Max Blumenthal Interview: Can Trump Salvage His Presidency? (Transcript) 

That con worked momentarily because voters were so desperate to end the genocide, in this heavily Arab American district, but it’s not working this time. It totally failed. Everyone has seen through it.

So there’s nothing that he can do to stop the bleeding. The only rational course for him to take right now would be to completely isolate, possibly in Bellevue, I don’t know if that mental institution is still functional, Laura Loomer, who he praised as a great Republican strategist, Mark Levin, Mark Dubowitz, who’s been advising CENTCOM Chief Brad Cooper and helped basically design the blueprints for this war through his Israel First think tank, FDD, and Marc Thiessen at The Washington Post. Just isolate all of the figures that were Netanyahu’s proxies that helped get Trump into this war.

And I don’t know if he has the strength to do that. Also, Ben Shapiro. Will Trump even— will he do that? Will he clear the way for J.D. Vance? I don’t think he has it in him. And I don’t know if he can. He may be so compromised by how deeply integrated he and the White House and MAGA have become with Netanyahu’s Likud infrastructure that he can’t do the rational thing at this point.

But one thing is for sure, Judge, it’s going to be much harder for Trump to do what we thought he was going to do, what Mark Levin and Netanyahu were lobbying for several days ago, which is to launch a massive third all-out assault on Iran.

Will Trump Launch a Third Assault on Iran?

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:09:44 – 00:10:25) The New York Times reports this morning that Netanyahu has another argument he’s making to Trump, that Iran has chemical weapons, an argument totally debunked by the CIA. But of course, Netanyahu and Mossad are making it anyway. Yeah.

I’m actually curious as to why you think— and maybe you’ve explained it already because Trump was so devastated last night— he didn’t start the war right away when his whisperer, Keith Kellogg, lunatic that he is, said “expect this to heat up on Wednesday,” meaning today.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:10:27 – 00:12:07) Yeah. Yeah, that was wishful thinking. And Kellogg, when you heard his comments, they were just promising more of the same. “Oh, we’re going to hit them so hard. We’re going to smash Iran. We’re going to hammer them.” With what? And where are the interceptors to protect Israel?

As the researcher Stephen Semler showed, the US fired more very advanced interceptors to defend Israel during the first round, Operation Epstein Fury. Or sorry, the second round, right, than Israel did to defend itself. The US blew through over one-third of its stocks and it’s going to take a while to replace them. Where are the standoff munitions? They don’t have— and they don’t have that.

And Trump no longer has the political— not just the— he never had the political capital to do it, but the political insulation from Congress to do it. That’s gone. There’s going to be another election in 2 years. The Republicans are going to get hammered again. They’re going to suffer further losses in the Senate and the House. The Democrats could come in with a supermajority.

J.D. Vance has issued a statement blaming the Iran war, attempting to insulate himself from his role in failing to do anything of substance, as Joe Kent did to stop this war. So Donald Trump, if he follows Keith Kellogg’s advice or Mark Levin’s advice, he’s calling for war again. Or Laura Loomer’s advice, she’s calling for war again, for a new round of war because, I guess hurt people hurt people. If he follows their advice, the losses will extend all the way into the vice president’s office.

J.D. Vance’s Statement: Too Little, Too Late

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:12:08 – 00:12:43) Yeah. Were you surprised, Chris? Can you put that full screen up again? Were you surprised when Vance made this statement? It’s a pretty long X, but he makes it clear: end the war, focus on the cost of living, put America first, Max, change our relationship to Israel.

He said this within hours of Trump saying, “Well, don’t blame me, I wasn’t on the ballot.” Don’t blame you? You started the war. Unilaterally started the war. At Netanyahu’s behest.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:12:45 – 00:13:16) Yeah, I would just like to know what J.D. Vance did when it would have mattered. And this was in February when Netanyahu was in town and Israeli military figures— before Netanyahu came to town, I think the Mossad director actually came and they were just providing instructions to the Trump administration on what was going to happen in Iran, how it was going to happen. And no one was explaining to the American public why it was going to happen. And J.D. Vance was nowhere to be found.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:13:18 – 00:13:19) Yeah.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:13:19 – 00:14:40) Yeah. He was essentially a yes man at that point, even if he privately disagreed. And hiding behind Tucker Carlson is not going to cut it with the American public.

