2-5-25 - 8am - To Talk Gaza or Not

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mike. To get rid of us AIDS, we need to
get a group called us A z T. Oh that's bad, Okay,
I get it. Isn't a z T the treatment for
HI D or something. I have no idea. Yeah, I
think getting rid of the US AIDS us AID is okay,

(00:23):
kind of pathetic, but okay, I'll take it. Well, I
won't tell you, but it is what it is. I'm thinking.
I'm just thinking where I want to go next. And
after a quick Google rese search, Yes, AZT is the
anti viral medication used to treat Oh, okay, all right,

(00:45):
he's much more cleverer than us. Well that didn't That
doesn't really take a lot. Let let's do this. There
was still some stuff I want to do about US,
about U S, A, I D. But I want to
move on for a little while. Maybe I might or
might not come back to that nine o'clock hour. We'll see.
But this is a this is a bullet train presidency.

(01:10):
It's it's not wasting any time. It is the paradigm
shift of we're going to just do business differently, and
we're not going to I mean, not only have we
gone from a you know, not even the little train
that said it could. Because Biden didn't even do that,

(01:31):
we went from just nothing. Dragon. I don't know whether
you're getting them or not, but I'm now getting the
White House press room emails every day. I am not
give me to sign you up for them, please, okay,
because holy Crapola, I'm gonna have to make it a

(01:52):
folder just to direct the email to go into those
because my inbox is just getting flooded with information. It's NonStop,
and Trump appears to be NonStop. So let's just think
about where we are. Yesterday, we had two votes that

(02:15):
moved Tulca Gabbert and Bobby Kennedy Jr. To the floor
of the Senate, and both went as expected. They were
both along party lines, and I think thanks are being
given to Tom Cotton and JD Vance, among others, for
this last minute push because both Senators Cassidy and Young
extracted commitments from the nominees on some key issues they

(02:38):
were important to them. Senator Young told the Wall Street
Journal that I would be pretty crappy at this if
I didn't use the leverage I had. Well, kind of honestly,
that's kind of what you're there for. I would only
argue that he didn't have to be such a jerk
in the hearings, just like Bill Cassidy. This is why senators,

(03:01):
and remember, senators set their schedule. The nominee does not.
So when Tolsey Gabbert or Bobby Kennedy Junior, or anybody
else this nominated. For example, when I was a nominee,
my handlers at the White House would schedule the meetings
with the senators, and they they would say, you know,

(03:23):
they would say, we can give him thirty minutes, or
we can give him them hour and a half. You know,
I suppose if I was going to be nominated to
be Secretary of State, they might give me two hours.
So you could have resolved any of your issues Senator
Cassidy about vaccines in a meeting with Bobby Kennedy Junior.

(03:44):
You didn't have to be such an a hole during
the hearings and lead everybody think that you were going
to vote against him, and then at the last minute
you extracted some concessions. The same is true for you,
Senator Young. But those are just well, their grand standing
is what they're doing. I mean anyway, more than that later,
but for now, the conversation shifts to the battle over

(04:06):
Russ's vote headed for return to the Office of Management
and Budget, and Democrats plan to use the full thirty
hours to criticize the administration, even knowing that vote is
headed for confirmation because Republicans, no matter what the Democrats
do in the committee, Russ's vote is definitely going to

(04:26):
become the next director of OMB. Now why are the
Democrats putting up such a fight? Because he makes Mitch Daniel,
the OMB director under George Bush, look like a pansy.
Because russ vote really does it really should have the
nickname the Knife, because he really does want to kill
a bunch of spending and he really does want to

(04:47):
hold Congress accountable for the spending that they are doing.
So you got that going on. And I only want
to touch upon this subject briefly because quite honestly, I'm
not sure I understand what's really going on here. But
there are some moments in history that demand you just
stop for a moment and at least acknowledge that something's

(05:09):
going on, not just for the fact that it's like
a slap in the face, but for the paradigm shift
that it points out is going on. If you listen
to that Trump Netanyahu press conference, which I did not live,

