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The Scott Horton Show taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
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We couldn't wait for that cold war to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand, go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States in military action in Libya.
That action has now begun when the president does it.
That means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.
My own government.
Aren't you guys introducing the news vandal JP Sotili?
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, man?
Good to be with you, Scott.
Very happy to have you on the show.
Very happy to get your email every day full of all kinds of stuff I'm supposed to read.
And a lot of times I can't get through it, but I do look at it pretty often.
Yeah, you're not supposed to read it, actually.
I mean, you can read it.
But the idea is, is that the headlines tell the story.
So if you just read all the headlines in order, you'd get what I call a meta story.
So it's like a cheat sheet.
So you don't have to go through all the entire news cycle.
You just read the headlines and you should be good to go.
Yeah, well, but there's a lot of good readables in there, too.
There are.
I tried the readables if I can fit them in.
Uh, no, it's a good thing.
News Vandal dot com is the website and you guys should sign up for the email list.
It's good stuff that you might have missed, but he didn't miss and he put a link in there for you.
And, you know, handy like that.
Hey, so listen, I want to talk about Donald Trump and all that stuff with you, because well, it seems interesting.
But really, first, I want to talk about this awesome article that you did a few days ago.
The U.S. military is the biggest big government entitlement program on the planet.
I even got a bumper sticker like that.
Uh, hey, you know what?
You're right.
Well, isn't that.
I agree with you.
Why don't you assert your case to the people so they can hear it?
I'm shocked that you agree with that, Scott.
Well, look, here's the.
I think we tend to obscure the fact that the government and the military are the same thing when we think about government spending or big government.
For some reason, we have compartmentalized military spending in the Pentagon out of that equation.
And I would I made an effort to try and reintegrate it into the equation and also to point out that the military budget is maybe the largest, perhaps most ineffectual jobs program in the history of mankind.
And I say ineffectual because it's not it doesn't create a lot of ancillary activity.
It doesn't create it's not like a breeder reactor effect.
If you build highways and bridges, if you build a lot of infrastructure, if you you know, you might actually create a lot of spinoff technologies and a lot of spinoff businesses in the military.
It tends to be fairly static.
You do get people providing food because we've begun to over the course of ever since what, 1991, 92, when we had the revolution in military affairs, we started to privatize a lot of functions that used to be inside the Pentagon.
So you do have a lot of those those jobs that are created.
But really, you don't have a lot of of economic impact beyond the just the straight socialistic employment of millions of Americans.
Oh, yeah.
And yeah, sorry.
Go.
No, go ahead.
Well, I was just going to say, did you ever read that Nick Kristoff piece?
Good center leftist, you know, Hillary Clinton night type right writer for the I'm going to say New York Times, but don't tell me it's supposed to know he's with the Times.
Yeah.
And, you know, humanitarian do-gooder, warmonger, liberal type who said, man, look at what a tight ship the great American action hero, General David Petraeus runs.
Why can't the entire American society be run like the U.S. Army?
And why can't the U.S. Army is proof that basically militarized communism works?
It works great.
And why in the world would we let markets and prices and private property owners decide how resources should be divided up and how people should be employed to work when obviously somebody like Petraeus knows what to do?
And it should be up to somebody like him to do it for us.
Oh, yeah.
Well, oh, Nick.
Oh, Nick, here's one of the problems with the military budget is that in some ways this job program is designed to mitigate some of the fallout from the crony capitalism that governs the economy at large.
And if you were to take away this, you know, semi-communistic or socialistic, however Christophe would like to put it, the socialistic jobs program, the question that I posed was, what are we going to do with all of the kids who come out of high school, don't want to go into one hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt, live in dead end areas in places in the Rust Belt or in the South where there are not a lot of opportunities.
So the college is not really an option.
There's not a job that you're waiting for you when you get out of high school.
What would we do with those kids if we couldn't put them in the military, give them health care, give them three good meals a day, put clothes on their back and some level of job training and employment?
That's, you know, when I when I was looking at the last election, because we could tie this back to the last election, I was fascinated by the fact that Donald Trump and some on some level was making an appeal to being a non interventionist.
We don't want any more of these foreign wars.
We've wasted three trillion dollars in the Middle East, so on and so forth.
Now, I think that was all a big bait and switch.
And we can talk about that, of course, and going forward.
But a lot of people said, yeah, I kind of like that because, you know, there is this missed opportunity by both parties, something that I think Donald Trump tapped, at least at the beginning of his campaign.
And it and that sort of that drunkenness from that idea lasted through the election for a lot of his supporters is the antiwar idea because they're because America is war weary.
Yet, on the other hand, he talked about we're going to fund the biggest military in the history of mankind.
We're going to you know, the military is depleted.
So how is it that you have these two things, these two seemingly diametrically opposed ideas in the minds of voters at the same time?
And I think it's because a lot of people depend upon the military budget for their livelihood.
And they are voting their economic self-interest when they are voting for a big military or for people who promote a big military or big military budget.
And that's because the economy is not creating a lot of other opportunities for people in these areas.
And they've grown comfortable with that, which you could argue for or against this kind of government intervention in the economy.
There are both ways to go on this.
I think it kind of argues against it, at least in the military budget, because if you have a large military, you tend to want to use it.
And so there's this feedback loop that's built into the military budget whereby the people who are benefiting from military spending are not just the contractors, the evil military contractors, the beltway bandits who are in Crystal City and whatnot that we all identify, but it's also a huge constituency inside the American population, particularly in the South, where military representation or representation in the military is incredibly disproportionate.
People in Alabama are far more likely to be in the military than people in places where you have a thriving tech economy like the Bay Area or New York or even that Northern Virginia corridor.
So we are in a weird feedback loop that is not creating extra value in the economy, but it's actually creating a predicate for more military interventionism in spite of the fact that a lot of people are weary of interventionism.
