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- [00:00]
A
Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree.
- [00:03]
B
Zoe, this thing weighs a ton. Drew Ski, Live with your legs, man.
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C
Santa. Santa, did you get my letter?
- [00:07]
B
He's talking to you britches. I'm not.
- [00:10]
A
Of course he did.
- [00:11]
B
Right, Santa, you know my elf Drew Ski here. He handles the nice list. And elf, I'm six' three. What everyone wants is iPhone 17 and at T Mobile, you can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies, right, Mrs. Claus?
- [00:25]
A
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- [00:32]
B
It as a gift.
- [00:33]
A
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- [00:37]
B
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- [00:59]
A
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- [01:34]
C
Miles Taylor. Welcome to Truth in the Barrel.
- [01:37]
B
It's great to be in the barrel with you, always.
- [01:41]
C
Are you ready for Christmas? No, I don't think any of us are.
- [01:46]
B
I. I don't. I don't think I've gotten all the presents I'm supposed to get. I don't think I've done the mental preparation for all the little landmines there are between personalities. But, you know, it'll be fine. It'll be fun.
- [02:01]
C
Yeah. I mean, this is the time of year when I've got to sit down with my husband. We kind of. And I say to him, you know, hey, what. What have you bought, you know, for this person, this person we got? We gotta like, match up things and. And then I realized he hasn't really done anything either.
- [02:16]
B
Yeah. Yeah, I'm like him. I know that. I know that Hannah's downstairs and she's like, don't worry, I've got it all. I've got it all figured out. So I realize I'm a freeloader here, but my excuse is I've had this terrible cold. And so if you, if you hear me sneezing and coughing, that's why. But I've got a, I got cough drop in right now, so we're going to try to fix that.
- [02:35]
C
Well, there's always an excuse, isn't there, Miles?
- [02:38]
B
That's why I didn't get presents this year.
- [02:42]
C
Well, I want to start out today talking a little, a couple of segments here on national security because there's a lot going on. Just recently, at the end of last week, the White House released its national security strategy.
- [02:57]
B
Okay.
- [02:57]
C
Now, this is a document for those folks who are not maybe in the national security world. This is a document that typically comes out once during a four year administration. And it's kind of a blueprint for where the country sees its national security threats. Okay. It's not a budget document, but it's something that kind of gives everybody a direction. So, for example, during Bush 2 administration, administration, we had 9, 11, the National Security strategy was written, talked a lot about terrorism and how do we fight the terrorist threat. And then during the Obama administration, there was maybe a shift a little bit toward China and some more great power competition, but still looked at the terrorist threat. And then you were in the first Trump administration and that national security, were you involved in that national security strategy?
- [03:52]
B
I was one of the handful of people drafting it. I can't say I'm proud of the document, but, but yes, I was, in fact, very early on in the administration, Amy, I had proposed a framework for Trump's national security strategy because I had just been doing a version of this exercise the year before he got elected. So I helped Paul Ryan craft his own sort of national security strategy when he had been speaker of the House. Is Ryan had put out this thing right as Trump won the GOP nomination called the Better Way Agenda. And it was meant to be the GOP's vision for the next few decades in American life. And almost no one has ever heard of it because right around the time Ryan crafted this thing, Trump entered the scene. And it was clear that this man not only was a strategic at best, he didn't think strategically, he didn't plan in advance of doing a thing, but that he, in a lot of ways, stood on the opposite side of the Republican party on so many issues, especially on foreign and defense policy. And so, you know, Ryan's vision for where US national security should go became almost instantly irrelevant. Now I engaged in this sort of fruitless effort to resuscitate that national security strategy we had crafted in the Republican House and sort of shoehorn it into Trump's worldview in the administration as an effort to try to steer the President towards a more rational foreign policy. But in that process, Amy, I realized it almost didn't matter because Trump wasn't going to read the document and the document was probably not going to govern what the administration did because we, we operated basically by tweet instead of by strategy.
- [05:45]
C
But the strategy then, during the first administration, if you read that document, it wasn't terrible. I mean, it was, it was, it was, it was very much, it was very much aligned with sort of the way that both Democrat and Republican presidents had viewed the world, probably, as you said, because it was not written by Trump, it was written by sort of the adults in the room. And then the Biden national security strategy was similar. Now the administration, this Trump administration just released this 33 page document and it is completely different than previous national security strategies. So we're talking about upending 80 years of U.S. foreign policy since World War II. Right? We're backing away from global commitments, we're backing away from the rules based order that the greatest generation put in place for us. The kept great power peace for, you know, 80 some years. Free trade is now bad, Miles. NATO is now bad. Immigration now threatens the United States. Russia, not a concern for us. I mean, this is, this is bonkers.
