Daily Updates

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Good evening. It's Wednesday, November 13.

Tonight: The principal liberal and media theme of the 2024 campaign was that Donald Trump does not merely have a bad ideology, and is not merely a bad person, but he is a fascist threat to American democracy: a literal Hitler figure who intends to impose violence and permanent dictatorship on our nation. How odd, then, to see the American Hitler invited today to the White House, where he met with the sitting President Joe Biden, who warmly shook his hand, expressed fondness for him, and vowed to provide him all the assistance he wants in facilitating his path back to power. 

If Democrats actually believed anything they had been saying about Trump and the singular threat he poses, all of this should seem bizarre and should never happen. But it did, precisely because few in the media or politics actually believed the fears they were trying to gin up about what a Trump re-election would entail. Obviously: you don't invite and embrace Hitler to the White House.

Then: Donald Trump announced a spate of appointees for key positions in his cabinet since we evaluated his initial choices last week. Today alone, he chose Marco Rubio to be his Secretary of State, Tulsi Gabbard to be his Director of National Intelligence, and – in perhaps the most surprising choice of all – announced Matt Gaetz as his pick for Attorney General. Yesterday – in another major surprise – he announced combat veteran and Fox News host Pete Hegseth to be his Secretary of Defense, and Mike Huckabee to be his Ambassador to Israel: obviously, Israel is the first country to which he appointed an ambassador because, in American politics, Israel comes first.

Understandably, people seek to read into every choice certainty about what Trump's new administration will do and be. But did anyone watch Trump's first administration? The reason so many people left with such bitterness and rage – from John Bolton to John Kelley and countless others – is because Trump so often rejected their advice and refused to follow their preferred policies. Whether Trump will rely on Marco Rubio, JD Vance, or Matt Gaetz – or just Trump himself or whoever he is listening to – is very difficult to ascertain, let alone with certainty.  

There is clearly a lot in common with Trump's national security choices in particular. They are almost all fanatically, almost religiously loyal to the Israeli state, far more than many Israeli citizens are. And at one point or another, all of them, or most of them express views that one could easily describe as classic establishment Bush-Cheney foreign policy views or even outright neoconservatism. 

There is clearly a lot in common with Trump's national security choices – they are all fanatically, almost religiously, loyal to the Israeli state – far more than many Israelis themselves are – and, at one point or another, expressed views that one could easily describe as classic establishment, Bush-Cheney foreign policy views and even outright neoconservatism. Marco Rubio is probably the pick that most vividly exemplifies that, and there are many others.

Perhaps it is true, as many are arguing, that these appointments signify that Trump will be just a standard adherent to the DC foreign policy blob, and will pursue policies of confrontation, militarism, and war in his new administration. I understand why that conclusion is tempting – I certainly am far from a fan of all these choices, to put that mildly – though I am a fan of several – but I think the picture is far more nuanced and ambiguous and uncertain about who will wield power in this administration and how. And so, we want to devote the bulk of our show to digging into these choices and what they likely do, and do not, signify.

Finally: Jeremy Loffredo is an outstanding independent journalist whose work we have featured on our show previously. Loffredo is an American citizen whose reporting has been primarily done with Grayzone. He has spent the last year focused on critically scrutinizing the Israeli destruction of Gaza and the role of the U.S. and extremist ideologies in that. Agree or not with each one of his views, that is the work of a journalist.

Yet last month, Loffredo was arrested at a West Bank checkpoint by IDF soldiers, blindfolded, and put into solitary confinement. His crime? Reporting on the damage done in Israel by Iranian cruise missiles after Israeli officials falsely claimed that none of those missiles landed and did damage. Despite the fact that Loffredo's reporting was cited and divulged by Israeli outlets, his arrest was clearly punitive retaliation for the critical reporting he's done of Israeli occupation and war. We'll talk to him about what he endured and what it means about Israel's attitude toward journalists and whether “the region's only democracy” still deserves that term.