Man, that's so well said.
And you know what?
This is where I stop and praise your work some more because I just really like the way you write.
And I think, I don't know if anybody has noticed yet that I, and I think this is fair to say that you're some sort of liberal or progressive or what have you.
I know that you're smart enough to appreciate the good parts of libertarianism and while disagreeing with the rest and that kind of deal.
But we clearly have a lot in common in the way we look at this stuff.
And, and what I really like about this article, well, oh, I meant to say you're always so thorough on all your articles.
You really do a lot of research and a lot of links and it's always, you know, at least 2000 words.
And, you know, that's what I meant to say.
And in this case, you really break that down and you really get into the part where, like you're saying now, it's the American people themselves.
People believe war is good for the economy.
Well, that's funny because the economy sucks and we do nothing but bomb people.
So it seems like people will kind of break out of that, but they've heard it a million times over again and they go, well, you know, it's good for the economy.
But of course what they really mean is it's good for some companies who like pushing that myth at the expense of the rest of us.
And so of course I'm a ideological libertarian no matter what, but it's also just true that it's at some point it's just, um, uh, I think just a mathematical problem.
Maybe there'd be some argument about the deflationary spiral or some kind of nonsense, but I'm looking at trillions of dollars spent on things that do not produce other things.
Aircraft carriers, F-22s, F-35s, a bunch of tanks and guns and boots that I guess, you know, maybe the guys after they're out of their army, out of the army, they keep their boots for just a little while.
But basically none of this stuff contributes to the economy at all.
But like you're saying, millions upon millions, tens of millions, a hundred million, I don't know how many Americans are in on this system.
That was why Nick Terse, who writes such great stuff about Africa and wrote the great book about Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves, before that he had written this book, The Complex.
And the reason why was because he said, you can't call it the military industrial complex because it's the military industrial everything.
There's 15 hyphens, you know, the media, academia, and all of science and research and all of the high tech industries.
And, you know, for that matter, the people that make the combat boots, the companies that make the buttons for the shirts, and these are huge contracts.
And there's a huge interest in keeping the thing going.
And that's really what I like about this article so much is that, you know, the people who work at these bomb factories, they're grownups, you know, they may not be the CEO who hires the lobbyist to push Congress, but they do vote for the warmonger, you know, at least they don't oppose them.
Well, you know, you go to Defense Link, it's actually not Defense Link anymore.
It's been renamed.
But if you type in Defense Link, it goes to the contracting announcement website.
Every day, the Pentagon announces its contracts.
And I started going through them on a day by day basis.
I picked one particular day to highlight.
And you should look at where these contracts go.
They are designed by the Pentagon with the contractors, whether they're contractors, big or small, Raytheon or some company you never heard of, to be peppered all around the country for that very reason.
They create constituencies.
This is something that goes obviously back to the Cold War, but it's something that has been preserved, and it's a very, very effective way of incorporating people into the military as a constituency.
Call it social engineering.
Social engineering.
You know, there are a couple ways of looking at it, too.
You know, I don't even know if I'm a progressive or a liberal.
I don't know what I am, frankly.
I have to be honest with you.
I don't think I have an ideology anymore.
I think what I've come to over time, and I think that's actually where the American people are going, is they would like to have a cafeteria kind of politics where we go, well, that libertarian idea works really well, and that progressive idea works really well, and that sort of middle-of-the-road thing appeals to me.
I think that actually fewer and fewer Americans identify with a distinct, thoroughgoing, holistic, Catholic, you know, all-encompassing kind of ideology anymore, because ideologies don't seem to work in practice, or at least not when the people who profess to hold them get in office.
So, you know, I think that for a good example is Rand Paul has disillusioned a lot of libertarians, for example, because he doesn't seem to adhere to the libertarianism that he promotes.
So, or he says that he's- Right, but in the libertarianism that sucks, it's Rand.
If that's what- But you see, that's what- I think that's what's happened, is that, you know, in American politics, the ideas and the personalities have become a melange, nothing seems to make sense, and I think people are just looking for things that work, and I would say that I- you know, all things being equal, you know, the less- you know, George Will has this great idea about divided government.
He loves divided government, because that means they're not doing anything, and at this point, if we had divided government, divided Congress, and divided presidency, and neither of them could do anything, I think I'd be okay with that.
But, you know, either solution, if you were to take a pure libertarian solution or a socialistic solution, either of those solutions to the defense budget is better than what we have.
If you were to just say, okay, we're going to cut the defense budget, if we cut the defense budget right now, it's, you know, close to $800 billion, that's the straight defense budget.
If you take the total of all defense spending, you're looking at $1.3, $1.4 trillion, somewhere in there.
William Hartung has done the numbers, and POGO, Project for Government Oversight, they've crunched the numbers, and all that spending is well over a trillion dollars, reliably.
The OCOs, though, and so on.
The Energy Department for the nuclear weapons.
Energy Department for nuclear weapons, everything.
So, if you were to cut that in half, that would have a huge direct impact on the economy.
You would have an unemployment spike.
So, to do that, how do you deal with that?
Because just a straight cut doesn't really cut it.
Yeah, no, see, that's the thing where ideology can help inform you that the free market will work it out.
What would happen to all those people if we lay off the Army and the Marine Corps?
Hey, they're all a bunch of able-bodied people who right now are being diverted away from actually producing goods and services for people.
And that's a great point.
Not only are we going to stop sinking money into the Lockheed black hole, but we're going to have that money to use as capital to invest in things that produce greater wealth and higher standards of living for people.
Right.
So, you could do that.
So, it'd be fine.
In other words, it'd be fine.
Fire the entire federal government, everyone who works for the federal government.