- [07:01]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's really crazy. If I would describe the, the strategy that was produced in the first administration as sort of like, you know, we walked into a heaping pile of trash and we tried to make a Michelin Star meal and we put it on top of that trash. But you could still see that under the filet mignon there was a pile of trash. So. Or put another way, lipstick on a pig, I mean, is what we tried to do with that first national security strategy. This time there are no illusions about it. The trash is the story. And it's more reflective of Donald Trump's actual worldview, which is transactional and not values based. And that's the big switch here. And a lot of us had warned about it after our first experience with him in that first Trump administration, that Donald Trump viewed America's role in the world in sort of the inverse of how we viewed it the past 80 years, as you note, which is that to him, our friends are our foes and our foes are our friends. I mean, it really is the opposite. And if folks doubt that even for a second, I'll just draw your attention to the last month of news in U.S. foreign policy, where some of our closest allies, like the Brits and our friends in Denmark, have started to treat the United States as a national security threat. The Brits have cut off intelligence sharing because they're worried we are using it to commit murder in the Caribbean, which I know we'll talk about in a bit. And Denmark just this week labeled the United. United States a national security threat because they're worried we might launch a spontaneous military mission to retake one of their territories, Greenland. And they're worried that we are trying to undercut Europe. So that's what's happening with our friends right now and then with our foes. Again, I said, just look at the past month. We basically put out a plan that was Russia's plan for peace in Ukraine. So we accepted our greatest geopolitical adversaries plan for how to. One of our greatest geopolitical adversaries plan for how to end this war on the doorstep of Europe, and then agreed to go give some of our most sensitive technology in artificial intelligence to another adversary, China. So we are literally rewarding our foes, and we have been punishing our friends to the point that they are scared to share things with us and to deal with us. That is how fast this has happened. Now, I don't think any of this has happened because of this national security strategy. The national security strategy is just sort of a mirror of the man who put it out.
- [09:40]
C
I feel like the movement toward Russia is now written down on paper. This national security strategy is terrible news for Europe. It's taking us away from Western Europe, as you said. It's actually listing countries that we should work more with, with the goal of pulling them away from the European Union, buddying up and cozying up with Hungary and some of these other countries that don't exactly share our values. It's just a. It's. It's what Vladimir Putin, what his press secretary would write for us. I feel like this is like, well, this is great. What does Putin think? Well, let's write that down.
- [10:27]
B
And I will say there was an effort in the first administration, you know, to try to guard against some of those worst excesses. I mean, it was obvious that, you know, Donald Trump had this deep and abiding affinity for Vladimir Putin. And what we didn't know. What his Cabinet secretaries didn't know and his Cabinet officials didn't know was whether, you know, that was just sort of miseducation. You know, Trump really didn't realize America's role in the world and the danger that Putin posed, or whether it was very much intentional and witting, if you will. And so in that first year, in addition to the National Security strategy, I remember the US Strategy towards Russia getting sent around to the different departments and agencies. And it was just before, I think John Kelly had left to go become White House Chief of staff. And I remember getting it in and taking it to him when he was DHS secretary and saying, boss, you got to look at this. This is crazy. This initial draft of the strategy is basically capit to Russia instead of standing up for American interests. And, you know, we made a bunch of, I'll call them edits, but we probably lit the document on fire. And Jim Mattis did the same at the Pentagon and Rex Tillerson at the State Department. And ultimately, you know, we didn't end up with this strategy saying, hey, let's become best buds with these people who want to kill us and take over the world. You know, let's continue to hold them to account. The reason that's important, as you know, Amy, it doesn't matter so much with the president. He's not reading that document. He's going to say what he's going to say anyway. But it's important because you use that to signal to all of the array of offices and programs across the government. Here's what you should and should not prioritize. And we didn't want to say to them, stop prioritizing protecting Americans against Russian spies and cyber attacks. Please keep prioritizing that. Please keep protecting Americans. This matters now, because now that the strategy is so clear, we are literally turning off our defenses. And I mean that literally. The White House is canceling cybersecurity programs, gutting offices that protect Americans against this type of influence. They are taking FBI, FBI agents off of cases that involve protecting us against foreign espionage. They are actually bringing the defenses down. So this has very real implications, again, even if Donald Trump himself doesn't actually read the documents.
- [12:54]
C
And the other thing that is interesting to me is Donald Trump is very much a might makes right kind of guy. And that hasn't been what the United States has been all about in the last 80 some years. We're very proud, we're very strong, but the greatest generation built for us. This world where dominant countries have some rules, they can't invade less powerful countries, for example, and get away with it. It shouldn't be able to. And I feel like Donald Trump is just taking that and just throwing it in the trash. He's saying, well, the less powerful should be controlled by the more powerful. And that's just the way I'm going to. And we're actually going to be that now. I think that's wrong.
- [13:42]
B
Yeah. And look, and it shows in the statements he's made in the past. I mean, there was a quote from Donald Trump, I think in 2020 during the pandemic when he said something along the lines of when the President says it, that's the way it's got to be and nothing else matters. Something along those lines is basically like, I am the law. It was as close to Huey Long as you could imagine of just saying I am the law. And you know, it's another way of saying might makes right. If I've got the power to make it so it doesn't matter if it was illegal or not. It now is because I've done it. That is his worldview. Those weren't slips of the tongue. He said a version of that in so many different ways. And now we are getting the rawest execution of it. I mean, you know, whether you rolled your eyes or not at this notion of in the first Trump administration there being the so called axis of adults around him, folks now see that it was real because the first term looks just vastly tamer than what we are experiencing right now. Was it perfect or even good? No, the first Trump administration was a disaster. But I think now folks are recognizing, oh, it could have and would have gotten so much worse. There could have been this blizzard of illegality and there was a thin veneer of bureaucrats holding back the wall and saying, we can't break the law, we can't do this just because the President wants to. There's a thing called the Constitution.