(05:31):
but I went back to listen to it afterwards because
of Wow, it's one of these moments that I'm talking about,
and you can find it, Michael says, go here dot com,
and I would encourage you to go listen and you
tell me what you think about it, because I'm still
trying to figure it out myself. It was not a
perfunctory diplomatic exercise. Nor was it this routine you know,

(05:55):
Israel's our greatest ally in the Israelis saying, you know,
America is our greatest supporter and we all love and
hug each other. No, it was an unambiguous declaration of
a particular intent. It was a disruption of long entrench
yet failed orthodoxies, and it was the unveiling of a vision,

(06:19):
a dream, an idea that wants to reimagine the Middle
East in a way that it's never been imagined before.
Now let's let let's think about it historically, because for decades,
world leaders, world leaders have clung to exhausted formulas. How

(06:44):
many times have we talked about the Middle East peace process?
And that's really all it's been. You know, there's there
there's too like due process. There are two kinds of
du due process. There is subdue process, meaning the actual
meaning of due process, and there's procedural due process. Procedural

(07:06):
due process is what is the mechanism in a trial
or in a negotiation or whatever by which you get
to the ultimate outcome. And that substantive due process. Well,
we have clung to this process of peace in the
Middle East, a peace process. Has there ever been peace
in the Middle East? Now, the closest we've really gotten

(07:28):
are the Abraham Accords, and I think we'll get those
going again, and I think they ultimately will result in
you know, the Arab world sands, perhaps the Iranians and
maybe the Iraqis or somebody, but the major players in
the Arab world, the Egyptians and the Saudis, will sit

(07:49):
down and say, yeah, we want to be good neighbors
with Israel, and parenthetically, I would add probably be because
they all have a mutual enemy and that's the Iranians.
This peace process that we've been using in the Middle
East is built on illusion. It's built on agreements that

(08:13):
are predicated on some sort of fantasy view of that
part of the world, and it's also based on a
willful refusal, refusal to acknowledge the fundamental realities of Palestinian rejectionism,
of everything that's ever put on the table, and of
Palaestinian terror. That era is done as of yesterday. I

(08:38):
think because standing side by side in that press conference,
Donald Trump and Benjamin Nett and Yahoo made it unmistakably
clear they're not here to modify. They don't want to equivocate,
and they don't want to perpetuate any cycle of appeasement
that has long defined the American approach and quite frankly,

(09:01):
the Israeli approach to to the Arab Israeli conflict. They
want to reset the board entirely. They want to reset
the They want a paradigm shift. So in the midst
of all of that press conference yesterday, one thing stood

(09:21):
above everything else, Trump's unequivocal statement that the goal of
I want to say both him and that and Yahoo.
But I honestly don't know whether this was pre planned
or not. And I don't know that anybody outside maybe
Susie Wiles or Marco Rubio or anybody else inside the

(09:44):
inner circle of the White House, knows whether this is
pre planned or not, or this is Trump once again
just shooting from the cup. But Trump's unequivocal statement that
the goal is no longer to reform Gaza. The goal
is not to manage Gaza, but to remove the population entirely.

(10:07):
Whatever you want to call them Hamas, Palestinians, has Belah, terrorists,
whatever you want to call them Arabs, I don't care
whatever you want to call them, Just move them all out.
We're no longer going to talk about Palestinian self rule,
which personally I always thought was stupid. No more diplomatic

(10:28):
contortions to accommodate an irredeemable status quo. The Trumps is
not another failed experiment in Palestinian self rule. It is
an effort to dismantle that population that carried out the
most brutal attack on the Jews since the Holocaust, and
to relocate them somewhere else. Holy crapola, the gravity of

(10:54):
that simple announcement cannot be overstated. Now, I expect over
I haven't looked today at the New York Times. I
haven't looked at today's Wall Street Journal, I haven't looked
at any of the newspapers yet, running late, didn't have
time to check the headlines, and even on the Fox
News headlines that I listened to now in the morning,
even they really hadn't mentioned it in the short time