Fire them all tomorrow, and we'll have a big recession, and it'll be over in six months, and we'll be great again.
Well, yeah.
I think probably longer than six months.
There would be a lag, the dislocation lag, right?
So, I've actually proposed one of two things.
You could either turn that into direct investment in the economy if you wanted to.
You wanted to go the left-wing route.
Or how about a sort of a modification of your approach, which is give everybody that peace dividend they've all been waiting for.
Abolish the IRS.
Give them a...
That's a possibility, right?
And all income taxation.
Yeah.
Why should earning be a crime that you have to confess to and pay a fine every year?
It's insane.
It's insane.
Well, unless you're a tax lawyer, and if you're a tax lawyer, you're loving life right now because this new tax reform is so laden with loopholes and Winchester mystery house false doors that you can open up if you have the right high-priced accountant that a lot of people are going to be making a lot of money helping other people save a lot of money getting through all these different loopholes.
But...
Another fake jobs program.
Bunch of H&R Block guys who should be out digging ditches or doing something useful.
You know?
Another part of this racket.
Well, look, ultimately, all of this is going to be leveled.
And there's another piece that I wrote recently on the coming robot economy.
We are in a massive generational economic shift right now.
And the economy is transforming.
And this is one of the things that I thought was so hilarious about Make America Great Again, talking about bringing back an economy from the 1950s and 1960s that was itself rooted in the military industrial complex, but was also rooted in a manufacturing base that in many ways was actually linked to the military industrial complex.
Because remember, back in the 50s and 60s, you had companies like Westinghouse and GE.
They were working on nuclear weapons and selling you refrigerators.
And so that economy is going away, if not completely gone.
It's in the rearview mirror.
And we are coming into a new economy in which we are going to have a whole lot of labor we're not sure what to do with.
And we're going to be reallocating labor in significant tectonic ways as many, many jobs.
Farming, in particular, is going to be automated very, very quickly.
It's already starting.
You have automated strawberry pickers and automated food production is going to radically change the way the economy works.
But I digress.
To get back to the defense budget, we never saw the peace dividend after the Cold War ended.
There was a decline in defense spending.
But then, as you well know, because of the coming of the war on terror and the Iraq and Afghanistan war, and the Afghanistan war being one of the great kachingers of all time, it's just like an incredible money laundering scheme.
You just pour the money in and it comes right back out to other companies.
We'll see if Eric Prince can privatize it.
Something tells me he's not going to be able to do that.
But that is a lot of money and labor and resources, as you well said, does not go into the productive economy.
It just doesn't go there.
The funny thing about it is, particularly for people who serve in the military, we could say it's a jobs program and it's keeping them from being on the unemployment line.
But the oddity of it is that one of the highest rates of food stamp usage is among active duty members of the military.
They're getting a job, but it's not even like a good job.
It's not even like something that's helping them sustain a family, because a lot of them are relying on ancillary social services, much in the way Walmart.
It's such an important point, too.
First of all, I can't tell you how many army guys have told me, it's just a job.
I know a guy who used to run a business in Killeen near Fort Hood, and he would do this thing like TV trained him.
Oh, thank you for your service.
And they would all say, it's just a job.
You know, so that's the way they see it, too.
But then also the more important point about what a crappy job it is, killing people for an empire that has no business in any of these, quote, interventions and wars of choice as they themselves label them.
For Christ's sake, if it's an intervention, it's not self-defense, is it?
OK, that's the end of that argument.
But then, more importantly, you know, all my life and I think anybody who's just, you know, if you're a male in America, you grew up watching football.
And it's not just since the war on terrorism.
It's all through, you know, I was a kid in the Reagan years and that kind of thing.
Be all you can be.
Get an edge on life in the army.
We get more done before 5 a.m. than most people do all day.
And if you're, as you kind of describe, you're from a small town, you got nothing to do, you don't know what to do, you're not sure exactly how to bridge this gap between being a teenager and being a man.
Well, that's when you go and serve your country, fight for freedom, and we'll train you and we'll teach you and you'll have technical skills.
And then when you get out, you could be a firefighter or a helicopter repairman or some kind of like pseudo professional job almost and go to college on the G.I. Bill when you never would have been able to go to college before and all these kinds of things when, in fact, most of that isn't true.
And a lot of guys do go to college and that's a perverse incentive for having this massive army in the first place, as you were saying.
But mostly you don't get to become a helicopter repairman.
You know, you're much more likely to come home from the army going, well, geez, you know, I'm an infantry guy.
Well, how am I?
I guess I'll become a deputy sheriff.
You know, that's about it.
Yeah.
And that's kind of a perfect circle, right?
Because one, a lot of the training is highly specific and compartmentalized.
So it's not like you have great technical skills that are saleable in the civilian economy.
A lot of these guys then end up do guys and gals end up do coming back and going into policing where, by the way, all of the excess equipment from the military industrial complex is also ending up.
So the equipment and the personnel are essentially being shifted from the military into domestic policing, which may account for one for why we have we've had declining crime rates over the course of the last 25, 30 years.
Yet we've had increased problems with police abuse of power.
That's right.
We're off illusions now.
Exactly.
And you know what?
People warn that this is what's going to happen.
You know, I never could find the quote.
Somebody called me out and I really looked and I couldn't find it.
But I know for a fact it was Chalmers Johnson who told me on the show or had written it on dispatch or something somewhere.
Either give up your empire or you live under it.
You bring it home and it'll destroy you.
Rome built an empire and then let the empire crush its core civilization that it sprang from the British.
At the end of the day, cut it loose.
Let the Americans take care of it.
We'll keep our rainy little island and most of our English liberties and and leave it at that.
And that's the way you should go, America.
Go ahead and call it quits while you've still got about a third of a bill of rights here.
And now here we are a generation into this.