- [15:14]
C
That wall is gone now 100%. And when you talk about there used to be this people there to say, hey, we can't do this, it's illegal. Now, those people are not there. And the perfect example of this is these strikes in the Caribbean and in the Pacific which the Trump administration are saying legitimate, they're talking in this national security strategy about the Trump collarary to the Monroe Doctrine, which is basically saying, we're going to dominate the Western hemisphere, we're going to target and defeat these drug cartels using military force. Of course, none of this is authorized by Congress and these Strikes right now, which are very controversial in the place like the Caribbean. You're seeing them with this second strike on that first day being, you know, potentially a war crime. You know, we don't know because we haven't seen it, but the evidence that we have seen so far is pretty bad. Right?
- [16:21]
B
Yeah. I mean, look, I would go as far as to say this. I don't even think it was a war crime. I think it was just a crime because I think the underlying basis for the strikes themselves is so absurdly flimsy based on what we've heard come out of the Justice Department. I mean, the Guardian obtained, you know, leaked copies, allegedly, of the Office of Legal Counsel memo at DOJ that allegedly provides the underlying basis for all of these strikes. And that memo, according to those reports, effectively says that the United States has made the determination that the boats themselves, not the people, the boats themselves, and the drugs on them represent an imminent threat to the United States such that we are in a war. And the memo claims that the profits of those drugs are being used to fund a literal armed conflict against the United States because, of course, there is violence in the drug trade. This all rests on that one point, this. This kind of wacky piece of logic that drug cartels are not selling drugs to make money. They are selling drugs to wage a declared war against the United States. I think that is provably false. And. But you don't need proof to show that. And the whole thing rests on that, that sort of crazy logic that, no, no, no, it's a war because we say it's a war. I don't think you could ever get a single alive or dead that's ever even said a quote in public or private that their purpose in doing this is to somehow supplant the United States and take it over and destroy its democracy. These guys, as horrible as they are, they're criminals. They're criminals who are trying to make money in an illegal drug trade. They are not Nazi Germany trying to supplant governments around the world. They are not Al Qaeda and ISIS trying to overthrow the United States government. They may engage in violence in different countries, but fundamentally, it is not, under international law, warfare. And therefore, you cannot treat the belligerence, you cannot treat the drug couriers as belligerents, as combatants on a battlefield. And even if you could, then we would be assessing whether this was a war crime, because if it was a war, this appears to have not been conducted consistent with the laws of war. But I think we go to that first Question. I don't even think we can credibly say it's a war. And I think that is starting to dawn on people, including members of Congress, who have been privy to the logic in that memo. A lot of them have started to come out and say this is shaky at best and just patently illegal at worst. And I think that's ultimately going to be the conclusion of history, is that these strikes were based on completely flawed logic that says, no, no, we're just targeting the boats and the human beings are collateral damage, and don't worry about any of it because it's a war. And. And one more thing, Amy, I would say is even if you accept a whole bunch of these absurd premises, let's say we are in a war and, you know, let's say that these are legitimate targets, fine. But when you use airstrikes, that has to be done under the laws of proportionality. So, I mean, you know this better than anyone. I would defer to you on this point. But you use basically equal force when responding to something. So if you are facing an imminent threat, yes, you can use lethal force. If that boat had guns on it and the guns were pointed at US Soldiers and the trigger was about to be pulled, of course we can use lethal force back against them. But we don't need DOD to tell us that these boats didn't represent an imminent threat. Because it's obvious when you watch the videos, these are random boats in the middle of the ocean that we've now found out, many of which were not even coming towards the United States. Some were going to places like Trinidad. They did not represent an imminent threat. They might have represented a threat because we don't want drugs coming into the United States, but not enough to say we have to incinerate these people from the air. We have no opportunity to arrest them and prosecute them.
- [20:33]
C
Right. That's a really interesting point that I think hasn't been talked about enough. Is that proportionality argument, because that is really real. You know, when I was a fighter pilot, attack missions, you can't drop bombs all over the city if you're going after one guy. Right. You know, you're going after one targeted individual. You can't level, you know, five blocks to. To destroy that one person. You know, that's just not. It doesn't make sense. It's not proportional. And that's.
- [21:06]
B
You would have worried about that in the cockpit. You would have thought I could get court martialed if I use excessive force. I mean, surely you were consulting. You Know, with the mission commander and the jags and other folks, to make sure the targets you were going to go get had been properly identified, and you guys were using the right ordinance to go after them.
- [21:25]
C
But also, I feel like right now, with what's going on in the Caribbean, Donald Trump, he campaigned on getting us out of wars, and now we are slow walking into a war. I guess we're trying to go to war against Venezuela, which Venezuela is not the place where most of these drugs are coming from. And I've also looked at this and said, okay, if we really want to start a war on drugs and go after these guys, why is the President of the United States pardoning the drug runner who was actually convicted of running 500 or 300 tons of cocaine? And also, if we really care about drugs, and. And we should, because people are hurting in the United States. Certainly people are hurting and affected by them in Kentucky. Why would we continually cut prevention and treatment programs? And I just feel like now our tactic is to schwack boats in the Caribbean. It just doesn't seem like there's a real plan here for any of this stuff.
