The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

Michael Tracey is filling in for Glenn, who is off “gallivanting around somewhere on one of his mysterious misadventures.” 

Zaid Jilani is Michael’s guest to talk about what everybody is talking about: the Trump administration's threat letter to Harvard, which Harvard has defied.

 Tracey also covers what appears to be telegraphed as an increasingly likely march to war with Iran. According to the intrepid journalist, the war may not happen, but the groundwork is certainly being laid. 

There was another aspect of that Bukele meeting that hasn't gotten enough coverage: Trump was asked about the Iran negotiations that are sensibly underway between the United States and Iran. It's the first known senior-level contact between American senior leadership and Iranian senior leadership since the Obama administration – infamously, Donald Trump decided to withdraw, after the Obama administration, from Obama's signature foreign policy diplomatic achievement. 

You can criticize that achievement or herald it, but it was his signature achievement, I think it would be hard to dispute, which was the Iran nuclear deal, or the JCPOA. 

Trump campaigned for president in 2016, denouncing that deal. I vividly recall him appearing at a Tea Party Patriots protest in September 2015, alongside Ted Cruz, that was devoted to denouncing the JCPOA, with Trump saying he had never seen a worse negotiated deal in his entire life. 

Anyway, direct negotiations, or at least direct contacts, we don't really know the full extent of what's been discussed yet, have begun between the United States and Iran as of this past weekend. And Trump was asked about those negotiations. 

So, let's hear what he had to say. 

Video. Donald Trump, Nayib Bukele. April 14, 2025.

 That's Trump being asked if he is contemplating, or does the outcome envisioned here include a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, and Trump says, “Of course it does.”

Trump has been becoming more and more brazen with these overt threats against Iran, particularly since March 30, when he decided to place a phone call to Kristen Welker, of NBC News, the host of “Meet the Press.” “There will be bombings the likes of which they have never seen before.” That's what Trump called up Kristen Welker of NBC News and told her in a phone interview. 

There could be an extent to which people are inured by this because Trump says a million things every day, some are deliberately incendiary, some are sarcastic, some are trolling, some may be earnest. Who knows? We can never quite settle on what the proportion is here in terms of how we're supposed to interpret the endless cacophony of Trump’s remarks on a given day, but it is really worth noting that presidents hadn't tended to come out and publicly threaten Iran that they will be bombed in a time-bound period if they don't capitulate to U.S. demands. 

You have had previous presidents, including Obama, say stuff to the effect of all options are on the table with respect to Iran. But it was seen as so obviously bellicose and so obviously impermissible diplomatically to come out and just blatantly threaten to bomb Iran. Why? Because, in the case of Obama, if there was some potential diplomatic arrangement in the offing, which Obama subsequently did attain in 2015, then running around threatening to bomb Iran might be an impediment to achieving that because it could cast aspersion, grave aspersions on the intentions of the United States and its attempt to interact with Iran. 

So, I actually went and asked a handful of people who are the wrong kind of policy experts, who are involved with Iran policy professionally and know the history of Iran and U.S. relations really well. I asked them: Is there a precedent of a U.S. president cavalierly coming out and just saying there will be bombing of Iran if X, Y and Z don't happen? And they say, “No, no, this is unique to Trump,” except for Trump's first term, when he did threaten, after the Soleimani assassination, in January 2020, to bomb Iranian cultural sites. But other than that, it's really not customary for presidents to be so bombastic in their public utterances with respect to Iran. 

There are certain ways in which Trump really does defy foreign policy convention in a salutary way. One hallmark example from the first term is when, after some initial bluster, he did initiate direct diplomatic relations with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. The negotiations with North Korea didn't ultimately result in a settlement because, for one thing, Trump and his administration at the time insisted on maximalist demands around denuclearization that North Korea, as a matter of national pride or even personal pride on the part of Kim, was never going to agree to but it did break a significant taboo for those direct talks to even happen in the first place. It likewise breaks a taboo for Trump to be threatening to bomb Iran so openly, pursuant to some cobbled-together negotiations, which it's not even clear are in particular good faith. 