And with that many more literally that many more Iraq and Afghan war veterans serving as our sheriffs in our city police and killing us.
Well, I think interestingly enough, I think the decision is is being made for us.
One of the linchpins of the military industrial complex or the empire is oil.
And I've made this case in the past is that the defense budget is actually is one of the most expensive direct subsidies to an industry we've ever seen.
I'm not talking about the defense industry.
It's been a direct subsidy to the oil industry.
That's, you know, the reason why the Fifth Fleet is in Bahrain is not because we love the Bahrainis.
It's to keep the oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf.
The reason why the United States has an increased pace of mission pace in the South China Sea is not because we're worried about the Chinese spreading their cultural influence around Southeast Asia, but there's oil in the South China Sea.
And the there is a direct interlocking relationship between the oil industry and and the military and American empire.
And that has been true since the end of World War Two.
And I think now what we're seeing is, is that oil is since peak demand never really peak oil never panned out.
And we're now heading towards peak demand, something that Saudi minister, former Saudi oil minister al-Naimi pointed out in emails circa 2006, 2007.
I think these were they were released by WikiLeaks that he was talking to people around him saying, we're I'm worried about peak demand.
I think that now that we've had the shale boom, the shale boom is coming.
They he saw it coming.
You know, we're not going to be able to keep oil prices at a sustainable level to sustain our own economy because demand for oil is going to decline.
And we've basically seen that panning out.
And, you know, China right now is pioneering roads with solar panels in them.
China is moving in a direction toward solar power.
They just opened the largest solar power plant on the planet.
That was, I think, last September they did that.
So the one of the one of the predicates, one of the foundations of American empire is essentially waning.
It's going away.
So will empire now just be for the sake of of empire to sustain this jobs program?
Because it's not even providing providing oil, which was the underlying wink and a nod and not so much of a wink of a wink and a nod, frankly, because the Gulf War back in 1990, it was at ninety one, ninety two, ninety one.
Remember, it was it was Dick Cheney saying we're we're going to war to save our way of life, you know, and Ari Ari Fleischer first few days of of the the war on Iraq.
It was Operation Iraqi Liberation.
And then when they realized the acronym was oil, they changed it to Operation Iraqi Freedom.
So when oil is no longer the the driving force of the global economy, if there is a if there are other sources of energy that can replace oil, is then just employing people in these crappy jobs the only reason to have an empire?
I mean, there's not even like a you know, it's not even like the British going into the going into India to extract wealth so that they can build these wonderful manors all around around the British Isles.
We're not even absconding with wealth at this point, right?
Is it just simply to employ people in these in these jobs?
Yeah, well, you know, that was what Garrett Garrett said back in after the end of World War Two was that in our empire, they don't even pay us tribute.
All the wealth goes out and all the graft is on stealing from the American taxpayer and sending the money off into a black hole.
But, you know, reaching your hand out into the stream as it goes, as it's destroyed.
So that's, you know, Lockheed's taking it.
And that's really the question.
I mean, I think you've really nailed it.
You know, David Stockman calls this the great deformation, this massive.
This is what I learned in high school.
I was lucky to have an anarcho-communist history teacher in high school.
So we have a warfare economy and it's entirely dependent on keeping this thing going.
Now, it doesn't have to be this way, but it's the way it is.
And it's one hell of a dirty snowball rolling downhill.
And I don't know how to stop it.
Well, as you say, the dollar breaks.
Ron Paul says the dollar is going to break one day, but that could be a long time from now.
Well, you know.
Ron Paul's right about the economy a lot.
So, yeah, no, no, no.
But he also says he doesn't know when either.
So that's what I was hesitating on.
Take a long time.
Not that he's wrong about his time.
Because I'm not sure it's that far off, frankly.
You know, one of the fascinating things about Trumpism.
And this is a piece I haven't finished yet, but I call it the unexceptional end of American exceptionalism.
And one of the upsides of Trumpism is that he has created this vacuum around the world.
And other powers are saying, oh, well, maybe I'll fill that vacuum.
Maybe I'll become the global leader.
Now, you can be skeptical about China's real commitment to being a leader on something like climate change.
But you want to know what?
The rest of the world says, OK, well, if America wants to abdicate, well, we'll go with China.
Look at what China is doing with with Pakistan right now.
China is there.
There's a little dust up.
It didn't make it into the rundown because there was this story that broke that China was going to be opening up a base, a military base in Pakistan.
And the Pakistanis quickly said, no, no, no, no, no, no.
That's you know, they didn't say fake news, but essentially said that's fake news.
But, you know, China's there.
They've got this belt and road thing going on around the world.
They're putting, you know, the United States is putting a trillion dollars a year into its defense budget.
China's putting a trillion dollars a year into building infrastructure in other people's countries.
And it's an interesting juxtaposition of hard power by a waning power and soft power by a rising power.
And, you know, I'm not saying the yuan is going to replace the dollar anytime in the next year and a half or two years or three years.
But I think that we are fooling ourselves if we think that the world is so tied to America and its and its idea of American exceptionalism and the way that the dollar and the petrodollar has sustained that, that that's going to go on forever.
Not so sure.
I'm not so sure.
And Trump has created space for other ideas by vacating, vacating a lot of these.
What would you call them?
Self-appointed responsibilities that the United States has taken on.
So that's kind of one of the upsides of Trump.
Well, and Barack Obama left us.
Well, and his predecessors left us 21 trillion dollars in debt.
And so at some point that number is going to get too high already.
I don't know what it is that we pay just an interest to those bondholders every year.
But to think of people's real blood, sweat and tears going just to pay interest on the debt every year, the way it is now, hundreds of billions of dollars.
Just Scott, isn't that why?
But Scott, isn't that why nobody really made?
Everybody talks about the national debt, but nobody really wants to do anything about it, because ultimately there's it's the it's the rentier economy, right?