- [22:41]
B
Yeah. And also I would say that, you know, Trump thinks that this is what makes us look tough. You know, if we blow up boats, we look tough. I actually think this is a total weak guy's approach. We look really, really weak to the drug cartels because we are basically blowing up our evidence in the process. We are basically denying ourselves the opportunity to go get the big fish. Because this is what you do in law enforcement. These guys are criminal. Go roll up the low level guys. You get them to flip on the higher level guys. You map out the network and you take down the kingpin. And Donald Trump, as you note, is giving pardons to the kingpins and is just kind of blowing up the pawns on the board. That's a total weak guy's game. Like, what loser thinks that that's how you win on the chessboard? Donald Trump's not playing 3D chess. This guy is literally just playing with the pawns, you know, and blowing them up on the board. He's an idiot. This is a total loser's way of approaching drug cartels, not a tough guy way of out. Then I would say, Amy, to. To reduce it for folks, to just help them understand. You know, we talk about things like the laws of war and international law. That doesn't mean stuff to people. Just think about it in your own community. This is the analogy. There's a guy who's moved into Your neighborhood, and he's selling drugs and you want it to stop, and he's getting it from someone and you want him to stop. And so you call 911 and the cop goes over there and, you know, knocks on the door and the guy comes out. And before he even says anything, before the cop even can ask a question about where those drugs came from, the cop just unholsters his sidearm. Unprompted drug dealer standing there, doesn't have anything in his hands and just blows his face off, just kills him. Holy cow. You'd be in the neighborhood and say, I didn't want you to come and kill the guy. And. But, but do you know where the drugs are coming from? Can you stop this? And the cops like, I don't, you know, I don't know where the guy got the drugs. I just had to kill him. You're like, well, well, wait, we didn't solve the problem at all. Now you've just brought murder into the neighborhood. The drug dealers, you know, you've taken out their pawns. They don't care about their pawns. Guns. They're going to stick someone else in that house to sell drugs. And we would say that the cop clearly committed murder. Like, I mean, he had no justification just to pull out his sidearm and to shoot the drug dealer. That's exactly what's happening.
- [24:56]
C
And the neighbors are all scared of you.
- [24:58]
B
Neighbors are all scared.
- [24:59]
C
The people who once would talk to you will now not talk to you.
- [25:02]
B
That's right. Your friends, your friends say, this is crazy that you and the cops conspired to kill this guy. Things start to get real weird. That is, that's what's happening here on the world stage with what the United States is doing. And like I said, this is the weak man's way of going about it. I mean, you know, I used to help oversee these operations during the first Trump administration. I can tell you we engaged in dozens and dozens and dozens of law enforcement operations between the U.S. coast Guard and the Navy that were highly successful in going and intercepting these boats. It's not hard. There is no argument this administration can give me for why we couldn't intercept these boats. You know why? Because our guys, our men and women who go out there and do this, are freaking awesome at stopping these boats and arresting these people. They're real, real good at it. They're really, really good at it. And by the way, they get the intelligence that we use in courts to go stop these guys and take down these networks. It's Very, very effective. And what they've done, you know, to play Donald Trump's version of, you know, little kid military is deprived us of that opportunity to actually do something about the threat.
- [26:08]
C
Threat, yeah. And we've been doing it for a long time. You know, my husband was a Navy pilot, SH60 Bravo pilot, and he did these operations all the time. You know, and, and so while there, it's, we, we haven't stemmed all of the flow of drugs into the United States, but those operations do work and they are successful. So, I mean, we can't, we can't forget about that. But what, what do you think about this new seizing oil tankers off the coast of Venice? What, what, what are we doing here?
- [26:42]
B
It's going to get really bad. I mean, you know, that's, that's a prelude to war, you know, doing, doing that kind of seizure. I think the administration is probably, I think this is an indicator that we're veering towards some kind of land operations in, in Venezuela, and the administration is starting by intercepting economic assets of the Venezue. And my caveat here, of course, is Maduro's a very bad dude. You know, one of the worst leaders on the face of the globe. A very corrupt autocrat. Venezuela has been ruined by his leadership. But the American people have not asked to go to war in Venezuela. And the White House has not sold the American people on why we should be going to war in this country, why we should potentially let our sons and daughters go die in Venezuela to take over that country and to overthrow that regime. Now, what I think there is bipartisan support for in Washington is we want to see Maduro gone. And if that means supporting democratic opposition groups in that country, that's a good thing. But we want to see the Venezuelan people take back their country. Americans, by and large, if you ask them in polls, don't want to go send our people to go take back that country for Venezuela. But that seems to be what the administration is on the path to doing. And it's going to start with, you know, this effort to get some leverage over the regime by seizing its economic assets. But I think this is an extraordinary mistake. Right now we're asking for a fight that we're not going to get anything from.
