Trump’s Crime: Waging War Against Globalism
Tucker Carlson's March 31, 2023 show is excellent. It's worth watching in its entirety. The key section begins at 12 minutes when Tucker discusses Trump's persecution with Stephen Miller and Glenn Greenwald.
Here is a partial transcript:
TUCKER CARLSON [at 12 minutes into his monologue on a Manhattan DA's indictment of Donald Trump]:
So you have to ask, given that our entire system has been subverted to stop this one guy from becoming president again or from serving effectively as president when he had the office, what is this about? Why do they monomaniacally hate Donald Trump so much? Oh, he's obnoxious, he's racist. Okay, right! It's not about that.
Here's what it's actually about. Donald Trump challenged the reigning foreign policy orthodoxies as president. He infuriated the neocons who control the State Department and the Pentagon. When he briefly paused arms sales to sacred Ukraine, they impeached him for it. When he ordered troops out of Syria, as was his constitutional right as commander in chief, the Pentagon just ignored him.
So it's hard not to see Trump's current indictment as an effort to make sure that he can never do anything like that again. He can never tamper with the one thing they care about most, which is their foreign policy, a foreign policy that has not served this country, which has in fact weakened it.
Stephen Miller is a former senior advisor to Donald Trump. He's founder of America First Legal. He joins us tonight to assess. Stephen Miller, I just wonder what you think of that. Sort of tainted after watching this Trump saga for the last seven years. That seems to be the third rail, really, is the foreign policy questions.
STEPHEN MILLER: Yes, and I lived through it, Tucker. And I lived through by this man's side - for those seven years. The moment that he got the nomination we watched as the hidden power centers in this country came out from underneath their rocks and began to pull the strings that they control. They began to leak information designed to sabotage him at every turn. They began to use every organ of control that they have in the intelligence community, the national security community, the law enforcement community to try to control him and to control his presidency.
Russia is a central example of this. They tried desperately to keep him from pursuing detent with Russia. They tried desperately to keep him from holding that summit with Vladimir Putin, to try to have a relationship between our two countries.
Now look what has happened. Now that he is out of office. We are on the brink of a world war, Tucker, as soon as they pushed him out of office. Look what happened. We are now almost in a nuclear conflict over the borders of Ukraine. So you asked me what was Donald Trump's crime. We know it's not a financial crime. We know it's not a campaign finance crime. His crime is refusing to bow or bend to the corrupt and rotten foreign policy establishment that is used to always, always getting their way in this country.
TUCKER: . . . and that has much greater control over our system than I think any of us appreciate. You look at John Cornyn, the Republican senator from Texas, who I think most people - I'll speak for myself - assume he's kind of a conservative. ; And then you realize, when you view it through a lens of what's happening in Ukraine, John Cornyn and Mitch McConnell and Thom Tillis and almost every Republican senator is a screaming liberal - actually. And if it weren't for foreign policy, you wouldn't know that. You wouldn't know that they are completely aligned with Chuck Schumer and the Democrats and Joe Biden.
So there really is a uni-party on the most important question.
MILLER: Well there's obviously an ideological disease that courses through Washington when it comes to foreign policy, and the sacrifice of our interests to foreign nations and foreign profits. But it's even deeper than that - and I know this because I also worked on The Hill for almost a decade. The intelligence community is able to manipulate the intelligence process and their relationship with lawmakers in order to obtain the answers that they want from Congress.
So when it comes to an issue like the Patriot Act, they can leak what they need to leak, they can push the narrative they need to push, they can manufacture the threat that they need to manufacture and they can work the relationships that they have in order to obtain the outcome that they want. And that has always been true on foreign policy for many, many, many years.
Then Donald Trump comes up out of the sea of Washington, a man with whom they have no relationship, a man who has no affinity for them, who doesn't care about them, doesn't value what they value. And this for them was a panic moment. It is a panic moment. And we are now living in the seventh year of that panic turning our entire democracy upside down.
And I will tell you, if a prosecutor in Manhattan can take control of our entire presidential election process, then by what definition can we say that we even have a democracy in this country?
TUCKER: No, I mean, we were mocked, I thought justly by the president of El Salvador yesterday. We're not going to take any more lectures about democracy from a country that interferes in its own elections like this. And unfortunately, he's right. He is. Stephen Miller, great to see you tonight.
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[Later in the broadcast]
TUCKER [at 36 minutes]: The hallmark of tyranny is the total distortion of justice. Differences of opinion become felonies for which you can be imprisoned while actual crimes are described as just business as usual, just the way that we do things. So even if we're trying to throw people in prison for criticizing the Democratic Party, we are allowing people who've hurt this country profoundly to ascend up the ladder of success.