Yeah, it's the warfare.
Welfare state is exactly what it is.
That's why Rothbard says, why would I want to get paid back now?
Everything you owe me when I could just sit back here and continue to make money?
It's it's it's really it's financialization, you know, right?
Instead of an economy of things, it's economy of debt.
It's an economy of of rents.
And it has in no small small part been been it's the fruit of the military organized system that we live on.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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All right.
So we got a full interview right there.
Now you want to change the subject and keep talking about stuff?
Yeah, sure.
Why not?
Well, if you want to talk about Bannon, because I think that this all does intersect with Bannon and what, you know, one of the fascinating things about Bannon to me.
Background here is there's some new book with a bunch of gossip about the first year of Trump here.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah, it's Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff.
And it basically portrays Trump as kind of a gassy, half flatulent, an income poop who hides away in his room, locks the door, eats McDonald's and watches television all night long so that he can load his arsenal for his morning tweet storms.
And in this book, you know, Wolff got a lot of access.
And I think Wolff got the access because Donald Trump idealizes and idolizes both of those things.
Rupert Murdoch and Wolff wrote a book on Rupert Murdoch.
And since Trump doesn't read, he didn't read the book to see that Wolff didn't do Murdoch any favors in the book and just thought, oh, if you want to write a book about me, well, you wrote a book about Murdoch.
So, yeah, I want to be like Murdoch, which I think is pretty much, you know, I think Trump's number one policy objective is coverage.
I think it's really the only thing that matters to him.
Well, look, I mean, that's kind of been the thing all along, right, is you and I look at all these policies and debts and important questions of who's killing who and all this stuff while, you know, dum-dums look at basically the Hollywood gossip level of politics, the cable TV news, Chuck Todd level of analysis about just who's winning and whatever, but never what anybody ever says they stand for, much less what they really stand for or really do to people or anything like that.
And Donald Trump himself, he looks at politics at that level, even though he's the president of the United States.
He doesn't see the state.
He's just the star of the show is all really.
That's all he's that's all he's ever been able to see politics as is, you know, sort of like your your nicest but dimmest aunt, you know?
Well, I call him the ultimate shiny object.
And if you were looking for a shiny object because you had policy objectives supporting Donald Trump would not be a bad alternative.
And I, you know, I think Donald Trump's four main he had five constituencies.
There are four main constituencies, traditional constituencies, and there's the fifth one.
One constituency would be the defense industry.
They made out really, really well.
Another constituency would be the would be Wall Street.
They've made out really, really well.
The Saudis, the third, the Israelis would be the fourth.
And then the fifth would be his base.
Now, that's mostly right now the evangelicals.
But we can sort of broaden it out because these are the people that Bannon brought to the table, or at least Bannon thought or at least he believed he was bringing to the table this new populist cadre that he thought he was going to cut out of the white working class, particularly that had been voting for Democrats, and bring them over into this new sort of supranationalist populist force inside American politics that was going to essentially discard the Republicans and make a break finally with all the country club elitists that he despises, even though he's kind of one of them, and then make them the new contraposition against the Democrats.
And I think he was hoping that the Democrats would go the way of Bernie Sanders so that there would be this wonderful sort of binary, pure sort of left versus right conflict in American politics that would be highly creative.
And I don't think that that's going to happen now, at least not the way he thought, because he has in a sense defecated where he's been eating and the Mercers have cut him off and Sheldon Adelson has cut him off and the money that he was going to use has been cut off and Mitch McConnell is now running a victory lap.
I think Bannon was probably right when he was campaigning with Roy Moore that the Republican establishment was basically using Trump to get a tax cut.
And once the tax cut came, they would have no problem cutting bait on Donald Trump in the coming year.
I think that's probably true because Donald Trump is a front person.
He is not, as you say, a policy guy.
He is a shiny object.
He is the busty assistant next to the magician.
And while you're watching him, the magician can do whatever he wants with that rabbit in that hat.
And by the time you look over, he's pulling a rabbit out of the hat.
You go, wow, how do you do that?
That's magic.
No, it's not magic.
All these decisions have been happening while you've been looking at the busty assistant.
Well, look, one of the things is, and this is his call.
I mean, at the end of the day, he is still the guy in the chair and not anybody else.
And he can overrule them on almost everything.
But he doesn't because of who he is.
And that's part of the thing.
Someone accused me earlier today, actually, of having Trump derangement syndrome.
I thought, well, geez, I'm perfectly rational about Donald Trump.
My assessment of him is exactly the same as it was the first time I saw him on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous in 1983 or something like that.
He's exactly who we all know he is.
What's to be deranged about?
I mean, I guess if you're a liberal, then, oh, Russia, Russia, Russia, nonsense.
But that ain't me.
Never was, obviously.
So but yeah, no, I mean, he's clearly a bad person and has bad instincts on everything.
And one thing is the obvious politics are, and I don't know if he knows the name, but don't be like Lyndon Johnson and get accused of making the military fight with one arm behind their back.
That's like something a weak liberal Democrat would do or something.
So he has told the military to loosen the rules of engagement and the decision making of when to strike and that kind of thing down the chain of command and go right ahead.
Because no matter what happens, you're not going to say that I held you back.
And yet, of course, as I know, you know, the more you fight and the harder you fight against these insurgencies, the bigger you grow them anyway.
So the whole thing is destined to be a failure.
But, you know, VICE News has one this morning.
They're just the latest to report that the numbers of casualties are up all over the place in all the wars in Iraq and Syria and Yemen and Afghanistan and Somalia.
They've had, you know, sent in, you know, apparently, I don't know how many infantry, not just special operations forces.
They have infantry on the ground now in Somalia for the first time.