- [28:22]
C
Yeah, I mean, I talked to a lot of people here in Kentucky and a lot of Trump voters as well. And I mean, I've never met anyone who said, you know, I really voted for Trump to go take us to war in Venezuela. That, you know, not even in the top five. If you were to ask people what are the threats that face this country, no one says, I'm really worried about Venezuela. We gotta get, we gotta, we gotta start a war there.
- [28:52]
B
Yep.
- [28:52]
C
I mean, it's just crazy what is happening right now. We have 15,000 troops down there, a carrier strike group, 12 or 13 different ships. This is really, we're building up. And I think I'm worried that we are going to start a war.
- [29:11]
B
Yeah. And look, people keep asking, I think, as if it's complicated, you know, why, why is he picking Venezuela? You guys, it's so simple. Let me let you into Donald Trump's psychology. It's just about money and that, it's hard to use that as the explanation because for so long that's been a political talking point in our system is if the United States goes to war somewhere and the opposition doesn't, the political opposition in the United States doesn't want us to. You know, they say the White House is doing it for money, and that's almost never true. I mean, you can love or hate George W. Bush, but the Iraq war was not because he actually wanted to go get oil. There's nothing to document that, nothing to support it. And guess what? We didn't see any economic upside off of that. It wasn't real. Now, it was an easy picture to paint.
- [30:01]
C
We didn't seize the oil.
- [30:02]
B
Yeah, it was an easy picture to paint against George W. Bush because he was an oil man. And there he goes into Iraq. I mean, that was an easy picture to paint. But I can tell you from having been in that administration and you were in government, Amy, it's not what was animating those people around the President. They were ideologues. You could make other criticisms about why they wanted to go into Iraq. There was more about democracy promotion, right or wrong, than it was about seizing oil. With Donald Trump, it's very, very simple. The places that he chooses to engage diplomatically are places where he sees economic upside full stop. That's what he cares about. If there's not something where he can get money or treasure, you know, benefit for himself, his family, or potentially for the country, he doesn't go do it. And so, you know, the guy is not, he's, he's not totally ignorant about where the money making, you know, opportunities are in the world right now. There is a reason he cares a lot about Ukraine. It's one of the most resource rich territories on the face of the planet. Venezuela happens to be the same. Donald Trump cares about these and he used to talk in private about carving up parts of the world like we would have heard 300, 400 years ago, you know, from, from the autocrats and the monarchs of world history. He sees the planet the same way and I think looks at Venezuela and he says, ah, I have an opportunity here if I oust this regime to control the supply of oil out of there. And by the way, I'm a real estate guy. Boy, can we develop Venezuela into a place and. But look, he's already said that about Palestine, he's already said that about Ukraine. This is how Donald Trump thinks, guys. It's not more complicated.
- [31:39]
C
Wants to take over Greenland. You know, that's right.
- [31:43]
B
Also resource rich and strategically, you know, beneficial in its location to the Arctic. That's what Donald Trump is doing here. PhD dissertations that are going to be written on, like, the strategic rationale. Give up that PhD, quit that program. There's no need for you to look into it. It's not more complicated than one word. It is money.
- [32:05]
C
Yeah. And the signal that it sends to other powerful countries like China, Russia is, well, you're powerful. You go do whatever you want to do. You want to take that over, you can take that over. You know, South China Sea, you could take that. Taiwan, you could take that. You know, I'm just really worried. It's a fundamental shift from what the United States has stood for for the last 80 years. And we all need to recognize that and push back on it. But speaking of money, last week, President Trump announced a $12 billion bailout to help farmers in America who've been struggling because of his trade war. Right. These tariffs that Donald Trump and the Republicans are cheering on, that they put on China and lots of other countries, but specifically to China, led China to stop buying a lot of American crops like soybeans. And that left many farmers and farmers here in Kentucky with huge losses. And this is at the same time that they're dealing with, with rising costs. So farmers are, are, are getting screwed, and now we have to bail them out. How do you see this?
- [33:22]
B
This is total insanity. I want people to imagine you're, you're headed to the grocery store, you got 100 bucks in your pocket. A pickpocket comes to you on the sidewalk, pushes you, steals that hundred bucks. You walk to the grocery anyway, you know, maybe you got a couple bucks in a front pocket, and you get to the register and, yeah, your money had been stolen, so you can't afford what you're buying, and then you turn the guy behind you is the pickpocket. And he hands you five bucks and says, don't worry, I'll cover you with your money. That is, that, that is basically what happened here. Donald Trump's tariffs were attacks on all Americans and harmed farmers. He basically pickpocketed our farmers, and now he's taking the money. He's basically pickpocketed from them and offering up a pittance from that, that, that theft and saying, hey, I realize I made it hard for you guys. Let me give you a couple of bucks, see if that helps you. This is bananas. It's also not more complicated than that. It really is not more complicated than that. That's what's happened. And, and I hope, first and foremost, our farmers realize that. I think a lot of them do. They're waking up to this. They are pissed off. They don't want to play this game where they're screwed out of the international system economically, but they get some additional money from the government because they also don't know if that money's still going to be there in the future. Are they just going to get bailed out forever? No. They realize that the problem here was the tariffs.