So, that just is an indication of how it can be a double-edged sword meaning defying foreign policy convention can at times be salutary because foreign policy consensus is rife with failure, rife insular clique type thinking, and often revolves around people who have a demonstrable track record of myopia and “inhospitability” to criticism or contrary ways of thinking. So, Trump has at times the ability to disrupt that. But the double-edged sword is he could also say he's defying foreign policy convention because it hadn't previously been conventional to just be openly threatened to bomb Iran as he's doing now repeatedly in hopes, presumably, that it could result in some diplomatic settlement because Iran is just going to be so bludgeoned into submission that they're going to agree to maximalist demands imposed by Trump. But who knows? It could also be a pretext for war. Trump could say, “Look, we made every effort to negotiate with Iran. We even defied some convention by resuming high-level contacts between the U.S. and Iranian senior leadership, but they were so obstinate that we had no choice but to launch this bombing campaign with Israel that we've been threatening for weeks. And actually, even in the 2024 campaign, Trump threatened it publicly then. 

So, let's take a look at what Steve Witkoff, who is becoming an all-purpose Trump envoy, initially focused on the Middle East, and that is still his official title, but he's also leading negotiations with Putin in Russia. He was on Sean Hannity's show on April 14, and he was asked about these ongoing negotiations. 

There's an undercurrent of humor here because Sean Hannity would have blown a gasket in any other circumstance in which a senior U.S. official was trying to justify the utility of directly engaging with Iran. Namely, during the Obama administration, I can vividly recall Sean Hannity thinking that even the mere fact of talking to Iranian senior leadership was an abandonment of core American values or whatnot and giving credence to this Islamic terrorist regime or what have you. But nonetheless, of course, in the presence of Witkoff, he has to remain cordial. 

Anyway, Steve Witkoff here gives some details as to what the conditions might be to obtain a settlement with Iran. 

So, let's take a look at that. 

Video. Steve Witkoff, Sean Hannity. April 14, 2025.

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

There is actually a lot to cover. I want to focus specifically on the meeting that President Trump had in the Oval Office with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, because there was a great deal of things said that I think weren't a lot of analysis, a lot of breakdowns, a lot of understanding of very consequential claims that were made, claims that in some senses were untrue, other claims seemed to be quite radical. 

It's always hard to know exactly when Trump says something, whether he really means it, whether he's doing it to be a little bit trolling, whether he's going to provoke some sort of response. But it nonetheless is our responsibility if the president of the United States says he intends to do something – and he didn't just say it once, he said it repeatedly throughout the week – obviously then it's important to discuss what it is that he said in the case of a radical idea like deporting American citizens convicted of crimes to El Salvador to serve in an El Salvadoran dungeon that is notorious around the world for human rights abuses.

I think it's very important to take that at least seriously enough to talk about it. If you object, that's your right as a citizen, you could say your duty, certainly a duty as a journalist. So, there's certainly a lot to break down. We will do our best to do that for you.

El Salvador is a small country; the U.S. had been at war with it, involved in dirty wars there throughout the 1980s. It is generally considered an underdeveloped country – still is – but President Bukele has gained global attention in part because the government under him just rounded up thousands and thousands of people who were not convicted of crimes but were “suspects in gang violence.” 

No question, a lot of them have been swept up who are innocent, many of them guilty, and they're put into not ordinary prisons, but prisons that are some of the cruelest, most dehumanizing and exploitative in the world, purposely meant to dehumanize. Bukele talks openly about the fact that the prisons pay for themselves because they force the prisoners, basically, to engage in slave labor. They love to take videos and photos and make all kinds of films showing the dehumanization process. 

Rights have been run roughshod over in El Salvador. There's no free speech; you can't criticize Bukele. If you're a journalist, you get attacked by the government if you do so. There's certainly no right to due process. People who go into this prison are meant to stay there for life. There's violence in this prison, not from the prisoners, but from the guards. It's a place that you're intended never to leave. 

A lot of people in El Salvador, as often happens with authoritarianism, love their leader. They love their authoritarian leader because it has had results. It has significantly lowered crime in a place once plagued by a lot of violence, it has now become significantly safer. 