There are a million of examples of this, but we picked one tonight: Victoria Nuland, who was one of the leaders of the State Department, the architect, by the way, of our current war with Russia, was also the architect of the war in Iraq. And that war began under false pretenses. More than a million people died for no reason, and it destroyed ancient Christian communities in Iraq. Before the war, there were about a million and a half Christians in that country. Now just a few hundred thousand are left.
But Nuland was never held to account for any of this. In fact, she was praised. And then she was promoted. So she went back into government service and she was caught on tape orchestrating a coup in Ukraine. We're not making this up . . .
[Tucker plays partial clip of the famous 2014 conversation between Nuland and then ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt orchestrating the shape of the new government o of Ukraine after the US-backed coup]
So that's the lady who lectures us about democracy subverting democracy in a foreign country, getting caught, and then getting an even better job, and then pushing another pointless war on our country, this one against Russia. She one of the architects of this war. Nuland is driving this nation into a conflict against both Russia and China. We can't win that war. We will lose that war. It will destroy our country. But Victoria Nuland has never been punished for any of this. Once again she's been promoted. The destruction that she has wrought is really almost beyond fiction.
Here she is bragging about blowing up critical infrastructure in Europe. Watch.
[Clip with Senator Ted Cruz in which Nuland celebrates the blowing up of the Nord Stream II pipeline]: Senator Cruz, like you, I am - and I think the administration, is very gratified to know - that Nord Stream II is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea ]
That's just disgusting. And yet no one says a word about it. What does it take to get indicted in Washington? Well, if you're Victoria Nuland, you know you'll never be indicted for anything. You'll get some sort of glass-ceiling-breaking award for women at the State Department. In Washington you only risk indictment and punishment if you dare to criticize people like Victoria Nuland. And that's the real lesson of what's happening to Donald Trump and his supporters. Their real sin was opposing the people in charge, and particularly in opposing their foreign policy.
So using the legal system to stop a political rival in a presidential race is the gravest possible attack on our country's core institutions, the one's that matter. It's election interference. It's an actual threat to democracy.
You'd think someone would care. But Nancy Pelosi is celebrating it. Last night she wrote this, the most revealing quote ever on social media. Here it is:
[Image: Pelosi March 30 tweet which includes these words]: No one is above the law, and everyone has a right to a trial to prove innocence. ]
To prove innocence? No. In a free country, this country, the government has to prove guilt. You are innocent until you are proven guilty. But Nancy Pelosi inverts it: "Prove your innocence, criminal!" And she believes that. They all believe that. You are guilty the moment they come after you, just as in the Soviet Union. And good luck proving your innocence.
So you have to ask, where are the adults? Has anyone in authority on the Democratic side, on the neo-liberal side stood up - not for Donald Trump, not for Douglas Mackey - but for our country. We watched carefully today. We didn't hear a single one.
Glenn Greenwald has long reported on the political abuses of the legal system. He's the host of System Update on Rumble and our friend. He joins us tonight. Glenn, you would think that somebody would say I don't like Trump, but this is doing grave damage to institutions we're going to need two years from now and for the next hundred years. But not one person that we can find has said that.
GLENN GREENWALD [40m in]: ... I think that people like Victoria Nuland demonstrate the theater behind this whole Republican vs Democratic war. This is the key to the whole thing which is that they are determined not to criminalize conservatism or the Republican Party. They're fine with people like Jeb Bush or John McCain or Mitt Romney or Nikki Haley or Lindsay Graham or whoever. They are determined to criminalize Donald Trump and his movement because the only time that Victoria Nuland wasn't in government - she worked for Clinton, then she worked for George - Dick Cheney, then worked for Obama, now she works for Biden - was when Donald Trump was elected president.
That's the only way you get these people out of government. And that's why they are determined to single-minded criminalize - not the Republican Party - but Donald Trump and his movement and that's what we saw yesterday with his indictment and today with this person [Douglas Mackey] who's now going to prison because of anti-Hillary Clinton memes he posted on Twitter.
TUCKER: The problem is in organizing the system that way they cut out the majority of the population. Of the majority of the American voters of either party in favor, for example, of going to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China? I don't think there's any evidence the majority is in favor the that. Do you?
GREENWALD: No or, for example, keeping troops in Syria, which I would bet barely anybody knows what the United States is doing, let alone wants to, and yet Matt Gaetz had a resolution to withdraw all troops from Syria saying we shouldn't be spending money on that. We should be spending money here at home. And the Republicans and Democrats joined together - the establishment linked - to say no. We want to keep, we want to let Joe Biden keep troops in Syria. It's the establishment wings of both parties who are the real enemy and they're the ones who rule no matter what you go and do at the voting booth. Donald Trump was the only one who could disrupt it and that's why they want to criminalize that movement.
TUCKER: That's exactly right. If you were just to write out the crimes of Donald Trump - being obnoxious, okay - versus the crimes of Victoria Nuland: destroying the West - you know, one list would be longer than the other. But who's getting excited? Glenn Greenwald, thank you so much.