- [34:52]
C
That's what happened the first time they got bailed out during the first Trump administration. But that bailout didn't go so far because they had lost a lot of that market. And it's not what, you know, it's not what, as you said, it's not what farmers want. But it is very simple. It's like you tax the American people in the form of tariffs. You take our money, you destroy the farmer's market, which was an overseas market that they may or may not be able to get back, and in many cases, they can't get back. And then you take whatever little money you made off of these dumb tariffs, which you made it off of our taxpayer money, and you redistribute it, redistribute it to the farmers. So you're, you're, like, taking our tax money and handing it to them because you've screwed them over with their overseas markets. I mean, it is just, like, the dumbest thing on the planet.
- [35:49]
B
Well, and it's. It's socialism. I mean, I say that as someone who is an actual conservative. Donald Trump is not an actual conservative. He doesn't understand conservatism. He's a populist. And it's so funny how much he's hoodwinked his own followers. He's made them all look like idiots because he's, he's, he's planted the word socialism in their mouths and they said democrats, socialist, socialist, socialist. This is definitionally a socialist way of engaging in economics. Donald Trump is acting like the former Soviet Union or China in centrally controlling how our economy works and picking winners and losers. If the Biden administration or the Obama administration had done anything like this, I mean, conservatives would be lighting their boxer brief shorts on fire in front of the White House and saying, you know, we cannot put up with this. This is a socialist policy. And this is the consequence is it makes people totally reliant for their survival on the government, which is not what these farmers want. They want go sell their goods abroad and they wanna get an honest wage for doing hard work. They don't want the government to decide what the prices should be, to decide what the taxes should be and then flip em some coin when Donald Trump decides they deserve it.
- [37:08]
C
And a lot of times these bailout payments, they don't get down to the small farmer. You know, they help the bigger farms. They don't solve the real problem. And that's what we saw during the first Trump administration. And here we're doing a, doing it again. I mean, and oh, by the way, we can't forget that we decided to take US taxpayer dollars and bail out Argentina as well.
- [37:32]
B
I mean, talk about adding insult to injury. You know, our farmers are hurting. But guess who got taken care of first? Their farmers first.
- [37:42]
C
And with more money Miles with like double, triple the, the amount that.
- [37:47]
B
How do you feel about that? American farmers? I mean, maybe you voted for the guy. I don't care. It's never too late to do the right thing. I think if you voted for Donald Trump, now's the moment to wake up. Is if you didn't believe it before, he is trying to screw you. He does not care about you. Take it from someone who spent a lot of time with the guy. He doesn't give a shit about you. He does not. He cares about himself and he would say that type of thing in meetings with people. I remember my former colleague Olivia Troy telling me during the pandemic about a meeting where Trump was basically slapping his leg and laughing about, about how much he hated going to these rallies with his disgusting supporters and you know, needed to carry extra Purell to clean his hands because he views his supporters as trash. But he, you know, he knows that he can take advantage of them. And, and that's what he's doing here. And, and this time he's not making any, any, any bones about it. He's doing it very Brazenly, because he's not worried about re election.
- [38:43]
C
That's right. I mean, he's, look, he, he campaigned on, hey, you gotta, you gotta send me back to the White House because I'm gonna cut costs, I'm gonna fight for you. And now as this affordability issue is getting worse and worse, he's going out on these rallies and, you know, not even acknowledging that people are in pain. You know, I mean, he's like, oh, well, the prices are down. No, they're not. I mean, he just, I don't know, he's just looking the other way, lying about it. But people, people feel that prices are up. They feel this affordability issue, I mean, even, you know, Trump voters are out there and they're, they're coming forward and talking to the press and talking to people and saying, look, utility bills are up, electric bills have gone up, water bills gone up. You know, home prices are up, we're not seeing any break.
- [39:36]
B
And he's trying to pay, he's trying to pay himself from the US treasury in the meantime. I mean, Donald Trump has not given up his demand for a quarter billion dollars from the taxpayers as an apology for him having been investigated for committing obvious crimes in his first term. He's demanding a nearly $250 million payment from the Justice Department for the fact that he was investigated after he left office. That's crazy. This guy is literally just trying to steal money from the US treasury to pay himself while he's screwing American workers. And he thinks he's going to get away with it. And to say nothing of all the other ways, he's now used the presidency for personal profit. I mean, we forget about the fact that he basically coerced a billion dollar jet out of a foreign government that he gets when he leaves office. Okay, I'm going to tell you folks, like when Amy and I were both in government, if we got a gift from a foreign government of any value, like over 50 bucks, we had to declare it. And then it basically went to the US National Archives forever.