And and then as we're talking about this with this humanitarian, what's it's from the U.N. on the show earlier today, he doesn't know anything about this stuff.
He's complaining about the blockade in Yemen when it's his blockade.
He's complaining about the war and he doesn't even know as far as he it's pretty apparent to me.
I'm just reading tea leaves, but it seems like he knows that he told the military to kill Al-Qaeda there.
But he doesn't understand about the Saudi war versus the Houthis.
That's entirely done on his authority, you know, with his planes, with his fuel, with his intelligence, with his everything that he could turn it off like a light switch.
And he's like tweeting about how he doesn't like it and complaining to the British prime minister how he doesn't like it.
And he doesn't even know he's the boss of it.
They didn't even tell him.
So he's saying you're off your leash.
And then I always said, in fact, and you can probably find me on Twitter and find quotes from before where I said years before he was elected in 2015, I was saying that always going to say the military and the CIA is do whatever you want.
Just keep me informed.
But apparently that's not even the deal.
Just do whatever you want and don't even teach him nothing.
I mean, I guess he can't learn.
So forget it.
But that's a real problem to be in, you know, where he just let him off their leash and is not even paying attention to what they're doing.
Well, you know, he has to see things illustrated in map form.
He can't he doesn't take briefing books.
He doesn't take white papers.
So and I guess this is one of the things come out of The Wolf Book is that when you bring him some kind of briefing material that's generally sort of color coded maps or whatever, you have to make sure to put his name around it so that he sees his name and he remains interested.
So I don't know what you do in explaining, you know, what's going on in Yemen by putting his name on a map of Yemen to try and keep him interested.
But we it's McMaster and Mattis are the ones who are responsible then.
Well, no, it is.
That's exactly it.
And to a lesser extent, Kelly, because Kelly now is over at, you know, he's been doing DHS and chief of staff.
But this is the weird position that we've been put in is that we are hoping for McMaster and Mattis to to do to do sane things.
Now, you know, Mattis is a mad dog, mad dog.
Mattis, you know, Mattis is doing everything he can to try and get rid of the sequester, which is that that arbitrary budget cap that was put on after the what was the it was the shutdown of 20.
Was that was that 2012 when that shutdown happened?
2013 somewhere around there.
Yeah.
And the Obama administration negotiated the sequester with the with the House to cross the board budget sequester.
So he's trying to bust those thing.
And I know that Mattis still has a grudge against Iran because Iran was supplying IEDs in Iraq, you know, those darn Iranians being concerned with a war happening right next door as troops were massing on their border.
So so if these are these are the people that we are putting our hopes in are these generals and, you know, look, generals are generals.
You know, they're not it's not civilian leadership of the military.
And on some level, I guess maybe that's better than Donald Trump.
I don't know.
I mean, it's certainly not better for the people on the other end of the bombs and the guns all around this.
What is how many countries is in the is the war in now?
You know, and how many times do you see a headline where the people who are killed are now called militants?
It's not terrorists.
We've actually gone from killing terrorists now to killing militants and suspected militants.
Yeah.
Now they're not even insurgents because that implies they ever did anything right.
Militant just means that either they own a gun or maybe they live in a public enemy or exactly or suspected militants.
We suspect that they're militant.
It's a it's like it's a sinkhole, which again, brings us back around to China and China as a soft power option.
I think, you know, China and Russia are are kind of sitting pretty in this environment right now as the American empire doesn't really hasn't really started to fully collapse yet.
But it certainly is overextended in ways that that nobody would have could have imagined, you know, 15, 20 years ago when when we were at the end of the Clinton administration.
So the first Clinton administration, not the second one that Fox News is running against every night.
You know, this is where I think.
The politics gets interesting because heading into this next election cycle, one of the things that is not going to be talked about is empire and war.
And you talked about Trump derangement syndrome.
The Trump derangement syndrome is real insofar as all of these issues that you and I have been talking about today and particularly these issues of war and peace and empire are issues that do not get covered because MSNBC and CNN spend every waking hour regurgitating and and parsing and then swallowing and regurgitating and reparsing every little tweet that Donald Trump produces.
And they're really taking the fun out of hating the guy.
Honestly, I hate all presidents better than everybody.
I hate Hillary Clinton more than any other person hates Hillary just because she ever wanted to be the president.
And also remember Waco.
I'll never forget.
But listen, the thing of it is, yeah, all they do is falsely accuse him all day.
You know, this new book supposedly says he's losing his freaking mind.
And I can understand that.
Like, here's a guy who absolutely should be already in prison for war crimes.
I mean, he's absolutely a terror.
He's the worst thing going right now.
He's the worst president since Obama.
There's no question.
And yet all they ever do is attack.
Are they attacking Russia by way of Trump or Trump by way of Russia?
But they're picking a fight with another foreign government.
And in this case, the only one that could wipe our entire civilization off the face of the earth in one afternoon.
I just I hate it so much.
And all this Russia stuff is such nonsense.
I don't know how much you bought into any of it or not.
But I just I hate him for every other thing except this stupid thing.
And then but it almost makes me feel sorry for the guy.
Like for I'm the kind of guy where if I'm driving perfectly fine and then someone honks at me for no reason, then I get really mad.
Like, how dare you honk at me when I didn't do anything, you know?
So imagine being the president.
And from before you even become the president, they're calling you the Manchurian sock puppet candidate of Vladimir Putin, the of the new newly reconstituted Soviet Union or whatever it is.
And and you're Donald Trump already.
And you're 73.
I mean, he must be out of his mind.
I must be out of his mind.
Well, you know, we could talk about what's there and what's not there on Russiagate.
I think, you know, on the money laundering issue, these are things that I had somebody.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's the whole joke, right?
Is yeah.
Oh, business is business.
But none of the accusations about the campaign are right.
That's the point.