(11:16):
it took me to get here. But my guess is
at some point, well let me, I got Trump, I've
got Drudge up in big bull red headlines. Trump Palestinians
out of Gaza, USA to seize the land. Pentagon's going
to enforce we will own it. Mannic don Stun's Mid
East New Temple on the Mount Global Fury builds. Well,

(11:39):
that's kind of what I expected. So there it is.
That's exactly what I expected. And Israeli, commentated by the
nickname of a mint Sigal astutely observed this had the
hard right politician being gear proposed such a policy as
part of all negotiations merely two years ago, it would

(12:03):
have ignited an international firestorm. But now here we are
and it's actually being calmly and deliberately articulated as the
official position of the most powerful nation on the face
of the earth. So I don't think this was an
off hand remark. It wasn't Trump, you know, improvising to

(12:25):
be explained away. Later he was reading from prepared notes,
delivering that statement with the deliberation and the gravity of
a policy that's been long in the making. And in
that news conference was the Chief of Staff, were representatives

(12:47):
of the National Security Council, representatives of Marc Larubil, and
the Department of State, all delivering the statement. So it
wasn't hyperbole, it wasn't some just you know, I'm going
to try to provoke somebody. It was a calculated official pronouncement,
an active political theater designed to create a paradigm shift,

(13:12):
to break the bubble of denial, to break the bubble
of intransigence. What has been accomplished. I happened to be
in DC when Jimmy Carter sat down and signed those
accords with Arafat and Sadat, and I remember thinking at

(13:38):
the time that it was yeah, okay, here we go
again kind of thing. It'll last a little while and
then he'll be right back the same thing. Uh, you know,
Arafat will be replaced by somebody else, and Sadat ultimately
was assassinated, and the players will change and we'll go
right back and it'll be you know, leather Rense repeat,

(14:00):
leather of rent rep And that's that's where we are.
Because the old paradigm is a fixture of diplomatic orthodoxy.
It's just it's the State Department and all the negotiation
negotiators doing all the same things over and over and over.
It's the it's the was it Einstein who was said?

(14:21):
You know that you keep doing the same crazy thing
over and over and over and keep expecting different results,
and you don't know this is that's not what this is.
Yes to absolutely, Yes to an enduring, peaceful thought of
Arabia without any Palestinian preconditions. Now, I could spend hours

(14:48):
talking about the real meaning of the word Palestinian. And
that is not a group of people. Oh they claim
to be today, but historically it is not a group
of people. I remember when was it two thousand and eight,
of two thousand and five, whatever year it was, when

(15:11):
Ariel Sharon, prime Minister of Israel at the time, decided
to give the Gaza strip to the Palestinians or to
the Palestinian authority, And I remember thinking at the time,
why the hell are you doing that? I mean, I
remember thinking out loud, this is the craziest thing I
think I've ever heard. It's not going to buy you peace.

(15:31):
And of course obviously it's been proven truth. It never
did and it never will, just as a two states
solution would never bring peace in the Middle East. Oh,
that's what the left will always scream about, and that's
what the elon Omars and the squad and everybody else
will be screaming about. That's what the anti American, you know,

(15:53):
choir in the Middle East will always be screaming about.
But it's never going to never hazen end, never will.
The old linkage between Arab Israeli normalization and Palestinian statehood
just got blow torch off the stage yesterday, although the

(16:15):
Saudis and I understand why swiftly denied that. So yes
to and enduring peace with Saudi Arabia without Palestinian preconditions,
and yes to permanently ending Hamas and ensuring that Gaza
can never again pose a threat. The destruction, as NET

(16:40):
and Yahoo originally said, will be total, but now it's
been added to there will be no rebuilding for Hamaster
rule over. There will only be American led efforts. And
then there was, and this was in one of the
emails that I got out, the maximum pressure on the Iranians.