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Good evening. It's Monday, November 11. 

Tonight: It has been 5 full days since Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 election and, as such, the President-elect of the United States. To say that Democratic Party officials and corporate media personalities have not handled this news very well is to dramatically understate the case. At least since the Sept. 11 attacks, I have rarely seen such a frantic and unhinged reaction to any event as we're seeing toward this election result, and the spasms are, I'm afraid, nowhere near the end, but merely in their incipient stages.

To begin with, Democrats and their media allies need to explain to their faithful partisan hordes how this happened – why would people as honorable and decent and noble and patriotic as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz possibly lose a national election to a ticket led by a convicted felon and twice-impeached monster and insurrectionist who is literally the new Hitler, along with his Vice President whom they proclaimed to be, depending on the week, weird, fascistic, and a Silicon Valley puppet. There are two rules Democrats and the media must follow in offering an explanation – first, to identify who the villains are who caused this traumatic event, and secondly, to ensure that the villains are anyone other than the Democratic party, its leaders, its establishment ideology, and its media and secondly, they have to ensure that the villains are anyone other than the Democratic Party, its leaders, its establishment ideology, and its media. The one thing they all agree on is that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the Democratic Party. The same thing happened after 2016. People who voted for Trump are racists and misogynists, some argued. They are deceived and confused by a steady stream of disinformation fed to them by right-wing oligarchical media barons who somehow control the independent podcasts and shows that have become far more influential than CNN or the New York Times. Or it's Joe Biden's fault for not dropping out soon enough. It's just a problem of messaging – people never were told why the Democratic Party deserved their gratitude. Or it was all the left's fault for their excesses on culture war issues such as trans rights. 

Anything to avoid having to confront and grapple with the real rot at the heart of the Democratic Party: its corporatism and militarism which produces major benefits for a small clique of American liberal elites, while leaving everyone else ignored and abused. I've often said that the two most accountability-free professions on the planet are politics and punditry. No matter how much they fail, they never acknowledge their failures, find someone else to pin the blame on, and just merrily continue in their positions of now-rapidly diminishing influence and power. That is exactly what we're seeing right now, an attempt to shift the blame onto anybody other than the actual culprits, which are themselves. 

Then: There are many things one could say about the first Trump presidential term. That it was driven by rigid ideological coherence is not one of them. For all sorts of reasons – constant contrived scandals from the U.S. Security State disseminated by the corporate media, Trump's lack of familiarity with how the Swamp really worked, the conflicting factions he allowed deep into his government – it was hard to discern a clear political worldview from these first four years. Official Trump policies often conflicted with the President's rhetoric; his orders were often thwarted or ignored by unseen bureaucrats; Trump seemed unsure of himself when it came to particularly complex policy decisions.

Trump himself has acknowledged many of these problems and is explicitly vowing to avoid their repetition. But there are, of course, all sorts of ideological factions vying to influence him: none more dangerous than the neocons and warmongers who sometimes populated his first time and are eager to drive him into the very wars he insists he wants to avoid.

Those tensions were evident over the last several weeks as Trump's CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, arguably the worst person and the first Trump administration was included in Trump's inner camp on some of his last campaign stops, clearly attempting to worm his way into a position of influence. But Trump, responding to the concerns of the anti-interventionist wing of his Republican base, preemptively announced that he would bar both Mike Pompeo and, for good measure, Nikki Haley, from any position in his administration and wish them the best of luck in the future. That announcement, combined with Trump's prior selection of J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate earlier this year, created hope that Trump would freeze out that standard DC warmongers and interventionists from tape shaping his top national security start. Donald Trump Jr. this week vowed that freezing such people out was his top priority and by all reports, Donald Trump Jr. is wielding more influence in the Trump camp than ever before. 