So more specifically, I think if if the MSNBC and CNN in particular, because that's that's kind of the online, the the the on air media that that we're we mostly identify with when we talk about the media going after Trump, if they're if they're trying to take him down, they suck at it because they're not really actually digging in.
Again, we're getting back to the busty assistant right next to the magician.
There are all of these other things going on, all of these different policies.
There are things that are that are like these like the the civilian casualties.
Why not just spend an hour a day updating America's wars around the world?
Do you know what happens when you do that?
People get weary.
People get upset.
People don't like it.
I mean, you saw it in real time with the Iraq war.
There was that turning point when all of a sudden the bad news was coming every single day.
And as the bad news kept coming and we started to see more and more people dying and people started to really sour on it, kind of like what happened in Vietnam.
People, you know, Katrina, if you go back, it was the summer of 2005 when Katrina drowned.
Everybody said, you know what?
Maybe these people really don't deserve the benefit of the doubt anymore.
Not that anybody who said that all along was right.
But now maybe we'll take a more critical look slightly.
Started looking.
Yeah.
Once you start showing these things, people start to respond because because in spite of the fact that everybody has some kind of seems to have not everybody, but a huge chunk of the population has a financial interest in keeping the defense budget going when it comes to the actual, you know, where the rubber meets the road or where the bullets meet the bodies, people get a little squeamish.
People kind of don't like it.
And there is a way of being critical of Trump's administration that does not involve constantly beating the same story over and over and over and over again, like a dead horse.
There's one simple principle.
Are you advancing the story?
If you're not advancing the story, you're just you're just listening to yourself talk.
And and how many times do you do you turn on the news and see them not advancing any story when there are stories like the Horn of Africa, like Niger?
Has anybody sent anybody to Niger?
Have we seen any live reports from Niger?
Let's go find out what's going on in Niger.
Let's go find out what's going on in Somalia.
Let's go find out what's going on in in Pakistan.
Why isn't somebody reporting from Pakistan?
The security arrangement is under under great strain right now.
You know, Trump is pulling, pulling money.
Are there real answer, right?
Is the entire empire, but and especially Barack Obama are implicated in all of this.
And so what are you saying that Obama's Yemen policy was genocidal?
It must be something else.
Then let's talk about something else, because everything that Trump's doing is he just took all of Obama's wars and turned them up two notches or maybe just one.
You know, well, and Obama took all of the wars that were handed to him and took all of the policies that were handed to him.
Now, the one place where I think Obama was heading in a an interesting direction was his relationship with the Saudis and the Israelis vis-a-vis the Iran nuclear deal.
So, you know, that's one thing we do know about Donald Trump.
If Obama did it, I want to do the opposite, at least on some things, because he's not doing the opposite on Yemen.
He's going for broke on Yemen.
Right.
Yeah.
He'll only undo the one good thing about Obama's legacy, double down on all the worst parts.
That's Horton's law.
Wait, that's like a colliery, I guess.
Keep all their bad promises, but none of their good ones.
Where we're at heading into 2018 is that this thing is going to be most likely a referendum on a personality.
And look at who the Democrats have to bring to bear, too.
Well, what if Donald Trump wins again already as senile as Ronald Reagan?
Well, I'm talking about the off year elections first.
Oh, OK.
I'm sorry.
I'm already looking forward to Hillary trying to run again, man.
Well, I mean, who is it going to be?
Joe Biden?
Is it going to be?
It's well, he's already like 75, too, right?
I know.
But he's standing with Bernie Sanders.
They seem like they're they're poised.
And look, the bottom line is, is that either one of them would have beaten Donald Trump.
Well, that's absolutely true.
Yeah.
Either one of them.
You know, this is one of the funny things about bringing it back to Bannon.
And Bannon does have quite an ego, and that's becoming more and more apparent.
And as these these stories pour out in response to the to the Wolf Book and, you know, Bannon thinks he engineered what was going to be a third way in American politics.
And that's one of those things.
Whenever somebody starts talking about a third way, not a third party or an alternative, but a third force, you know, the last guy to have a successful third force was Tony Blair.
Let's let's look at how that turned out.
Yeah.
All that means is Bill Clinton ism.
You know, Bill Clinton.
Yeah.
Well, and for that matter, I mean, it's always the right wing Democrat and the liberal Republican, right?
Right.
That's the Clintons and the Bushes.
That's the standard.
So that's Bannon's radical new direction is the same old thing.
Well, but yes, basically.
But with this new hyper nationalism infused in it, but, you know, Bannon thought that he engineered something new when really, you know, Selinda Lake, an old time Democratic pollster.
And I say old time because she was a big deal in the 90s.
And then she disappeared after the turn of the century.
And then for some reason, she popped up two days after the election.
And when I saw that she was going to be on, I was like, oh, I got to see what Selinda Lake said, because I haven't heard from her in years.
And she was being asked about the election.
And why were the predictions wrong?
Why was the polling wrong?
So the polling wasn't wrong.
And actually, if you go back, the polling wasn't wrong, particularly if you just look at the aggregate voting.
The polling was kind of kind of right.
What was wrong were the turnout models, because five million people didn't show up.
Five million people, the Democrats thought were going to come to the polls, which would have been a would have led to basically a solid win for Hillary Clinton did not show up.
Why?
Because they couldn't pull the lever for lever for Hillary Clinton.
They just couldn't do it.
She was the only person who could have lost to Donald Trump.
Exactly.
So so, yeah, I mean, that's not to say you don't have to ascribe a single positive attribute to Biden or Bernie Sanders to say they would have beaten Trump.
It was all they had to be was not Hillary Clinton, not Hillary Clinton.
And and part of why that was is because members of her own base were not comfortable with what her liberal interventionism, her Kaganite point of view.
Right.