(17:05):
So not only no rebuilding for hermast rule over yes
to stopping the Iranian nuclear ambition by any means necessary.
Iran will be weakened in its regional reach. We'll be
hard to believe. The election was just three months ago
and Trump has only been in office two and a
half weeks. So many great changes, and it is truly

(17:30):
a paradigm shift. I'm still you know, as a talk
show host, my job is well, first and foremost is
to entertain, to entertain, and to draw as large an
audience as possible, to draw sponsors. I mean, this is
our business. When are you going to start doing that? Well,

(17:54):
I'm desperately trying. I'm getting I have a tutor. I
have a tutor who's about to quit. But I agree,
I'm trying. I'm trying. Uh and so, but so, I thought,
I don't really want to talk about the Gaza Strip
today because there's just so many tentacles to this that

(18:15):
I don't fully know that I comprehend everything going on.
And with respect to Donald Trump, what I do know
is this, he he plays three D chess. He says
things that maybe hyperbole, but like like a conspiracy theory,

(18:40):
it still has an element of truth to it. And
so he throws out some wild idea, but there is
some basic element of truth to it and it and
he does. I think, as I told oh As I
was telling one of my bosses yesterday about Trump, that

(19:03):
I sincerely believed that his four years in the wilderness
were good for him. The assassination attempt, thank Goodson, didn't
actually succeed, or the attempts didn't succeed, but you know,
you come that close to death, it does change your perspective,
and having been beaten by someone like Joe Biden, it

(19:26):
makes you a little you know. I was asking a
Newsmax interview yesterday if I had any The question was
do I harbor any ill feelings toward the media about
my treatment during Katrina. Now they had told me they
were going to ask the question because they wanted to

(19:46):
give me time to think about it, and in the
pre tape interview, I said, well, my answer will simply
be that as a human being, of course I have
some still harbor some anger about it. But I have

(20:06):
found that one the apologies that I got from people
my plain about this story is that when you get
shot at, or you get someone tries to assassinate you,
which is essentially what the media was trying to do
to me. There are two ways to respond. You can

(20:27):
go hide forever, or you can rise above it and say,
you know what, I'm not gonna let this. I'm not
gonna let this kill me. And so while I do
despise the media, I have risen above that and I
have found that. Isn't it kind of ironic that some
of the most vocal critics of me turned around and

(20:49):
later apologized once they heard my testimony before the Senate
and House committees, they read my book, they did in
me all sorts of things. When the truth came out,
then suddenly, oh, we got this wrong. And then people
like I mean, Chris Matthews is a great example, who's
no longer on THESMBC, But you know, Chris Matthews was
a horrible critic of mine, and yet not only did

(21:11):
he apologize, but I became somewhat of a regular guest
on his program. And I just found it funny that
the very people who called me incompetent suddenly were asked
me to come on their shows and talk about, Oh,
explain to us what's going on here. The point being,
when those things happened to you. It's how you react.

(21:36):
It's how you learn and how you deal with those
things that I think is most important. It's not the
actual it's not the actual things that they did, it's
how you react to it. It's the choices that you make.
And I think that Trump's made some choices, and I
think this whole Palestinian Gaza thing is a deliberate choice
that may on its surface be slightly and then the

(22:00):
way it appears someone that I So during the break,
I thought, let me back up one more step. So
this morning, as I'm thinking do I talk about this
or not? I really could not decide until the last minute,
and then I decided I can't ignore the elephant in
the room. And the elephant in the room for me

(22:23):
was the Drudge Report and all these gigantic, blazing red
headlines about the world is now on fire because of
what Trump said yesterday. Okay, I got to talk about it.
So during the break I went onto the Google machine.
Deliberately chose googlet go because I wanted to see because

(22:43):
Google will feed me all of the cabal without telling
you the sources, because it doesn't make an difference. They're
all the same. Palestinians and Arab States reject Trump's gaza
takeover plan. Trump's Gaza plant has stunned the region. Here's
a look at the serious nature of it. Trump's Goazi
proposal for bare the Middlely sparks global outrage. Last on