- [40:47]
C
It had to stay with the government. So one time when I was, I did an exercise in Egypt and it was called Exercise Bright Star. And at the end of it, we did this big soccer game between the Egyptian Air Force and the Marine Corps squadron that I was a part of. And I had just been a Division 1 soccer player at the Naval Academy, so I was still in pretty good shape, unlike now. And I played in this game. Game. Now, the Egyptian had never seen a woman play soccer. And they who who could compete with the men. And they were just floored. Now, I was nowhere near the most valuable player on that field. Okay? I was probably 26 years old, but I was a good player, and I held my own. And at the end of the game, we. We got crushed, by the way, like, seven to two. And at the end of that game, the Egyptian general. General Comes in with this huge plaque with, like, gold and all this stuff. And he, you know, I think he's going to give it to one of the Egyptian players who scored, you know, I don't know, six goals or something like that. Well, we're all lined up there, this crowd, huge crowd. And he hands it to me, and the crowd goes wild. It was a crowd of all men, by the way. And it was. I was, like, floored. I was like, this is great. I guess I'm the mvp, even though I'm not really the mvp. I bring that thing back to the United States States. It's just a plaque, but it had some gold and stuff on it, and it had the Egyptian flag and, you know, the American flag and everything. And I couldn't keep it. You know, I had to hand it over. I couldn't keep it. I couldn't. Couldn't bring it back to my house. You know, I had to hand it over to, I guess the Marine Corps. It's still somewhere, and, I don't know, on base somewhere.
- [42:31]
B
You know, you couldn't keep that plaque. And Donald Trump is going to get to keep an airplane. And by the way, you didn't ask for that plaque, Amy. Donald Trump asked for the airplane. People are forgetting about this. You go back to February, the President said publicly, I'm thinking about replacing Air Force One. I wonder if there's any countries out there that would donate a jet to the United States. And surprise, surprise, a few weeks later, later, Cutter came forward and said, we have a $400 million jumbo jet that we would love to donate to the United States of America. And then shortly thereafter, the Justice Department cobbles together this memo and says, and, oh, by the way, Mr. President, we think it's okay for you to keep it after you leave office and use it at your presidential library. What? This is crazy, guys. This is also not complicated. There's not some other version of that story there. Like, maybe this was important for diplomacy.
- [43:31]
C
Bloop, blah, blah, blah.
- [43:32]
B
No, no, no. It was a. It was a quid pro quo. It was a. It was a. It was a bribe. It was an obvious bribe from a foreign government to the United States to get favorable treatment. And guess what? This year, Qatar's gotten very favorable treatment from the United States, including negotiating a deal with the United States to be treated like a NATO country that if, you know, an attack on Qatar is treated like an attack on the United States. And we defend them. Look, we've got great allies there. You know, I did. I did a lot of good things with our allies in that country, and, you know, they help protect the American people against terrorism. A lot of things happen there. But this, to an external observer, looked very clearly like some kind of bribe to the President. And we've heard no better explanation from the administration otherwise, other than the fact that they've just said, no, no, those two things are not connected. No, no, they just. They gave the jet. It's altruism. They just gave this jet from altruism. And by the way, Amy, it's worse than Qatar just giving us this $400 million jet because Donald Trump reportedly, according to the New York Times, pilfered a billion dollars from the Pentagon to retrofit the jet to make sure it meets his specifications. So that's the first billion of taxpayer dollars he stole from you in this administration that I account for to go make his jet prettier, better, you know, safer, faster, more luxurious.
- [44:52]
C
And by the time that that's done, he'll be out of office.
- [44:55]
B
Yes, It'll be finished right around the end of his tenure, and the office of the President will get to use it for a few months before the private American c. And Donald Trump gets to use it for the rest of his life.
- [45:05]
C
Well, this has been a great conversation, Miles. We gotta get close to wrapping it up here, but I want to throw some quick takes at you. This is what we do on Truth in the Barrel at the end, when we have some interesting things but not enough time to talk about it. One of. One of the things that just happened last week was the United States Institute of Peace has been renamed the Donald Trump US Institute of Peace. I mean, you can't. I can't make this stuff up.
- [45:31]
B
Yeah.
- [45:32]
C
What's going on? Yeah.
- [45:33]
B
Gavin Newsom had the best response to this, which was that Kentucky Fried Chicken might as well found an institute of veganism, because that's what we're talking about here is the warmonger President Donald Trump is so hell bent on being seen as the peacemaker president that to make that seem reasonable deal, his staff, Marco Rubio in particular, have renamed this building that had been dedicated to peace in honor of Donald Trump. It's so funny that that happened in the same week as Trump was blowing up more boats in Venezuela, threatening the president of Colombia that he might go to war against that nation. And on and on. This is the peacemaker president, but you can't think of a clearer hypocrisy than that.
- [46:23]
C
I keep waiting for when, hopefully when all this stuff is done and we're finally through the Trump presidency. I just want to see the pictures of, you know, first of all, Pete Hegseth's posters, which are, by the way, all over the Pentagon right now. His face. I just can't wait to see them, like pulled down and put in the trash bin. And the Department of War sign, going away. And, you know, the taking down Donald Trump's name from the US Institute of Peace. I mean, that's such a. It's. Yeah, I can't even.
- [47:02]
B
And folks, it will happen. We're going to get to do that. And those are going to be some great moments. I think there's going to be some amateur smelters that come out of the woodwork here to go, you know, melt some of that stuff down and, you know, turn it into, I don't know, you know, statues to Rosa Parks and that sort of thing. But we're going to have some great opportunities to take that wasted metal and reuse it for better purposes.