Isn't that what well, and she's such a poor candidate.
If this is a clue to what a poor president she would be, she's such a poor candidate that after she gets the nomination and Sanders is out of the way, she doesn't say, OK, Sanders, people rally with me.
She's still reaching out literally to Robert Kagan and going to fundraisers hosted by him and and and traveling not to the swing states up there in the Midwest, but traveling to Texas as though if she's just a warmonger enough, she will get Texas conservative Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton and give her the state of Texas in the thing.
Because to her, that's just it goes without saying, even though Barack Obama soundly defeated her for exactly this reason in 2008, she is always still convinced that especially if you're a Democrat and boy, especially if you're a woman, you got to be a big time warmonger or they're going to call you weak.
And she never noticed it.
That was why everyone hated her.
Well, and this brings us to this this crossroads that American politics finds itself at, where there is no alternative presented on a regular basis to to the to the military, industrial, political complex.
It's there's just not an alternative built into the system.
I think Bannon actually thought he was going to offer an alternative.
Now, Bannon's got his own thing about China.
He doesn't want to be an interventionist in North Korea or in the Middle East or anywhere around the world.
That's his version of American first, I think mostly because he wants to save all his bullets for the coming showdown with China.
But still, he has a non interventionist bent and that appeal can be made.
If there's any one lesson that I took from positive lesson that I took from Trump's election is that if you can find a way to make that appeal and not do it as a bait and switch the way he did, but actually be be a non interventionist anti empire candidate, whatever your domestic politics are, I think you have an edge in an environment in which that is not an alternative.
And, you know, 72 or 73 percent of millennials would like to see a third party alternative.
I think a lot of that is out of a weariness that they have about American empire.
Because that's what Ron Paul always says is the peace candidate or at least the proclaimed peace candidate always wins.
It's true for Trump.
It's true for Barack Obama.
It's true for George W. Bush in the year 2000.
That's right.
He said, you know, the reckless Al Gore, if we keep doing what he says, we're going to get terrorist attacks.
Well, not exactly those words, but pretty damn close.
Yep.
Yeah.
He said, we don't we don't have a right going around the world, you know, telling other nations what to do in nation building.
And then he doesn't present us and we'll have problems coming down the road.
Yep.
So we'll see, you know, whether that's a possibility in 2020 at the presidential level, I'm skeptical.
But I think now inside the Republican Party, that faint little glimmer that that was there is now completely gone, particularly since now with Bannon being exiled.
The core of Trump's base is is the evangelical cadre that is oddly enough, just about as bloodthirsty as any constituency inside American politics.
And I think this is the reason why you see Trump doubling down on Jerusalem, doubling down on Iran, because he is he is their guy.
He is really the first evangelical president, even though he's about as evangelical as I am, you know, a Martian.
But.
Well, you know, there's one this morning in Mondo Weiss that has quotes from the book here about Roger Ailes, I guess, spilled all his guts and told these stories about Bannon and Bannon saying, yep, we made a deal with Sheldon Adelson.
And what we're going to do is we're going to turn the West Bank over to Jordan and Gaza to, I guess, part of the West Bank, the the worthless part with no water to Jordan.
And then we're going to give Gaza to Egypt and just forget about it.
Let the Israelis take Jerusalem.
I guess that was step one in this plan.
And Ailes says, yeah, you know, is that right?
And Bannon says he's Trump's totally on board.
And and then in the anecdote, he says, I wouldn't give Donald too much to think about, I guess, on this specific issues, you know, like don't start teaching him about the occupation or something like that and get him confused, I think, is what that means.
So it was that easy for Sheldon Adelson to buy off Donald Trump, I guess, you know, a couple of ten million dollars for his campaign.
And he's done because he is the ultimate shiny object.
That's it.
All these if you look at this, this book and you and you start to look at the last year, what you see is a bunch of competing interests who have all found their their front person, or at least what they perceive their front person.
And if you give Donald Trump the praise, he will he will give you the key to his to his branding kingdom.
Yeah, well, and, you know, the Israel lobby gets their way on a lot of stuff.
But this is something that so far Jerusalem that is they had gotten in name only from Congress, but the presidents had never implemented it.
And in fact, you know, Trump hasn't moved the embassy yet, but he's officially recognized all of Jerusalem as Israeli property.
So it's a pretty damn big deal already.
Yeah, that's a bargaining chip that's gone now.
That bargaining chip is is is is over.
It's not there anymore.
So well, maybe we won't get into a nuclear war with North Korea.
You know, I've I've I've had a lot of people ask me this question.
You know, I studied Asian history, particularly contemporary Asian history, although that seems like an oxymoron, but Asian history from the middle of the 19th century through to the end of World War Two.
I I've never really felt that there was danger of nuclear exchange with North Korea.
I think North Korea is actually in its own way a rational actor.
I think the one thing that's not going to happen is they're not going to give up those nuclear weapons because everybody learned the whole world learned one lesson from Iraq.
If you don't have weapons of mass destruction, you will be attacked.
Yep.
Well, in Libya, too, if they wanted to really reinforce the point you go, if you give up your junky old centrifuge equipment that you've got stacked in boxes in a garage somewhere, we'll do a regime change in a couple of years.
It was on a turkey farm.
It's hidden on a turkey farm.
They closed down the turkey farm and then look what they got.
Man.
So.
All right, well, listen, I better let you go at a solid hour here.
It's a good one.
Thanks very much, JP.
All right, y'all.
That's JP.
So Tilly, the News Vandal, he's at News Vandal dot com.
And you should sign up for his morning email.
It's got great stuff in it every single day and including this great article, which you really should read.
It's really well done.
The U.S. military is the biggest big government entitlement program on the planet.
And, you know, me, Scott Horton dot org for the show.
Antiwar dot com for things to read.
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And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