(23:07):
a Trump administration is Gaza plan spark sharp criticism. Trump's
Gaza plant has stunned the region. Unpacking Trump's idea for
taking over the Gaza strip. Trump's Gaza plant has stunned
the region. Here's a look at it. World reaction to
Trump's takeover and ethnic cleansing. Al Jazeera calls it an

(23:28):
ethnic cleansing, and The Guardian donald Trump's Gazi plan. The
key takeaways. Okay, well, you know what, I really don't
care what they say. But someone that I do care
about said something and I had him up here. Now
where did it go? Because I do believe that he

(23:49):
is Oh, let me just pull it up over here.
He's someone that I read on a regular basis and
that I think is pretty rational and is asking the
right questions. And that is Alex Bearnson. Alex Benson used

(24:11):
to be a New York Times reporter, and Alex just
sent out an email, the presidency is not performance art,
and it's dangerous to encourage Donald Trump to act like it,
and he explains why he voted for Donald Trump, but
then goes on to point out that he thinks that
this plan is a disaster and that it's absurd. Well,

(24:36):
as I read through it, I thought these are good points,
but I agree with some and I don't agree with others.
Let's walk through, he says, as a practical matter, taking
God as it would be catastrophic. He mentioned the United
States military in a colonial occupation without precedent in American history,
unlike our quasi occupations of Iraq or Vietnam, we wouldn't

(25:00):
have a local government to work beside or to give
us political cover. Well, I'm not sure that you can
say that. I mean, America has never really been a
colonial occupier, but we've certainly been involved in nation building,
and we've never really been very successful at it. So

(25:20):
I think the wording here is a little queasy on
Alex's part, But he does ask a legitimate question. If
this is what Trump meant, how exactly would these deportations work?
Would we be rounding up unwilling Palestinian men, women, and children?
And putting them on trucks. Those images would lead to

(25:42):
a wave of Islamic terror that would dwarf, that would dwarf.
September eleventh, Well, I'm not sure he's talking about deporting them.
I think he's just simply saying that you're not going
to occupy it, which, to me, occupy is a particular
term of art. It means that the Gaza Strip itself

(26:06):
is no longer going to exist. The Gaza Strip is
a complete fiction, a total historical fiction. If you look
at historical maps of the Middle East, boundaries have come
and gone forever. The Gaza Strip is something that Ariel

(26:26):
Sharon really decided that, look, let's just take a piece
of land and give it to him. And by the way,
I've seen the Gaza Strip. It's beautiful countryside. Now, the
urban areas are an absolute well, they're an ef In disaster.
They were an ef In disaster before Israel bombed the
crap out of them. But the rest of the country
is beautiful. That part of Israel is beautiful, and it

(26:49):
does sit on the Mediterranean and the beaches are gorgeous.
I've flown over the beaches and helicopters are absolutely amazing.
So we're not necessarily I don't think Trump's saying We're
going to deport them, but he does say or Berenson
says this, Trump's proposal runs entirely contrary to his view

(27:13):
of the Middle East and American military power generally for
the last twenty years, which is that America shouldn't be
fighting wars or undertaking the grand geopolitical initiatives known as
nation building. And he's right about that. This is complete
opposite of what Donald Trump has said in the past
about Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and all the others. So let's pause.

(27:34):
So is that what Trump's really doing. Is he talking
about nation building or is he simply saying, wait a minute,
We're going to eliminate this fictional boundary. It's not going
to be a Palestinian occupied territory. Doesn't say. That's not

(27:55):
saying that Palestinians can't live there, because people often forget,
let me emphasize this. People often forget or don't even
realize that Israel is not some homogenic country where it's
just Jews living there. All sorts of ethnicities, all sorts

(28:16):
of religions, all live together in Israel and I'm not
just talking about Jerusalem. I'm talking about the entire country.
It's not a monolithic country. It's not just acidic Jews.
It's not just you know, non practicing Jews. It's not
just liberal Jews or conservative Jews, liberal or Democratic Republican Jews.
It's everything. It's a melting pot, much like America. So