Today, however, Trump announced that he was appointing New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Nikki Haley clone, to Haley's old position as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.. He also just announced moments before we went on the air that Congressman Mike Waltz, Republican of Florida and former Green Beret, somebody who has been quite hawkish in the war in Ukraine – he actually opposed Trump's attempt to withdraw from Afghanistan, is quite hawkish on China, though he is a NATO skeptic – will be his national security advisor.

None of these individual appointments standing alone will definitively signal what differences, if any, the second Trump administration will have from the first. But we do have some revealing clues thus far that at least are worth examining, especially because there is clearly an ongoing fight among those closest to Trump to shape how these differences might emerge. But it's definitely worth looking at since we have enough data points at this point to try and map out how we think that will evolve. 

Watch the full episode HERE

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Good evening. It's Wednesday, November 6, the day after the 2024 presidential election. 

Tonight: Donald Trump last night won the American presidency for the second time in a sweeping landslide. Trump won all seven of the so-called swing states. He is almost certainly likely to win more than 300 Electoral College votes. His lead in the popular vote over Kamala Harris is now almost 4 million, which would make him only the second Republican candidate this century to win the popular vote, the other being the wartime president, George W. Bush, in 2004. He also beat Kamala and her running mate, Tim Walz, in his home county in Minnesota. As striking as the massive margins are, is the breadth of demographic groups in which Trump made major strides since 2020. In fact, in virtually every demographic group other than college-educated women, Trump improved his vote totals from 2020 and 2016, chief among them among Latinos, but also Arab and Muslims, young people, and, by large distances, non-college-educated white men and white women. In other words, Trump, who has been branded by the national media virtually every day since 2015 as a racist, a white nationalist, a white supremacist fascist, owes his win in large part to the massive number of nonwhite voters who migrated from the Democratic Party toward Trump, starting in 2016 and into 2020 and even more so in 2024. 

On top of that, the Republicans took control away from the Democrats of the Senate and appear likely – it's not certain, but it appears likely – that they will maintain control of the House as well. The biggest loser in all of this, besides the Democratic Party and their neocon allies such as Liz Cheney, is the corporate media to say that they are becoming more and more irrelevant at a rapid speed is to severely understate the case. They spent the last week of this campaign focusing on such towering issues as how a joke told by a comedian at a Trump rally enraged celebrities such as Bad Bunny and Jennifer Lopez, thereby, according to them, jeopardizing Trump's ability to attract Latino and especially Puerto Rican voters, as if that's the first thing on their mind when they go to vote. They spent 48 hours melting in contrived indignation over their false claim that Trump threatened Liz Cheney with execution by firing squad. I suppose we'll see whether that actually is scheduled shortly, whether it's on pay-per-view or whatever. But at least as of now, it was a completely fabricated allegation that they spent two or three days full days drowning in and that most of their time over the past two months has been screeching that Trump is the new Hitler coming to put all of them – these very important people in the media, the pundits and the various politicians – to come and put them all into camps. 

None of that mattered in the slightest, and that is not only because corporate media is rapidly losing their audience to independent media outlets, podcasts and the like, but also because their lives are increasingly lived in a different universe than the millions of Americans on whose behalf they believe they speak. So many of them, these cable pundits and op-ed writers spent the day expressing pure bafflement – “I just can't understand why this happened. After everything we said about Trump, how can people go and vote for him in such large numbers” – while others spent the day blaming and heaping scorn not on the Democrats for losing, but on the voters for not doing what they were told. Particular scorn was reserved for Latino and Arab voters accused of being racist and misogynistic. Because, as we know, nothing enrages Democrats the more than one member of marginalized groups that they believe they own don't do as they're told. In sum, the leaders of the Democratic Party can never fail. They can only be failed by primitive, stupid, bigoted, and racist American voters who have a lot more to say about what is clearly a historical election. There is no figure like Trump in all of American history for multiple reasons and a bit later in the show, we are joined by the great, best creative journalist and my friend Lee Fang, who principally writes at his great Substack but is also a contributing writer for the British Journal Unheard. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.