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Good evening. It's Wednesday, January 24.
First of all, thank you for your indulgence as we were off the last few days as a result of my being under the weather. The real culprits here were my kids who passed me some sort of bug or flu that their little 14-year-old body enabled them to get over in less than 24 hours while it lingered in me and I suffered for four straight days. Time permitting, I will have a segment tonight vehemently denouncing them. But either way, we're very happy to be back. I'm feeling well enough to do the show and we're looking forward to it.
Also tonight, Donald Trump scores his second consecutive decisive victory on the road to determine who will be the 2024 presidential nominee for the Republican Party. Trump defeated former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, his last remaining competitor—using a very generously broad definition of that term—by a margin of roughly 12 points. The only reason it was even that close is because New Hampshire has an open primary, meaning that all voters, not just Republicans, have the right to vote in the Republican primary. And so many left-leaning independents and even Democratic Party voters who said they prefer Joe Biden answered the call of Democratic Party leaders and Democratic Party pundits that they go and vote for Nikki Haley, that it made the real gap seem less humiliating than it actually was.
According to exit polls, Trump won three out of every four Republican voters, which means that had only Republicans been allowed to vote, as happens in many of the upcoming states, the margin of victory would have been 50 points, 75 to 25, not 12. Trump's control of the Republican Party is historically massive and no longer in question. Nikki Haley, clearly addicted to the lavish media praise she has been getting, as well as all the dreams she's harboring of how much she can monetize her candidacy, is so extreme that she's even willing to go next to South Carolina, her home state, where she's certain to lose to Trump by a wide margin, despite that being her state. In fact, the person she anointed to be a United States senator, Tim Scott, endorsed Donald Trump as soon as he dropped out of the race, as have many of the most prominent South Carolina officeholders. It's very rare for someone to go and lose their own state, let alone lose it by the margin that she is likely to lose it by, and yet her humiliation is well worth the price she's willing to pay for more media attention and to monetize her future.
The fact that Trump's victories in these primaries have been predicted and expected is, I think, causing the really extraordinary nature of his victories to be somewhat overlooked. It is virtually impossible to overstate how much has been done by virtually every major center of power in the United States to sabotage Trump's candidacy, destroy his reputation and all but force voters to choose someone else. They've poured massive sums of money into that effort, and have not only had almost every major American media corporation devote seven years nonstop to depicting him as a literal Hitler figure, but they are trying to bar him from the ballot and even making history by becoming the first party in power to use their control over the judiciary and the prosecutorial power to try to prosecute and imprison their leading political opponent. And yet, in the face of all of that, Trump just keeps winning.
The collapse of establishment power and credibility, as illustrated by Trump's resilience and all but inevitable victory in the GOP race, continues, in our view, to be of historic significance arguably the most important story in American politics since Trump's emergence in 2015. We will do everything possible to examine all facets of that tonight, including even having on, yet again, the intrepid independent journalist Michael Tracy, who will join us from New Hampshire, where he has spent the last week or so doing reporting.
Then I know it's not being reported this way, but the reality is that the Biden administration has now heavily involved the United States, not in two new major wars, but in three new major wars over just three years. The Biden administration has financed and armed the proxy war against Russia and Ukraine; it is financing and arming Israel's now three-month-old war in Gaza, and it is involved in a new regional war that involves constant bombing of Syria, Iraq and especially Yemen, a country that they have bombed at least six times in the last three weeks, with votes on the white House to continue even more bombing.
As we have been reporting, none of this has been done without the slightest whiff of congressional approval, let alone congressional debate. The warnings we issued after the first bombing attack on Yemen are now even more visible than ever. Namely, when a president starts new wars without involving Congress, it is not just some technical violation of the Constitution— although it is—it is dangerous in its own right, as it can easily lead to the type of endless war we are now at risk of seeing, with no strategic plans, no metrics for success, no exit plans, no weighing of benefits versus the risks of regional escalation and full-scale war.
We’ll examine the latest in what can only be called this new Middle East war, and we'll speak with Erik Sperling, the executive director of the DC advocacy group Just Foreign Policy, one of the few D.C. advocacy groups that really applies its principles and values rigorously without the slightest regard for which party it helps or hurts. They have been leading the way in arguing why it is so vital that Biden, if he's going to continue to expand this Middle East war, at least seek the approval of Congress, and that a public debate is had.
And then finally, time permitting, we report on some of the latest and most gruesome developments in Israel's ever-expanding war in Gaza, including one horrific video scene, that appeared just today of the IDF shooting several men with their arms raised and waving a white flag, just moments after one of them gave an interview to a British news outlet, only to then be shot dead seconds later after the interview concluded, as well as the truly horrifying and almost certainly illegal abuse of detainees in Israeli custody. As always, the key factor, remember, is that it is the United States that is financing and arming Israel's war, and it is the Biden administration that has assumed the role of Israel's most stalwart and unflinching supporter.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