(28:41):
maybe what Trump's saying again as a paradigm shift is
simply that it's not going to be what it's been
in the past, without really defining what it's going to
be in the future, except it's just going to be
part of Israel, and it's going to be you know,
because he thinks like a developer, because that's what he is,
He's a real estate developer. He's thinking, oh my gosh,
much like I think about Cuba, much like I'm certain

(29:04):
that the owners of the Hyatt chain and the Marriott
chain and the Four Seasons chains, and the Rich Carlton
and all of these high end hotels are all looking
at Havanah and just salivating at the opportunity that at
some point when they when raul Castro finally dies, they
can swoop in and completely convert Cuba into a free democratic,

(29:29):
you know, maybe republican government of some sort, not by force,
but by a free market. Maybe that's what Trump's thinking here,
and I'm just thinking out loud. What I'm trying to
get you to do is to not buy into the

(29:51):
hysteria that you're already hearing. I'm not saying it's without problems.
I'm not saying it's without you know, some downside. I'm
simply saying that there may be more here than you
actually believe, which leads to Berenson again asking or stating
four possibilities, and we'll do those after the break.

Speaker 2 (30:15):
History lesson Name an Assyrian king, Saragon, name a Babylonian king,
Hammurabi a Persian king, Cyrus, a Jewish king, Solomon David Egyptian,
Ramsey's Palestinian.

Speaker 1 (30:36):
You got it. They don't exist, right. So Baronson says,
here are four possibilities. That Trump is serious and that
he's tired of hearing about Gaza, and he wants to
shift that problem away from just the Israelis and make
it a world problem. And he believes that Israel will
be safer if it doesn't have to deal with the
Palestinians in Gaza or the west Bank. You know, absolutely

(31:01):
I could buy that. In a New York minute. Two,
Trump is semi serious, and Barnson writes he wants to
light a fire under the Arab world to do something
about Gaza, and he thinks this proposal will light that fire.
It's simply a negotiating tactic. Well, we shouldn't be surprised
by that at all. Or three, Trump did it to

(31:25):
distract the world from the fact that he's going to
let Israel do whatever it wants in Gaza. That could
be true too, but Berenson adds this, by the way,
I'm fine with letting Israel do what it wants in Gaza.
In parentheses, he says, I know many of you disagree,
but I think Israelis have the right to live without

(31:46):
fear of mass terror attacks. Close parentheses. But that's Israel's problem,
not ours. Well, that's where I disagree, because Israel needs
our backing morally and perhaps militarily, not boots on the ground,
but you know, with armaments or equipment, whatever it might be,

(32:08):
in order for them to do what they need to
do in Gaza. And they also need us to give
the go ahead, something that if you think back to
the past four years, What did Biden and Harris do?
They constantly equivocated with Net and y'all about what he
could or could not do. There was never any definitive
we back you, We back you, but we back you however,

(32:32):
we back you on these conditions. And Trump's just saying, no,
I back you. You gotta do what you gotta do, Now
go do it. That could be a very reasonable reason too.
Or number four, Barnson writes, Trump likes attention and he
just hadn't gotten enough attention Tuesday. Yeah. Now, I think

(32:54):
Alex there is just being a smart ass. Trump does
love attention, and he's getting it every single day. Watt's driving.
You know, I don't even know that what's going on
in the weather right now. I think we've got the uh,
the atmospheric river going up through California, and we got

(33:17):
a bunch of rain in California. But I don't think
that's leading the news. We don't have you know, frigid
coal temperatures freezing, you know, two hundred million people on
the East Coast out So the evening news has been
leading with Trump, probably not that I can attest to that,
but probably leading with Trump's actions for the day, every

(33:39):
single day for the for the past week.

Speaker 2 (33:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
By the way, just as we talked, two more emails
from the White House Press Office about what they're doing today.
I'm just going in here and read those emails for
an hours in time, just tell you what's going on. Yeah,
so think about gods. Don't jump any conclusions yet, just
like I'm just trying to, let's hear it all out

(34:05):
before we decide anything.