I also would point to another signal event. A pivotal event, which is right after Islamabad, where J.D. Vance was sent to negotiate an MOU that the Trump administration was going to blow up. The Trump administration immediately allowed Marco Rubio after Islamabad to go to Beirut with Beirut’s completely sold-out, anti-sovereign government and to negotiate a separate MOU, which directly sabotaged and undermined the Islamabad MOU by allowing Israeli forces to remain in southern Lebanon and to continue blowing up homes and ethnically cleansing Shia citizens of Lebanon in droves.

And what did J.D. Vance do against that? He was directly stabbed in the back by Trump’s Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, who was Grant, who had just been sitting ringside at UFC with Donald Trump. What did he do? So this is just too little, too late from J.D. Vance.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:14:41 – 00:14:49) Yeah. He is a big loser from yesterday. He couldn’t deliver his own state. He couldn’t deliver the seat that he—

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:14:49 – 00:14:50) with the same donors.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:14:51 – 00:14:51) Right.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:14:51 – 00:14:58) Right. Ramaswamy was backed by the same donors who created J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel being chief among them.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:14:58 – 00:14:58) Correct.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:14:59 – 00:15:25) I mean, I’m sure J.D. Vance could swing a baseball bat better than Vivek, or I hope he could. But I mean, this was a huge, huge blow to the machine that J.D. Vance is supposed to construct in place of Trump Incorporated. Whereas Trump, from 2016 onward was able to deliver in key races like Georgia, for the candidates he backed.

Lindsey Graham’s Seat and the Repudiation of the Neocons

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:15:27 – 00:15:36) Trump, Trump lost every— Republicans lost every state that Trump visited this fall except for Florida.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:15:38 – 00:18:05) Well, South— how about South Carolina? Lindsey Graham’s seat was flipped by a very milquetoast Democrat. The Democrats have not won a Senate election in South Carolina since 1988. That was when Fritz Hollings won reelection.

He was kind of, he’s sort of an antiquated extinct breed of conservative populist Democrat from the old kind of Dixiecrat tradition who opposed free trade. He opposed the First Gulf War. He was an outspoken opponent of the Second Gulf War. He was denouncing the neocons. Then Democrats moved away from that kind of politics in the South, and now suddenly they’re back just because people hate what Lindsey Graham represents so much.

He installed his own sister, they installed his own sister after his untimely and sort of mysterious death, unless his sister is himself in drag. This was a massive repudiation for the whole neocon wing. Lindsey Graham was going over to Tel Aviv advising Netanyahu on how to manipulate Trump. He was literally an advisor to the Israeli government. And we’re going to pretend that this had anything to do with something other than Israel and Iran?

I watched CNN last night for 3 hours, partly because I’m a masochist, but also because they were doing instant results and I want to know what corporate media wants me to think. And all they could talk about was the ad Vivek Ramaswamy ran featuring Amy Acton’s mom as a reason why the Republicans lost. They weren’t talking about the economy, and I only heard one brief mention of the Iran war.

But this is why Lindsey Graham’s ghost has been cast to political hell. This is why Mike Lawler lost. This is why Randy Fine in his gerrymandered Republican-plus-20 district that was apparently promised to him 3,000 years ago as one of the few Israel First survivors of this election, why the Republicans were hammered in the heartland, why they were— Greg Abbott, one of the biggest Israel First fanatics in Texas, this was at least a peripheral factor in his defeat. Texas is also a big farmer-producer state right now. Yeah.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:18:06 – 00:18:15) You didn’t misspeak when you said Randy Fine was promised 3,000 years ago. You didn’t mean to say 3 years ago. You mean literally Randy Fine believes that?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:18:15 – 00:18:16) He said that.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:18:17 – 00:18:18) He said that Mike Huckabee believed it.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:18:20 – 00:18:47) Randy Fine took to Twitter and said he won because God was lifting him up. He basically said that. As I mean, he’s in one of the safest red districts in America where he is. He is, by the way, he’s imposed a 5-year, working with the local sheriff, 5-year prison sentences for littering in his district, because a group called the Goyim Defense League was handing out leaflets.

Tucker Carlson, Lavrov and the Nuclear Question

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:18:49 – 00:19:54) Well, that would be cruel and unusual punishment, 5 years in jail for littering. Littering.