In general, though, we in the United States, our founding values, our founding as based in the values of the Enlightenment, don't believe that we should sacrifice rights for safety. The whole Constitution, in fact, is intended to elevate the rights of people, even if it means impeding our ability to catch criminals. The founders understood, because they were waging a war against the British crown, that all the rights that the British crown routinely invaded in the name of stopping crime – invading people's homes with no search warrant, just rushing them through a trial with no rights if they thought they were guilty – those were the things that had to be avoided if America was really going to be free and democratic. These are the things in the Constitution that you can go and read, none of which are available in El Salvador. 

So, there is a little bit of an oddity that the person most responsible for this authoritarianism – you can even call it tyranny – in El Salvador, although with positive results that many of the people in El Salvador seem to like – again, it's not uncommon for people to love their authoritarian leader. People crave security, crave, crave protection. If you promise them that in exchange for something they fear, they'd be happy to give up rights. We've seen that in American history. That's what the War on Terror was. It's what all sorts of wars in the United States have entailed, including the Cold War. It's a very common formula that the American founders set out to avoid most. 

So, it's a little strange, to put that mildly, to see a political faction – what do you call it? MAGA movement or nationalists, whose primary objective or aspiration is to preserve American values – venerating a tinpot dictator, at this point, of a small Central American country as someone who is not just a close ally of the United States who we pay to imprison people even though they've never been convicted of crimes, we just send them there when their only crime is having entered the United States illegally – although some people have been sent there who haven't entered illegally, who are in the United States legally, seeking asylum, who came through a legal port on the border, the port of entry, as people are told to do. But in any event, it's not just that we're allied with him, but a lot of people seem to really admire Bukele, almost suggesting that we in the U.S. need to use him as a model, to use El Salvador as a model for how our own country should be – in part to fight crime, in part to fight the obvious problem that most people agree is a real problem of people pouring into the country illegally. 

So, the question becomes how much liberty are we going to sacrifice? How many constitutional rights are we to repudiate in the name of these other goals, whether, oh, we have to fight crime as though crime is rampant, worser than usual, or because of the problem of people in the country illegally? 

The laws of the United States make it very easy to deport someone who's in the United States illegally. You don't even have to go to a real court. You just issue a removal order, you go to a special deportation court that's not even part of the Article III Judiciary, it's just inside the Department of Justice, and they just rubber-stamp it. All they want to know is: Is the person in the United States here legally? If the person can't show they are – and it's very easy, it's just, here's my green card, here is my visa – if they don't have that, it means they've entered the country illegally and the court approves their deportation. 

But deportation means sending them back to their country of origin and what has been so controversial is not that. President Trump ran three times on a pledge of sending people in the country illegally to deport them back to their country of origin, people voted for him in the last election based on that promise of mass deportations. Most people involved in these debates have no problem with the legal deportation of people in the country illegally. That's what Trump pledged to do, he had a democratic mandate for that and polls show that's what people want. That's not the issue. 

What's happening is much, much different: people aren't being sent back to their country of origin. They're being sent to El Salvador, a country they've never been to, they have nothing to do with, they're not citizens of, never have been and they're being imprisoned in one of the worst prisons on the planet while the United States pays for their imprisonment and they're being imprisoned for life based on allegations of criminal activity.

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

As a program that covers only two or at the most three issues per night – because we prefer in-depth coverage to sort of cable-style quick five-minute hits of each different news event possible – sometimes, especially these days, it is difficult to keep up with all the news, given how fast and furious things are always happening with this new administration. 

As a result, we're going to try to devote one show per week or so to a sort of “Week in Review,” where we're able to cover more topics than we normally would cover on a typical program by inviting friends of the show on to talk with us about those. 

To help us do that tonight, we are joined by the independent Journalist Lee Fang and the always delightful and agreeable Michael Tracey. 

Lee Fang is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. He covers political and corporate wrongdoing on Substack at leefang.com. He previously wrote and reported for The Intercept where he was my colleague for many years; he has also written at The Nation and reported for Vice. He is an intrepid investigative journalist, always breaking lots of stories, working by himself or with an independent team. We are always happy to welcome him to the show.