- [47:28]
C
Yeah, I wanted to get your take on this one, too. So lawmakers, congressional lawmakers, the leaders in Congress outperform the rank and file members of Congress on stock trades by a lot. And so this is where I align with a lot of some lawmakers who I would never probably align with on pretty much anything. There's a representative by the name of Anna Paulina Luna who I have never Florida with Florida woman and typically thinks she's like, way off the charts different than me, shall I say. But she had filed a discharge petition. And that, you know, is something that lawmakers would have to vote on to ban the stock trading from members of Congress. And honestly, we should totally do this. Like, I don't understand why, why members of Congress aren't banned from stock training.
- [48:37]
B
Well, that's why it's a discharge petition. Right. Is leaders don't want to bring that to the floor. And so members are having to do these legislative maneuvers to force a vote because leaders of both parties have not wanted this to happen. And I'd agree with you there, Amy. I think it's an obvious thing to do. And look, if you want to go serve in elected office, it's not a big ask to say, hey, can you spend a few years where you don't get to use inside information to enrich yourself? That seems fair. Now, my bigger concern, of course, is, you know, the members of Congress who are making money off of stock trades pales in comparison to the absolutely historic level of corruption we are seeing out of the White House. I would say 100%. I'd love to fix that first, but this seems like an obvious and important thing to do. However, I will say in fairness, I think having worked on the Hill for a number of years, I think this has to do less with members of Congress necessarily in the leadership ranks getting access to very special information to make trades and more to do with something that I think is actually worse than that, which is that the people who raise a ton of money and make a ton of money are the ones that tend to rise through the ranks in leadership. And that's why you see their portfolios performing better, because it tends to be the richer people who work their way up in Congress. And so they tend to be, I don't want to say more financially literate, but more equipped to buy the asset managers that can make sure that they're making better trades. And so you, you know, some people say, no, no, no, it's gotta be because the inside information most of the time, I've never seen anything like that in Congress. But it's, but it's a worse thing. It's the fact that only the rich people are rising through the ranks in Congress and then they're enriching themselves in general off of that position and their influence. And that's what's happening here. And that's why they tend to be the ones whose portfolios are perform is, it's showing that the, the money has power.
- [50:42]
C
That's really interesting. I mean, members of Congress, the, the position is very powerful. The salary is not super high.
- [50:52]
B
Yeah.
- [50:52]
C
And so my, my belief on this was that, you know, the, these guys looked at it as well, I'm in a very powerful position. I should be able to get some benefit from that. You know, financially, I don't think it's right. Right. But I think that's, you know, part of why you get the pushback. And it's another argument in, from my perspective for term limits because I feel like you, we got to get back to looking at holding these positions as public service. Okay, yes, you get a salary, it's not, you know, CEO of a major corporation level salary. Okay. But it's, it's something. And, but I think that A lot of times these guys that stay in Congress for 20, 30 years, this is their job, this is their profession. And I actually think we need to get away from that and get Congress back to a place. And I don't even know if it was ever that place, but I think it's not working the way it is is. But get us to a place where people go there and think of these things as public servants. So I'm going to leave my business or I'm going to leave the military, or I'm going to leave something, I'm going to go serve in Congress and then I'm going to leave Congress and not look at this as, you know, this is what I do for a living.
- [52:20]
B
And we shouldn't think of this as novel. I mean, 2,000 years of history tells us that what you just said, Amy, is a pretty smart thing to do. I mean, you go back to the Roman Republic and the consuls, which was the equivalent of the presidency, and the tribunes and these other elected positions often had one year term limits where you could only come in for one year because they understood that the further you got out, the longer the terms were, the likelier the corruption and the potential opportunities to corrupt someone who had gone into one of those positions. So the assumption isn't always that a corrupt person's going into that job, but the longer that they're there and the more power they amass, the temptations are enormous and private businesses and others will say, ah, yeah, I got to influence that person. And term limits make that harder on both ends of the equation.
- [53:16]
C
I hear the arguments against term limits. Oh, you know, you're losing the knowledge and all the, that I understand that. I just think it's, we're way to the point where we need to try it because this, this, this isn't working the way things are going.
- [53:33]
B
So let's try it.
- [53:34]
C
You know, it's not like a whole lot of people are listening to experts in any other arena anyway. So, you know. Well, listen, Miles, this has been great. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Your insights are amazing. I hope you fight this cold and get better before Christmas. And I do want to say a shout out because this is arm. We call this Army Week. When I went to the Naval Academy. The Army Navy game is coming up this weekend. I'm wearing my Navy shirt. Go Navy. Beat Army. This is really important. There are some traditions that we need to keep in this country. So I want to end on that note. But I really appreciate you coming on the show Miles.
- [54:17]
B
I tell you, you saying that Amy makes me feel cold. Coldest I've ever felt in my life is usually whenever I've gone to that game. It doesn't matter where it is and when it is and which day it falls on. It always just seems to be bone chillingly cold there. And I've gone times where it's like 33 degrees and raining. The ice cold soaks through your clothes, so let's hope it's. I think it's going to be good weather for the game. And thank you for having me on. As always. I appreciate it.
- [54:43]
C
Awesome. Till next time. Thanks everyone for listening. Truth in the Barrel Foreign.
- [54:54]
D
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