Our friend Tucker Carlson, who famously in the past 3 or 4 days said he believes that Trump was prepared to use nuclear weapons in Iran, and our other friend John Kiriakou, who said the same thing in part because Trump wants to get rid of the taboo of American presidents not wanting to follow in Harry Truman’s terrible footsteps, provoked a response from Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who confirmed “no nuclear strike on Iran is planned. Carlson’s claims lack basis.” Ready for this? “Moscow and Washington continue counterterrorism intel exchange.” And that includes the plans of either side to use nukes. How about that?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:19:56 – 00:21:41) Well, it’s important that he forced the discussion. To force the issue of the possibility of a nuclear exchange at this point is always important, and it’s been sort of a personal passion of Scott Ritter as well, who worked on these issues, who worked on arms controls, to remind us that these nuclear weapons are still there and that there are fanatics very close to Donald Trump who have been pushing him to deploy a nuclear weapon in Iran.

One of them is no longer with us. His name is Sheldon Adelson, and he declared on stage with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the walking advertisement for antisemitism, that he would like to see a nuclear weapon dropped on Iran. His late wife is one of the major donors to the Republicans in the midterms and to Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, together with Jeffrey Yass and Paul Singer and all these other ultra-Zionist donors. They’ve ponied up something like $270 million for Trump’s reelection. So it’s not as though this is some fantasy that Tucker Carlson’s conjuring out of nowhere.

But what’s also important to note is that Iran is not Japan. Iran is not— when Japan was nuked in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it had already been defeated, as admitted, acknowledged at the time by the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower. The Strategic Bombing Survey found that Japan would have capitulated within weeks and there was no need to bomb Japan. Iran is not about to capitulate.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:21:42 – 00:21:42) Right.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:21:42 – 00:22:46) And a tactical nuclear weapon on Pickaxe Mountain or dropping a MOAB would not lead Iran to cry uncle and come to the table and offer up its nuclear dust. It would only escalate. Any attack on Iran now would lead to escalation.

The severing of fiber optic cables under the sea, which could lead to worldwide internet outages, the hammering of data centers that have been placed across the UAE and other Gulf states, the massive assaults on Aramco oil fields, the fields at Fujairah, the port at Fujairah. I mean, the destruction of the global economy would accelerate massively.

So we shouldn’t only be concerned about a nuclear attack. Any conventional attack on Iran is going to have horrible repercussions for the world. The entire world opposes this except for the subscribers to The Atlantic magazine and Mark Levin. So, yeah.

The Battle for the Democratic Party

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:22:48 – 00:23:06) Tell me your thoughts on what the election has done to the Democratic Party, which now has an El-Sayed AOC wing. And a Chuck Schumer, Josh Shapiro wing.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:23:07 – 00:26:32) Well, yeah, they’re at least wings, right? Thomas Massie is kind of on an “I told you so” tour today because he was heading up the rational America First wing of the Republican Party that was warning that this war would destroy Donald Trump’s entire coalition and shatter the party. Now there’s no America First wing left in the GOP. There’s literally no one left in Congress to say that. He was driven out, Marjorie Taylor Greene was driven out. I don’t know who else, everyone else was driven out.

So the arena for contestation now is the Democratic Party. But the wing of the party, the El-Sayed party wing of that party, has already won the argument. And they won the argument among the party base. If you look at every poll of Democrats, the support for sanctioning Israel, ending aid to Israel is overwhelming. There is absolutely no support for the Iran war.

There was also this fantasy put out there about the Jewish vote. And we kept hearing that Jews were going to turn their backs on the Democratic Party because it’s so antisemitic because of the podcaster Hasan Piker and his uncle and Abdul El-Sayed and the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Republicans wound up increasing their share of the Jewish vote by 10%, which means they got 10% more of 1% of the electorate in Michigan.

The Jewish vote is this term that corporate media uses as a stand-in for a very small slice of the American Jewish electorate who identify personally and politically with Israel and who play a disproportionate and outsized role within the donor class that funds both parties. So they’re actually saying Jewish money and Israel First money.

The rest of American Jews vote like typical Democrats. Their first issue is the economy, then they vote on social issues, and Israel is way down on their priority list. That’s most American Jews. If you look at a J Street poll of American Jewish attitudes on the Iran war, or other polls, overall American Jews oppose the war at the same level as other Democratic voters.

