East and Arab world who had no intention of fully integrating, assimilating, and acculturating.

Under their systems of parliamentary democracies, those factions have some veto power over policy. But more importantly, they’re terrified of Islam. They’ve had so many terrorist incidents, they think the only proper way to deal with radical Islam is to appease it, and appeasing it is what they do.

Add all that up. They also have a utopian idea of defense. They had been pretty much unarmed until the invasion of Ukraine, and now they’re trying to catch up.

But when you have a continent that has been unarmed, that is shrinking in population, that has high-priced, limited energy, that has energy shortages, that doesn’t have the confidence to defend its own borders, and that has let in millions of people who don’t like their host, the result is it can’t defend itself.

And therefore, it creates an exegesis to explain that reality. And the exegesis is: We are morally superior to you. We have all these bases. We have the ability. We have fleets. You don’t. And we think, as morally superior people, we don’t want you using them, and we don’t think you’re protecting us on your unilateral crusade.

Yes, the missiles could hit us. Yes, they could be nuclear-tipped if you hadn’t intervened. But that’s not our problem. Our problem is you trying to use these bases for your misadventure in Iran.

Even though the Iran thing is going perfectly well, it’s a month into it. We’ve almost destroyed the war-making potential of Iran.

So, what’s the future? Do we get out of NATO? I don’t think we get out of NATO. I think we just let it die on the vine.

We just say, “You know what? We were a full NATO member. Oh, you want us to go into Ukraine again and defend you, but Ukraine’s not a NATO power. There’s no Article 5. This is your problem. This is on your doorstep.”

“Oh, you want us to go into Serbia and the Serbs are acting up again? That’s not a NATO problem either. They’re not attacking any NATO nation. I don’t remember Kosovo being in NATO.”

“Oh, you want to go into Africa to your old colonies and stop the Islamists from taking over Chad? That’s not our problem.”

“Oh, you think that Argentine government might want the Falklands back someday? That’s not our problem.”

That’s our attitude.

Meanwhile, we can have very productive bilateral, coalition-of-the-willing relationships. We can say to the Czechs, we can say to the Poles, we can say to any of them, “You know what, we’d like to have a base in the Azores, Portugal. What do you want to do?

“It’s up to you. You want a bilateral agreement because NATO doesn’t mean much anymore. But we will have a special relationship with you, and we will guarantee your territorial integrity and national security in exchange for a partnership.”

And I think we could find six or seven European powers that together would make ideal alliances with the United States. And then we can just go through the motions with NATO.

Don’t cause any more trouble with them. Just say, “You guys are wonderful, and we’re going to treat you like you treat us. We are one of 32 nations, and we’ll pay one-thirty-second of the budget.

“We’re tired. You guys have had two big world wars. You’ve been the birthplace of Western military dynamism. Go to it. Re-arm. We’ll just kind of lag along, half-walk, and we’ll tell you we’re a fine NATO power.”

We’ll be kind of like Canada. Canada pays about 1.5%. We’re on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, like Canada. You love Canada. You don’t like us. We’re going to be your Canada.

We will expend as much effort and as much arms and as much intervention as Canada does, and that will be the new NATO.