So where does that leave the Schumer and Jeffries wing? They have the donor class in their back pocket. They’re heavily funded. They’re still there in their leadership positions, and what’s dangerous about this victory is although they scarcely opposed the Iran War, they are claiming ratification of their leadership with this massive blue-nami, and it’s going to be much harder to extricate a figure like Schumer or Jeffries, who are 2 of the biggest recipients of AIPAC money in history, from their positions now.

And if you believe Yair Lapid, who’s an Israeli opposition leader, he just wrote a fairly interesting or informative post on what Israel plans to do. Israel, if Netanyahu’s own leadership recedes, will lean on Schumer and Jeffries to hold off the other wing of the Democratic Party that wants to do what its base wants, which is actually democratic in a small-d sense.

Shielding US Aid to Israel From the American Public

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:26:34 – 00:26:58) Do you think that Trump and Netanyahu actually had a conversation last week in which they talked about dialing back American aid to Israel, or do you think it was just a pretext, a scheme which would allow Trump to throw it out there at the last minute in the hopes of turning some votes?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:27:00 – 00:27:35) This conversation did take place. It was driven by Netanyahu. It’s a plan that’s actually being advanced in Washington by Mark Dubowitz at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who’s one of Netanyahu’s key lobbyists in Washington. And it is not to actually reduce U.S. material assistance to Israel. It’s actually to shield US aid to Israel from the will of the American public. So they will no longer just give the aid in a vote in Congress every year.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:27:36 – 00:27:42) Oh, it’ll be that automatic thing that Tom Cotton proposed?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:27:43 – 00:29:15) Yeah, I think it’s like Section 219 of the NDAA, and it’s to integrate the US military and U.S. intelligence with the Israeli military intelligence apparatus. And Dubowitz spelled this out very clearly. He said, “We need to do this so that anytime Congress or the American public attempts to disentangle itself from Israel, it hurts America.” That’s the point.

So they’re preparing for the U.S. to actually attempt to reorient itself away from the special relationship with Israel. Netanyahu openly spoke about this in his campaign in an interview in Hebrew. He conjured up the very real specter of US sanctions on Israel and said Israel’s prepared to use crypto and all sorts of other means to evade sanctions like a rogue state.

And Dubowitz, if you go to his Twitter account right now, he’s talking about the prospect of a Democratic-led White House and Congress imposing sanctions on Israel, first over illegal settlement activity in the West Bank, but he’s correctly said that the entire Israeli economy is connected to the settlements. So they see the writing on the wall, and their only way they can preserve this tiny little foreign apartheid project is through the de-democratization of our country.

Closing Thoughts

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:29:18 – 00:29:24) Wow. Hey, well, I was happier over the outcome of the election until your analysis, Max.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:29:24 – 00:29:38) No, I mean, I think it’s the truth. I mean, I feel optimistic. There’s been a total cultural shift. And I would say Judging Freedom has played a part in that, a major part in that. Yeah.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:29:38 – 00:30:08) Thank you. Thank you. I did get some heat for endorsing El-Sayed, but it didn’t change my mind. Oh, I know Mike Rogers very well. I argued with him many times when I was at Fox. He’s the NSA’s guy in the Congress. That’s the last thing we need.

And I said to his face, “Mike, in your copy of the Constitution, there’s a hole where the Fourth Amendment is supposed to be.” And he stormed away. Not the way Randy Fine stormed away from you.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:30:11 – 00:30:27) I mean, that’s the principled take is, this isn’t about partisanship, it’s about principle. And Mike Rogers has waged a one-man war on the US Constitution since he’s been in Congress. And there has to be a price for that.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:30:28 – 00:30:43) And he paid it. Max, thank you very much. A great analysis, a great conversation, my dear friend. My best to your family. We’ll look forward to seeing you. Oh, when we see you next week, it’ll be after November 9th. Isn’t that when the Knesset organizes? The new Knesset?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:30:46 – 00:30:50) Allegedly. I mean, I don’t know. Could they go to a second election? I don’t know.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:30:50 – 00:30:54) All right. Well, we’ll maybe have some—

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:30:54 – 00:30:55) We’ll have a lot to talk about, though.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:30:55 – 00:30:59) A lot to talk about when we see you next week. All the best, my friend. Thank you.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: (00:30:59 – 00:30:59) Thanks a lot, Judge.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: (00:31:00 – 00:31:15) Sure. Coming up, if you’re watching us live, in 24 minutes at 3 o’clock on all of this with an interesting angle involving Jared Kushner, the great Phil Giraldi. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.

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